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Book Review: Lisa R. Withrow, Leadership in Unknown Waters: Liminality as Threshold to the Future

well, or else” (p. 71). Above all, lament recognizes the silence of God, the kenotic abyss into which prayer descends, to resound as a divine echo at the last, and this nowhere so well as at the foot of the cross, where lament is offered “at the foot of a taunted and tortured God” (p. 87). In the second half of the book, Blaine-Wallace offers counsel to the wider church (parish and beyond) in a challenge to typical hopes for church growth by a date certain. He issues a call to reorient prayer away from the cultural demands to “Deliver the goods or else. Good luck. A crucified God is not in a position to make us feel or do better on our clock” (p. 94). He urges us to adopt the patient attitude of waiting, like the women approaching the tomb, not yet knowing the end of the story. The closing chapters offer practical modes of action for entering this kind of patient lamentation in community, the kind of lament that builds community. Some of the modes are surprising, conflicting with standard practice. The author acknowledges that some of the techniques have been “attacked as unorthodox at best, dangerous at worst,” although most have “become accepted and increasingly preferred” (p. 127). For example, the one who witnesses lamentational testimony is not there to understand, but to be present; the rules for this communal lamentation are not the typical ones about a counselor using I-statements, but about a gracious willingness not to state anything at all, not to try to mine the lamentation for meaning. “To assume that words have hidden meaning requiring our excavation is to cross beyond the boundary of that which is offered, which is a violation of the other’s spirit” (p. 110). What, after all, is the meaning of a wail of pain, a tragic aria in an unknown tongue? This is not an attempt to mirror the lament, to sympathize or empathize, but to appreciate that “the suffering other, beheld by us, addresses us as the Other, the embodiment of God” (p. 112). Blaine-Wallace provides an outline for a parish process making use of these tools, including a handout for use by teams of witnesses and interviewers. Together with the foundations laid earlier in the volume, this book provides a useful guide for a new way to explore the reality of life’s painful aspects. The unorthodoxy of a kind of public/private testimony is its strength. Just as a pilgrimage is often its own destination, in communal lament “The conversation is the cure” (p. 132).