Stiff upper lip?

FACING GRIEF
Counsel for mourners
By John Flavel. Banner of Truth. 122 pages. £5.00
ISBN 978-1-84871-069-6

This is a book for grieving Christians by a Christian acquainted with grief. John Flavel knows his subject personally — he lost both parents to the plague, three wives and a child.

It’s a practical exposition of Luke 7.13, where Jesus’s heart goes out to the widow of Nain and he says to her: ‘Don’t cry’, and argues for moderate grief. He doesn’t want people swallowed up by grief, but, to our modern way of thinking (which could do with some Puritan help), it could seem that he doesn’t want people to grieve at all.