Prayer Thirty-Three

This prayer from Janet Morley’s 1988 collection All Desires Known is headed ‘At a funeral’ and has since found its way into Common Worship’s ‘Pastoral Services’. The first two lines assure us that God midwifes us at both birth and death, that we are cradled by divine arms through both these astonishing transitions. But the prayer in its entirety also gives us a glimpse of how the ‘Passion of Grief’ might feel. It cites, for example, the initial ‘shock’ which can catapult us to ‘confusion’, flailing about in unknown emotional territory, in need of that holy embrace again to ‘contain and comfort us’.

In this bronze, titled Lament, Kathe Kollwitz has sculpted herself. The date of composition, 1938-40, speaks volumes. What she is showing here is her grief at the intolerable suffering going on around her in Hitler’s Germany and her attempts to contain that grief. Eyes tight shut, she can bear to look no longer: a hand is clamped across her mouth to prevent an anguished sob escaping. Her own son had died in Flanders during the first world war…

In the searingly beautiful aria below from A German Requiem, Brahms set three different biblical passages. Like Morley’s closing lines, they take us beyond grief to hope, to something new. Near the end, we hear Elizabeth Watts, a former chorister of Norwich Cathedral, sing God’s words to a grieving people: “I will console you as a mother consoles her child.”