Today’s hymn is ‘We cannot care for you the way you wanted’ by John Bell and Graham Maule. When I planned the hymns for the year I took into account the seasons of the Church’s calendar but not the lectionary readings for Morning Prayer, because it was only later that John decided to include them. But he has sensibly suggested a swap here, putting this hymn in the service that includes the account of the Holy Innocents, the slaughter of all the young children in Bethlehem on the orders of Herod. For this hymn, following on from yesterday’s, is also about death and our feelings around it, and specifically where the death was of a baby or young child. So in singing it we join with the mothers of Bethlehem of old, with ‘Rachel refusing to be comforted because her children are no more’, and with the countless parents who lose children in or own time to disease, starvation or war. I read only this week in the context of the topical discussion of climate change that hundreds of children are dying every day in Africa from drought alone. Each one made in God’s image, each one loved by God, each death the cause of grief.
As an aside, and with a linguistic link since Rachel means ‘ewe’, I saw a story on social media this week of a ewe whose lamb had been stillborn, grieving for it until another ewe in the flock ‘donated’ one of her own pair to the grieving mother to adopt. These emotions are not only human.
To the lyrics, then: the first three verses are written from the point of the view of parents, expressing regret at not having been able to fulfil their own potential as parents or that of their offspring: ‘We cannot care for you the way we wanted, cannot watch you growing into childhood, cannot know the pain or the potential which passing years would summon or reveal’. Instead, a word of hope is offered, a promise by Jesus to cling to: ‘love will not die’, ‘you will still stay’, ‘we hope and feel [for promised fulfilment]’. The fourth verse recognises the complex of emotions experienced – anger, grief, tiredness, unresolved tensions. The very sorrow that this death has created is offered back to God along with the child itself, not reluctantly or as sacrifice but as ‘worship’.
Although I wrote yesterday of the difficulty of squaring the ‘everyone goes to heaven’ attitude with the theology of the Bible, when it comes to a stillbirth or the death of a very young child, few people today would argue that a child dying unbaptised would be rejected by God because of ‘original sin’. And pastorally, it’s more important surely to grieve with the family in their loss than to speculate exactly what has happened to the child’s soul. So, the hymn ends with placing the child into God’s arms with the words ‘believing that s/he now, alive in heaven, breathes with your breath’.
The poignancy of grief, especially at a tragic loss, is expressed exquisitely in the music of Schubert’s song ‘Litany for the feast of all Souls’, sung in the original German at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrqIEwQhRMo (with subtitles, but only two verses) or https://youtu.be/9eUPVDPkdHM (all three verses, no subtitles).