Last month, the Revd Jenny Bridgman unveiled a memorial stone dedicated to all lives lost through miscarriage, abortion and stillbirth. Since then, people from across the diocese have come to express their own quiet acts of remembrance.
Here she writes about the past few weeks and the response she has had.
"O God, who brought us to birth, and in whose arms we die..."
So begins Janet Morley's prayer, published in Pastoral Services (p. 355), which captures something of the span of life held in God's arms from cradle to grave.
Last month in Timperley Parish we unveiled a memorial stone dedicated to all lives lost through Miscarriage, Abortion and Stillbirth. The unveiling was marked with an online service (still available on the parish blog) and an invitation to people to bring stones to the memorial site. The response was overwhelming. People from across the diocese brought stones, flowers, and notes to lay: their own quiet acts of remembrance and mourning. Many were remembering the loss of a pregnancy or baby that happened a long time ago. Others were living through the loss even as they gathered to seek comfort and hope in the words of the inscription: "See I have engraved you on the palm of my hands".
As we journeyed towards and beyond the season of All Soul's, we incorporated these collected memories into a bigger act of remembrance. This week, alongside an online memorial service for All Souls’, the community are invited to bring stones to the churchyard, this time in memory of all who have died. We will bring together the stones left at the Baby Loss Memorial with stones left in memory of others who have died, and gather them into church as an aid to prayer. This gathering will be symbolic of the way in which our birth, our lived experience, our mourning, our loss, our death, and our eternity - are held in the arms of God.
This season started, for us, with a solemn marking of Baby Loss and a message of hope and comfort to all who have lost a pregnancy or baby. It will end with this act of gathering as a sign of defiant hope: God holds us before birth, beyond death, and in every moment in between: this is the hope that we have proclaimed in Timperley in this season of Remembrance.
Jenny and Jim tell their story
Listen to Jenny and Jim Bridgman's story about their own experience of child loss and how God opened up conversations with others in the parish of Timperley.