In some of our primary schools this term, the children and I are learning how to pray the Lord’s Prayer using British Sign Language. It’s a deeply fascinating and moving experience as week by week we rehearse the lines we know and add more new signs to our prayer. So many of the signs give us gestures which bring new insight to the words. So for example ‘daily’ (as in daily bread) is a continuous movement of the hand from signing yesterday to today and then tomorrow. It is a gesture which reminds us that daily bread has a bigger context: God’s provision for us came yesterday and it’ll come today and it will be there tomorrow and the day after and ….. well ….. every day we can ask and every day God gives. “Give us today our daily bread” sounds finite when we read the words; the sign reminds us it’s continuous provision.

So the experience of discovering the signs and learning them is making us think, and it’s giving us an alternative language to pray. I love the moment at the end when, understanding the signs, we give up on the words and just pray in that unity of movement and expressive hands.

There are times in life, aren’t there, when we want to pray and we haven’t the words? We don’t know what to say, or we don’t have the energy to say it, or we just need to employ our bodies differently to express our heart’s concerns and hopes to God. I’m sure that is why people light candles when they come in to church, or we find a quiet space to sit and to look up high into the church rafters, or we ponder a stained glass window or place a flower. All these non-verbal things are full of sentiment and say what we need.

On Remembrance Sunday we will make the gesture of placing poppies and of simply standing in silence; powerful actions of recognition, of gratitude, of loss. No words required. To mark All Souls those who have been bereaved in the last year will gather at church and light candles in memory, full of loss and love.

How we need the language of gesture, or action, of gift, of holding, of silence …… as well as the language of words!

Rev Louise Corke