A Prayer for a Funeral
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.
— Psalm 23:1-3
Funerals ask us to do the hardest thing at the worst possible time: stand in a room full of people and face the fact that someone we love is gone. We put on the dark clothes and we drive to the church and we sit in the pew and we do all of this while the ground underneath us has not stopped moving since the phone rang.
This prayer is for the morning of the service. For the drive. For the moment in the parking lot when you are not sure you can walk through the doors. For the moment after the service when you are standing in the fellowship hall holding a cup of coffee you do not remember being handed. It is short because the morning of a funeral does not have room for long prayers. It is plain because plain is what holds up when nothing else does.
Lord, I cannot do this, and I am doing it anyway.
Be in the room before I get there. Be in the words I hear and the hymns I try to sing and the silence that comes after.
Hold the person I am burying in whatever place you hold the ones who have left us. I do not need to understand it today. I just need to know they are held.
And hold me, too. Hold my hands when they shake. Hold my voice if I have to speak. Hold the ground steady under my feet, because it has not been steady in days.
Get me through this morning. That is all I am asking. Just this morning.
Amen.
There is no right way to grieve, and there is no right way to get through a funeral. Some people weep. Some people are dry-eyed and wonder if something is wrong with them. Some people laugh at the wrong moment and feel guilty about it. None of this means you loved the person less, or more, or wrong. It means you are a human being in the worst week of your life, and human beings are not predictable, and the Lord knows this about us even when we do not know it about ourselves.
The Twenty-third Psalm is the funeral psalm, and it has been the funeral psalm for as long as I have been alive. There is a reason for this. It does not explain death. It does not promise that death will not come. It says the Lord is with you in the valley of the shadow. The valley is real. The shadow is real. And the Lord is there, and that is the whole of it.
This prayer is yours to keep. Print it. Fold it and put it in your pocket. Carry it into the service if you need to. Ruby writes a short devotional every morning in the same spirit: Scripture, and a few plain words from someone who has been there. You can subscribe — it's free, or stay a while and read more of her writing.
If you are carrying grief right now, Ruby has written about it often:
- A prayer for comfort in grief — For the dark days and the harder nights.
- Ruby on grief — A collection of devotionals on loss, carrying, and what remains.
- How to write a eulogy — If someone has asked you to speak at the service.