Prayers for grief

Prayers from the Christian tradition for the experience of loss.

The Christian tradition has carried the experience of grief for two thousand years and has built specific prayers for it across every major tradition. The prayers here address loss directly: bereavement, mourning, the death of someone loved, the long sorrow that follows. Some come from the funeral and burial liturgies of the Church. Others are private prayers said in the privacy of grief at home. They do not promise that the pain will end. They do offer the words other Christians have used when their own pains were similar, which is what the tradition exists to give.