Monday 13th December, 2021
Carla Grosch-Miller, from ‘Psalm 145’, in Psalms Redux: Poems and Prayers (Canterbury Press, 2014), 87.
Image: Viktor Talashuk, @viktortalashuk
This quote is from Carla Grosch-Miller's contemporary re-working of Psalm 145 in Psalms Redux: Prayers and Poems (Canterbury Press, 2014), 87 - see here. Originally from the USA, Carla has lived and worked as a URC minister in the UK for many years. Her Redux versions of the psalms ,which emerge from a prayer life that has been sustained by a daily discipline of silence over several decades, offer a wonderfully rich reinterpretation of these well-loved biblical texts. A more recent book of prayer-poems, Lifelines: Wrestling with God (Canterbury Press, 2020) - see here - was written after the deaths of several of her family members in rapid succession and takes readers on a journey from the trauma and loss of grief towards resurrection life. This deeply moving and hope-filled collection points towards the personal journey that undergirds Carla's latest book, which addresses these themes in pastoral care, Trauma and Pastoral Care: A Practical Handbook (Canterbury Press, 2021) - see here. For those who would value a more academic engagement with theologies of trauma within the church, her co-authored book with Megan Warner, Christopher Southgate and Hilory Ison, Tragedies and Christian Congregations: The Practical Theology of Trauma (Routledge, 2019), will offer much. See here.