Today I accompanied 3 funerals on the organ. It was a very special day to accompany funeral on 19.12. Around 90% of the funerals that I played, bereaved families wish to have Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Von guten Mächten” (By Gracious Power) at the funeral.
This poem is originally written for his fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer-Weller, in his last love letter to her, before he was hanged on 9th April 1945 during the Nazi regime.
Tonight, I am reading this love letter.
“By good forces devotedly and quietly surrounded,
wonderfully protected and solaced,
thus I want to live with ye these days and head with ye into a new year.
… …
By good forces wonderfully sheltered,
we await confidently, what may come.
God is next to us in the evening and the morning
and most assuredly on every new day.”
PS English translation from Wikipedia
