The oratory of grief

When I returned yesterday night London looked like itself. The top deck of the double decker was littered with old papers and paper cups. Only the flowers in front of the closed steel bars of Liverpool Street Station revealed that something extraordinary had happened during my three-week absence from the City.

But others must feel it in a much more powerful way.

Today the Guardian brings Marie Fatayi-Williams's speech. The speech was held as she had come from Nigeria to look for her missing son Anthony, feared killed on the no. 30 bus.

It is commented by the British colonel Tim Collins who himself delivered a very moving speech at the onset of the Iraq war. His insight into his own and Marie Fatayi-Williams's speeches isn't that profound or deep - but nevertheless it is important: speeches borne by real emotions, not prepared by aides or assistants, have a much higher chance of rocketing into a true, memorable rhetorical artifact.

Read Marie Fatayi-Williams's speech first of all to hear what she wants to say, but then note how she draws from the repository of our common religious vocabulary and experience.