The first play I saw here that John had directed was Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. I was looking to see whether I might find a suitable quote from that play for this homily when I came across the response attributed to Miller on being asked whether he was going to attend Marilyn Monroe’s funeral. Why should I go? She wont be there.’
Just now Simon pictured what John would have thought if he could have been here mentioning that he would have been uncomfortable with people paying him all this attention.
But of course John isn’t here, yet we are, and showing therefore our disagreement with Arthur Miller. We come here because we want to honour John’s memory and we do that in part by honouring the body which was John and without which he couldn’t have been John the man full of energy and a curiously shy determination to make things happen. Though not everyone experienced John’s directing style in this way, when I had a small part in a play he was directing I was struck both by his hands off approach and by the way in which everything, even so, came wonderfully together, because of that odd combination of reticence and insistence. He seemed to make things happen by not drawing attention to himself, and paradoxically that created a stronger sense of his presence. And of course for all his natural humility he was also a man of strong opinions and capable of giving them forcible expression not least over Sunday lunches in the Flask.
All these things and much else we shall miss because he isn’t here. We shall have all our memories of him we shall talk of him living on in us; we shall talk of his soul being with God, and yet for all that we shall painfully have to get used to his not being here, because nothing can make up for not having his real presence. Memory can be selective; the idea of the soul can be a way of editing out all the difficult and irreducible otherness of a person so that we think only of what we liked in someone. It is their physical presence which forces us to take someone for all of what they are and it is that wholeness which we loose when someone dies. And so it is that wholeness which in this service we give to God for cherishing and more than cherishing.
All funeral services express a belief in the resurrection of the dead. It is a difficult belief in our almost schizophrenic age in which we keep the material and the spiritual in such tightly separate compartments. So if we do believe in the resurrection of the dead what are we saying? We cannot say very much and of course this is a belief about which there will be more questions than answers; but this much perhaps we must say. God creates and loves the totality of who we are body and soul, mind, heart and spirit. God loves to create. The material creation is one expression of who he is. And he creates us for one another as well as for himself. He creates us to learn with one another the love that unites God in himself as the Holy Trinity. So when we die he does not let his creation go though we who are left have to learn to let go. When we die God does not let us go but neither does he put us in a heaven which consists of a disembodied spiritual elite telepathically communing soul to soul. If that is what Christians are supposed to believe it’s not surprising that the idea of heaven has for so many become so boring. The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible’ says Paul and that at least sounds more exciting. In his own time God will raise us up and give us back to share and enjoy and love one another in a form that will surpass what we have now without letting us forget or depreciate the best of what we have now. O how glorious and resplendent fragile body shalt thou be’ as the hymn puts it. And why is this belief so important? The answer is there in the letter that Asfaw wrote to Sarah from Addis Ababa:
On behalf of the thousands of needy children, the poorest of the poor families and myself, for whom he devotedly assisted for the good part of his life to help us see a light of hope and meaningful existence, I would like to express again my deepest condolence and grand respect.
If we do not see how God cares so absolutely for the whole of what we are that he will raise it up beyond death, we shall never learn to care passionately enough that the poorest of the poor shall see a light of hope and meaningful existence in this life. There must be a meaningful existence for all God’s creation now because God cherishes it so much that he means to raise it up. And it takes a good man to remind us of that.
Amen.
Stephen Tucker
John Hester
Stephen Tucker