I’ve recently been involved in gatherings for Remembrance and celebration at our local Marie Curie Hospice at Edenhall. Those who come are of all faiths and none, so putting the event together can be challenging. Yet, at the heart of the programme we do the same there as we do here; we read out the names of those who have died and we light candles. The words and music, however, are very different. Some of the staff and care workers choose poems to read and pieces of recorded music to play. The poems are very varied. Some of them are very wise; some of them say things that don’t go far enough. Yes, those we have loved who have died do live on in us and in our memories, but is that all? A lot of the poems are about nature, and perhaps thinking about mountains and seas, and the earth and its trees and flowers, does help us by rooting our sense of loss in the beauty and splendour of our world, though not many of these poems are about cities and traffic. Some of the poems are moral in that they talk about a life well lived and having done what we were put here to do. Some of the poems, however, leave me feeling a little uncomfortable and unfortunately they are some of the most popular poems both at funerals and these memorial events. One of the best known is that famous prose piece by Henry Scott Holland, Canon of St Paul’s and preached during the lying in state of King Edward VII. It contains these words: ‘Death is nothing at all,I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, That we are still. ‘
To me this seems somehow like a denial of death and I don’t really think its true. My Mother did die and it wasn’t nothing at all. It was very painful, and although it was some years ago now the memory is still with me, as all our memories of loss are still with us, and of course my relationship with my mother isn’t the same, and what we were to each other we are definitely not still. I want just to say ‘Come off it, Henry Scott Holland – get real.’ *
At some point in those events at Edenhall, I am called upon to contribute something too, and I have been thinking what I can say at the one later this month. I have to be sensitive to the mixture of the congregation and I want to say something that will be real and truthful for all of us and which will also be true to the Christian gospel.
Dying is something we all prepare for in various perhaps unacknowledged ways; ‘Every day a little death,’ as Sondheim writes in ‘A Little Night Music’. Everyday we may be conscious of an experience of loss; a choice or decision always means we lose some other possibility; As we grow older we become more aware of the choices we weren’t really aware of making, but which may have meant that some aspect of our life has never really been fulfilled. At different stages of our lives something has to be left behind – a house we grew up in, a job we have enjoyed; people move on – children leave home and get married and our relationship with them changes – we don’t see them so often. And all these things induce a sense of loss and bereavement. Every day a little death until the final moment of letting go.
And how do we respond to the experience of grief caused by these losses? Because we all have other responsibilities we just try to cope. We set aside our grief as best we can, when we can, and get on doing other things. And if we set it aside too successfully it gets buried. And yet buried grief doesn’t dissolve – it can even gain in strength and try to force its way to the surface. And some kinds of depression are really just the voice of a buried grief trying to be heard. We feel lethargic and uninterested in what’s going on around us. The things we used to enjoy no longer mean very much to us. We find ourselves unexpectedly losing our temper, we shut ourselves away more and more from real human contact or friendship. We just feel depressed.
And perhaps the only answer to this all too common process is the sort of thing we may be doing here today. Here we are acknowledging our grief and loss; here we are saying the pain is real; here we are saying death is ‘not nothing at all’. Death brings us here to the foot of the cross where all our grief and pain and loss is seen and acknowledged and held by God. But that of course means that we have to look at it too, with the same honesty.
There is a kind of wisdom here which can be found in the secular world but which Christianity affirms and transfigures: and that is the truth that when we can hold steadily in our gaze the necessary reality of the pain we feel, when we can talk about it to someone we trust, when we can allow ourselves to cry without restraint, then slowly something is transformed in us; from somewhere even further down than our pain hope begins to surface. We begin to believe in the possibility that our pain will change to something else, something healed and renewed in strength and purpose. This is true of all those little deaths – any of the experiences of loss that come to us; and therefore it will be true also of that final letting go in death. As we acknowledge our loss so God gives to us new life; as we accept our dying so God will raise us up into his presence beyond death.
Some of us may remember that great archbishop Michael Ramsey. Shortly before his death he was visited by a young Muslim, who used to sell him stamps in the local post office. He asked how long the archbishop had been ordained. Ramsey told him it was nearly 60 years. ‘That’s a very long friendship,’ said the young man. Ramsey liked that phrase and often repeated it with a smile. It was that sense of friendship with God which enabled Ramsey to hold on to one word as he was dying, his favorite word, the word ‘glory.’ It’s a word that represents the acceptance of loss and death and the sense even so that there is life still to be had, life to be treasured and transformed. So to end we might remember these words of IzaakWalton which were applied to Ramsey by his biographer but which we should also ponder for ourselves and for those we have loved;
Of this blest man let this just praise be given
Heaven was in him, before he was in heaven.
* On the day after this sermon was delivered, Canon Giles Fraser also referred to Holland’s sermon on ‘Thought for the day’, explaining that Holland does acknowledge the painfulness of bereavement. It was not clear, however, from what was said, how all Holland’s ideas connect in his sermon, I shall have to read it myself before next year.