All Soul's, Sunday 1 November 2020

A few years ago, as a curate, I went to a pub to meet a parishioner, and as I arrived, an older gentleman saw me in my dog collar and said, ‘I’m not quite ready to go yet Father… I still have a few more years in me. But when that day comes, lay my body on this here bar and have a few drinks… and in preparation for that day, let me buy you a drink.’

It dawned on me then that many people associate seeing a dog-collared priest with death. It’s no wonder people avoid me and I get scared, odd looks on the street!

This global pandemic really has forced us to take stock and recognise our mortality. Coming to terms with our mortality is really important. It also reminds us of those whom we have loved and who have gone before us.

That’s the point of All Souls’ Day and this evening. It’s an opportunity for us to address our grief at a distance from its first intrusion. And it’s an occasion to draw comfort from the Judeo Christian tradition… which is full of hope.

Lamentations tells us that ‘The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end.’ Isaiah describes how the Lord will destroy, ‘the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.’  St Paul uses the same words, of death being swallowed up. Nothing can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus. John Donne – ‘One short sleep past, we wake eternally/ and death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.’

So, yes, a message of hope. But that hope tinged with pain, and a grief that can remain stubbornly debilitating. Tonight we don’t need to repress this grief or pretend that ‘we’re alright really’.

People talk about time being a great healer – well, it is and it isn’t. Because the wound that grief inflicts isn’t just a blow, it is more like an amputation. And with an amputation you can’t simply grow another limb over the passage of time. There is a profound sense of loss, and with it vulnerability. We might feel somehow incomplete, have irrational outbursts of anger, or experience numbing fatigue and inertia.

After the death of her father, the Australian writer Germaine Greer took refuge on a Greek island for several months. She wore black and covered her hair. She did so for her own reasons, but was surprised to discover that immediately, everyone on the island recognised the signs of bereavement. They treated her, appropriately, as one bereaved: with care, dignity and respect, asking her questions gently and with tact, listening to her, allowing her to be bereaved. I’m not sure she would have discovered this most grown up of responses in London.

I wish that every church would behave so well towards those who are bereaved. But churches are made up of people like me… fallible sinners, and we often get it wrong. Perhaps because we’re so busy, perhaps too afraid to engage with mortality. So we forget to make time and space, with respect, for silence and tears. 

Except for tonight. Tonight there is space, there is time, there is a mutuality of understanding. There is space to be present to think and feel and say those things that we perhaps have not yet allowed ourselves to.  

When a space is made for something, it allows the growth of something new. The space that’s made might be a letting go… perhaps the acceptance and burning out of the immediacy of rage and grief. Into that space, that silence, that sheer fatigue… can come the glimpse of what Christians and many other world faiths hold to: the continued insistence that death is not the brick wall, the annihilation of the individual. And that however much we do not know, however much we do not understand, this we believe:

Being human means acknowledging that we’re made from the earth and will return to the earth. For a few years we dance around on the stage of life and have the chance to reflect a little bit of God’s glory. And our hope is that our very being, born from God, hidden in God, loved by God, held by God… returns to God.

And so the names that we will shortly read out, the candles we light, the prayers we say, the Mass we celebrate, these link us in a way we cannot really define, to the heart of God. And they lead us to a place which is beyond the reach of death, beyond the reach of pain and of tears, God’s place, the place that is our true and eternal home.