All manner of things shall be well.
In Christian thinking the word ‘saints’ was applied to all members of the Church. A saint was someone set apart, or consecrated in the service of God, and through our baptism all of us are saints. But in time the word came to be used for just the great saints, like St Peter, or St John, so the Church decided another day was needed for all the rest of us. That day was called All Souls Day. Each year All Saints Day is observed on 1 November, while All Souls is on 2 November, and hence it is on the latter day (or close to it) that we gather as we do this evening to remember all souls, and especially those closest to us as members of our family.
All of us here tonight carry in our hearts the soul and spirit of someone close to us, and probably of several people close to us whom we have lost over the years. For many that loss is very recent, and at funerals this year we have joined in this cathedral, or at St Mary’s or St Stephen’s, to commend those souls that have been dear to us into the hands of God. For some the memory is longer and yet still fresh. I remember each year my brother Michael who died of an illness aged 33 : that was over 30 years ago, and yet there is still a gap in our family circle. I never find conducting a funeral to be routine. Every person and every family is unique. Yet the death of one in another family brings to the surface deaths in our own. We are reminded of our shared humanity, and also our shared mortality. We grieve not only for the one who has died, but also for that part of our own life that has died as well.
Yet while grief is a reality we all know, our mortality is also the gateway to those things in life that are of supreme importance, things that give us comfort in the present, and hope and strength for the future. Let me mention four of them :
First, we are reminded of those things that truly matter in life. In days gone by when funeral eulogies were often very stiff-upper-lip, a suited male would recite the salient points of someone’s public life, like a CV in retrospect. Those public features of someone’s life still gain a mention, and properly so, but today eulogies are usually of a different kind. They are delivered by family members and friends, often by children and grand-children, and not at all stiff-upper-lip but often with tears and laughter and in informal style. And the thing that stands out in the midst of them all is the central importance of family ties, and family love, and the times that were spent not in public office but at the beach together, or over a meal or at a birthday party – the things that are common to us all, often taken for granted, things that don’t cost money but are a priceless part of being human. Mortality reminds us of a gift too precious to lose.
Second, a death often evokes within us a sense of being part of something bigger than ourselves. One of the old hymns of the Church has the line “Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away” (and daughters too). In one sense that sounds very pessimistic but I find a stronger meaning to it. To officiate in a cathedral like this, and more particularly in St Mary’s, is to have a sense of the great sweep of human history. There are photos and memorials of our ancestors, as you find in a Maori meeting-house, but more important is the spirit of timelessness, of eternity, of a great over-arching drama in which each of us plays a part. Each of us in turn receives life. Each of us has the gifts and opportunities specific to our day and age. Each of us has a vocation to play our part in the service of others. Each of us gives life to others and in turn we give our own life up having played our part. We give our loved ones up, recalling the words from Wisdom 3. 1, 9 : “ The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God;…. those who trust in God will understand truth; the faithful will abide with him in love. Grace and mercy are upon his holy ones”. We may understand ‘holy’ here in the same way as all saints, and all souls. Our life although mortal, has a purpose. We have a place in God’s abiding purpose of love.
Third, mortality speaks to us of the support we find in loss that comes from the love of family and friends. The lifetime experience of love is especially real to us at the time of parting. To experience love is to experience God, for God is not some remote and abstract entity. God is love. Human love is the expression of a divine love that never leaves us comfortless. In the night-time of grief, when the loneliness and loss seem too hard to bear, we reach out to one another, and find comfort from each other, just as God reaches out to us and surrounds us with a love that will not let us go.
And finally, mortality speaks to us of the presence of God, one in whom we can trust as we look to a future that seems empty and uncertain. Faith does not provide answers to all our questions and anxieties about the future. Rather our faith lies in knowing that we travel with God, so that whatever the future will bring it will be all right. We have different images of God, but for me the most powerful is that of God as spirit, as we heard in the reading from John 3 this evening. Here Jesus is saying to Nicodemus that those who are born of the spirit are like the wind : you know not where it comes from, or where it goes. But the wind, the spirit of God, carries us, and wherever it puts us down will be OK. That is faith, to know that God’s spirit lifts us and sustains us, however empty life at times may feel.
On a plane the other day my fellow passenger told me of his experience at two funerals, one for his office secretary, much younger than he, the other for his father. He said he came away from each funeral with an incredible sense of lightness, which he defined as feeling that in spite of the loss everything would be all right. It wasn’t that he didn’t grieve; it wasn’t that he didn’t feel the loss; it wasn’t that he felt life would just be business as usual. He knew he would feel the pain of those deaths, yet at a much deeper level he had this feeling that in the overall scheme of things, all would be well. Those latter words were also used by the 14th century English mystic, Julian of Norwich, who affirmed that “all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well”. Not words of superficial comfort, but words of a deep conviction about the abiding presence of the love of God, a love that is with us in life and in death, mediated to us by family and friends, yet finding its source in a spring of compassion that encompasses all people in all times.
