Last respects to a loved one gone too soon
THE morning had broken. Just like the first morning. A blackbird searching for food in the garden flicked its tail and tweeted its protests. Perhaps neither of us had expected to see the ground covering of snow.
Tiny shivering crocuses and lowly snow bells chimed their own alarm.
From my bedroom window I could see that the still waters of Wick River ran deep. How many times, I wondered, had it ebbed and flowed down the millennia? What great wonders and mysteries had it carried in its wake?
Rivers were cut by the world’s great flood, according to the American writer Norman Maclean. They ran over rocks from the basement of time. And on some of those rocks were timeless raindrops. Whilst under some of those rocks, he believed, were the words of his ancestors.
"I am haunted by waters," Maclean had written...
Later that day we gathered in the tiny stone chapel above the shore to pay our last respects for a loved one; gone too soon.
Inside, sitting on the wooden pews either side of the nave, it was not the waters that bore the words of those who had gone before us but the inscribed stone voices echoing down from past generations.
And so, lost deep in our thoughts, we absorbed the alpha and omega.
Never before had the stone chapel – all silence and sanctity – brought such comfort to so many.
And then through the stillness resonated the wondrous fragile melodies from a lone harpist. Her beguiling harmonies gathered in pitch and tone. And before we knew it we were borne, soaring stratospherically, to another place. And there we were comforted.
The rector greeted those who had assembled. There were words of prayer. We sang hymns of adoration. And listened as verses were read from the Scripture.
"It is ceremony that makes bearable for us the terrors and ecstasies that lie deep in the earth and in our earth-nourished human nature," wrote the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown.
"What saves us is ceremony. By means of ceremony we keep our foothold in the estate of man. Ceremony makes everything bearable and beautiful for us. Transfigured by ceremony," he believed, "the truths we could not otherwise endure come to us. We invite them to enter. We set them down at our tables. Angels bring gifts for the house of the soul..."
And so we followed the order of service from the first prayer at the chancel steps, the hymn and psalm, the verses from Scripture and the Lord’s Prayer – spoken as one. We listened, transfixed, as the bereaved father read his eulogy of love to his lost son. We witnessed love and nobility. We saw dignity and heard grace. We cried. There was laughter, even. And the most difficult of all duties was performed as only a loving father could pay tribute to his own flesh and blood.
The rector performed a commendation to the deceased as he was carried "upon his journey from this world" to his final resting place. We heard words beseeching he "find life in Christ the Redeemer". There was talk of home in a heavenly city.
There was a final blessing for the congregation.
As we left the tiny stone chapel above the shore the harpist played familiar refrains: "Here Comes the Sun", "Bring Him Home", "Father and Son"...
Sometimes in life there are times we do not know what to believe any more. And the liturgy of the chapel above the shore makes big asks of us. It asks us to believe in a perpetually shining light after death where God, our creator, will sustain us. A place where we "shall never die".
We considered the lilies. They neither spun, nor toiled. And not even Solomon, for all his glory, was splendoured as one of those! How much more were we to be unburdened? For the time we were together we were transformed by a few seemingly random pieces of verse and song. Was it art or majesty – or maybe a bit of both?
T.S. Eliot, "the most important poet of the 20th century", suggested that "what might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation".
Time past and time present
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
Dedicated to the memory of Aaron Nicholas Fell, 1976-2013.