Whitsun

The story we tell this evening, is, in its way, a story of grief.

It’s a story of love and letting go.

It’s a story that begins with the moment made famous by so many artists:

Noli Tangere.

Don’t hold on to me.

It’s a story that resonates with the many bad poems you hear at funerals, and the occasional good ones.

It’s a story of trying to reconcile the feelings of despair, anger, fear, and loss of Good Friday, with the qualified joy, and hope, of Easter –

He is with us, but in a different way.

We cannot hold on to the fallen one.

We have to begin again, and the burden of responsibility now rests on us.

The philosopher Gillian Rose wrote of:

‘that intense work of the soul, that gradual rearrangement of its boundaries, which must occur when a loved one is lost –

so as to let go, to allow the other fully to depart, and hence fully to be regained beyond sorrow’.

The work of love, of the soul, the work of Easter is to let go of the known Christ, to let go of grief, to let him ascend to the Father, in order to find the new freedom and joy of the Spirit.

One of the truest expressions of grief was encapsulated by Henry Scott Holland writing on the death of Edward VII.

You find his words everywhere now on cards and tokens, written out as though it were a poem, when actually it was a sermon:

Death is nothing at all.

It does not count.

I have only slipped away into the next room.

Nothing has happened.

Everything remains exactly as it was.

I am I, and you are you…

Nothing is hurt;

nothing is lost.

One brief moment and all will be as it was before.

How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

What is not quoted is that he has begun the sermon by writing:

Death is the supreme and irrevocable disaster:

Nothing leads up to it, nothing prepares for it.

It is the pit of destruction. It wrecks, it defeats, it shatters.

Can any end be more untoward, more irrational than this?

His point, in the sermon, is that we hold these two experiences together in grief:

The sense of an absolute ending.

Sheer destruction.

And a sense of continuity.

That his life had meaning, that he lives on –

We may continue to converse with the dead –

Know them to be with us.

This contradiction is at the heart of our struggle to make sense of life, and to have belief in the Spirit, in God.

Because if death is really just the end then we have no hope and are engaged in nothing more than a short struggle against an insuperable foe.

But if that sense of the loved one’s presence stays with us;

If we can believe, trust, that there is meaning to our lives;

then we can take hold of that peace Jesus speaks of, promises, as the gift of the Spirit that is coming.

The musician Nick Cave, who has faced more tragedy than most, writes that grief is ‘a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things’.

it’s in grief that we’re closest to God, in suffering and in full awareness of our mortality;

I took a funeral with an open casket yesterday.

And there, for the family in the presence of lost love, in the frankly shocking reality of death unmasked,

Which being unmasked, unmasked the grief of those left behind –

I thought: this is the place where we decide what really matters;

This is where we discover what we believe, and so how we go on with our lives.

The journalist and writer Sebastian Junger has recently written a book about his own very close encounter with death and near-death experience.

Afterwards, he writes, that he would become paralysed by the realisation of how unlikely everything is, and the crazy gift of being alive in a world that’s full of beauty.

“Why isn’t everyone crying all the time over this?” he writes “Have you seen trees? Really seen them?”

The word for Spirit is breath, or wind.

We almost have to not think about breathing normally;

If you think about it too much, breathing suddenly becomes difficult;

Like you’ve forgotten how;

Perhaps with the realisation that the every-second-miracles, of which life is composed, are just too much to bear all at once.

In coming back to life from that shock of disaster, we may feel paralysed.

Realise how much we have to lose.

Be overcome with fear of the preciousness, precariousness, of life.

We may in wonder find the world is so much more alive than we had noticed;

And in noticing feel that life that spirit, that breath, in ourselves.

The line that most captures grief as I have known it is written by David Grossman, an Israeli whose son died some time ago while in the IDF.

He wrote, in a beautiful novel expressing the grief of parents:

In August he died, and

when that month was over, I wondered:

How can I move to September while he remains in August?

The story we are telling tonight is not so visceral to us.

But liturgically we are taken in these 50 days through a process of grief.

The work of letting go, of preparing ourselves for the new thing;

Of finding a new kind of presence in absence – of the spirit aside of the flesh;

We are asked to consider the fundamental essence of things:

Our mortality, our purpose, our hope, our faith.

To look again at this world and find the Spirit that moves in creation, and in which we move and live and have our being.

And in it to find our resurrection hope,

Our path to the Father,

And so a way into the mysterious life of the Trinity;

And the enduring and eternal power of love which is our Gospel.

Amen.