November is a remembering month. We remember our war
dead; it is a particular sad occasion for my family; my sister’s nephew Peter,
21, was killed in Basra in 2011 and buried with full military honours in his
local cemetery in North Wales. I together with my wife (a day-carer at St.
Cuthbert’s Hospice, Durham) will attend the Cathedral’s annual November hospice
remembrance service for those who had died during the year and previous years.
The cathedral is generally full.
I struggle most
of the time to come to terms with the death of my parents who died some years
ago, and close friends who have died during the years. Our remembering embraces
all people, those with faith and those who had great faith, those we call ‘the
faithful departed' or, in the words of that clever theological catch-all,
‘those whose faith is known to God alone'. And it is about me too,
because death, far from dissolving the relationships that have formed me in
this life, exposes, sometimes with merciless clarity, their true nature and
meaning.
In the church’s diary at the beginning of November,
the Feast of All Saints (November 1st) and the lesser know next day
the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed (2nd November) - commonly known as All Souls – remind us
that the church here on earth is not the whole picture of the Christian
family. What we live in and with here,
and sometimes have to endure here, is
but the tip of a vast iceberg. Our small Methodist and URC chapels are but just
tiny outposts of the one great communion of saints. We need this sense of
proportion, the recognition that we pray and struggle in the context of that “huge
number impossible to count of people from every nation, race and tribe and
language” not only of every place but of every age, a family of the living and
the dead. So in this month of remembering, remebering the war dead,
the death of friends and family, how do we remember them accurately without the
distortions sentimentality brings to memory by idealising the dead and
romanticising our relations with them? How do we love them in the truth
of what they were and what we are? And how does this affect the way we go
on living with our memories, our grief, our aching and our hope?
Prayer I find is
important and helpful. This is not
because we believe that God's mercy can only be triggered by our intercession,
but because it is our life task to hold in our mind and heart those who are
given to us through kindred and affinity, and as friends, colleagues and
neighbours. This task transcends the boundaries of life and death.
It matters to us that we should know that we shall not be forgotten, that we leave
behind some trace of ourselves in the memories and experiences of those with
whom we have shared our lives. So it matters that we do remember in prayer
those we no longer see, the dead whom we remember in love and truth. It
matters to the dead. It matters to the living.
Love and truth
belong together in our knowing of one another,
and both belong to the way God knows us. St John says in his first letter:
‘beloved, let us love not in word only, but in deed and truth'. This, he
tells us, is how God loves us in Jesus Christ, in whom ‘deed and truth' meant
self-emptying, his life poured out for us on the cross. For the
resurrection of Jesus is to raise and transfigure our entire human history -
not just that part of the story that belongs in this world, but all that
follows it, unimagined and unknown as it is. That is to say, our dying is
as much a part of this as our living, and the dead whom we remember this month
are as known to God and precious to him as we are. To love in truth is
always to try to love from God's eternal perspective. So to remember the
dead truly is to see them enfolded in God's everlasting love, to know that in
him all the fragments of human life are gathered up: nothing is lost and all in
the end is harvest.
This November weather,
the shedding of leaves and the dying of the light are their own autumnal
commentary on the transience of things. Mortality is in our thoughts:
this annual shedding of leaves reminds us that we are dust and to dust we shall
return. This recall is necessary for our souls' health. Yet for all
its impassioned cries for mercy and help, we would still want to give thanks,
to give thanks for Christs’s resurrection. To fix our hearts and hopes on
the risen Christ is to place life and death in their proper perspective.
It's to awaken to the tasks of living and dying in as authentically human and
Christian a way as is possible to us. To look death in the face, is both to
find comfort in our grieving, and renewal for ourselves to go on living and blessing
God for the gift of being alive.
Perhaps we
shouldn't ask how others may remember us when we are gone, with what thoughts
they will light candles and pray for us. I am sure it should not be that we
achieved some idealised, heroic, goodness: we know our own brokenness and
failure too well. But we can dare to hope that it may be with
thankfulness that in our faltering way we were faithful unto death, that we
touched the lives of a few others, that we were blessed to know love and to
give it; and that our goodbyes were bathed in the light of Easter faith, as we
are welcomed to our eternal home.
November then, the month of Remembering, challenges us
to take our faith seriously, and to ask what human life is about and what are
the true gleams of glory to be celebrated in human lives; it is a time too to
remember our own mortality, our frailty and failure. Death tears at the net of
human belonging, of loving relationships, of heartbreak and heart ache. But to
believe and trust in “the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the
resurrection to everlasting life” is to trust in a life, a grace and a
communion, born of a victory over sin, evil and death itself. And when we
remember that creedal statement the light of Easter breaks open the dark November
days.
* From
Love’s Endeavour, W.H.Vanstone (1923-1999)
Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in St
Andrew’s Dawson Street LEP, Crook and in the wider West Durham Methodist
Circuit
