We cannot care for you the way we wanted

Children’s graves, Sandbach cemetery.

Today’s hymn is ‘We cannot care for you the way you wanted’ by John Bell and Graham Maule.   When I planned the hymns for the year I took into account the seasons of the Church’s calendar but not the lectionary readings for Morning Prayer, because it was only later that John decided to include them.  But he has sensibly suggested a swap here, putting this hymn in the service that includes the account of the Holy Innocents, the slaughter of all the young children in Bethlehem on the orders of Herod. For this hymn, following on from yesterday’s, is also about death and our feelings around it, and specifically where the death was of a baby or young child.  So in singing it we join with the mothers of Bethlehem of old, with ‘Rachel refusing to be comforted because her children are no more’, and with the countless parents who lose children in or own time to disease, starvation or war.  I read only this week in the context of the topical discussion of climate change that hundreds of children are dying every day in Africa from drought alone. Each one made in God’s image, each one loved by God, each death the cause of grief. 

As an aside, and with a linguistic link since Rachel means ‘ewe’, I saw a story on social media this week of a ewe whose lamb had been stillborn, grieving for it until another ewe in the flock ‘donated’ one of her own pair to the grieving mother to adopt.  These emotions are not only human.

To the lyrics, then: the first three verses are written from the point of the view of parents, expressing regret at not having been able to fulfil their own potential as parents or that of their offspring: ‘We cannot care for you the way we wanted, cannot watch you growing into childhood, cannot know the pain or the potential which passing years would summon or reveal’. Instead, a word of hope is offered, a promise by Jesus to cling to: ‘love will not die’, ‘you will still stay’, ‘we hope and feel [for promised fulfilment]’. The fourth verse recognises the complex of emotions experienced – anger, grief, tiredness, unresolved tensions. The very sorrow that this death has created is offered back to God along with the child itself, not reluctantly or as sacrifice but as ‘worship’.  

Although I wrote yesterday of the difficulty of squaring the ‘everyone goes to heaven’ attitude with the theology of the Bible, when it comes to a stillbirth or the death of a very young child, few people today would argue that a child dying unbaptised would be rejected by God because of ‘original sin’. And pastorally, it’s more important surely to grieve with the family in their loss than to speculate exactly what has happened to the child’s soul.  So, the hymn ends with placing the child into God’s arms with the words ‘believing that s/he now, alive in heaven, breathes with your breath’. 

The poignancy of grief, especially at a tragic loss, is expressed exquisitely in the music of Schubert’s song ‘Litany for the feast of all Souls’, sung in the original German at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrqIEwQhRMo (with subtitles, but only two verses) or https://youtu.be/9eUPVDPkdHM (all three verses, no subtitles).

When human voices cannot sing

Today is All Souls’ day, the remembrance of the dead, and so I have picked a funeral song from the hymn book. ‘When human voices cannot sing’ by Shirley Murray.   

Verse 1 acknowledges that hearts do break in bereavement, and that singing praise must necessarily cease during that first period of intense grief. God knows that, and we can bring our grief to him, aloud or silently.  The second verse admits there is also often fear: the fear of not knowing what happens in death, or of dying in the same, perhaps unpleasant way. We ask to be set free from that fear of the unknown, and have our path lit by Christ.  The third verse asks for God’s love to be as real as it was at Easter. The fourth releases the beloved to go ahead of us on this unknown journey in peace and that our sorrow may come to an end.

The Church has to tread a wary path between the general assumption among most people in contemporary society that there is an afterlife or paradise to which all souls go without exception, and the apparent teaching of the bible that ‘not everyone will be saved’ (go to heaven, spend eternity with God, however you choose to express it).  Even Jesus who welcomed everyone in life and extended God’s covenant with Israel to the whole world, still taught of the narrow way that not all will find, of those who call him Lord but who will find themselves rejected, and of Gehenna, the unpleasant fate that awaits even those who call someone else a fool, from which the popular idea of hell may derive.  The Church’s teaching has generally been around the idea that entry into heaven is for all who believe in Jesus and repent of their sins, rather than for everyone or for the non-existent person who never sins.  Yet dare to challenge, however gently, someone who is convinced that their deceased relative is now an angel in paradise and we will be charged with insensitivity or prejudice.

What the lyrics of the hymn remind us is that the future is truly unknown. The Bible offers many images: of a stairway to heaven, souls given new bodies, people in white robes worshiping around a throne, a new Jerusalem.  In our own day people make comparisons with a caterpillar that cannot imagine the butterfly it will become.  All these can only be poor metaphors for what eternal life really is.  All we can do with certainty is put our trust in Christ who said he would go ahead of us to prepare a place. ‘Justorum animae in manu dei sunt’ – ‘the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God’.

We praise you Father for your gift

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is the last, for now, in the series of evening ones: ‘We praise you Father for your gift’. It is attributed not to an individual but to St Mary’s Abbey, West Malling (Kent). The tune (Gonfalon Royal) is not written for it, and we’ve used it twice already this year (see 7 March and 5 April).

In the first verse we praise God for dusk and nightfall. Why? Because they ‘foreshadow the mystery of death that leads to endless day’.  The assumption we have as we go to sleep that whether our dreams be good or bad we will awaken in the morning, should also be the assumption we have at the end of life that whatever experiences lie beyond it, we will be received into a new life with Christ.

The second verse is more earthbound. We ask for quiet sleep to renew strength, gain looking ahead to morning when may wake in the love of God.  The third and final verse of this short hymn asks that we may seek God’s glory in rest as well as in activity – a reminder to us who are naturally active that rest and sleep are an important part of life.

Unless a grain of wheat shall fall

(c) Anthere cc-by-sa 3.0

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is from one of my favourite contemporary hymnwriters, Bernadette Farrell. The form of the hymn is six verses of three short lines and a chorus, the words of which are “Unless a grain of wheat shall fall upon the ground and die, it remains but a single grain with no life”.

“Unless a grain of what shall fall” is based on Jesus’ explanation to his followers that his death was necessary in order that he could rise again in a new and eternal form and send the Holy Spirit, just as a seed has to be buried in the earth in order to sprout and come to life as a new plant.

In different ways, the verses call people to the Christian life, and are balanced to show that Jesus gives as much as he demands. We are called to die, live and eventually reign with Jesus; to serve him and follow him; to make our home in him as he makes his home in us in order to bear much fruit; to remain in him and let his word live in us; to love and be loved; and finally, without any action demanded of us, to accept the peace that he gives which the world cannot give. 

All these sayings are to be found in John’s gospel, and are worthy of reflection as we approach Good Friday and Easter.

The Apocrypha in Lent – 19 March

If this is your first visit, please see my introduction to these Lenten readings.

19 March. Ecclesiasticus chapters 39-41

The second half of chapter 38 was about farmers and tradesmen – people who work hard for a living (and with no suggestion there is anything wrong with that in itself) but have no time to become wise or educated.  They do not become councillors, judges or writers, or what we might now call celebrities, but “they give solidity to the created worlds, while their prayer is concerned with what pertains to their trade”.  These are contrasted in the next chapter with ‘scholars’ – well travelled men who study secular writings and religious texts, and meditate on God.  Such people, says this writer, will become well known and praised in their own day and remembered after their death. But they are few.

Through human history (and until quite recently with our modern obsession with record-keeping and fame) only a small minority of people became well known outside their own town, and fewer still were remembered beyond the next generation of those who had known them.  To die, be buried in an unmarked grave and mourned by few people – that was the fate of most humans, unless they were important enough to appear in official records that were retained for a long time.  The ordinary person – farmer, merchant, miner, baker or housewife – lived their life in a small circle with no expectation of lasting fame.  And countless millions have never made it to adulthood –  rates of death in childhood were historically far higher than they are now, along with miscarriages and still-births.  To live long enough to make a living for yourself was an achievement in itself.

That is the background of the verses in chapter 41: 1-4, where death is described as unwelcome for the rich and healthy, but welcome to the poor, very elderly or distressed. But the word to both of them is “do not dread death’s sentence; remember those who came before and those who will come after”, with a rider that “whether your life lasts ten, a hundred or a thousand years its length will not be held against you in Sheol”.  In other words, while a short life many be thought a tragedy on earth, it will make no difference in the life to come.

Maybe such wisdom needs to be heard by the parents who mourn for years for a dead child, sometimes keeping their bedroom exactly how it was on their last day; or erect a large and florid monument to their “Little angel”; or who spend their last penny and every ounce of energy trying to get “justice” when what happened to their relative was an accident with no one person obviously to blame.  Their grief is understandable, the unexpected loss of a close relative at a young age seems unnatural, but it is a credit to our economy, infrastructure and  health systems that such a loss is now rare.

But it takes a spiritual kind of wisdom to understand that there is a life beyond this one, in which the time we spent on earth is irrelevant.  Happy memories are more helpful than bitterness and anger, and an understanding that the deceased has “gone on ahead of us” may be more helpful than a sense of them having been “left behind”.  One of Jesus’ most comforting sayings is “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” (John 14:2).

 

The Apocrypha in Lent – 11 March

If this is your first visit, please see my introduction to these Lenten readings.

11 March. Ecclesiasticus chapters 8-11

The “wisdom” of these chapters is nothing that humanists could disagree with.  Let’s look at just a couple of examples. Of course, you might say, it is foolish to try and seek justice against a rich or powerful man (8:1-3) because in every society there is corruption.   And given the attitudes and actions of certain “world leaders” at the present day, some of the verses about good government ring very true: “A leader of the people must be shrewd of speech; a phrase-maker is a terror to his town. … An uneducated king will be the ruin of his people; a city owes its prosperity to the intelligence of its leading men.” (9:17, 10:3)

But this book is written very much from the perspective of faith, and there is an underlying assumption that there are moral standards to be upheld.  Religious people are sometimes criticised for making too much of morality; and indeed it is true that Christianity has no “rules” other than those of loving God and loving your neighbour as yourself, from which all other ethical principles can be derived (Mark 12:29-30). Yet there is general agreement between civilised people of all faiths and none that there are essential basic standards in areas such as justice, honesty and fidelity.  For example, given agreement that adultery and promiscuity are generally a “bad thing” and that there should be an “age of consent”, then  we can all agree with the advice here that men’s desire for women makes it risky to go drinking with a married woman, make friends with a sex worker or “stare at a virgin” (9:5-9).

The difference that faith makes, as we read in chapter 11, is that rather than being frustrated and angered at the way some people get away with crime, sin or just being generally nasty – an attitude that tempts us to retaliation – the person who trusts in the God of eternity can take the longer view.  That has two implications. Firstly we can look death in the face and acknowledge our own mortality, something that humans tend to avoid if they have no hope beyond death.  “A man grows rich … and says ‘I have found rest, now I can enjoy my goods’. But he does not know how long this will last; he will have to leave his goods for others and die” – a couplet that may have inspired Jesus’ parable of the wealthy farmer (Luke 12:16-21).

The second is that we can trust in a God whose justice is made complete beyond the grave – “call no man fortunate before his death; it is by his end that a man will be known” (11:28).  So the purpose of all these proverbs is to encourage us to live lives without greed or envy, so that at the last day we, and not the arrogant rich, will find favour with God.  But if you don’t believe in God or the last judgement, then just read them as sensible advice for a stress-free life.