Tag: All Souls

All Souls: Wound & Bound Together

St Nicholas Charlwood
All Souls
November 3rd, 2024

All Souls by May Sarton
Psalm 27:1-6, 13-14
John 11:32-44

May Sarton ‘All Souls’

Did someone say that there would be an end,
an end, Oh, an end to love and mourning?
What has been once so interwoven cannot be ravelled,
not the gift ungiven.
Now the dead move through all of us still glowing.
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited–
only the strands grow richer with each loss
and memory makes kings and queens of us.
Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flow to some real haven,
we who find shelter in the warmth within,
listen and feel new-cherished, new-forgiven,
as the lost human voices speak through us
and blend our complex love,
our mourning without end.

In Church of England tradition, we come together over these few days at the beginning of November for a short season of remembrance. The Church has marked All Saints and All Souls for hundreds of years. It stems from the belief that there is a powerful spiritual bond between those in heaven and those living on earth. It is often said in my family that the dead sit at the dinner table long after they are gone.

This service offers us space and time to give thanks to God for the life and love that was shared, for the memories we carry and to ask for God’s help if we have unfinished business with those who have died. Not all our remembering will be of the good, sweet times as none of us are perfect and neither were they!

The only alternative to avoiding grief is to avoid love. To avoid the grief I feel over my person who has died means I would have had to forfeit the love and the relationship that we shared. We cannot have it both ways. May Sarton’s poem that Lorne just read begins with a very good question…‘Did someone say there would be an end to love and mourning?’ I doubt there is anything more complicated than love and grief.

I appreciate that many relationships are complicated. We should not pretend they are not. Some feelings about the person who has died might be mixed or ambiguous; maybe there is guilt or shame if you felt you did not do enough for them or felt relief when death finally came. We must be very careful in how we interpret relationships; especially ones that are not ours even if they are in the same family. There can also be great temptation when someone dies to want to paint a rosier picture of them, their life and relationships than actually ever existed. We lie! We do it for all sorts of reasons; some even noble ones.

We are wound and bound together and plaited together as May Sarton says. It cannot be undone even if we come undone. We are held together by love.

Love is a thread through the story of the raising of Lazarus. We can be held together by love and belief even when it seems impossible and we do not understand what or why things are happening. This is a complicated story as it raises a number of questions about the nature of life and death, faith and belief, Jesus’ miracles and the wider story of what will happen to Jesus.

At the heart of this story is a close-knit, loving family with a brother who is ill. There is an assumption that Mary, Martha & Lazarus have been orphaned at some point. If this is true then they know something of grief. We also know that they lived in Bethany which was on the edge of Jerusalem. Bethany was known to be a place where sick and poor people lived. Along the way these three poor orphans met Jesus and they became friends. When Lazarus became ill, the sisters sent a note to Jesus telling him that. They did not ask Jesus to come to them; maybe they assumed He would.

The story unfolds that Jesus does not immediately go to see them. Lazarus dies and his body is put into the tomb before Jesus arrives and the normal Jewish grieving process begins. There was no waiting around like many people today have to wait around for cremation or burial.

Jesus arrives and the sisters react differently. Martha goes out to meet him while Mary stays home. Jesus has to ask for Mary to come to see him. Mary’s opening statement is relatable to anyone who has ever felt abandoned by God, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ If if if. If the cancer was caught earlier, if the NHS waiting lists were not so long, if the scan showed, if they had left the house 10 minutes later or earlier, if God really loved them or me, then…

Jesus offers no explanation or excuse for his delay as though an answer would make anyone feel better at this moment. Jesus does not speak. He sees. Jesus sees Martha & Mary and all the others weeping and begins to weep too. If nothing else we see a God who weeps with us, knows and shares our pain even when we think we have been abandoned. Jesus’ love for these poor orphans is visible to everyone.

If the story stopped there we would still have a wonderful picture of God’s love. It goes further of course with the raising of Lazarus from death. Now we might wish to have had longer with our loved ones and ask why they did not get more time. Why did God not spare their life and give them back to us for a while longer? These are questions that cannot and will not be answered on this side of heaven.

Lazarus was given more life and would have died again in the future. There is also no indication if Lazarus was healed from his illness. Whatever happened to the three siblings they knew that God was their light and salvation (Psalm 27). They had faced death and had nothing to fear as they knew Jesus to be the true resurrection and life.

Jesus wanted Martha, Mary and Lazarus and the others gathered to see the glory of God. When the stone was rolled away, I believe that they did. The same as when the stone was rolled away on the first Easter.

Where does that leave us on a November afternoon in Charlwood at an All Souls service?

Love and mourning have no ending because they are tied up, plaited together
Jesus sees
There is a lot we do not and will not understand
But we can inquire in his temple, be hidden in the shelter of God
We can know that there is life in the resurrection

Finally, let your heart take courage. You are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses in the heavenlies and around you right now. All of us here have loved and lost. We can share God’s goodness with each other in the land of the living even while we wait.


All Souls: The moments when we shiver in grief

All Souls Service
29/10/23

Lamentations 3:17-26; 31-33
John 5:29-25

In Church of England tradition, we come together over these few days at the end of October/beginning of November for a short season of remembrance. The Church has marked All Saints and All Souls for hundreds of years. It stems from the belief that there is a powerful spiritual bond between those in heaven and those living on earth. It is often said in my family that the dead sit at the dinner table long after they are gone.

This service offers us space and time to give thanks to God for the life and love that was shared, for the memories we carry and to ask for God’s help if we have unfinished business with those who have died. Not all our remembering will be of the good, sweet times as none of us are perfect and neither were they!

I am going to start with a quote from Arthur Golden’s novel Memoirs of a Geisha:

“Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it.
It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord.
The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver.
But it opens a little less each time, and a little less;
and one day we wonder what has become of it.”

Memoirs is the beautifully haunting story of a young Japanese girl named Chiyo whose life was a catalogue of loss, grief and bereavements. She is now an old woman and is telling her story to a writer who will publish it. Chiyo’s story is not only a story of death but of the many non-death losses we encounter in life. The loss of relationship, loss of trust, she loses her name, her status, her freedom. As she looks back on her life, she makes this comment about grief as a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver.

This speaks of the random nature of grief. It just happens, we have no control over it. Isn’t this true? We hear the opening bars of a much-loved song, a favourite program on the telly, driving by a special place, or seeing an item that would be the perfect gift for our person. Whatever our trigger is, it can bring that feeling of uncontrolled grief, the coldness and all we can do is shiver.

The writer of the Lamentations reading certainly is shivering; ‘my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is’. The person writing this book is lamenting the fall of Jerusalem around 587 BC and the horrors experienced by the Jewish people. Jerusalem was once the chosen city of God but has now fallen from grace because of bad behaviour. The enemies have taken over and the people who lived in Jerusalem have been exiled. The loss for the people is immense.

The reading we have here is about the author’s own suffering; he believes that God has deliberately marked him out and is now not listening to his prayer. His peace is gone. Yet at his lowest point he remembers God’s steadfast love, hesed. Hesed is the love and mercy God has towards his people; it is a long-term and loyal love. It is love that never ends. It is new every morning.

The writer has experienced this love, not just with his head and his heart but in his very soul, in the marrow of his bones. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ he says. The Lord is enough for him.

The bereavement that we are facing is not the whole story. It might be a very big part of the story right now, might feel like it has taken over the whole story for a long time. It might feel like you won’t ever stop shivering.

The only alternative to avoiding grief is to avoid love. If I want to avoid the grief I feel over my person who has died means I would have had to forfeit the love and the relationship that we shared.

I appreciate that many relationships are complicated. We should not pretend they are not. Some feelings about the person who has died might be mixed or ambiguous; maybe there is guilt or shame if you felt you didn’t do enough for them or felt relief when death finally came. We must be very careful in how we interpret relationships; especially ones that are not ours even if they are in the same family.

There can also be great temptation when someone dies to want to paint a rosier picture of them, their life and relationships than actually ever existed. We lie! We do it for all sorts of reasons; some even noble ones.

We might almost be able to fool ourselves but we cannot fool God. He knows what was said, unsaid and done and not done. He also knows the motivations behind our words and actions. He knows and loves them, and He knows and loves you. He knows the situation and is the only one who truly knows both sides.

That is because God has authority over everything. In John’s Gospel reading, Jesus is telling the disciples precisely this. Everyone (even him) and everything (even death) is under God’s control. He can raise the dead. This is not just the physically dead; but John is suggesting that those people who are spiritually dead. The people who Jesus healed got their lives back and came alive again.

This authority is not based in control or power or a malicious need to be authoritarian. It is the authority of love. God’s love is so great for his Son and for us. The idea is that God the loving father is showing Jesus the beloved Son all that he does and even greater things.

Those who believed in Jesus would be treated by God in the same way that Jesus was. Jesus died and rose again and so will we. The Bible does not give us very much information on what happens when we die. To die in a few places means ‘to fall asleep’.

Paul’s vision in 1 Thessalonians, which is based on what he has been taught, is that one day when Jesus comes back, those who have fallen asleep/died will be woken up. The dead in Christ will rise first and if we happen to still be alive when that happens will be caught up together. We will be together with God forever. This is the great Christian hope: that once this life is over we will be reunited together with God to spend eternity.

This is good news – death is not the end of the story. Grief is not the whole of the story either. We live in the in-between time where everything might seem withheld, you might be shivering in your grief, you make your own way through. Even in that, knowing that the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, there is good news for the soul that seeks him. A new dawn will arrive.