To connect. To converse. To respond. To listen. To silence.
Through poetry.
At the outset of his father's funeral, this man made us aware that we were all members of a most unique gathering.
A gathering of neighbours, family, friends, friends of friends, colleagues of family, colleagues of friends - all brought together by this one extraordinary person who had touched the lives of so many people over decades. And the ever-growing, never-ending waves of the impact of those connections had brought us all to this place, at this time, to honour him, to honour his family - where honouring is about keeping what you know to be true in view.
And here I was, with colleagues and some distant family relations and many people I did not know at all, finding myself in the middle of a community that would never come together again - and had never been together before. As I look back on it now, I wonder if we had a glimpse for the duration of that funeral of how mayflies feel as they come to the surface of the water to bask in the gold rays of the sun. For one momentous day, they fill the air and before they leave the scene, they sow the seeds of another momentous day that they will most surely not live to see.
Each one of us in the church had followed a different path to get there, we all had a slightly different reason or connection to be there. But we were together, each of us quietly bearing our own story as to the imprint that man had had on our lives, be it directly through knowing him or indirectly through his family. Like the pictographs in Norway of which I wrote in the last blog, you wouldn't know of anyone else's story unless you approached them in a particular way. Chatting to them while queueing to sympathise at the end; approaching them on the far side of the Church to connect via conversation.
Indeed, the son who spoke at the outset of the funeral asked us to do that, to talk to each other before we left the church at the end about this heart of the community who was no longer with us. As I looked around the church while queueing to sympathise, it was resoundingly clear that this was a neighbours' funeral. There were whole hosts of families talking to each other across pews. There were young men being greeted by slightly older men with a soft, friendly hand to the shoulder, talking of matches last week and matches to come; people talking of the extraordinary music and song, of how a grandson played this piece and a daughter-in-law read that piece…
On my way to this funeral, I played a podcast between Martin Sheen and Krista Tippett which was first broadcast some years ago. He spoke of the importance of community as the space in which we live - in which we connect and grow - as the space in which our moral compass finds its true North, so that we can tell when we are out of phase and when we are not.
And in that church, at the end of the funeral, I saw, heard, felt what Martin was talking about. Although I was a stranger to most people there, I felt encompassed, and I like to think that the family, grief stricken as they were, were also encompassed by us. There was something intangible connecting us, and while we talked about a lot of things to each other, there were certain things that did not need words to give them shape.
In one of her poems, Emily Dickinson has some of the most intriguing of lines I have ever come across in poetry:
There is a fitting a dismay,
a fitting a despair.
In that church, I think these lines spoke to the shared garment we all bore across each other's shoulders. Each of us, of course, carried it, bore it in a different way - it was far heavier for some than it was for many others. But we still carried it all together, if only for a few moments. In silence, in simply present stillness, we did something for each other and for the family.
Chatting with a friend earlier that morning, we had discussed the idea of compassion, and how relevant it was today. I had reflected on the root of the word in suffering (passion) and the idea of co-suffering, companionship, bearing suffering together. And my friend spoke of how compassion is an act, while empathy is simply a feeling.
There was suffering in that church, and there was also compassion - a handshake, a hug, a word, a lean in, a visible raise of the head.
At the end, we scattered like mayflies here and there, barely conscious of what we had been reminded of at the beginning - that we would never gather quite like that again.
For we knew, that in the end, this is what we would want too.
They lived and loved and laughed and left. James Joyce - Finnegan's Wake
Tomás Ó Ruairc 31 Jan 2023
"What you truly are has never had an argument with life, you have always been in love with this…" - John Astin
"But that's the thing about having vision. It's not about always being right about the future. It's about constantly learning what's right and striving for it." - Daniel Jonce Evans writing of his wife Rachel Held Evans (d. 2019)
"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." Anne Frank
"Our greatest experiences are our quietest moments." Friedrich Nietzsche
I don't speak because I know that something is true. I speak because I hope and know that authentic conversation between us will unveil the sense of Truth a little more. Tomás (Inspired by the writings of Mark Nepo)
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