What We Can Do For The Dead

‘One has lost so many friends, and that one feels, of course. But the deaths of tens of thousands happening every day is the most insignificant of sensations.... One death means more than a thousand. When men are dying like flies, that is what they are dying like.’

This is Marcel Proust in Alan Bennett’s play A Private Function. He is speaking about war. But he could have been speaking about a pandemic. How right he is. We can scarcely get our minds round the scale of the mortality due to Covid19. Twenty thousand and more in our own country, hundreds of thousands worldwide. We could not have imagined six months ago how suddenly catastrophe can come upon us.

We try to make sense of the numbers through the arithmetic of morbidity - the statistics, the charts, the graphs. We study the probabilities, the trends, make comparisons with other countries, calibrate our exposure to risk. It’s clarifying and necessary. But what cold data can never do is convey any sense of the human tragedy that is happening around us. It’s crude to say that the amassing of metrics treats the dead as if they had died like flies. (It’s not even true, given the respectful way the figures have mostly been presented at the Government’s daily media briefings.) But on our bad days, the global calculus of death can feel like that, unremittingly desperate.

For more and more of us, the virus is no longer a drama happening ‘out there’, safely beyond our immediate experience. It is now touching us directly. We’re not spectators any longer. Maybe we’ve succumbed to infection, felt its impact for ourselves. We may have become seriously ill, hospitalised, been on a ventilator fighting for life. It may have affected our mental health, perhaps precipitated an episode of depression or suicidal thoughts. Or meant that a cancer test or ‘routine’ operation (which of course no operation ever is entirely) has had to be postponed, and that too will have life-changing effects.

And by the day, many more of us are bereaved. Someone close to us, a family member or friend, has died. Or someone we were less intimate with but still knew - a neighbour or work colleague perhaps. Or someone further removed, a friend of a friend, a distant relative, a friend from the past we have long lost touch with, or someone we’ve got to know on social media. It doesn’t matter how far removed they are. The point is that the person who’s died is not a mere statistic, lost among the nameless myriads who have also died ‘like flies’. This was someone real, a human being with a face, a name and a story. And we had a place somewhere in their concentric circles of belonging. However close to us or distant, they had become part of us and we of them.

‘One death means more than a thousand.’ This seems to me to be a clue to how we could try to respond to death happening before our eyes on such a scale. We need to individualise death, personalise it. We need to focus on the individual human beings behind the daily stats, the men, women and children who like us are not islands but are ‘part of the main’, each of whose deaths, as John Donne famously said, ‘diminishes me’. I’m suggesting that it matters because this is work we need to do for the dead.

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How do we do this? By starting with the people we know, or know of, who have died. My first cousin’s husband. My sister’s schoolfriend’s partner. The local councillor I knew and worked with years ago. The father of a friend on Facebook. The young nurse who was a friend of someone I got talking to in the village. A colleague’s parish priest. I can take the trouble consciously to ‘remember‘ them, name them, weep for them, cherish them in my mind and heart for a little while. Not necessarily just the once on first hearing the news that they had died but maybe from time to time, especially on the day of their funeral if we know when it’s taking place. With only handfuls of mourners allowed at a graveside or crematorium during lockdown, there’s immense strength to be drawn from the knowledge that others too are ‘present’ through an act of mindful embrace.

To me as a person of faith, it’s the most natural thing in the world to pray for the dead. It’s as natural to intercede for the departed in the presence of Light and Love as it is to pray for the living. There’s no great mystery about this as far as I can see. Whatever we believe about an afterlife, our love for people and our duty of care towards them doesn’t suddenly stop when they die. Holding, honouring and cherishing in our hearts those whom we love but no longer see is certainly to keep memory alive. In times like these, nothing could be more important than to know that when we die we are not forgotten, that those who love us will go on loving us to their own lives’ end. It keeps the verbs of loving and caring in the present tense. As for God, it says of Jesus in the gospel that he loves ‘to the end’. It’s all I need to know, because it transcends the boundaries of time and space.

But if it’s true, and experience tells me that it’s likely to be, that ‘one death means more than a thousand’, then we need to recognise this in relation to all Covid19 victims including those we don’t know personally. My daily paper, like most others, has published articles featuring groups of people who have died as a result of the virus. It has highlighted those who served in the NHS. It has honoured people who kept essential services going as frontline workers. It has recognised men, women and children who died in hospitals and, in the past week, in care homes. And so many others. The elderly. The young. The homeless. People of minority ethnicity. The LGBT community. Those from other counties who came to Britain to make a better life for themselves and their families. The all-but-forgotten who died alone in the world and had no one to attend their funerals and grieve for them.

They make painful reading, these potted biographies, the photographs, the heartfelt tributes from family, friends and colleagues, the volume of naked grief that pours off the page. ‘I just can’t get over that I didn’t get to say goodbye or be with her after 52 years of marriage. It’s so cruel’ I read yesterday. This was Tony from Birmingham, speaking about his beloved wife Suzanne. ‘She was wonderful.’ I stopped to take in that one word, such a simple yet eloquent tribute to a love that had grown over a lifetime. ‘She did everything’ he said, explaining how she was active in the community and had chaired the local Flower Club. I tried to imagine her life and his together, the beauty and yes, the wonder that an intimate relationship can flourish across half a century and more.

The media are doing us a great service by this simple, respectful way of personalising death. They are helping us to honour people as individuals, not simply aggregate them namelessly into the swollen mass of the thousands of dead, as if they had died ‘like flies’. This is what I mean when I talk about the work we can and should do for the dead. We may or may not have a religious faith, but that doesn’t matter. Amid the welter of Coronavirus news we can take the trouble to read about a few of those who have died, and be alongside them in some simple act of the imagination, whether it’s recollection, mental embrace, lighting a candle, offering a silent prayer or simply speaking their name. It’s the least we can do to pay our respects to the departed in this way, take it upon ourselves to undertake a little ‘heart work’ for them.

The few minutes it takes to read a dozen tributes seems little enough. Yet to do it mindfully, trying to be present to people we do not know, could be a powerful act of human solidarity and reverence for life in the face of sickness and death. It’s a way of bearing witness, at least to ourselves, to the truth that we are one human family and are in this together. Lighting a candle, metaphorically or actually, feels like a sign of hope. What could be more important?

Requiescant in pace. 

I’d just published this blog when my wife drew my attention to this article in The Guardian,’How reading obituaries can humanise a crisis’. It’s well worth reading. 

Ride on to Die!

Ride on, ride on in majesty!
In lowly pomp ride on to die.

It is strange not to be singing those words in the Palm Sunday procession this year. Strange and dislocating when for my entire adult life the great ceremonies of Holy Week and Easter have been the pivot round which the year turns. It will no doubt feel more and more uncomfortable as the week goes on. Not to gather with others in the Upper Room and Gethsemane, at Golgotha and by the empty tomb. We understand why this is necessary. But it hurts, the locked door of the parish church across the road, its emptiness, its silent organ, its lonely altar. It hurts very much for it feels like a kind of abandonment, a death even. It's as if a great stone has been rolled across the entrance.

Which is why this Holy Week will require a great act of the imagination on the part of all of us for whom it matters. It always does call for imagination, of course. We are not literally actors in the drama of the Passion. When we tell its story, we are not rehearsing history but proclaiming this story as a life-changing narrative that is of ultimate significance for us. This is what the liturgy does through its words and images, its rituals and symbols. It's anamnesis, invoking the dynamic of memory that brings past, present and future into a single whole and says: this is the reality that has formed and shaped us, makes us what we are, that lies at the heart of what it means to be human.

I was due to give Holy Week addresses in a southern cathedral this week. The theme was to have been St John's passion narrative, and on Good Friday, the three last words from the cross in that gospel. For St John, Golgotha is a place of achievement, of glory. 'It is accomplished!' I had drafted the sermons before it became clear that there would be no public liturgy anywhere this year. Looking back on them now, they seem to come out of another world when things were normal and we felt safer, less afraid than we do now. Such first world illusions, when so much of the human race lives in fear and insecurity all the time. But this was life back then. And sermons written in one context won't travel when everything has changed.

In the last few days, Covid19 has begun to touch me personally. I don't mean foregoing so much I took for granted and practising social isolation: for us the sacrifices have not cost very much, not compared to others. No, I mean that someone I used to know (and like and admire - but that isn't the point) has died of the virus. I mean that family and close friends are now reporting deaths of people they knew. It has suddenly become a whole lot more real. And even that is a more distant kind of reality for me compared to what is being faced by people who have lost those they loved or who are seriously ill and afraid for their lives. And so many others who are taking great risks every day to care for them, or to maintain the fabric of our common life. These are cruel times. We wouldn't be human if our hearts weren't being broken more than perhaps we can ever remember.

So I find that for now, I'm living more in St Matthew than St John. In this Year of St Matthew, his is the passion story we would have read at the Palm Sunday service. It perfectly fits the experience of this Holy Week 2020. This is the gospel in which there is a great darkness 'across the whole earth' says the evangelist. And Jesus dies with the agonised words of the psalm on his lips, 'My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?' How many people 'across the whole earth' find themselves in just such a darkness uttering just such words right now? I tried to write about some of this in last week's blog when I reflected on a crucifixion altarpiece specifically painted for a convent where the sick and dying were cared for.

St Matthew is clear early on in his gospel that Jesus' death was inevitable, that he 'must go to
Jerusalem and undergo great suffering' (16.21). On Palm Sunday he enters the city as its humble anointed one. No-one gets the irony of the donkey bearing the messianic king. There are shouts of hosanna and victory palms. Who else guesses that he has come to die? Not even his disciples seem to have been paying attention. I wonder what this felt like to the Son of Man who when he arrived at the city he had wept over from afar, how illusory the acclamations and palm branches must have seemed when he looked beyond them to what must inevitably follow. 'Ride on to die.'

This is the first time I've consciously thought, I too must 'ride on to die'. We all must. Not with any messianic pretentions of course, but in the sense that what's true for Jesus is true for all of us. His mortality is ours and ours is his if he is truly 'bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh'. This is the solidarity I wrote about last time, God’s life with ours. We mortals move from one scene to the next in the drama of life that's 'but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more'. That's not to say that the play (let’s not name it out of respect for those in the acting profession) is right to sum it up as a 'tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'. On the contrary. Every human life holds an infinity of meaning and value, if only we could see it and know it. But as to mortality, who is going to argue with Shakespeare, least of all when we face the threat of a disease that could bring the life of any of us to an unexpected end? We all ride on to die, if not soon, then one day.

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This means me. I can't escape that fact. 'Most things may never happen: this one will' writes Philip Larkin as he lies awake at night and imagines what it will be like to die. Philip Larkin’s greatest and bleakest poem ‘Aubade’ won’t bring any comfort to us during this testing time or any other. ‘Not to be here / Not to be anywhere, / And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.’ Fear of death is real. It calls for courage, and yet ‘being brave / Lets no-one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than understood.’ The poet accuses religion of being implicated in denial: ‘That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.’ Who is to say that he’s not at least partly right about that? It’s easy for preachers like me to present the resurrection as the ‘happy ending’ to the story of suffering and death rather than the great mystery about which we can only say that it is the heart of our faith, it keeps our hope alive, yet we cannot know this side of the grave what it really means. And meanwhile, the ‘work’ of dying is inescapable, whether we have faith or not.

What Larkin’s poem teaches me is that paradoxically, it’s calming and empowering, if not immediately then in time, to stop pretending, face the truth and live in the light of it. This is the theme of Kathryn Mannix’ outstanding book With the End in Mind: dying, death and wisdom in an age of denial. I read it before I’d ever heard of Coronavirus (but knowing that I would soon reach my allotted three score years and ten). She is a consultant in palliative care who has found in her work with the terminally ill, dying and bereaved that when we acknowledge our mortality and are able to speak about death, we not only prepare ourselves to die well, but also find that we live more fulfilled lives as a result. This is precisely the theme of the great classics of seventeenth century Anglican spirituality, Bishop Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying. Perhaps one of the positives to come out of this crisis is that we are being urged to think realistically about dying, name it and talk about it with those who are closest to us. This means that if we were to succumb to the virus, we would die having said what we needed to say and made what practical arrangements were necessary. (To their credit, William Collins, publisher of Dr Mannix’ book, has made it available as a free e-book for the next few days. Follow the link.)

Of course Holy Week is about a lot more than our own mortality. These coming ‘days of awe’ celebrate nothing less than the redemption of the world through the cross and resurrection of Jesus. This Great Week transforms everything. This includes our own personal view of life, what we value, what we aspire to, how we are going to live. And how we hope to die. This year, as we observe Holy Week in isolation from one another and in anxiety about what the future may hold, it would be strange if we did not see in the lonely vulnerable Sufferer on his Via Dolorosa an image of us all, strange if we did not hear his cry ‘let this cup pass from me’ as ours, not only for ourselves but for these we love and for all who are suffering in these terrible  days. And yes, even his ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

The days of Holy Week were terrible for Jesus too. Which is why, paradoxically, they can bring reassurance, comfort and hope. Where we are travelling in fear, desolation and sorrow he has been, and in an important sense, still walks and always will. Could it be that this year, because of the unique context we find ourselves in, we hear these familiar stories as if for the first time? Could they come alive for us in new ways in our aloneness, our fear, our loss? Could they help us to live better and trust that we shall die better when the time comes? In the last few days Sister Catherine Wybourne, the ‘Digital Nun’, has written a blog that I find profoundly moving. She has decided not to undergo a course of chemotherapy for her terminal cancer, which would now be ‘treatment of last resort’. She asks what it might mean to die at a time like this.

But what about dying itself? We all have our own views on that. The chances are that, in common with many others, if I die in the next few months, I shall die without the sacraments. I cannot easily express what that means to me, but if that should be my lot, I know that it is one I will share with many others, including many great saints. Can it really be so lonely to tread a path many have travelled before? I don’t know. What I do know is that whether I die alone or with someone watching at my bedside, with the sacraments or without, I shall be surrounded by the prayers of the great cloud of witnesses, living and dead, who make up the communion of saints. So, surely, it will not be so lonely after all.

Sister Catherine inspires me this Palm Sunday as I begin the Holy Week journey towards Easter. We can’t know what lies on the other side. It’s a case of ‘one step enough for me’. It always is. But as we take up the cross today we may perhaps find to our surprise that its yoke is easy and its burden light - or at least, a little lighter and a little easier than we had imagined. The Palm Sunday hymn sets the tone in which we must ride on ‘with the end in mind’ - both to die and to live:

Bow thy meek head to mortal pain,
Then take, O God, thy power, and reign!

Assisted Dying: “Compassion is not a Crime”

Three years ago this month I watched my mother die. It was brutal for her and for me. She had recently been admitted to a care home following a short spell in hospital. A few weeks before, she had still been living at home in her ninety-fourth year, glad to have retained her independence for so long.

It was becoming clear that the end would not be far off. Like any son, my hope for my mother was that it would be quick, dignified and free of pain. But the reality turned out to be none of these things.  When she lost consciousness, the presumption was that death would soon follow. But it didn’t. She clung on to her life for a full two days, contorted by a pain the morphine administered by the medical staff seemed unable to assuage. I sat with her in the darkness through her last night with my memories and my prayers while she cried out in distress. Next day the morphine ran out, so I was dispatched to the hospital pharmacy to get some more. While I was gone, she died. 

The previous week in the hospital, she had asked the young doctor who was looking after her, “why can’t you give me something to help me cross this final threshold?” He replied, gently, “no, I can’t do that, but when the time comes for you to make that journey, we won’t get in the way”. She knew that he had no choice about his answer. She accepted it and didn’t argue the point. She knew that he had her best interests at heart. But she also knew that prolonging her life by not intervening to bring it to an end was not really about living at all. It was simply prolonging her dying. To her and to me, this was heartless.

My mother had long been an advocate of voluntary euthanasia. I found this out by chance one day when I was rummaging around the upper levels of a bookcase in the living room. There I came across a publication that bore the intriguing imprint EXIT. I asked her about it. She told me she believed that there were circumstances in which to choose to die was not only permissible but responsible. What circumstances, I wanted to know? Terminal illness for one thing, she said. Or the loss of your mental or physical faculties. Or any situation where your quality of life would be so diminished that death was preferable. I now think she had the Nazi death-camps in mind, in which members of her family had perished.

I can’t have been more than about twelve when we had that conversation, but I recalled it as I sat by my mother’s death bed. And I wondered what could be said for a law that prevented her from being relieved of her suffering had she chosen in advance, as she assuredly would, that in these desperate circumstances she would want her life to be terminated. I wondered why anyone would think that my mother’s pitiful condition during this ordeal was a good way to die, a dignified and compassionate way to bring a long human life to its close.

I could rehearse the ethical and theological objections to assisted dying and euthanasia, of course. I had (still have) every sympathy with those who argue that reverence for life must underlie all our decisions about palliative care and what we used to call the end of life pathways on which terminally ill patients were set. In all things there must be the imperative to “do no harm”. I understand the risks inherent in changing the law, the abuses that could follow bad legislation, the fear that the right to die could slide into a duty to die on the part of elderly people who could come to feel they had outstayed their welcome on this earth. 

But there’s another side to this. For one thing, at a time when every moment of human life can be, and is, managed by decisions we make for ourselves, including life’s beginnings by planning whether and when to give birth, it seems artificial to exempt life’s ending from this good and wise decision-making. Indeed, we don’t do this - in a case like my mother’s, every aspect of care in the final days and hours is highly managed until the end comes. But not the end itself. Yet in the face of terminal illness and the collapse of our mental or physicality capacity, not to be permitted to make a free and informed decision about bringing our life to a close is to subvert an aspect of our human responsibility to make moral choices. We make decisions about our healthcare throughout our lives, advised by professionals we trust. Why should the ultimate decision, the awesome choice whether to go on living or to die be denied us?

But a pastoral theologian wants to go further. It seems to me that this is fundamentally a matter of loving your neighbour as yourself or, as the Golden Rule has it, to treat others as we would have them treat us. We do not want to see other people suffer. We do not want to suffer ourselves. Contrary to how the Christian tradition is sometimes presented, there is surely no virtue in pain per se, which is why people of faith don’t regard relieving suffering as somehow frustrating the will of God. On the contrary. To alleviate suffering wherever we find it is an act of love and compassion that is motivated by the very same reverence for life that is often invoked against assisted dying. 

This week Parliament has once again been debating assisted dying. This debate will not be concluded any time soon. And it is right not to rush to conclusions, for these are matters literally of life and death. But I’d like to think that the churches’ contribution to it would not be implacable a priori opposition. I believe as a matter of Christian ethics that legislation could be enacted that would allow people - if they chose - to be spared the kind of suffering I watched my mother go through in her final hours. In an important book, Professor Paul Badham* considers the arguments for and against assisted dying in the light of biblical, theological and ethical considerations. He also presents evidence from places (such as the Netherlands, Switzerland, the State of Oregon) where the law permits assisted dying. He concludes that there is a Christian case for it that needs to be taken seriously. Which is why I support the Campaign for Dignity in Dying in pressing for legislation that will permit it in this country. As they say, “compassion is not a crime”. 

Sitting with my mother as she lay dying, while being profoundly aware of my own helplessness was not what brought me to this conviction. I had come to it long before that. But my belief about a principle had now acquired a personal dimension. What she suffered at the end of her life was in no way what she would have wished, in no way what I or anyone else who cared for her could have wanted. We ought to be allowed to be spared such an end. All our pastoral instincts surely point in that direction. It’s often pointed out that we are kinder to our pets when they reach the end of their lives than we are to our fellow human beings. Are we not of (even) more value than they?

It’s true that in all things, l’homme propose, Dieu dispose. We don’t know how we are going to die. But as I grow older I find myself echoing the petition in the Litany that we may be protected from a sudden catastrophic death. How much better to die peacefully, and whatever the poet says, to go gently into that good night. How much better to allow the artistry with which we have tried to shape our lives to help shape our deaths too, to the extent that is possible. This is what assisted dying is about, in the settings I’ve described.

So for myself, I hope to be able to make the decision while I am of sound mind to ask, if I need it, to be helped across that final threshold with dignity and grace, in the presence of those who love me and before my God who I trust will help me to pray, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”.

*Paul Badham, Is There a Christian Case for Assisted Dying? Voluntary Euthanasia Reassessed (SPCK, 2009).

Forty Days and Forty Nights - to Brexit

This isn't an early blog about Lent. Easter is late this year, so Ash Wednesday doesn't fall till the 6th March.

No, this is about the time that's left to us before Brexit Day on the 29th March, forty days and forty nights. That's the same length of time as Lent (if you take out the six Sundays of Lent which don't count towards the total as Sundays are always feast days). Less than six weeks. Or put it another way. In 1939, war was declared on the 3rd September. If that were Brexit Day, then by now it would already be 25th July.

That's frighteningly close to an event that is probably Britain's biggest crisis since the last war. By now, whatever your hopes or fears about leaving the European Union, you'd have thought that the shape of our nation's future after the end of March would be looking clear. But not at all. Thanks to Theresa May and her government, the past two and half years since the referendum have resulted in a negotiated deal that has twice been comprehensively voted down in Parliament. It is baffling beyond belief to Leavers and Remainers alike, not to mention our frustrated EU partners, that she persists with this fantasy. One EU negotiator speaking today put the likelihood of the UK crashing out of the EU without a deal as around 90%. That would be terrible for trade and business, for police and security co-operation across Europe, for travel, for cultural and environmental collaboration and a whole lot else.

You don't need me to rehearse the litany of probable woes. Indeed, it's already a litany of actual woes. Each day it seems that another business announces that it's relocating its headquarters to the continent. Today Flybmi has gone into administration citing Brexit uncertainty. Here in the North East, the news that Nissan will not now be manufacturing the new X-Trail model at its Sunderland works has come as a heavy blow. The stockpiling of essential supplies including medicines has begun. There is talk of civil disorder, and plans to evacuate the Royal Family. The billions Brexit is already costing the nation are only part of the price we are paying. And our hapless Prime Minister and her cabinet hurl themselves like Gadarene swine towards the cliff edge dragging the nation in their slipstream. No wonder we are the laughing stock of Europe. It's hard not to feel ashamed of the way we have conducted ourselves since the vote.

Standing on this threshold of a Lent-length forty days' journey to Brexit, I ask myself what's to be done? I've nothing new to offer here, but I guess that the more people who try to challenge the Brexit groupthink and speak some sense into this bizarre and dangerous situation, the better.

The first thing is that we must defer Article 50. It is a nonsense to think we can safely depart from the EU at the end of March with no road-map even for the short-term future, no consensus about what our key relationship with the EU is going to look like after Brexit. You don't take off from the runway without knowing where your aircraft is taking you and how you are going to navigate the weather that lies ahead. You don't complete on a property purchase if the survey has thrown up matters that need resolving first. Or in the parables of Jesus, you check that you're building your house on rock, not on sand. You don't embark on a project without first counting the cost. Mrs May’s brinkmanship is making a hostage of this nation’s future. This close to B-Day, we must give ourselves more time. And while we are about it, Parliament must rule out no-deal as an option and get serious about negotiating realistically with the EU.

The second thing is that having deferred Brexit Day, we must go back to the electorate and hold a People's Vote to establish beyond doubt that leaving the European Union is what the nation wants. ,I've no patience for the riposte that says that having voted once on this subject, it would be a betrayal of democracy to do it again. On the contrary. Given the divided nation and Parliament that we are, it would be a betrayal of democracy not to check what the "will of the people" is now, in 2019. Democracy means that it is permitted to change our minds.

This is critically important when we all know so much more about what Brexit would entail than we did in 2016. There was so much that was wrong with the 2016 referendum, not least excluding 16 and 17 year olds from the vote, excluding UK citizens who had lived abroad in EU countries for more than 15 years, and not stipulating that a majority of 60% or two-thirds of votes cast would be needed to effect such a major constitutional change. A People's Vote would allow those mistakes to be corrected. One of the options on the ballot paper would obviously be to remain in the EU as we are, on the current terms. I've no idea whether it would secure a safe majority to reverse the disastrous 2016 vote. But it's important to find out. Democrats have nothing to fear from this. If Brexiters are convinced that the case has been made for leaving the EU, let the public endorse it if that is what it believes. Why are so many people, even MPs who voted Remain in 2016 (like my own elected member) afraid of doing this?

The third thing is that we should use these forty days to try to clear our heads. Groupthink is a dangerous mentality because you can never argue against it, never persuade anyone that there is another side to an issue. Our government has got it into its head that there is only one direction in which to travel, and that is out of the European Union. For all the counter-arguments, all the evidence that this would damage not only the UK economy but also its standing in the world and its networks of influence and collaboration, for all the threats that we face, this government has only one song to sing, which is that "the people have decided" and the referendum outcome is sacrosanct.

I want to ask, respectfully but plainly, what would it take to shift this government's mind, break out of this slanging-match we are in that becomes more hysterical by the day, and instead, get a grown-up conversation going? How dire do the threats have to be before Mrs May notices? What evidence would need to be presented for her to revisit her beloved red lines? What arguments would it take for her at least to contemplate changing her mind? If only she could show a modicum of self-doubt! If only she could think it possible that she was mistaken, could entertain the idea that our nation had misjudged things. If only she could admit that it's allowed to step back and think again. Prudence at a time of crisis is a virtue in leaders. This is just such a time.

If only... if only... Well, in the Bible, forty days and forty nights are often set aside as a period of preparation, self-examination and prayer. Think of Moses and Elijah on the mountain, think of Jesus himself in the desert. That's one of the reasons we observe Lent. Wouldn't it be a good idea for our elected representatives to try to do this in the spirit of a pre-Brexit Lent, to take time to ponder, reflect, and yes, in desperate times - if they can - to pray. And ask themselves if it doesn't make sense to step back from the brink while there is still time.

But what Lent is chiefly for is to prepare for Easter, for the commemoration of Jesus' death and resurrection. Right now, I can certainly see a death lying ahead on the other side of these forty days of Brexit. But no resurrection, I'm afraid, no new life or even the promise of it. Just a no-deal abyss into which we are destined to tumble if we do not come to our senses. It's utterly reprehensible that our leaders have allowed this nation to sleep-walk into disaster. Deferring Article 50 and holding a People's Vote seem to me to be the only way of averting it.

You can tell that I'm writing with some feeling. That's because I'm deeply afraid of the future that is rushing down the slipway towards us next month. In my view we have been badly let down by our leaders. I want to believe that it's not too late to change course. I wish my waters were telling me that it's likely to happen. Do I believe in miracles that can win minds and hearts? I suppose I must at least believe in the power of persuasion, for otherwise, why am I even bothering to write? I don’t believe in praying blindly that some deus ex machina will get us out of a mess for which we only have ourselves to blame.

I just can’t see how this can end well. I’m proud to be European. And I’m proud (on good days - there aren’t many of those just now) to be British. But I confess to sending this blog out into the world with a very heavy heart. If the lights go out at the end of March, my generation won’t see them lit again in our lifetime.

Growing Old Gracefully

This week I'm taking part in a 24 hour event for clergy who are coming up to retirement. So here's another in a series of occasional blogs on retirement "from the front line". This one's about growing old.

And it's trending nowadays. We baby boomers are about to add to the pressure on our struggling health and social care provision. My generation was born just after the last war. We're getting to the age when we're going to need looking-after in the last years, even decades, of our lives. Some have already reached that difficult turning-point in life where we can't go on without the help of others, whether we're wholly or partly dependent on family, friends, neighbours or social welfare.

The trouble is, we are living too long, a lot longer than was imagined in the 1940s and 50s when I was born. And this at a time when healthcare expectations and the strains on our public finances are greater than they have ever been. Many of us retired people in the so-called "third age" enjoy a quality of life that compared to most others across the world is altogether extraordinary. We look at people like Cliff Richard in his seventies and Joan Collins in her eighties, and can't quite believe they aren't still in middle age. (Perhaps they think they are!) Even at this modest age of sixty eight, I occasionally get told off for pretending to be older than I really am, old enough to be retired.

Well, most of us last played that game of pretending when we were kids, trying to get in to watch "A" films at the local cinema. Or worse... I can see you're worried. Let me reassure you. It was nothing salacious, but I was underage, eleven probably, when I went to see Whisky Galore after school one day with a friend. How grown-up it felt! (Who was that friend? I wish I could remember. Another symptom of ageing, that...)

"Be your age" we used to scold our children. But of course that's precisely the point about how ageing tends to be viewed in western society. "You're as old as you feel" we're told; "sixty is the new forty. Welcome to middle age." And while I get impatient with that kind of talk, there's some truth in it. We don't really feel our calendar age. My consciousness of being "me" tells me that I'm fundamentally the same person as I was a lot earlier in life. Inside, I feel I be back at school again, or getting married, or starting my working life, or having children. And a lot else. Use your imagination. It's when bits drop off my body and its parts start to fail or stamina falls off that I'm reminded where I am on this timeline of being, not Adrian Mole aged thirteen and three quarters, but Michael, now fast approaching seventy. It can feel hard at times.

But why should it be hard to admit that? It's a very western problem to see growing old in this nostalgic regretful way. Most other cultures respect the old. The Japanese even have a special "day of the elderly". Yes, we should look back and be thankful for all the good things that have happened to us in youth and middle-age, all that has blessed and enriched us, fulfilled us and made us glad to be alive. Thankful too for the capacity to recognise our mistakes, say sorry and try to put them right, or at least live well with memories that will always be sad or painful or dark. And especially I am trying to be thankful for God's inestimable love, as the General Thanksgiving in the Book of Common Prayer puts it, God's constant presence and care from first breath to last, whether I knew it or not. If being human means lifelong learning, then no experience we've undergone is ever wasted.  Yes, there's a lot that's been lost, and most of all the people who have loved us and have died. But "all in the end is harvest". Loss is real, but the memories of cherished souls still touch my life and continue to make me what I am.

I've just read a rather wonderful book by Lynne Segal, Out of Time: the Pleasures and Perils of Ageing. She writes with insight about the ambiguities of growing old, and how the elderly are perceived in our society, especially by the young. We comfortable baby boomers who "never had it so good" are, she observes, increasingly resented by young and middle-aged people who struggle with unemployment, lack of opportunity, poverty, poor (or no) housing and the near-collapse of proper social welfare. By contrast, as some see it, baby-boomers' self-interest has begotten consumerism with all its ills, caused financial mayhem across the planet and has continued to plunder the world's resources when we should have known better. Add to that (too late for the book) how the young regard the silver-haired generation who have stolen their future from them by voting so decisively for a Brexit they (the young) do not understand or want.

Segal recognises that there's caricature in some of this. When has any generation not scorned or blamed their forebears for the predicaments they find themselves in. And yet... I know as we all do, so many inspirational young people who want to make the world a better place and find common cause with my contemporaries who want the same thing. Self-interest is not, I think, age-specific. I'm always heartened by that saying in the Rule of St Benedict about how we need to listen to the young, for God often tells them things he withholds from those who are older but not necessarily wiser.

The book urges me to be honest and realistic as I answer the question, "how old are you?" And that's about much more than what I'm feeling. Having read it, I now want to respond as truthfully as I can and acknowledge what belongs to the age I am rather than five, ten or twenty years younger. There's dignity in that, especially when it includes facing up to our physical or mental deterioration, our dwindling beauty or attractiveness, our sexual prowess or athletic ability. It isn't always easy to own up to. We can long to recapture those first, fine careless raptures wherever, whatever they were. In one way or another, we can devote all our lives to that attempt to re-set ourselves to some point in the past.

In the end, though, it's a futile quest. We are mortal. We know that one day we shall die, even if we pretend (back to that word again) that we can sit out the summons to join in the dance of death. When I laid down my work as a stipendiary priest, I wondered whether retirement might prove to be the last really big rite of passage of my life until either my wife or I myself died - a portentous thought to concentrate the mind. But more gently, ancient wisdom invites us to cultivate the art of living well in the time that we have left, to make old age a true summing-up of all that we've tried to be in life. Paradoxically, as we contemplate death, far from finding it a depressing or sinister thought, we discover that perhaps it's the clue to embracing life in all its fulness and living joyfully in our old age. Read the great seventeenth century classics of spiritual writing, Bishop Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying and Holy Living if you don't believe me.

Late in life, I'm trying harder to celebrate the miracle that I am "alive, alive-oh" to quote the title of a book by that doughty writer on old age, Diana Athill. I don't mean anything dramatic, simply learning how to be more present to being alive, how to pay more attention. To live contemplatively and thankfully in the present tense is truly transformative. And that's also to recognise the past and future tenses of ageing, how grace has brought me thus far, and how, I trust, it will lead me home.

I realise (how can I not?) that "old age is not for wimps". It takes courage to peer into the possible futures that could await us in this adventure of growing old. Some of them could be bleak indeed. The spiritual question I live with is, how do I keep alive the sense of God, whatever may happen? When it gets hard, I so want still to be able to sing alleluia. But even if courage fails in whatever ordeals may await, I hope I shall always hear that still small voice calling to me deep down, and be able to whisper back: For all that has been, thanks! To all that shall be, Yes!

Up in the Attic

I've been in London this week going through my late mother's things. Readers of this blog will know that she died in July at the great age of nearly 94. 

 

You might think it was dispiriting to spend several days in your parents' house where only their memories are left behind, especially when it's the home you were brought up in. Not at all dispiriting, though it was thought-provoking. My sister lives not far away and we had many hours together sorting their stuff out, going through a vast number of books, unearthing unsuspected papers in the attic and reminiscing about our childhood in North London in the 1950s and 60s.

 

The trapdoor to the attic was hardly ever opened. So I had never clambered inside it before this week (unless the memory has been wiped). How strange, this late in life, to find an undiscovered country in your own childhood home! Once, when my father was busy up there archiving his papers (or something), I dared to climb a few rungs of the ladder he had positioned against the skirting board. It was queasy perching there as the ladder flexed and swayed above the stairs that descended into the abyss below my feet. I did not want to go any further. I could not go any further. (Later in life I replayed that experience when I followed a false trail high up on the Langdale Pikes. The friend I had got separated from said he spent an uncomfortable hour rehearsing the speech he would need to make to my wife when he came back from that Lake District expedition alone.)

 

We found a lot of papers that my father had obsessively kept: decades of bank statements and cheque-book stubs, invoices, receipts, business letters and utility bills. But this was not all there was. We came across a large musty bag containing my grandmother's personal archive. (This was my mother's Jewish mother, "Omummy" who with my grandfather whom I never knew was hidden underground in occupied Holland following the German invasion.) Letters from her children, her parents and her friends were carefully bundled together - by year I think. There was correspondence from the German front during the Great War with postage stamps bearing the Kaiser's image. 

Most poignantly, and chillingly, I unearthed my grandmother's Verzeichnis über das Vermögen von Juden, the Third Reich's valuation of my grandmother's assets as a Jew, signed on 29 June 1938. She had pathetically little to declare: by then, not long before Kristallnacht, regular income for Jews who had been in business had dried up. It was a case of Things My Mother Never Told Me to quote the title of Blake Morrison's memoir. I was both moved and excited by this find that I hadn't expected. It will take time to assess how important it may be in contributing to our knowledge of family life during the Great War, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era.

 

Taking breaks in the fresher air downstairs, I was happily poring over my parents' immense collection of books. I remember from childhood how some of the titles stood out on the choked bookcases: Bannister Fletcher's History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, G.M. Trevelyan's four volume English Social History, Plato's Republic (Benjamin Jowett's version, the famous nineteenth century Master of what would be my Oxford college, Balliol), Lancelot Hogben's Mathematics for the Million, Spinoza's Ethics, the Knox translation of the New Testament that a Catholic boyfriend of my mother had given her during the war in a vain attempt to convert her to Christianity.

 

But most of all I relished what was on the top-shelf. These books, far above my head, were strictly not for children to take down and look at. I know what you're thinking. But you're wrong. These were the leather-bound volumes of German poets: Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Rellstab, Hölderlin, Rilke and others. They were beautiful books, a joy to look at especially when the sun was setting in summer and lit up the fine bindings in a golden light. They had belonged to my grandmother (or her parents) and been passed on to my mother. They were never opened, and a day came when my parents decided that they should go into stack to make room for newer books that needed accommodation. So they were banished to the attic in a big mouldy suitcase where they remained for years until I rescued them from their long dusty exile and brought them back downstairs this week. 

 

Heinrich Heine was one of the greatest European Romantic poets. He was from Düsseldorf where my mother was born and grew up until 1937 when as a teenager she was sent to England. While browsing through her bedside books, I'd come across a paperback anthology of German poetry. On the flyleaf was written in my grandmother's careful script: "for Michael" - so it should have come to me when she died in 1987. She had also referenced her favourite poem. It is by Heine, so in my imagination it belongs to that nineteenth century leather-bound set on the top shelf. Here is a translation by Sibylle Luise Binder of that poem, Wo?

Where will the tired wanderer last resting place be?

Under palms in the South? Under lime trees by the Rhine?

Will I be hastily buried by strangers’ hands in a desert?

Or will I rest in the sand on a sea’s strand?

At least, here like there I’ll be surrounded by God’s heaven. 

And at night as lamps of death the stars will hover over me.

 

I didn't know the poem before this week, but I think it will come to symbolise these winter days spent in my parents' home. It's typical of the Romantics' love-affair with death, and with the metaphor of life as the journey of an exhausted wanderer yearning for home. (To get the idea, listen to that seasonal song cycle Winterreise by Schubert, a profound setting of poems by another Romantic poet Wilhelm Müller in which a rejected lover finds his whole life under review as he makes his winter's journey away from all that is familiar and homely. Or look at the pictures of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.)

 

As I thought about the Heine poem, and the death of my parents and grandparents, I recalled that it was Advent. It's the season when we reflect on the Last Things: death, judgment, hell and heaven in the light of Christian faith. In later life our thoughts inevitably turn towards mortality: the loss of those we have known and loved, the prospect of our own death, "one whole day nearer now" as Philip Larkin put it (on whom see my last blog). Heine's poem is about death as a homecoming. I found it comforting to read in this house of truth where death could not be evaded, this place that was once home and that is so full of childhood memories. And in this Advent time, it was good to be reminded that we live by the promise of the One who is to come, that in our Father's house are many mansions.

Philip Larkin, Poets' Corner and Haydon Bridge

Tomorrow, a memorial to Philip Larkin will be unveiled in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey on the anniversary of his death on 2 December 1985. 

I can't let this occasion pass without offering a congratulatory salute from Haydon Bridge, the village in Northumberland where we have retired. For this was where Monica Jones, the companion and longest love of Larkin's life had come to live. He came here frequently to be with her from 1961 to 1984. In a sense he made his home here, no doubt a welcome change from the urban campus realities of his life in Hull where he was University Librarian.

Monica had a flat at 1a Ratcliffe Road, the house on the end of the Victorian terrace just by the eponymous bridge. This is the heart of the village where the road that drops steeply off the ridge carrying the Roman Wall meets the old road along the valley from Newcastle to Carlisle. In their day, traffic hurtled relentlessly past the house along the A69. Now there is a bypass and the villagers have reclaimed their streets and pavements. Outside the Co-Op on the corner opposite there is usually a huddle of people meeting and greeting one another, and dogs tethered to the lamp post while their owners are shopping. There are two pubs a stone's throw away, and a third just across the bridge. The pagoda tower of the late Georgian St Cuthbert's Church tops the townscape. Did Larkin ever darken its doors, if only as the curious but uncommitted visitor described in his famous poem Church Going who finds in this "serious house on serious earth" a place to grow wise in?

There is a blue plaque on the wall of Monica's house with a louche reference to a "secret love nest" - hardly a Larkinesque epithet, unless someone can tell me that he himself parodied the place in that way (which is not impossible). The plaque quotes him: "I thought your little house seemed...distinguished and exciting and beautiful...it looks splendid, and it can never be ordinary with the Tyne going by outside, a great English river drifting under your window, brown and muscled with currents!" It takes a poet to capture the sense of a place so succinctly. Though I doubt Larkin ever saw the Tyne surge free of its bounds, inundate the garden and knock at the front door as it did thanks to Storm Desmond a year ago on 5 December.

Andrew Motion's biography says that here the two of them "lazed, drank, read, pottered round the village and amused themselves with private games. The place always cheered them up" - "worked its spell" said Larkin. It's good to know that this little place wove a good magic on the poet. He was not the only one to find in these northern hills a source of joy and inspiration. W. H. Auden also loved the North Pennines that begin their steady rise up towards the high fells on the right bank of the river opposite 1a. Monica's house would lie in their shadow when the sun was low on winter afternoons.

I have long admired Philip Larkin. He had a marvellous ear for the sound of words, the sheer music of human language. On the day he died in 1985, we had a meeting of the Parochial Church Council at Alnwick where I was Vicar at the time. To introduce the meeting, I read aloud his enigmatic poem "Days".

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

I said I thought it was the job of a PCC on behalf of the local church to address this very question. It wasn't just for priests and doctors but for everyone since this universal question of what our days are for is faced by the entire human race. This was met with a certain bemusement. I went on to pray the Advent Collect with its reference to Christ coming among us in great humility, and coming again on the last Day (I emphasised that word in the light of the poem) to judge both the living and the dead. What are days for but to look forward to that Day, I suggested a trifle rhetorically. I'm not sure Larkin would have approved. But I wanted in a small way to pay tribute to the passing of a great poet. Soon after that, I went to work in Coventry, the city of his birth. I was amazed that Coventry had not taken the trouble to honour him in the way that Hull has done, and in a more modest fashion, Haydon Bridge.

The writer Blake Morrison will give the eulogy at tomorrow's unveiling in Westminster Abbey. He has his own way with words as anyone who has read his books, among them the brilliant memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father? knows. You don't need me to add to all that has been said about Larkin since his death, how he has been celebrated as one of the twentieth century's finest poets writing in English. And although he was hostile to organised religion, he seems to have had a feeling, an artist's instinct for the inward - might we call it spiritual? - dimension of life. "I may be an agnostic, but I'm an Anglican agnostic." I wouldn't hesitate to place him in the forefront of those poetic voices who have shone a light on the doubting, faltering and believing of Christians like me. With T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden in the previous generation and R.S. Thomas, Elizabeth Jennings and a few others of his own, he deserves to be recognised as one of those who have unflinchingly gazed into the human condition and helped us to come to terms with what it means to be a man or woman of faith.

If you want a sense of his deep seriousness, read one of his last poems, Aubade. It's a profoundly discomforting piece, honest to the point of painfulness. In it, he faces unflinchingly the night demons of the insomniac, which for him mean the grim reality of death. He is shaken to the core of his being. Morning light brings no relief, only the bleak awareness of the one fact that is incontrovertibly certain in life, that we must die one day. Advent is a good time to read it, this season when we meditate on the four Last Things: death, judgment, hell and heaven. Was the poem inspired by a memory of Haydon Bridge in winter on one of those days the North East does so well, when the bare hillsides crouch under the weight of lowering gunmetal skies and a mist hangs over the Tyne as it runs cold as the Styx between the stones of the bridge?

For people of faith, "Aubade" it is not the last word. Religion is - isn't it? - more than just a "vast, moth-eaten musical brocade / invented to pretend we never die". So we need other voices than Larkin's alone: John Donne's or George Herbert's perhaps, or a Bach Passion, or a painting like Grünewald's Crucifixion where we can glimpse how dying is the supreme act of faith because the crucified and risen Lord has walked this way before us. But we mustn't indulge our own pretence that death is not an awesome and an awful mystery. If the poets can give us the words and the courage to look into our own mortality, we must thank them for their gift, even if it's not a comfortable one.

If you're in our village and admire the Tyne "muscled with currents" as you stand on Haydon's Bridge, don't forget to nod in the direction of 1a Ratcliffe Road and the memory of a poet who pursued his truth and spoke it. And remember his words now immortalised in Poets' Corner: "What will survive of us is love". 

Everyone's death diminishes us, but tragedy changes things

What can I say in the aftermath of Jo Cox's shocking murder? What language can we borrow when an MP is assassinated doing what she loved - serving her constituents and seeking the welfare of her  Yorkshire community and the community of suffering people across the world? There's a real sense in which she "laid down her life for her friends". She died because she was an elected member of Parliament. Her death was an act of witness to the values she cherished. A vocation to public office carries risks. She gave herself to her role and paid a terrible price. 

Jo's sister has told us that when they were children, "all Jo wanted was for everyone to be happy". She made this her life's work. People who knew her have written tributes that it's been extraordinarily moving to read. Most of us never met her, yet it seems oddly natural to be calling her by her Christian name. We feel as if she was somehow our own elected representative, even our friend. We wish we had known her and seen for ourselves the spirit of this remarkable woman: her passion for justice; her longing to make the world a more peaceful, happier place; her fiery love for humanity especially its weak and voiceless members in distant lands and on her own doorstep. If we had problems, we could imagine taking them to her surgery and she would have listened, understood. She would have cared and helped. And what fun we'd have had with her as her guest at the kitchen table with her family, sharing bowls of pasta and salad washed down with good wine, stimulating conversation, political anecdote and I'm sure uproarious laughter.

Why do we feel this way? Not because we want to write hagiography, though it's easy to canonise people we admire, especially when their lives are dramatically cut short. We're especially prone to hagiography when they died precisely on account of their vocation to a noble task. Something of that sort did shine out of Jo's life. But if I've read her correctly, she'd have been horrified at the idea of anyone rhapsodising in stained glass window language about her. I think she'd have been baffled by the degree of worldwide attention that's been given to her death. She'd have said: this isn't about me. Think about the people I care about and do everything you can for them. 

And that's the point. Anyone less prone than Jo to status-anxiety or self-importance it's hard to imagine. She was one of the world's spontaneously generous people. What we are drawn to in people like her is not - or not only - their heroic qualities, the achievements that mark them out as extraordinary. It's that these very qualities were allied to her sheer human ordinariness, indeed, seemed to flow directly out of it. It's unbearably poignant to learn about her devotion to her husband Brendan and their children, her happy temperament and love of life, her gift for home-making, hospitality and friendship. For most of us who live in intimacy with someone else, vocation is famously the third partner in bed with us. Not so with Jo. She seemed to practise a kind of stabilitas that was immensely life-affirming.

I need to tread carefully here. John Donne's time-honoured words tell us that "every man's death diminishes me". If we didn't know this before, we know it now. When death is "wrong", whether it's murder, accident, premature illness or armed conflict, it affects us. When it suddenly ambushes a man or woman who in some way stands for us, it is symbolically happening to us too. When that person is young and at the top of their game, has everything to live for, and is living such an exemplary, courageous and fulfilled life, it diminishes us more than ever. Who among us with any shred of human feeling has not wept for the senseless waste and cruelty of Jo's being taken from us? Even as I write, I am feeling it all afresh. Why ever did God allow this? Can God himself even answer that question?

The temptation for most of us in the shock of grief is to be angry, bitter and vengeful. What a wonderful example is being set by Jo's widowed Brendan in his loss. He speaks about honouring Jo by carrying on doing what she would have wanted and gave her life to, trying to roll back the tides of hatred that threaten to engulf our world. Inspired by this remarkable couple, I want to say that this senseless act of violence is very much not just a terrible waste, though in the rawness of our emotional response right now, that is precisely what it is. But we know from our own experience of the death of those we love that their memory goes on touching our lives. They live on in us and we are better people because of them. 

Jo's death has released a huge outpouring of admiration, gratitude and affection. This includes people who energetically disagreed with her views on such big issues as refugees, the EU, poverty, sanctions, immigration or human rights. But death transcends our differences. It's the great leveller that strips away pretence and illusion so that we have to focus on what we have left: our common humanity. Wealth, privilege, status and power count for nothing in the face of death, only what has been of lasting value in our lives. It is necessary that death should "diminish" us if only because it pulls us back to what really matters: that we should live not for ourselves but for the others who have a claim on us. Her death shows us the unselfconscious beauty of this way of being a human being. And the best thing about Jo seems to have been her native simplicity. It all seemed as natural as a bloom emerging to full flower. I imagine it wasn't: achievements like hers are always hard-won over a lifetime. Nevertheless it's precious gift to be able to live in the way she did. We honour it and admire her all the more because of it. 

This isn't a Princess Diana moment - the collective grief we feel seems more earthed in reality than that. Perhaps Jo's Yorkshire grit is helping us to get things in perspective. It's too early to say whether something in our politics and in the habits of public life may be shifting. Could the discourse of politicians, journalists, campaigners, everyone with influence over others (even preachers!) be touched by her death? Could we become less cynical and compromised, more respectful, compassionate and humane? Could our motives and aspirations be purified a little? Many have posed these questions in the last few days. Tragedy can have the effect of cleansing our vision so that we see and act in new ways. Perhaps Jo's death can help us to be more serious about life, find more fulfilment in our work, put laughter, joy and generosity back into our relationships. The spirit in which we engage in the final days of the EU referendum campaign, so febrile and bad-tempered up to now, may give us a clue about how Jo's death has changed things. 

As a Christian, my faith is founded on another death. That death too was the cruel waste of an even younger life in which so much promise was never to be fulfilled. "Those whom the gods love die young" wrote Herodotus of soldiers who perished in war. "The unfinisheds are among the most beautiful of symphonies" said Viktor Frankl, writing about the millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust. The extent to which we are diminished by a tragic death is itself a tribute to the value of the life that has been lost. But faith goes on to say: in that death we remember every Good Friday lie the seeds of transfiguration, of resurrection and of eternal life. "Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain" we sing at Easter. 

What might Jo have become with so much yet to bring to us! How might she have brought her own happiness to make a difference to our fractured world? To murder such a good person makes no sense. We feel the heartbreak at the heart of things. But we cherish the memory of a rich and rewarding life that will not lose its capacity to inspire. Perhaps we can dare to hope that some redemption might come to our nation's broken sense of self as a result of this shameful deed and a life that was sacrificed. Faith wants to believe that it's possible. 

But this much we can say for certain. She will keep the flame of hope alive for that better world she fought for so well. She restores our belief in humanity at its very best.  Grief and gratitude walk hand in hand.  Ave atque vale.