I was at a fruit garden and coffee centre in Montrose on October 1 (Yesterday). I was taking a funeral a bit later and came down early because I like to sit and think and prepare inwardly. Conducting a funeral should never become a familiar and well practiced set of skills. Death is an inevitable outcome of life, and each person's death is unique, special, important, and changes the way the world is. A presence has gone, a voice has fallen silent, a face only now visible in memory, a fellow sojourner has finished their particular and once travelled journey.
One of the first lessons of pastoral theology is to acknowledge with reverence the limited time and unlimited hopefulness of human life, our capacity as human beings to grow and change, to discover or hide from who we are, to be in fact, human. Death is that moment when potential and possibility have come to fulfilment, and the rest is left to God.
John Donne's words remain amongst the most cliched, quoted and irresistibly humane words on the way we should look on the death of another.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
And so on my way to take the funeral of a lady who to our knowledge had no close relatives, (and indeed no family member attended her funeral) I stopped for a coffee and some food, and some reflection time. I came back into the car, started it, put it into reverse, and my eye caught a movement in the long grass about 30 feet away. I realised immediately I was looking at a stoat, frantically at work, hauling and pulling a young rabbit it had killed towards, presumably, its den. I stopped, switched on my camera and managed only three or four pictures before the movement stopped and the grass was still. What I saw was a rare sight, one of those moments when several random rare circumstances coincide, and you are by entire accident, a witness.
Life can be unpredictably cruel. As one philosopher said, death is the possibility that overshadows all my other possibilities. As a theologian yes I can create a framework of creation, fallen and broken, where accidents happen, where life only survives by the death of some other part of creation; even vegetarians consume parts of the world to go on living in the world. And I can ask questions, interrogate my own faith claims, wonder what kind of God creates this kind of world, ask the futile question which reduced to my recent encounter with creatures reads, why this young rabbit and not another? Who kills the stoat? Why is life so ridiculously cheap and so infinitely expensive, so casually disposed of but to the one whose life is taken the tragic stopping of a unique unrepeatable existence?
At which point, it was time to go and conduct a funeral, and to celebrate a life, the infinitely expensive gift, and to remember with gratitude someone uniquely precious, and to do so from the standpoint of hope, trust and faith. The New Tesament vibrates with life and shudders with hope in the face of a creation which groans and awaits its redemption. The last reality of the universe is not death, but eternal love, the creative patience of the God who says "Behold I make all things new!" Death is the last enemy, but it does not have the last word. That word is God's word, and it is a word that spoke the world into being, called into existence each person and all creatures into the mystery that both terrifies and liberates, life and existence within the purposes of a God defined as the Love, Light, and Hope of all things.
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