A Funeral

 I went to a funeral yesterday. The deceased had had a long life and a distinguished career and was much loved by friends and family. It was a successful life well lived but he had been a religious sceptic up until nearly the very end. But not apparently at the very end. The canon who gave the address related how he had visited this man a few days before he died and they talked about the afterlife. Naturally, one's approaching end concentrates the mind and you become more open to things you may previously have dismissed. Their reality or otherwise is suddenly a matter of pressing importance. The canon said he had asked his friend, for they were friends, to imagine he was speaking to a baby just before it was born. What would he say? Something like this perhaps. "You are now in a dark, safe and secure place where your every need is met. You have nothing to do except to be and grow peacefully in silence. But very soon all that will change. You will come out into a world of light and sound and other people. You will change and form relationships. There will be challenges you will be required to meet and suffering too in all probability, but there will also be love, joy and fulfilment in various ways, for some more than others but for all there will be opportunity to make some kind of mark, great or small." How could the as yet unborn child understand any of this but if he could then might there not be excitement at the prospect? In the same way, said the canon, you are about to leave one form and phase of life for another. Your horizons will be hugely expanded in ways you cannot now envisage but, if you approach this change with hope in your heart and a faithful mind, all will be well.

I thought this was a good way of looking at things. After all, birth and death are two sides of the same coin. We come from mystery and at the end of our life we return to mystery. It's like the famous story told by the Venerable Bede in his account of the conversion of King Edwin of Northumbria of the sparrow that flies into a warm hall out of a wintery night and then out again at the far end of the hall. There is a great world outside the hall and the sparrow continues his journey. Likewise, we too are on a journey and death is but a stage on that journey, an important one to be sure, but still only a stage. It is not the end.

Apparently the dying man was reconciled at the end with the prospect of a new life in which he would meet his loved ones who had gone on before, and he ventured forth with a newly found hope in his heart. I believe in some kind of purgatorial purification after death so a simple shift of belief is but the beginning but I also believe that it is a necessary beginning and if we open our hearts to the reality of the spiritual life, even if that is only at the end as it was in this case, then we face towards the light and move in the right direction on the next stage of our journey.