As we cry out in grief God meets us

Here's the reflection I shared in tonight's Commemoration of the Departed Service at St Andrew’s Wickford:

Psalm 23 is a picture of life. Our lives contain both times of refreshment and joy – those times by the still waters and in the green pastures – and times of trial and loss – as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. These times of joy and times of trial are our common experience of life. But this Psalm says more. It says that God is with us in all of these experiences. He leads us beside the still waters and walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death. He can do this because in Jesus he has experienced human life for himself. God understands and will be alongside us in our grief.

How can that be, particularly when grief involves a whole mix of different emotions at different times – anger, sadness, love, guilt and numbness – which mean that it is a very individual experience? All we can really do, as a result, is to share our experiences of how it has been for us. That is what Alfred Tennyson did in his poem ‘In Memoriam’, a sequence of lyric poems written over a 17-year period which comprise a requiem for the poet's beloved Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna in 1833. Tennyson then wrote memorably again on the subject of death in ‘Crossing the Bar’ after he had survived a serious illness. Shortly before he died, Tennyson told his son, whom he had tellingly named Hallam, to "put 'Crossing the Bar' at the end of all editions of my poems." Just as Tennyson memorably shared his experience of God with him in his grief, I would like to do the same.

My younger brother, Nick Evens, died on 11th November 1999 in a plane crash in Kosovo. He was on a UN commissioned plane taking relief workers into Kosovo to work on reconstructing the country following the conflict there. Nick was part of Tearfund’s Disaster Response Team. He had been in Kosovo working with Kosovan villagers to rebuild homes, had returned home for a short break, and was then returning to continue work on the rebuilding programme.

The plane went off course as it neared Pristina Airport and crashed in nearby mountains. I remember taking a phone call from my parents who had been notified that contact had been lost with the plane and feeling absolutely unable to accept or comprehend the news. This was something that simply could not be happening.

My father and I were flown to Rome by Tearfund to wait for news together with the families of the other 23 people who died in the crash. After a few days we were flown to Kosovo to see the crash site for ourselves. On arrival at Pristina Airport, we were loaded into helicopters and flown the short distance into the mountains and over the site of the wreckage. This was the worst moment for each one of us. As we saw the small pieces of the plane strewn over the mountainside, we knew exactly what had happened to our loved ones and were faced full-on with the reality of their death.

When we returned to Pristina Airport, some refreshments had been organised for us in a tent and members of Tearfund who had worked with Nick had travelled to the Airport to be with us. We sat and listened as they told us about the effect that Nick had had on the Kosovan people with whom he had worked and also on other members of the team as they had valued his friendship, support and advice. As they talked, the tears flowed; theirs and ours and, I believe, God’s as he was with us at the time enabling us to express our grief. But, as they talked, I also had a growing sense that Nick had gone into God’s presence and had been welcomed with the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” In that moment I glimpsed something of the glory into which Nick had entered and that glimpse continues to sustain and strengthen me in my loss.

Over subsequent days, I heard many more stories of the way in which Nick’s life had influenced others and, over the years since, I have seen the way in which the inspiration he provided has led others to continue the work that he began. Young people whose lives were turned around through the youth project that Nick worked for have continued his youth work and his charitable work in Uganda while Nick’s involvement with Tearfund inspired another member of our family to join their Disaster Response Team. In these ways, the stories about Nick that begun to be told at Pristina Airport have continued to be told and in the telling my sense that God is alongside me in my grief and that Nick has been welcomed into glory has grown.

My experience of grief suggests that it is as we cry out in our grief that God meets with us. He is alongside us through his Spirit and will speak for us in groans that words cannot express. We should not be afraid of tears, of memories or of stories, as they are an expression of the love we feel. As we share our grief together, we may catch a glimpse of the glory that waits to be revealed to us and into which our loved ones have entered and that glimpse can sustain us as we re-enter our everyday lives. In these and other ways God offers to lead us through the times of trial until we come to live with him forever.

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Delirious? - Find Me In The River.

Discover & explore: Bereavement (All Souls)

St Stephen Walbrook held a special Discover & explore service for All Souls today. This service explored aspects of bereavement with readings, music, prayers and reflection. The Choir of St Stephen Walbrook and the Choral Scholars of St Martin-in-the-Fields joined together to sing pieces from Fauré's Requiem and the service ended with an opportunity to light candles in memory of loved ones. Here is the reflection that I shared during this service:

Psalm 23 is a picture of life. Our lives contain both times of refreshment and joy – those times by the still waters and in the green pastures – and times of trial and loss – as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. These times of joy and times of trial are our common experience of life. But this Psalm says more. It says that God is with us in all of these experiences. He leads us beside the still waters and walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death. He can do this because in Jesus he has experienced human life for himself. God understands and will be alongside us in our grief.

How can that be, particularly when grief involves a whole mix of different emotions at different times – anger, sadness, love, guilt and numbness – which mean that it is a very individual experience? All we can really do, as a result, is to share our experiences of how it has been for us. That is what Alfred Lord Tennyson did in his poem ‘In Memoriam’, a sequence of lyric poems written over a 17 year period which comprise a requiem for the poet's beloved Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna in 1833. Tennyson then wrote memorably again on the subject of death in ‘Crossing the Bar’ after he had survived a serious illness. Shortly before he died, Tennyson told his son whom he had tellingly named Hallam to "put 'Crossing the Bar' at the end of all editions of my poems". Just as Tennyson memorably shared his experience of God with him in his grief, I would like to do the same.

My younger brother, Nick Evens, died on 11th November 1999 in a plane crash in Kosovo. He was on a UN commissioned plane taking relief workers into Kosovo to work on reconstructing the country following the conflict there. Nick was part of Tearfund’s Disaster Response Team. He had been in Kosovo working with Kosovan villagers to rebuild homes, had returned home for a short break, and was returning to continue work on the rebuilding programme.

The plane went off course as it neared Pristina Airport and crashed in nearby mountains. I remember taking a phone call from my parents who had been notified that contact had been lost with the plane and feeling absolutely unable to accept or comprehend the news. This was something that simply could not be happening.

My father and I were flown to Rome by Tearfund to wait for news together with the families of the other 23 people who died in the crash. After a few days we were flown to Kosovo to see the crash site for ourselves. On arrival at Pristina Airport we were loaded into helicopters and flown the short distance into the mountains and over the site of the wreckage. This was the worst moment for each one of us. As we saw the small pieces of the plane strewn over the mountainside we knew exactly what had happened to our loved ones and were faced full-on with the reality of their death.

When we returned to Pristina Airport, some refreshments had been organised for us in a tent and members of Tearfund who had worked with Nick had travelled to the Airport to be with us. We sat and listened as they told us about the effect that Nick had had on the Kosovan people with whom he had worked and also on other members of the team as they had valued his friendship, support and advice. As they talked, the tears flowed; theirs and ours and, I believe, God’s as he was with us at the time enabling us to express our grief. But, as they talked, I also had a growing sense that Nick had gone into God’s presence and had been welcomed with the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” In that moment I glimpsed something of the glory into which Nick had entered and that glimpse continues to sustain and strengthen me in my loss.

Over subsequent days, I heard many more stories of the way in which Nick’s life had influenced others and over the years since I had seen the way in which the inspiration he provided has led others to continue the work that he began. Young people whose lives were turned around through the youth project that Nick worked for have continued his youth work and his charitable work in Uganda while Nick’s involvement with Tearfund inspired another member of our family to join their Disaster Response Team. In these ways, the stories about Nick that begun to be told at Pristina Airport have continued to be told and in the telling my sense that God is alongside me in my grief and that Nick has been welcomed into glory has grown.

My experience of grief suggests that it is as we cry out in our grief that God meets with us. He is alongside us through his Spirit and will speak for us in groans that words cannot express. We should not be afraid of tears, of memories or of stories, as they are an expression of the love we feel. As we share our grief together we may catch a glimpse of the glory that waits to be revealed to us and into which our loved ones have entered and that glimpse can sustain us as we re-enter our everyday lives. In these and other ways God offers to lead us through the times of trial until we come to live with him forever.

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Gabriel Fauré - Libera Me.

Clare and Tennyson: A scenario for a novel

This afternoon at OPEN I heard a fascinating account of the links between the Suntrap and the Asylum at High Beach, Epping Forest which included the probable meeting of the poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson at the asylum.

John Clare was admitted, in 1837, to Dr. Matthew Allen's asylum after years of struggling with alcoholism, neglect and depression. He stayed at the Leopard’s Hill Lodge and was free to work the fields and walk the Forest.

Alfred Tennyson lived at Beech Hill House, High Beach, from 1837 until 1840, where he wrote parts of In Memoriam (1850), on the death of Arthur Hallam, including 'Ring out, wild bells' inspired by hearing the bells of Waltham Abbey.

Suffering from depression, Tennyson stayed for two weeks as a guest of Allen’s asylum and would have encountered Clare at Leopard’s Hill (Lippitts Hill) Lodge or perhaps walking in the Forest. He reported that the mad people were ‘the most agreeable and most reasonable persons’ he had met.

I thought to myself as I heard this story what a great scenario it would provide for a novel and later, after googling John Clare and Tennyson, I found that the novel has already written - The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds, "where Tennyson’s transformation of private grief into public success is nicely contrasted with Clare’s public displays of delusional behaviour."

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Jonathan Dove - Ring Out, Wild Bells.

A plausible plausibility structure (1)

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.”

These lines from ‘God’s Grandeur’ reveal the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, to be a late Victorian confident of the argument from design placing him very much in the mainstream of the Christian tradition. This argument, that the beauty and intricacy of the natural world (including that of humanity) must derive from an Intelligent Designer, can be found in both the Old and New Testaments and in Christian thought from Augustine to William Paley (an Anglican priest and older contemporary of Hopkins). Additionally, the same argument can also be found in the Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle who were both significant influences on the development of Christian theology.

Thomas Aquinas, who drew heavily on Aristotle’s thought, developed, in the Five Ways, a series of natural arguments for the existence of God. The Five Ways began to be questioned in the seventeenth century following the development of the science of mechanics. This did not destroy the argument from design but did lead to its development being primarily by scientists rather than theologians (and thereby entwined with the belief that science provided objective knowledge of the world) and to differences in where its supporters chose to look for evidence of design.

Hopkins was, however, unusual in the late Victorian era in the confidence with which he held to the argument from design. More typical of late Victorian opinion was Alfred Tennyson when he wrote of “life as futile, then, as frail” because Man, who had “… trusted God was love indeed/And love Creation’s final law”, had now discovered that “Nature, red in tooth and claw/With ravine, shriek’d against his creed” and left him to “Be blown about the desert dust,/Or seal’d within the iron hills”.

As the archeological references in Tennyson’s poem show, the most significant threat to the argument from design came from the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. Darwin’s hypothesis was that organisms and creatures evolved through a process by which random mutations that improved the chances of survival for an organism/creature were naturally selected as they enabled survival in preference to other weaker organisms/creatures.

For many, Darwin’s hypothesis was taken, over time and with developments, as objective proof that purposefulness in nature could be explained without there being a need to invoke a creator. This belief was also supported by David Hume’s earlier philosophical critique of the design argument in Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.

Dialogues had been posthumously published in 1779 but its arguments were not taken up on a significant scale until the following century. Hume argued that the design argument was based on an analogy between the world and the mind of God that had no rational basis. It was just as easy, perhaps easier, Hume argued to suggest from the way in which the world was formed that there were many gods or no gods and, therefore, he concluded that there was no reasonable basis on which we could “draw any conclusion about the origin of the world from the way we find it”. The combination of Darwin and Hume appeared to sound the death knell to the argument from design.

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Bob Dylan - Watching The River Flow.