From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

As many of you know, when I was younger I dealt with loss of all sorts. My mother died and my sister not long after. Including those two, I had attended thirteen family funerals before the age of eleven. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and more. It was a mix of alcoholism, suicides, and the natural course of disease and age.

So I’ve spent a lot of time over the years pondering death and trying to make sense of the Christian hope. There are two lines that have always resonated with me from the Book of Common Prayer. The first Is from the Funeral liturgy on page 382, “For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; and when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place eternal in the heavens.”

The second is from the funeral liturgy on page 481 and is part of the Prayers of the People at a funeral, “Grant that, increasing in knowledge and love of thee, he may go from strength to strength in the life of perfect service in thy heavenly kingdom.”

All of it speaks to a continual growth in God—the hope that union with Christ in this life means life with him in the next. It seems not a life only of the placid absence of the negative but of a continued growth in his love.

In any discussion of the departed, it seems wise to be careful not to try and be overly precise while still striving for some illumination. It is poetry rather than prose that seems to best describe the life after. To grasp for notions of what a soul’s existence may be like (or unlike) requires reaching for language, metaphor, and hope beyond what the mortal mind can hold.

This is where the Book of Common Prayer’s poetry and the promises of Scripture shape our sense of life to come and gives us a reasonable, sure, and holy hope. It comes down to a determined willingness to hope and an open willingness to take Christ at his word. 

John chapter five puts this hope in stark terms, “Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne concerning his Son. And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.”

Of course, Jesus himself offers a number of points at which he talks of the life to come. One which always feels to me like the fierce protectiveness of a loving God is John 10:28, “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.”

This week, we’re all praying as Richard Kuns, who spoke and taught so movingly of the Christian hope, went on to his reward with Christ. We are all grieving in so many ways—not only losing Richard but grieving so much loss in this pandemic time. I find myself taking comfort again in the promises of Scripture and in the poetry of the Book of Common Prayer.

There’s a moment in the funeral liturgy called the Commendation in English but commonly called the Kontakion of the Departed. It begins, “Give rest, O Christ to your servants with your Saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting. You only are immortal, the maker of mankind, and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we  return. For so did you ordain when you created me, saying, ‘You are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”

There’s an especially moving and poignant rendition of this sung recently at the funeral of Prince Philip.

It is full of the roiling hope and sober mourning that is Christian death. May it be a balm to you this week as it has been to me. And may Richard and all the faithful departed Rest In Peace and Rise in Glory.

Yours in Hope,
Fr Robert