Sermons

Sunday 3rd November 2013, All Souls', evening

by Revd Chris Palmer

Let me start with a quotation from Simone Weil:

‘There are two forms of friendship; meeting and separation. They are indissoluble. Both of them contain some good, and this good of friendship is unique, for when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation. As both forms contain the same good things, they are both equally good.’ [Waiting for God, p84]

A bit of background: Simone Weil was a French teacher, philosopher, and writer, who lived in the first half of the twentieth century. She came from a Jewish family, though they weren’t observant. Even though she was an academic and teacher, she chose also at time to work in factories to be alongside ordinary people. In her late 20s she had various religious experiences that converted her mind and heart to Christian faith, but she chose never to be baptised or receive the sacraments of the church, as she didn’t wish to reject other traditions and their truth. Though she escaped the Nazi genocide and was living in Britain, she didn’t escape her own ill health, and died of Tuberculosis in 1943, in her mid 30s.

In the quotation I read above Simone Weil is saying something we all know but can’t quite find the language for: the joy of being with someone you love and the pain of being apart from those we love are expressions of the same thing – Love. And we’d always chose love, even with someone we can’t see or meet now, to ‘meeting’ someone we cannot and will not ever know.

This idea is summed up in popular sayings like ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ and ‘better to have loved and lost than never to have loved.’ Or more particularly, the love we have for husband, wife, children, parents, friends, who have died is more important to us than the extreme proximity we have to people we don’t know on a packed commuter train.

Our grief is a source of blessing because it is love in action. Jesus makes the same point when he says, ‘Blessed are those who mourn...’

Of course, grief doesn’t often feel like a blessing. The emotional pain can be very strong and might get diverted into anger, or depression, or self-pity. In fact these aren’t necessarily ‘diversions’, but the proper road of grief, so long as we don’t get stuck on them for ever. The alternative, of course, to this grief is to deny or suppress all feelings of grief, believing that they are bad – even some brands of Christianity encourage this approach on the basis that our loved ones are in glory so we shouldn’t mourn – or just because they are too painful to face. But when we do this we are usually just storing up problems for the future. But it’s good to be sad, to let ourselves grieve.

There are lots of ways of grieving, and no one right way. I remember one man who invited people to dinner, on condition that they spent the evening talking about the wife he’d lost. Others construct memorials, visit special places, make albums of memories, tell stories, wear mourning (though this seems to be out of fashion) – and acts of worship as in this service are a way of expressing our grieving too.

Simone Weil goes on to say that these two loves, meeting and separation, are present in God too. In God as Trinity we find the love of lovers who want to be together until they merge into one – God is three and one. And at the same time the separation of God from God which we see in the cross – ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ – is also a true love.

And she goes on to say that ‘our misery gives us the infinitely precious privilege of sharing in this distance placed between the Son and his Father.’ We might balk at the idea that misery is an ‘infinitely precious privilege, and she doesn’t ease our discomfort when she rubs it in: ‘the distress of the abandoned Christ is good. There can be no greater good for us on earth than to share in it.’

To have a sense of God’s absence – to feel God is far, distant – is a sign of love, a good spiritual state, because it shows we love him, desire him, seek him, want him. To not have a relationship wouldn’t be like feeling God’s absence, it would be feeling nothing.

What hope does this harbour in our grief? If the hope we harbour is to see again, talk to again, encounter again our friend who's died in an ordinary everyday way and this is our only longing, then we’ve got stuck. Obviously we might imagine such an encounter and that’s good, but death has broken the possibility of a relationship being renewed in this way.

The love expressed in our sense of separation is rather taken up in our love of God, in whom all the dead and living are one. This what Jesus’ means by the other part of that beatitude: ‘Blessing are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’.

This comfort is not the reassurance we receive by backing out of our grief, but encountering it, going through it, and finding light beyond it. It is the truth of resurrection, to which the only route is via death. The life God offers the world is reached via the separation of God from God on the cross; the comfort of union with God is reached via the separation of friend from friend in grief. And we discover this comfort as something strange and unexpected, something that doesn’t come to the mind, hardly even to the heart, but to the spirit, in a way we can’t describe – but just know deeply.