31st October - Canon Stephen Carter

MEMORIAL SERVICE MALDON 2010

It is just over a year ago that my family and I  moved to Maldon. One of the most difficult things about leaving our old home was having to pack up the model railway which had occupied the whole of my garage. It had taken over 8 years to assemble and had originally been built for my two boys. Of course the inevitable happened. The boys lost interest as they grew up: and I was left with a model railway and no children to operate it. So I just had to keep it for myself!

The boys thought it was really sad to have a father who played with trains! In my defence I would say that my family had a railway background. My Dad had been a fireman on the steam locos at Parkeston Quay. I had an uncle who had been a Station Master in Norfolk. And my own bedroom in the house where I grew up, looked out on Harwich Town station. I spent countless hours staring out of the window at the train ferries shunting when my parents thought I was revising for exams.

There does seem to be a tradition of clergymen and railways. Bishop Eric Tracey was one of the finest railway photographers. Thomas the Tank Engine was the creation of the imagination of the Reverend Mr Awdy. Why, I wonder, do Vicars and Railways so often go together?

Is it, I wonder, something to do with human life being like a journey? One of the privileges of being a parish priest is that you stand alongside people on the most significant points in their journey through life.

To use the railway analogy, the train sets off at birth. There are various stations, stops and changes of train on the journey. Until eventually, the train reaches the terminus: heaven the final destination.

There is a wonderful memorial by the South Door of Ely Cathedral, to two railway men. It is entitled “The heavenly railway” Engraved on it are these words,

“The line to heaven by Christ was made,

  With heavenly truth the rails are laid;

From earth to heaven the line extends,

To life eternal where it ends.

God’s word is the engineer,

It points the way to heaven so clear;

Through tunnels dark and dreary here,

It does the way to glory steer.”

There are certainly many tunnels on the journey of life. None is darker than the tunnel of bereavement: that experience of losing someone you love, whose life you have shared. And going through that experience, the emptiness and loneliness and grief, can really feel like being in a very dark tunnel.

If I may continue with the railway imagery, it can feel when you loose someone that the whole train has been derailed. That the journey has lost its meaning, and that the train has no driver.

Depression, lonliness, fear,  panic, guilt, anger, all of these things can be a perfectly normal response to the experience of losing someone we love.

These feelings are a very common reaction to bereavement: but at the time they can seem to overwhelm us.

As we journey on though life, at some point each of us will have to face the pain of loss. It is part of the cost of love. To love another human being is to open ourselves up to the possibility of the grief of losing them.

But if life is a journey, it is certainly true that grief is a journey. It is  will be slightly different for each of us. In recent years we have come to understand much more about grief. It is certainly a painful process. But it is also a process of healing. But as we travel on that journey, we will begin to find little signs of hope again. Little glimmers of light at the end of that dark tunnel.

That morning when you get up, and perhaps for the first time in ages, you notice that the birds are singing again; or that the sun is shining; or that there are children laughing. And when we find that we can laugh again, we should not feel guilty or disloyal to those we have lost. It just means that we are starting to move further on our journey.

We don’t forget those who have loved and lost. But in the journey of grieving we learn to absorb the pain of our loss and gradually to learn to live with it.

All of us here today are united in one thing. To remember before God  someone we love and whose life we have shared.. For some of you that loss will have been very recent: within the last year. We all come to reflect on the memories we treasure. Later in the service names will be read out, and you will have the opportunity to light a candle for the person you have come to remember. For though we no longer see them, we still feel a sense of closeness to them, for they are still part of our lives.

Railway stations can be very poignant places. They can be the scenes of parting: as we wave off people we love. But railway stations can also be places of joy, where we are reunited with those we have been separated from for a time.

The Church believes that if life is a journey. But  it is a journey with a purpose and it has a destination. Jesus spoke of himself as being “the way, the truth and the life.” He is like the sign post on the journey. He points us to God his Father who is the goal of our traveling.

To follow Jesus is to walk with him on that journey. So we do not travel alone: for he is close beside us.

We know that he has shared the journey even to the point of suffering and of death itself. But for him, the journey did not end with his death. It was the prelude for new life.

And so because of Jesus, because of his victory over death at Easter, we have hope for those we have loved and lost. However dark and hopeless and insecure the world may seem at times, there is a love that holds us safe. A love which is stronger and more powerful than we can imagine.

St Paulexpressed it like this.

“For I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels, nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth nor anything in all creation shall be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.”