Memorial Service at  St. Mary’s - 25th February 2007: Revd. Julia Boothby

We have gathered here today to remember those whom we love and from whom we have been separated by death. We will remember them in our thoughts and prayers and in few moments in the symbolic lighting of a candle for them.
For some of you the loss of your loved one may have been quite recent, for others months or even years may have passed since their death and so each one will also be a different stage in their grief. For some the feelings of shock and disbelief may still be uppermost. For others, as time passe,s the pain of separation may have become more real. There may be feelings of guilt, of anguish, of intense loneliness. There may well be feelings of anger or resentment; you may be at the questioning stage…why them? Why me?

Whatever you are feeling today is all right. That may sound like a slightly strange thing to say, but so often I meet people who say;

I have so much to be thankful for so I shouldn’t feel like this…

or;

 I thought I was over the worst of my grief yet all those initial feelings have come back and they shouldn’t have.

You may today feel that you have hit the very worst part of your grief, where life has no meaning for you and all you want to do is give up or it may be that you feel guilty because you feel a little brighter, a little more hopeful, that you have begun to enjoy some things in life again.

It can be very easy to get trapped into guilt about your feelings and yet you have them, and so I do say to you today, don’t deny them or feel bad about them, just accept them and where you are, for it is who you are. Whilst it is true that there are some generally held patterns of grief, each person here is unique, and no two people will grieve in exactly the same way.

So today one of the common threads among us is grief and loss, but the other thread that we have in common is love. I started by saying that we have gathered here today to remember those whom we love. I was very careful to put that in the present sense because although we may be separated from them, we do not stop loving those who have died. Whoever they have been to us, be they mother or father, husband or wife, child or friend, our love for them goes on. Love does not stop at death. As Paul reminds us in that wonderful passage that we heard read to us from 1 Corinthians...

“Love never ends.”

Perhaps you wish it did…for it is the fact that we love that causes us to grieve and be sad, to be filled with longing for the one who has died, and for the ways that we had of showing love whilst the person was with us. The loving touch, the meeting of eyes, the thousand and one ways in which love was given and received, can no longer happen,

But love can and does go on in other ways, ways that do not deny death but go beyond it. Love lives on in the memories we have. Love can live on as we uphold the good and the true that was important in the life of the one who has died. Love can and does go in the way that life is lived, in caring and above all in loving others.

This is not easy, nor does it mean that we cease to grieve over what we have lost. Yet, as Paul reminds us in that passage that we heard from Corinthians, love, keeps hoping and bearing and enduring.

And God is always there to help us in our grief and sadness, and God understands. God sent Jesus to die for us and yet God’s heart must have been broken with grief as he looked at what they did to his only beloved Son, as he watched his son die. In our moments of despair and loneliness we can turn to God who understands and who himself has suffered loss and pain. And yet it is because of that very loss and pain that we can find hope and strength renewed.

Christ died to save us and if we turn to him then we can know the joy and promise of eternal life. And all of this was done because God loves us with a love beyond what we can begin to imagine or express. We can entrust ourselves and those whom we have lost to that love, for, as Paul also reminds us, nothing can separate us from the love of God. Again, love never ends.

And as we trust in God and in his love, so we too can know his help in our grief. Our first reading from Isaiah reminded us that:

“They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall rise up on wings like eagles. They shall run and not grow weary; they shall walk and not faint.”

Perhaps the day seems far off when you will find your strength and hope renewed, when you will be able to walk, even run with life again. God promises that if we put our hope and trust in him he will help us to do just that. What we have to do is wait. Wait for God. Offer him our tears and our sadness and allow him to carry us, as an eagle spreads its wings and carries its young on them. Wait for the Lord, for he will, in his good time, bring renewed strength and hope. Our faith may seem so weak, yet God will take it and help it to grow.

And so, as Paul so eloquently puts it, these three remain faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.