This summer I took the 5th Harry Potter book with me onto the beach and immersed myself in the world of Hogwarts and Harry’s latest adventures. The books are brilliantly written and J K Rowling has a way of grappling with all sorts of issues along the way in a very imaginative and engaging way.

Without giving too much away for anyone still ploughing through the 766 pages, in this book we find Harry again coping with death and bereavement. Someone very close to him dies and we find Harry asking questions about what happens when people die. Is that person totally out of reach or are they tantalisingly close, as if just beyond a veil? Sometimes they can feel very close indeed and we may draw comfort from that. At other times they may feel very far away and we know that the process of letting go has to begin.

Harry puzzles over why he can’t now just find the way to reach them and for everything to be as it was. He struggles with how death changes everything and the shock of grief. We read of the emotional pummelling which he goes through and it is not surprising he gets tired in a way he hasn’t before. No doubt this all sounds very familiar.

We also find Harry experiencing all those other emotions we have come to know so well. He is angry, very angry. He is angry with those he holds responsible, because of the circumstances of this death. He is angry with himself, torturing himself with a whole string of ‘if only I’d not…’, ‘if only I had…’. Oh how we can all torment ourselves with these! Guilt has a way of finding a chink in our armour and as much as we tell ourselves this is not rational, or even justified, somehow those thoughts pop into our head like an unwanted pop up message when surfing the internet.

He is also angry with the one who has died for dying. Not that there was much they could have done about this. As we explore all of these angry thoughts they have one root to them - he misses the person who has died and wishes they hadn’t; wishes they hadn’t with a passion as strong as death itself.

If only he could just wave his wand and change… well everything really. We can’t, and he finds that he can’t either. Those eternal questions buzz round his head and he has to grapple his way through as we have to grapple our way through them.

It is these kinds of thoughts that bring us to this service this evening. A struggle to make sense of the death itself; a struggle with the emotions that comfort and torture us in the silent hours; a struggle with the loss of someone close and who has just been there for so long.

I was talking to someone after a funeral recently and clearly for this person confronting death was new to him. For me, I suppose it goes with the territory of being a priest, I see so much of it that I have come to view it as being a normal part of life. We are born. We die. And all of this happens within the love of God who will not let go of us, if we ask him not to. Well, that’s the cold rational part of my brain. But then like everyone else, I know the emotional side which cries and doubts and looks in awe and wonder at this mystery we call life and death.

I suspect that most of us don’t find that we have just one coherent faith, as it were, in which to hold all of the thoughts that surround a death, but almost a number of faiths that swap around at different moments. At one time we may find a crystal clear vision that life comes from God and that it can only have any meaning within God, so we are confident that our loved ones now share in that love in a new way - what we call heaven and eternal life. At other times the long silence and the darkness overwhelm us and the certainty wobbles. The exhausting thing is that we may well bounce between both extremes and all the shades in between several times in any given day.

We have come here this evening to be held by the centuries old faith which the Christian Church offers and keeps alive. That faith is rooted in a person who walked and taught, who did some impressive things, and died. His followers thought that was the end and went away to lick their wounds; one even sat by his tomb weeping like so many have done since.

It is what happened next that turns the Christian faith from being just a collection of teachings about how to behave into Good News for all, a Gospel of hope. These shattered and broken men and women experienced such a powerful sense that Jesus who had died had been raised to new life that they were prepared to go out and tell everyone about it, even be killed for it. They were changed from broken people to people filled with a new joy and hope. The precise details of what happened is in a sense not the issue - that is caught up in all sorts of religious language and pictures - but what matters is they were convinced Jesus had risen from the dead?

That he did is at the heart of the Christian faith, in fact it is the Christian faith. So we gather here in our own grief and shock, however recent, with the light of this hope surrounding us and holding us. The God who gives us life at all holds before us life the other side of the grave. Our tears are held in a purpose that stretches way beyond the here and now into the eternal and it is in this eternity that we offer our grief and our thanks for those we remember this evening.

This faith and hope doesn’t remove the loss, it doesn’t remove the aching, but it does hold it and hold us and them together in a mystery that is life itself. It is in this hope that we can give thanks and place our trust for all that has been and all that will be. It is in this faith that we can join in with the eternal ‘alleluias’, heaven’s song of praise, trusting that life and death are held by God’s love.

© Ian Black 2003

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