on letting go

 

November is, in the rhythm of the church year, a mini-season of the Saints, and of Remembrance.

I have attended some very large funerals recently, both Christian and humanist. One of the things that strikes me about humanist celebrants is their belief that no one is truly gone while their story lives on in our memory. That seems to me to place an unbearable burden on the living, on those who are bereaved.

Everyone we know will die; and we cannot carry them all, as the monks of Lindisfarne carried Cuthbert’s imperishable remains in his coffin all around the north of England for over a hundred years, after their home was invaded by Vikings, before settling in Durham. Far from being urged to keep carrying, the bereaved themselves need to be carried, at times.

To paraphrase words familiar from national acts of Remembrance, we grow old, and weary, in ways the dead do not. And with distance, more and more of those who knew the deceased think of them less and less, if at all—grow weary—until only the closest mourners are left, carrying the memory alone.

Is the loved-and-departed one becoming smaller? a ‘thinner’ ghost? do they undergo some prolonged death after death?

The Christian claim is that past, present and future, and earth and heaven, are held together—knitted together, inseparable—in the person of Jesus. These things—and all who dwell in them—are remembered by God in him. As such, we believe that we are and remain united with our dead; and that—precisely—this is not dependent on our remembering them. Indeed, we are free to forget them, in time: literally to release them over into God’s remembering.

Dementia runs strong in my wife’s family, and it is statistically likely that she will, one day, forget who I am. (God knows, some days she tries to.) This will not diminish me—though, of course, it will sadden me—and, indeed, it will not diminish her: she will remain, in this world and the next, held within the love of God in Christ Jesus, from which nothing, including death, or memory-loss, can remove or harm us.

To remember, then, is not so much to recall episodes from someone else’s life—though this is another aspect of the joyful fusing of past and present—as it is to be reminded that we are grounded in Jesus, along with those whom we have loved, and those whom we have failed to live as we ought.

Far from carrying the dead with us, we rest in peace with them, now, and will one day rise in glory with them.

This November, I shall ‘remember’ the saints with thanksgiving, not least by ‘forgetting’ them into the hands of Love.