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In the bedroom of my mother in a hospice, my little boys said good night over the phone as my Mother passes over, contemplating both ends of finite life & the wrongness of death - playing songs from the sixties for her and the plain chant of human voices that delights heaven
As her student and then her friend my mother nursed the great Gillian Rose during her dying and her death - she said she saw angels around her in the last days - my mother never lied - so I trust they are now also with her in ranks of red and gold song
We have no idea what life is - why then should we assume it ever ceases to exist
If as Julian of Norwich said God does not forgive he just gives - what then awaits us on the other side of death? Not simple judgement then but justice combined with gift and yet greater plenitude - what could that be .....?
We talk about love as if it’s something weak & twee, a fading attribute of individuality but what if love is objective, so objective in fact that it is the only rational explanation of the universe, and that it is woven into being and into all existence
What does loving do to the loved? Why does it matter so? Why is it in part if not whole, the foundation of everything decent and good in the world? For it unites us with what we ought to be, it points us to our platonic form, it ignores our fall & extols our heights, it is mercy
Mother has gone into the next life - I opened the Bible unknowingly onto Ezekiel 37 and the Jewish anticipation of resurrection-‘I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my spirit in you and you will live,’ now I drive home but not alone ...
I am often reminded of CS Lewis’ s Cosmic Trilogy whose insight was that the whole universe is light and it’s the earth that is surrounded in darkness with the stars being ruptures in this fabric of misperception. Death is like this, it’s an end but signals also a beyond.
