There are
those tasks of clergy life that draw the jewels of tears. Tread softly, for you
tread on my tears.
For the
average run of the mill priest there were many of those moments. Were. Before civil celebrants cornered 70ish per cent of the scene.
Alister Hendery notes ‘funeral practices
are in a windstorm of change,’ and adds, ‘It is as if the valley of death has
been subjected to cultural forces that make the terrain almost unrecognisable.’[1]
In my own
priestly career, I have seen funeral demands drop exponentially (if that is
mathematically possible). Every traipse in the valley of the shadow was a sacred
traipse. In the early Noughties, in a rural NSW community, demands peaked at a
ridiculous and pastorally unsustainable peak of some 60, by memory, in a year.
In my last year in parish priesthood I conducted only a couple.
Geographical
as well as sociological factors drove those changes, but still. The tectonic forces
that drove the changes produced some fine results, as mourners found forms of
expression better suited to their beliefs than those driven by Anglican faith.
But not always: I have unfortunately seen secular rites delivered with
nonchalance at least as bad as any I saw in the terrible days when the vicar
was the default in any community. I have been aware of some civil celebrants
churning through an assembly line of grief with the pastoral compassion of cake
mixer.
But there are
other deaths, too. In his Earthed in Hope
Hendery references the death of a city landscape that was going on around him;
he wrote in the aftermath of the Christchurch/Canterbury earthquakes. He wrote,
too, after Aotearoa New Zealand’s Pike River Mine disaster, when once more a
nation’s psyche was scarred by the knowledge that many in our workforce live
and work somewhere close to the cusp between safety and peril.[2] Anglicans
in Christchurch have watched the long, slow and ungainly pivot of their
landmark cathedral, stalled in suspended animation, hardly life-support,
somewhere between death and burial.
 |
| At least five of the buildings I have lived in have taken their journey from structure to rubble |
What, then,
when a city or a building dies? When the dreams of countless ghosts who have
inhabited it are released into nothingness? At least five of the buildings I
have lived in have taken their journey from structure to rubble, reminding me
that they and I are but dust, and to dust they have returned and I will return.
Actually,
having swum in a vortex of depression a couple of years back I’m partially glad
I’m not with them yet. “Partially” not because I have any great worries about
surfing the wave of all flesh but because I’m stumbling along rather happily –
but yes, very stumblingly – in a new job that I would not be exploring if I
were dead. In that stumbling I am working alongside some powerfully “in the now”
fellow-stumblers. In particular I have watched with gentle awe as my new boss
has addressed precisely the questions of the life and the ghosts and the death
and the fading memories, yes perhaps even in that order, of buildings.
These are the
buildings in which previous stumblers have laughed and wept and prayed and
nodded off over decades, moments in which he has given lament a voice, quietly
weaving full stop into the collective memory of a community. He’s been closing
… “deconsecrating,” “secularising,” whatever …. churches in which our
predecessor-stumblers have stuttered their prayers and hurt their hurts. I’m
not totally unrealistic about these things. Buildings die, like dreams and like
loved ones and me.
My father’s
ashes were interred in the grounds of the church where his funeral was held,
where his daughter was later married. Church, ashes, and the protea bush that
marked the latter are all gone now, and that’s life and death and eternity
(this side of mysteries unveiled, at any rate).
 |
| These are the buildings in which previous stumblers have laughed and wept and prayed and nodded off over decades |
But my bishop
sensed that, and trod tenderly on the dreams and memories of those who gathered
in the little God-boxes, humble sacred spaces in Mataura and Athol, where the
buildings face probable deconstruction (a fancy word from other circles that in
reality means little more than knocking to buggery), and central Invercargill,
where the great, the grand old worship space will be reinvented and
strengthened against tectonic caprice, and become a dreaming and working and
meeting space for a tertiary institute with a
truckload more resources than a dwindling church can or should summon.
My bishop knew
the pain and the tears, and trod tenderly. The death of a loved one, the death
of a building, the death of a dream. The Christian community has orchestrated
and perpetrated some tragic wrongs across the millennia, and it is only just
that our words, words that should have been the poetry of hope, have been
baton-passed to other players, runners, whatever the metaphor. Yet we are
kaitiaki o nga kupu o te whakapono, custodians of words of faith; these are
words that include lament, the wailings of breaking human hearts, odes mumbled
in the shadows of broken and dying dreams. Ours are words that acknowledge the
brutality of death – we die, we do not merely pass – and yet there dare to
rumour hope.
This bishop’s
words were not his alone but words drawn into order by a community of hurting,
stumbling, hoping peoples, giving sorrow voice.
As it happens I fear many, many more churches, outward and visible signs
of our stumbling prayers, will surf the wave of all flesh. Many more if not all
of our buildings will disintegrate or reintegrate and become “former” churches.
C’est la vie.
But if, as my
bishop did, we find sensitive and soul-filled stutterings to give human sorrow
its voice then we may yet have a place in the landscape of world society. Perhaps
if we learn to listen we may have a place even until the warming planet
breathes its last and we are all both dead and alive in the mysteries of
eternity, where tears shall be no more.
(Dr) Michael Godfrey
Diocese of Dunedin
Ministry Educator
Ministry Educator
[1]
Alister Hendery, Earthed in Hope: Dying,
Death and Funerals – a Pakeha Anglican Perspective (Wellington: Philip Garside,
2014), 12.
[2] A
quick Google search of NZ mining disasters highlights the vulnerability of
those employed in that industry. See https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10688752
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