Honouring and joyful

Remembering a love that never dies away.

I’ve spent much of mine picking up the many balls I’ve dropped over the last month, since we said goodbye to my mother (I still can’t write those words in a way that feels real).

Just over a week ago, we gathered as family and friends for a service that a cousin kindly and beautifully described in a card as “honouring and joyful, despite the sadness involved (what an oxymoron!)”. And yet, not.

That evening, I shared one photo on Instagram, of my parents’ wedding day.

Getting my dad to the service wasn’t a given, right up until the last minute. But he made it. That the service coincidentally fell on the day of Our Lady of Sorrows, in the Catholic church of the Italian side of my family — even though it is not the tradition I was brought up in — brought deep comfort.

On Insta I wrote:

Mummy. We said goodbye today and the sun shone though the stained glass windows of the Lady Chapel and it was beautiful. The miracle was my dad being there for her and honestly I have no words for how much it meant to us all, and how grateful we are and how amazed … but this picture says it all. Thank you to all those who’ve held my mum and dad and us all in your thoughts and prayers.

“If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me …
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.” - Psalm 139: 11-12)

I had a shrine lamp burn for my mother at the Oratory, something I’ve never done before, but felt drawn to doing.

My mother adored summer and sunlight, which made all the more grateful for the lunchtime light that flooded through the stained glass windows of the Lady Chapel, illuminating scenes from Jesus’ life with his mother, while we honoured one who loved us so well.

My parents were married in October 1958. We displayed their stunning, black and white photo album at the gathering afterwards, and that picture - of my mother stepping out of the car, and my father taking her hand - jumped out at me.

It was if I was seeing my mother again, after the longest time. The mother she was, before, as Will once put it so well, the jigsaw pieces of her memory became increasingly muddled, and she less able to return them to their right places. The mother I miss now more than ever, and in a way I think I haven’t let my myself miss in that way until now.

One of the kindest comments on Instagram post was left by the church where my parents were married, in East Sheen, south west London. Their condolences and prayers would have meant so much to my mother. And, while my parents moved away from the area decades ago, it says something about the deep and sacred significance of churches where people have worshipped, celebrated and lamented across generations. Where parishioners have gathered, as James K A Smith writes in You Are What You Love, to “worship with the communion of the saints across the centuries”.

It brought deep comfort, and I’m so grateful.

I got talking to some friends the other night about the tradition of Taizé. The candlelit, mesmerisingly meditative services originated in a French monastic community of Catholic and Protestant brothers in Burgundy. Today, the atmospheric ecumenical services are held all over the world, and include chants and prayers from other traditions, including Eastern Orthodox.

Jacques Berthier, a Parisian composer and church organist, composed music for the first Taizé community, when it formed in 1955.

Within our darkest night,
you kindle the fire
that never dies away.

— Jacques Berthier, for The Taizé Community

To close, the words of St John Henry Newman, set to Elgar, and featured on the album A Meditation by The Sixteen.

They are at rest.

They are at rest.

We may not stir the heav'n of their repose

By rude invoking voice, or prayer addrest

In waywardness to those

Who in the mountain grots of Eden lie,

And hear the fourfold river as it murmurs by.

And soothing sounds ….

Angelic forms abide,

Echoing, as words of watch, o'er lawn and grove

The verses of that hymn which Seraphs chant above.

They are at rest.

—St John Henry Newman