(My Father’s Day post. My father never lived to see my children.)

What happens when you run out of words?

As I believe you all know, my father died very suddenly on Remembrance Sunday [2001]. He had suffered a major stroke the previous Thursday morning, and from that time until he slipped away peacefully on the Sunday afternoon my mother, my brother and I were by his side. As you can imagine it has been a difficult time for my family, and we are very grateful for all the messages of support and prayers that have come to us from the people of [this church].

I would like to say a few words today about what happened in those days. Now, obviously, this is difficult stuff. And when I mentioned to J____ that I was planning to talk about it today, she said she hoped it wouldn’t be too dark. I hope that I won’t be too dark; I don’t plan to be. I am fundamentally a positive person – a trait that I inherited from my father – but I believe that the truth sets us free. There are dark things in this world, Jesus was crucified, and I think it doesn’t help us if we run away screaming when we are brought face to face with the dark things of our world. For my faith is that the dark things of this world are not overpowering, that death does not have the last word. That there is an Easter morning. Or, to change the image, we are a pilgrim people, and if we are to keep walking towards the Kingdom, sometimes we must walk through the valley of the shadow of death where the only thing that can keep us from fearing the evil that surrounds us is the staff of the Good Shepherd – that is, a trust that the valley of shadow is not the whole of life.

When we were at the hospital, first and foremost, we prayed. The word prayer originally comes from a word meaning to beg, and that is what we did – we begged for the life of my father, we begged that he would not be taken from us, we begged that he would not be brain damaged or paralysed.

After a while, in a situation like this, the words begin to run out. There are only a certain number of times that you can put your whole heart into praying such words. But the process of saying those words so often, and in such a heartfelt manner, changes you. It burns off the dross that we so often fill our minds and hearts with. You get more in touch with the things that you truly value – the clutter gets swept aside, and the central building blocks of your life – your love for your nearest and dearest, your husband or father, your brother or child or friend – these come into focus. And you realise just how very precious they are. For we each bear the image of Christ within us, we are each made in the image of God, and we are each so very, very precious. I think that is how God sees us. And one thing that I take away from that hospital bed is this sense of the richness, the value, the sheer beauty of a human being, another soul. It is not easy to let something like that go.

After a day or so, my mother asked me how to pray. The words had run out, the begging didn’t seem to be being answered, and perhaps there was an element of ‘If only I could say the right words then God will be merciful to us, and spare this man’. I said to my mother that the heart of prayer is love; that if we brought our love for my father to the centre of our awareness, then God would be able to work through us. I had in mind a passage from Romans, which I shall read to you:

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will. And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8. 22-28)

It was the second part of that passage that I had in mind at first – that the Spirit prays through us. If we can only centre ourselves on God, who is the Love that is the Source of all our life, then I believe that He can work through us. If we could only bring into our hearts our love for my father, then God will be able to work through us.

It was at this time that we asked for the Chaplain to come, to administer the sacrament of anointing. I had to explain this to my nephew, who is ten years old, and I will just briefly say to you what I said to him. It’s not an exhaustive explanation as you will realise, but I think it says what is most important. I said to him that anointing with oil was a way of expressing your love and approval of someone, and that what happened with the rite of anointing was that the whole church together had blessed oil for this purpose, so that when this oil was used, it was a way of concentrating all the love of the church into the act, not just that of the people gathered around the person. It was a way of focusing and reinforcing that love into a single act.

As time went on, the doctors became more and more downbeat. On the Friday they had told us that we should prepare for the worst, and they said the same on the Sunday morning. We had been attending a service at the Chapel – it was Remembrance Sunday, “they shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old” – and we were called up to hear the sombre news. This was difficult; we had clung on to small strands of hope, and now these were taken away from us. Our clearest wish was that my father should not be suffering, and so we arranged that he should be made comfortable, and we gathered around him for his last journey. Which I won’t go into here; but I will say that it was a very peace filled time.

I need to return to my theme of talking with God. For we had tried all the words that we had, and begged with all our hearts. And then we ran out of words, and we just centred on our love for my father, hoping that this would allow God’s healing power to come through. And of course, led by me, we placed our hands on him and prayed “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, may the Spirit of the Living God, present with us now, fill you spirit mind and body, and make you whole”.

There was still a sense, in me, that if only we did things the right way, then my father would be returned to us. This is magical thinking, it is not Christian thinking. Magical thinking is about controlling the world for our own purposes, using occult means. This is one of the main reasons for Christian missionary success – if the God of these incomers can heal the sick, give people back their sight, or knit bones back together then their magic must be the most powerful magic, their God must be the most powerful God, so let us convert to their rituals. Traces of this can still be found in the Old Testament by the way – and we can trace within the Old Testament a growth in understanding of God, from being the magical figure who was under Israel’s control, to the Creator of the universe. For the central reality that was brought home to me so clearly during those difficult days was simply this – that we are not in control. God is in control. And God will make the creation in a way of his choosing. This seems an obvious thing, a trivial truth, and yet I do believe it is one that we have almost forgotten in the structure of our lives. We have become accustomed to getting our own way with most things. If we break a leg, we expect to be able to recover, and return to our previous normal life – when that is something astonishing in human history. We are accustomed to being able to see during the dark winter hours, and be kept warm and well fed. Yet, within all the insulation that we surround ourselves with, all the comforts that chloroform the soul, God is still the fundamental ground of our being, the support on which we sit. We are utterly and irreducibly dependent upon God.

We fight against this.

We fight against it not least when we are touched by Him in a way that we do not like. We don’t like giving up our sense of control, the illusion that we are in control of our fate. And when God asserts His presence in ways that we find offensive or painful, we react against him, we hurl our anger at him, and in many cases this anger becomes a hatred, and we fight back in the only way left, by saying that we don’t believe in Him, rather as an angry child might say to a parent ‘I don’t love you any more’. And perhaps God is hurt by that in the way that a parent is cut to the quick by such a child. But to be honest, I think God’s only response to the anguished crying of “Why?” is what he says to Job:

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements–surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38)

We don’t have a position from which to criticise God, or even to ask for an explanation. We live within the world that he has created, where we are entirely dependent on Him for our every breath. Our desire for being in control extends also to our understandings of the world. We form an understanding of the world, and it contains elements like ‘a parent will die before the child’ and ‘if I live a basically good life I won’t suffer greatly before my death’ and things like that. These act like crutches, like comforts and supports, and as long as we are aware that that is what they are then they work well. But I believe we forget that we are so wholly dependent on the grace of God for everything. And the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away; Blessed be the name of the Lord.

So why should we pray? And why should we, in this healing group, spend our time talking and praying together, and once a month come together to lay hands on those who are in need of healing, and renewal of mind and spirit?

I can’t pretend to have a full answer to that question. In particular, I can’t say with confidence that God will answer even the prayers of the faithful. When Jesus talks of the power even of faith as little as a mustard seed, or of disciples being able to do greater deeds than Him, or of the Father knowing what good things to give to His children – these things no longer have an immediate sense for me. I think that before my father’s death I still had a residual sense that God might sometimes intervene, to avert something hard from taking place. I hadn’t experienced it in my own life, but I was perfectly willing to believe that it might happen. I do not have that sense any more. In that, perhaps I gain a glimmer of what Jesus understood from the cross, when he felt himself forsaken. Some believe that Jesus expected God to bring the end of the world at that moment – when the world had judged and condemned his Son, when the battle lines and choices were clear. God didn’t do that. Instead, after the anguish, pain and humiliation of his death on the cross, Christ enters the underworld, and, in time, he emerges, changed, filled with light and peace. It hadn’t happened in the way that he expected. It happened in the way that God chose.

But there are a few things I would like to say here. The first is that the truth sets us free – and prayer brings us closer to the reality of God. When we are confronted with need, our priorities become clearer. What do we actually believe in? What do we think is important? And, as I have described, I believe that if we can but allow the love of which we are made to shine through our hearts, I think we can tune in with God’s purposes, and he will work through us. We can perhaps put to one side our comfortable certainties, and place our hearts wholly in God’s hands.

Secondly, during those days in the hospital, I felt supported and held. I’m not sure I would describe it as being held and supported by God, although I did have a profound sense that God was present in that small room. It was more a sense of being supported by prayer, that there were people praying for my father and his family, and that that support was somehow reaching me. I can’t explain that sense, all I know is that it was there.

Lastly, I have learnt the meaning of the expression ‘be grateful for small mercies’. The central and unavoidable fact of my father’s death is truly awful, and to be honest, I feel that I am still in shock; it hasn’t properly sunk in to my bones yet. There is much mourning still to come. But surrounding that hard fact, if God had decided to take my father away, to cause us so much pain – he did at least leave us with some small causes for gratitude. Gratitude that my father hadn’t been taken a few years ago, before the happy times of his most recent years. Gratitude that my father had not been left brain damaged, or paralysed, for that would truly have been a hateful condition for him to have had to endure. And grateful also for those few days that we could spend with him, so that he could know his family were with him before he slipped away, that we had a chance to hold him and to love him just a little more before he was finally taken back.

One last image. I hope that many people here will have seen the film, ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’, where Harrison Ford and Sean Connery go off in search of the Holy Grail. At the climax of the film, Indiana has to overcome a number of hurdles to reach the grail, and the last of them is the leap of faith. He has to step out across an abyss, where there are no visible means of support other than the grace of God. After much hesitation – and a little cunning – he takes the step. I am starting to realise the truth of that underlying image. That if we are to walk the path of faith, then we can rely on nothing other than the grace of God. We cannot rely on our own strength, our own understandings, not even on our own love. We are in the hands of God, He is in control. Let us trust that He loves us, and that he will take care of us, in this world, and in the next.

Let us pray:

Almighty God, who in thy wisdom hast so ordered our earthly life that we needs must walk by faith and not by sight; grant us such faith in thee that, amidst all things that pass our understanding, we may believe in thy fatherly care, and ever be strengthened by the assurance that underneath are the everlasting arms; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.