Sermon for the 29th of October - Requiem Mass for All Souls - The Rev’d Dr Ellen Clark-King Dean of King’s College London

Thank you for inviting me to be with you at this beautiful Requiem. I want to start by sharing with you something else I find beautiful: the first lines of a poem about death by Christina Rossetti. You may
know them:
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

“Gone far away into the silent land”. There is a truth there about how we experience the deaths of our loved ones: the way that conversations are interrupted, the reality that important things are always left unsaid, the absence of a person to whom we could speak our inner truths and know that they were truly heard. The dead are silent and our relationship with them is silenced.

And sometimes the silence spreads. Friends do not know what to say to the bereaved, so they say nothing. People do not like to speak about the person who has died for fear of causing pain, so the bereaved can find themselves surrounded by a double silence. We shrink from talking of death and so we shrink from talking of the one who has died, which only compounds the sense of loss.

Death is silence. The dead are silent and cannot tell us of the land in which they now walk. We have been given no map of that land, no detailed geography or plan of it. There is no-one to sit down with us and explain exactly what it is like. There are people who claim that they can talk to those who have crossed, but they seem to peddle false reassurance rather than truth.

This silence can easily be interpreted as emptiness. We can hear nothing so we believe that there is nothing to hear. The fear of this, of a final ending with nothing left, can haunt those of us who have faith as well as those who don’t. The words of W.H.Auden cry out with truth:
We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

Some look for that miracle within science – having their bodies preserved until some future time whenever what killed them has been cured. They seek a world without death – which might sound wonderful at first thought. Not to have to lose the people we love, but to have them always living with us. But think for a moment what it would really mean - a world without death must also be a world without birth. A world without endings means a world without beginnings. A world where there would be no room for the new, no room for change and growth and true, full, involved living.

But if death is a final end and a total absence then such a world might possibly be justified. But this is not what our faith teaches us. We do not have a clear account of that silent realm but there are faint echoes of the eternal music. Echoes that can be caught if we listen with patient attention. The deathly silence is alive with notes which lie just outside our hearing, but fragments of which we can sometimes catch.

The image of God we gain from scripture gives us a constant chime of hope, a constant hint of promise. The words of Jesus teach us that life reaches beyond death into eternity. We are reminded throughout the Bible that we are loved by God, that our value to God is beyond price. We are not created for destruction. We are created to be filled with the life and love of God: a life and love that are far stronger than death.

It is in this life and love rather than through scientific preservation experiments that the true defeat of death can be found. On the cross God took death into himself, in the resurrection we see that the love and life of God are beyond the power of death. This is the miracle demanded by the poet Auden.

We are a community in which death does not have the final silencing word. Each time we celebrate the Eucharist we are reminded that our companionship is not just with those who sit next to us in this building but with “Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven”. Death, our faith teaches us, is not a silent land but a place filled with voices of praise and love. All Souls calls us to remember that we have companions on our journey on both sides of the narrow divide of death.

I need to be honest with you – this vision of a joyful companionship after death is one that sometimes seems to me as clear and true as moonlight on a cloudless night. And yet, at other times, appears as
unlikely and clouded as a dream on waking. It is a joyful hope for me, not knowledge or certainty. A part of my faith rooted in what I understand of the eternal nature of God’s love for each one of us and of the transformative action of Christ in death and resurrection.

And in that hope I want to finish with a very different image of death to replace that of Christina Rossetti’s ‘silent land’. It is the image of a song sung by a myriad of voices – some loved and familiar – all our own beloved dead – and many, many more we have never known. And every voice is resonant with love and joy, and every voice is somehow one yet somehow distinct, and through, below, beneath and in every voice is the voice of God singing love without end. Amen.