A spiritual legacy

Today we said goodbye to Doreen Cooper, whose unexpected death ten days ago shocked us all. There had been little sign of life threatening illness. She was found dead at home after failing to turn up for an appointment, sitting on the stairs with her coat on and a letter in her hand, ready to go out to the postbox. She was quite an organised person in some ways, and from what I knew of her ready to go whenever the Lord called her, as she would put it. She'd pre-paid her funeral arrangements after her husband died sixteen years ago.

Nearly a hundred people came to pray their respects - from the Parish of Roath where she'd spent most of her worshipping life, and most of our regular congregation, where she'd made herself at home five years ago, when the Parish congregation at St Teilo's school stopped meeting for worship.

At seventy eight she still rejoiced in a full head of undyed black hair, and took a lively intelligent interest in everything. She went everywhere with Mary, a neighbour widowed in the same year. They never missed anything at church unless either of them was away on family visits. She clearly enjoyed the Lenten meditation courses I gave and would often comment on them with a smile.

When I visited her children and their families a few days ago to discuss the funeral, I discovered she had it all sorted out, as well as paid for - hymns and suggested contributions to the order of service. No eulogy was to be given, but instead a poem by William Blake expressing her committed and questioning faith.

You don't believe - I won't attempt to make ye:
You are asleep - I won't attempt to wake ye.
Sleep on! sleep on! while in your pleasant dreams
Of Reason you may drink of Life's clear streams.
Reason and Newton, they are quite two things;
For so the swallow and the sparrow sings.

Reason says `Miracle': Newton says `Doubt.'
Aye! that's the way to make all Nature out.
`Doubt, doubt, and don't believe without experiment':
That is the very thing that Jesus meant,
When He said `Only believe! believe and try!
Try, try, and never mind the reason why!'

I'd never come across this poem before, and was delighted that her son was willing to read it at today's funeral Eucharist. As Doreen was a regular at the midweek Eucharists as well as on Sundays, so this was an appropriate send off. Nearly half the congregation took communion - unusual in modern circumstances.

Remarkably, she left a hand written selection of scriptural verses, that had evidently been a consolation to her over the years of her widowhood. Members of the choir and her family welcomed her body into church overnight, and at the vigil office I read her scripture selection, and then used it again at the Committal in Thornhill. It was as if she herself was speaking to her family unequivocally about the faith which sustained her through life. A very Anglican faith, rooted in tradition, reason and scripture, centred on the love of God in Jesus his Son, incarnate now in Word and Sacrament. We're all the poorer for her passing.

Farewell John Morris

Today Clare and I said goodbye to an old friend, a quietly radiant man whom we had first got to know forty years ago when I was a student training for ministry at St Michael's College Llandaff. John Morris, dying at eighty-seven was mourned at his funeral in Llandaff Cathedral, where he had been a worshipper for many years, by a congregation of about 150, which included as many as a dozen clergy, male and female, and both our Bishops. He was a life-long layman of spiritual intelligence and learning. He was modest and humble, always enquiring, exploring and discovering wonderful new things about life. You could say he was typical of that breed of teachers who leave a lasting influence on one generation after another.

He came from a non-conformist farming family in Caerphilly, where I served my first Curacy, and had become an Anglican, like his elder brother, in his youth. Although from a radical Christian pacifist background, he served right through the second world war and survived, to complete his higher education and become a teacher of English and Scripture. After his first job, he returned to the Grammar school which had educated him, and remained there forty years. An unspectacular career by restless modern standards, but one which left a lasting impression on generations of students.

John and his wife Mary met Clare and I at St Mike's one evening when they were out looking for some musical students to recruit to take part in experimental liturgy in the Parish of Llandaff North, where they were worshipping at the time. We got on well and kept in touch while I worked in Llandaff diocese. John referred Martin one of his troublesome sixth formers, to me when I was Curate in Caerphilly. Martin caught the faith which shone from John unassumingly, but I was entrusted by John with the challenge of dialoguing with him about the relevance of the Gospel and God to his concerns as a young political activist.

Martin was one of the most original insightful and creative thinkers I have ever known, and made my own critical and rebellious instincts feel quite tame and conservative. He survived the exchanged to be baptized, confirmed and eventually ordained. John was very proud of Martin, and Martin gave a touching eulogy at the service. Only I know how much Martin struggled to say what John meant to him and to so many others. He was on the phone to me several times in the 36 hours before he stood up in front of all those friends and strangers assembled to celebrate a life so well lived.

It was one of those days. Just as I was leaving for the midday Mass at St John's, before going on to the funeral, Martin rang and said his computer printer had died, as he was about to print before leaving his home in Newport to drive over for the funeral. So, he emailed the file to me for printing. It arrived a couple of minutes before the Mass was due to start, and thankfully the office computer system behaved immaculately and delivered to order. That Martin should trust me with this task as an old friend was one thing. That he should trust that my computer system would be able to deliver was a real act of faith.

After the funeral, and before going back to John and Mary's house to gather with other mourners for the funeral tea, I had to go back into City Hall for a meeting of Cardiff Business Safe, to see a presentation on a business crime intelligence data system - a duty required of me as a new Board of Management member. In the midst of death we are in life. Sometimes I wish it wasn't all so crowded.

When we returned to Cardiff from Monaco, we met up again unexpectedly at the local doctor's surgery, the day we were re-registering with the NHS. Then we met again when we went to worship at Llandaff Cathedral, where we found John and Mary in the congregation there, involved in working with others to deepen the spiritual life of the community through a prayer and mediation group. The last time we met was just a month ago, again at the doctor's, each of us getting checked against those troublesome signs of ageing, though he was 25 years older than I. He went fighting through a war at the end of which I was born, yet despite all those brutalising experiences remained meek and gentle to the end, resting calmly in the love of God as his end approached, much in the same way as he had done throughout his life. I could envy faith like his.

Farewell Wally

.
Wally Burns was given a great send-off at St Michael's church this afternoon. There were over 150 people present - family and friends, Cathays neighbours, church members, former Cardiff Bus Company colleagues, and Burma Star Association members, who formed a guard of honour with the Association's flag. All the circles of community life that were part of his life paying him tribute. The service concluded with the Kohima epitaph, Last Post and Reveille, played on a bugle. It was the kind of occasion he would have approved of for others, and in a way it was strange that he was not there to oversee the event, to make sure in his warm and easy going way, that all was being done decently and in order. I was happy just to sit at the back, there being no reason for me to take part in its conduct, with Burma Star Branch Chaplain, Bill Barlow on parade with Caroline Downs, Wally's Vicar, and fellow West Midlander - she used to tease him in her broadest Black Country accent (although she's from Coventry), and he loved it. Who will take over at caretaker of St Michael's? Who will take on the secretariat of the Burma Star Branch? Everyone is wondering. It's not longer quite to easy to find good people who will take on such tasks and give so much to them. May he rest in peace.

An unusual funeral

.
For only the second time this year, I had a funeral to do this week. It was of a man, born a Catholic, who spent much of his life as a seafarer, and in his old age, he'd started reading the Qu'ran and practising prayer Muslim style. A few days before his death he was visited by two local Mosque officials, and he made his submission to Allah, all of which left his family a bit bewildered about what to do, since he's stipulated in his will that he wanted to be cremated - not a very Muslim thing to do.

When I was in Geneva, the Welsh friend of an Iranian woman got in touch and asked if I would do her friend's funeral. She still believed and practised Muslim prayer at home but had an abhorrence of Iranian religious personnel. Her three daughters were content for a Christian priest to do their mother's service. We included some CD tracks of the call to prayer, and a reading of texts from the burial ritual in Arabic and English. On this occasion there was no Arabic speaker around and no CD, so I had to use the English versions of the prayers, and readings from the Old Testament and Psalm, with a brief Gospel passage about the compassion and unconditional acceptance received by all who turn to God.

In several areas of common human experience Christian, Jewish and Muslims each want to express the same things to God, and prayers are adaptable or interchangable. It seemed right to reassure the forty mourners of this, and to say that conversion even if it seems hard for us to think of it as anything other than a rejection, if it leads a fuller deeper relationship with God, is a work of grace, by the One who moves in mysterious ways through our lives. I'm not quite sure what the three daughters (again, co-incidentally) made of my explanations, but then they had plenty to deal with coping with their children and other family members.

They'd agreed to the visit of two Mosque officials who arrived ahead of the ceremony to wash the dead man's body and clothe him in a shroud. Was this OK? They wanted to be reassured. I had to explain that putting someone in ordinary clothes was something of a recent innovation, at one time working class families couldn't have afforded to see the late beloved's clothes go with them. When I started out in ministry, the shroud was still accepted convention for people of all religions. How quickly this has changed to the point where the custom has all but been forgotten - except in horror films.

When we traipsed out of the Roath Court Funeral Chapel, several old guys, probably ex-mariners or workmates, expressed their appreciation for what I'd said, or maybe it was for not glossing over things and pretending this was a Christian man's funeral when it was something different.

Just a believing man trying to work out what it was right for him to be and to do, and not letting himself be carried along by the flow.

It strikes me how often in the life of a pastor, the response one is called to make to a real situation isn't matched by the options available in the book of rules or the variety of liturgical texts. Having them is more of a safety net (or trampoline for take-off?). They give a basis in values and attitudes towards caring for people and accompanying them in the messy realities of real life and death situations. Starting from a dialogue with ones own tradition reveals what is relevant and what is not is always educative and creative. It makes the job worthwhile.

Smash and grab

.
Last night thirty members of St John's congregation gathered for a Requiem Eucharist, in thanksgiving and remembrance of our friend Vincent, whose funeral took so very long to arrange, because the hospital had somehow managed to have him as a patient for a fortnight without taking any details of next of kin from him, or if they did, they managed to conceal the fact from everyone, including themselves. Our choir robed up to meet Vincent's coffin beforehand at the south gate, and escorted into church for the service. It was a moving simple 'family' occasion with church members present who had known him for most of his life, or worked with him in the tea room. His own closest surviving relatives could not be present, living in Australia and America and unable to travel. His coffin remained there overnight, decked in flowers arranged by
church members.

Today at ten, there were forty odd people in church for the funeral office - some of those who had attended the night before were there again, but not all, as some had to work. Others who couldn't attend last night made it for this morning's service or came to the Crematorium for the Farewell and Committal. There were a dozen members of Cathays Methodist church present. He attended their Tuesday lunch club regularly. They were his friends too. Vincent's poor sight and deafness made him seem more of a lonely person than he really was. He was content to live alone after his mother's death fifteen or more years ago, but remained constantly connected with two local Christian communities where his friendship was treasured.

As we left for Thornhill Crematorium after the funeral office, there was a bit of traffic chaos in the High Street outside. At the entrance to the Castle Arcade, I noticed police cordon tape strung across the battered front of the Clive Ranger jewellery shop, and a parked Panda car nearby - signs of a smash and grab raid. I learned later that it had happened just a short while before we'd left church. Two hundred thousand pounds worth of goods stolen, including two valuable Fabergé eggs on display. Balaclava'd men with a sledge hammer had got away with daylight robbery on a busy thoroughfare.

I spoke later in the day to the shop manager, to express my sympathies. He simply said how thankful he was that nobody was injured. He was philosophical about the assault on the shop, having seen much worse outcomes in his thirty years as a trader in precious things. And he graciously thanked me for 'my time'. I was amazed he had time to stop a minute to speak to me, a stranger in a dog collar, what with all the details of a big insurance claim to sort out, and a shop front to get repaired as soon as possible.

A strange event accompanying Vincent's final farewell.

Progress at last

.
It's been a busy day, but the one notable thing is that while I was out the Police Inspector in charge of the Cathays station got in touch to say that Vincent's house had been accessed and relevant phone numbers retrieved to start with. Now he has to get Interpol to contact the Police in Australia to go around and tell Vince's sister in law that he's died. "As she's likely to be pretty old and we don't know what state of health she's in, it would be better to do this than for me, a stranger, to ring up long distance and tell her." I thought that was very considerate. Let's just hope that the local aussie cops are are humane and sensitive in relaying the sad news.

The astonishing thing is that his house keys weren't held by the police, but held on the ward where he died, after an ambulance man handed them over. Somehow nobody on the ward remembered this, or if they knew, thought fit to act upon it. They simply got stuck at the point of embarrassment caused by realising what when he died the still had no record of who his next of kin was. Normal procedure seems to have collapsed in ruins. And it's not surprising, since every other person I spoke to about this matter on the ward, in the social work office, seemed only to be working part-time. Whilst people were aware of the case and its concerns, there seemed to be no coherent way of working together and sharing information and making decisions. Failure to remember the keys has had a lot of people running around fruitlessly for a whole week.

Hopefully now it won't be too long before we can arrange a decent funeral for him.

One more piece of progress to note. The building site hoardings around town are finally beginning to get decorated with information about who's doing what to the city centre and why. It's the best part of two months late. Hoardings on both sides of the churchyard site are now decorated with childrens' art work. Tomorrow there's a photo opportunity for SD2 bigwigs with a couple of councillors to publicise the effort in aid of 'Keep Cardiff Tidy'. I'm doing assembly at school first thing, then celebrating the school's 'class mass' at St German's straight after, which means I won't get to take part in this. Just as well, I'd only embarrass them by saying "Too little, too late."

Notes of disquiet

.
Our guests got off to an early start to get their Easyjet flight back to Geneva from Bristol, which robbed me of the vital Monday morning lie-in which I find essential to enable to recover from my four service Sunday. It was just as well, however since had to rendezvous with a couple of teachers and sixty year ten youngsters from Corsham Comprehensive school near Bath at St John's.

This GCSE year group does a visit to our city centre church, a mosque and the Millennium stadium in a quest to wrap some experience around the RE curriculum items that are concerned with the social functions of different religious gathering places - sport here is regarded as a kind of alternate religious activity I guess. Heaven knows what the kids make of this. I gave them a ten minute introduction to the history and contemporary function of the building including as many curricular buzzwords as I could muster, then allows them to wander around and take photos for another ten minutes before they left to get on a bus to go to one of the two mosques in Bute Street.

Notably, this group was comprised almost entirely of white English students. Credit to their teachers for trying to open up their students' eyes to how others live and socialise. Another group of the same size will visit at the same time tomorrow.

After lunch, God on Mondays re-started at Tredegarville school. Numbers of people attending are perhaps half those when we moved over from church. It's not the sort of commitment that many find easy to sustain. Still, it was pleasing to hear from several parents of their delight that the older of their offspring have been offered places at St Teilo's church high school, to which they had hopefully applied. Having to respond on their behalf to the school admissions officer's enquiry forms was just a bit different this year, since the closure of St James which some parents would have conscientiously attended with their kids (albeit in support of their high school applications), introduced a measure of uncertainty. It meant that I had to explain in each form what 'God on Mondays' was. I don't know what the admissions officer made of it, but the kids have their places, where their parents and peers want them to be for next September.

Glenys, the Head Teacher is worrying over budget cuts which have come swiftly due to crisis management of the County Council budget on the one hand, exacerbated by the sudden departure of eleven Czech Roma children, whose accommodation was condemned. Instead of keeping them together, so that the children and parents can get language support, and properly managed social inclusion, the families have been dispersed in small groups between three different local authorities outside Cardiff. Nobody is happy about this, even if their new accommodation is superior. The school's very caring community of teachers of support workers are distressed because they are aware of the impact of this disruption and dispersion upon the children's education and social acceptance in new communities far apart from each other - and they've all been here in Adamsdown because they are from the same area, and belonged to the same social network, which led to the migration of these families in the first place.

It's now nearly a week since Vincent died. Still, nobody has managed to find out any information about next of kin or will executors, even though its quite likely that all the information is locked up in the house from which he was taken by ambulance, two weeks before he died in hospital. Whoever locked his front door behind them when he was stretchered out must know where the keys are, but that information has not yet been obtained by the hospital social workers. People ring me to ask when the funeral is to be and I have to explain to them that nobody seems to be willing to take the authority to go back to his house and find out. If no information is forthcoming by Wednesday, the hospital social services will hand the case to hospital bereavement, who in the absence of any information will proceed to arrange a paupers' funeral for him - something that none of his friends would want to see happen. It's as if nobody is willing to take responsibility for the simple procedure that will resolve this case. Still his surviving next of kin, a sister in law in Australia has not been informed of his death. It's very difficult not to be able to do anything about this other than nag the people involved to get on with sorting it all out.

Losing Vincent

.
Vincent, the regular 'washer-upper' on the St John's Friday tea room team died Monday night. He was in his eighties. A fortnight ago he'd been found on the floor at home, having collapsed, and maybe lying there overnight. He recovered, but was kept in hospital for tests to find out why he collapsed, but he died quietly in his sleep. He was a quiet, friendly man, very private, and he lived alone. The police had to break into his house as no neighbour seemed to have a key. He had several hospital visitors including the chaplain who used to take Communion at home to his infirm mother, friends from a local Methodist lunch club in Cathays, from the tea room, and myself.

However, he shared very little personal information with anyone. The hospital had not succeeded in extracting from him any details for next of kin or others to be contacted in case of need. The only relatives ever mentioned live in Australia and the USA, and nobody is sure how close they were to him or whether they are older or younger than him. Indeed, last night, I was 'helping the police with their enquiries' as the saying goes. Two police officers came visiting at home around nine thirty, made aware of his church links by the hospital, to see if there was any information that could help them contact someone on his behalf. As nobody seems to have been able to come up with anything, a police officer or coroner's court offical will now have to go through his house and personal effects in search of a will, or a phone book to get them started. An unhappy task in dealing with a stranger. Work is not all about catching crooks for them.

Members of the congregation are all wondering if and how we'll be able to hold a funeral service for him, so all his friends can say goodbye. Although he appeared to be a loner, (probably an effect of growing deafness and poor sight) he endeared himself to many people. He had a way at looking you in a way that suggested trust and openness of heart. He was constant in attending Sunday worship. He'll be missed on Fridays and Sundays.

More and more people in modern society, of all ages, now live alone, some of them feeling secure in their anonymity, some not liking anyone to know their business. As long as they can manage on their own that poses no problem to anyone, but once they are ill, incapacitated or they die, lack of information about them becomes an urgent concern, involving many in the community as well as health services and agencies of the law. So, while I have doubts about the overly fancy technology of government identity card policy, and its potential for abuse, the principal of obliging all people to own and carry an identity card is to everyone's benefit in the long run. It may even help to make grieving a more bearable process.