Reflecting Absence….
New York City:
May 7th 2012
The theme of this sabbatical has always been about connecting with what matters while letting some other things fall away, to see more clearly how things really are.
The manner in which we ‘let go’ is very important though.
Time out to reconnect with God is essential and so is managing our sad but expected losses in a way that helps.
The first funeral I ever conducted was for Patricia, and I agonised for a long time about what was required of me as a minister and what her family needed to help them to begin to lay her down gently.
Funerals have always felt like a process to me, with some careful listening to the family story, what is said and what is not said, being equally important. We talk about music and poetry. I ask obvious questions. ‘So what was she like?’. I have incorporated into funerals stories about beetroot and dog oil. We have read Spike Milligan poems and walked in together listening to Neil Diamond. A friend of mine has taken two funerals for people who were Shirley Bassey impersonators. Both carried in to, “Hey big spender” . Together we weave a story which carries enough of the truth about that person to enable it to become a vehicle of sorts, holding and moving the family forward to that inevitable point of letting go. The son of a parishioner who I had spent time with when she was dying once wrote me a note after his mother’s funeral which said, ‘thank you for walking us, with God, through the death of our mother’. His description of the process is a good one.
Because I am a priest, I bring to a funeral certain assumptions which I am aware not everybody shares, but which I realise now are ingrained in me. The assumption that death is not the end. That we can ‘hand over’ people to God. That souls (even metaphorically) go up, and not down. I have taken the funerals of people who I have come to love very dearly and whose“‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life ” we were all holding by our fingernails at the end.
The World Trade Centre memorial is called Reflecting Absence. It was only opened in September of last year, and it still sits in the middle of a huge building site, surrounded by a lot of security. As you walk towards what the media call ‘Ground Zero’ you become aware of an enormous gap in the buildings where the towers were. What is so strange is that the gap is not at ground level, which is a hive of activity, but up in the sky. Light pours through the hole in the buildings, which the towers left when they fell down.
The memorial itself consists of two enormous square monuments which sit in the footprints of the two towers. The names of the dead are recorded around each monument in what the architects called ‘meaningful adjacencies’, next to work colleagues or family members and not in alphabetical order.
I found the memorial profoundly disturbing and it took me a while to work out why, even and above the obvious context of that terrible day in 2001. I realised that I had expected it to have some soft edges. To contain some sense of that “the resurrection to eternal life’ which is so ingrained. To contain some “hope in the light of eternity”.
There is none.
The memorial is very beautiful and brutal. It pulls no punches about the horror of that day. Water falls down the sides of the monument and then slips away into a void in the centre, creating a sense of something pulled down and then vanishing forever. It is merciless in its refusal to rescue anyone from the memory. The sense of 3497 souls, and all that surrounded them in life, disappearing into that void is overwhelming and it sucks you in with it. No resurrection, no gentle laying to rest in the hope of eternity, just a horrible, violent waste of life.
I realised only afterwards that such a monument reflects not just felt absence of loved ones but indeed the absence of God himself. God may not have been absent on that day (and plenty of people who believe testify to that) but only the feeling of his absence begins to express the scale of the loss, and the violence of the ending. His absence of course can and should be properly located in the act itself and not in its consequences. The void within those who take the lives of others and the knowledge that there are some things which can never be made right.
Sometimes the story is so ghastly that we just have to leave it where it is. To let whatever green shoots of resurrection there are come through the cracks in their own time. It takes courage sometimes not to try to mend broken things, but just to leave them where they are and to wait..
