This Lent we’ve been looking at temptations, fear, and today, death. Not happy, laugh-a-minute subjects.

When we are grieving, hope can be such a fickle thing. Some days it seems so strong and other days so absent. Some days strong enough to resuscitate our weary soul, to breathe life into the lifeless, yes, even to raise us dead! Nothing seems impossible on those days.

But on other days it seems that everything has closed down, gone away, and we are like the town paddock after the circus has left. Only the memories remain and those too seem to be fading. On those days everything seems impossible.

It is to these latter days,the days of despondency, that some writers have tried to offer a hopeful word. Not in order to tell people they are wrong to feel as they do. Not in order to encourage them to forget the past and the pain. But rather to walk with them through the valley of shadows knowing that there is a breadth, an opening out, beyond that valley.

Two of the more common non-biblical readings you will hear at funerals are those of Bishop C. H. Brentand Henry Scott Holland, who both wrote in the early 1900s.

Brent writes:

What is dying? I am standing on the seashore. A ship departs and spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean. She is an object and I stand watching her till at last she fades from the horizon. And someone at my side says, “She is gone!” Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all. She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when I saw her. And just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination. The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says, "She is gone", there are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout, "There she comes" –and that is DYING.

The maritime imagery has an appeal for those of us for whom the sea has been a life companion, and as one of the places where we take our grief. Walking on beaches beside the constant moving of the ocean is very comforting.

I think too we need to appreciate Brent’s deviation from the up/down, heaven/hell metaphor prevalent at the time. Brent’s afterlife was not in the clouds or in the fiery depths but in the far horizon, the beyond.

Of course his metaphor is limited. Dead bodies deteriorate and decompose. They don't turn up somewhere as large in the ‘mast, hull, and spars’ as they once were. Whatever (or if) the afterlife might be, one thing is certain, it is very different from the now.

Brent’s reflection emphasizes two things. Firstly, perspective. Our vision is limited, just like our life is. But the horizon is unlimited. Secondly, absence. The one we knew and loved is dead and is gone. Life won't be the same again no matter what we believe. Hope does not ignore the reality of our loss.

Holland’s piece is quite different from Brent’s. He writes:

Death is nothing atall. I have only slipped into the next room. I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by my old familiar name. Speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference in your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was, there is unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well.

Holland writes of the proximity of our dead ‘just around the corner.’ He encourages us to connect with our dead as we did when we were alive; and to carry on living and loving, laughing ‘as we have always laughed.’ Hope is in the bonds the death cannot break.

Just as there is truth in Brent's metaphor of the dead leaving us and traveling far away, so there is truth in Holland's metaphor of the dead being ‘in the next room.’ Sometimes we need to hear one truth and sometimes the other.

Of course death is not ‘nothing at all.’ It does not often feel like a ‘negligible accident.’ Usually it feels powerful, crushing, overwhelming, earth-shattering, even vile.

Although sometimes too death comes as a friend.

Just as death is not ‘nothingat all’ neither do our dead literally, invisibly, reside with us. Rather Holland is pointing to the mystery of how after death the presence of our loved ones live on with us. Or to put another way, the power of our love, the knitting of our souls, was once so strong that even with death we remain connected. Even when in time we might partner/marry again, or have othe rchildren or grandchildren, or our memories fail us, there are marks on oursouls that will abide forever. Love has changed us, remoulded us, refashioned us. Death may break many bonds between us, but it cannot eradicate the changes love has wrought. And in this there is hope.

Edward Hayes, writing in the 1980s, picks up this thought in his Psalm for the Dying:

Relatives and friends, I am about to leave; my last breath does not say “goodbye, ”for my love for you is truly timeless, beyond the touch of boney death.

I leave myself not to the undertaker, (or to the decoration of the graveyard), but to your memory, with love.

I give you what no thief can steal, the memories of our times together:the tender, love-filled moments, the successes we have shared, the hard times that brought us closer together, and the roads we have walked side by side.

I also leave you a solemn promise that after I am home in the bosom ofGod, I will still be present, whenever and wherever you call on me. My energy will be drawn to you by the magnet of our love. Whenever you are in need, call me. I will come to you with my arms full of wisdom and light to open up your blocked paths, to untangle your knots, and to be your avenue to God.

And all I take with me as I leave is your love and the millions of memories of all that we have shared. So I truly enter my new life as a millionaire.

Fear not nor grieve at my departure, you whom I have loved so much, for my roots and yours are forever intertwined.

Hayes does not create a voice speaking to us from the grave. His speaker is dying rather than dead. But he does talk about presence after death. He believes in an energy, an energy fuelled by the love between two people, that transcends death. A love coming ‘with arms full of wisdom and light’ to ‘untangle your knots and to be your avenue to God.’ That love energy is like the roots of two trees intertwined.

Of course, once again, there are no guarantees. No assurances that when we call on the name of our dead there will be any response. Indeed if we expect visions and words from on high, we will be disappointed. When Hayes says, ‘I will still be present whenever and wherever you call on me’ he is referring to that strange unexplainable power which can connect us with each other, in spite of death. It is the power of love, sewn into our souls.

Interestingly, all three of these writings are by Christians and yet none talk of heaven, or hell. None of them talk about systems of rewards and punishments. None of them try to motivate people to live better lives in order to obtain a better hereafter. Rather they assert that one prepares for death not by being religious, or by keeping the Ten Commandments, but by living fully, loving to the fullest, and being all that we have the capacity to be. For hope is found, not in assenting to beliefs, but in the way we love.

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