OPINION (AN COLÚN): Memories, beauty and life after death

I ATTENDED the funeral of an old schoolfriend, via livestream, least week.
The funeral was held in a beautiful church in central London, the interior of which was magnificent and ornate.
As I listened to my friend's brothers talk about him, many memories which had long been locked away in my subconscious, were suddenly unlocked and came pouring out of their box. I was taken back to the late 1980s and the beautiful school we attended in rural Lancashire. (If you have seen the film “Dead Poets Society” you will get quite a good idea of what it was like living and learning in this school). We were all boarders. Strong friendships were formed which were as strong as the bond between brothers.
One of the long-submerged memories which returned during the funeral was the fondness my old schoolfriend had for drinking tea and engaging in conversation. One of the things which he loved doing was chatting with friends in his room or in their rooms while drinking large amounts of tea. The fact he took strong pleasure in this shows a civilised instinct. (“Tea,” wrote Thomas de Quincey, “though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities will always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual”). He remained a great conversationalist throughout his life, often knowledgeable and always respectful of others during his conversations. He was slow to criticise and usually tried to see the best in others; which is, sadly, quite a rare characteristic nowadays.
The hymns and readings for the funeral were excellently chosen. I sang along as I watched on my laptop, alone in my room. These were hymns I sang often in school and I loved them. The first was the beautiful “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.” The words for this are excellent (“Take from our souls the strain and stress, And let our ordered lives confess The beauty of Thy peace.”) They were written in the 19th Century by the American Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier.
The first reading was the powerful, famous passage from Ecclesiastes: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die...”
Our logical minds, the officiating priest told us, try to grasp at God and embrace Him in a rational circumference. Sometimes we think that by rationalising God, perhaps in the process erasing Him, we have achieved a breakthrough. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have allowed our logical discourse to diminish us. In fact, God will always remain just beyond our grasp, outside the boundaries of rationality, waiting for the heart to open itself to Him. When we open the heart, happiness floods in.
As we look at the toughness and the difficulty of our journeys in life, as we gaze at the transience of things, including those things and people which are so dear to us, some of us stand up and say in response, The Lord is my life and my hope.
The second reading was St Paul to the Corinthians, which has a modern resonance. Many of us today feel as the Corinthians once felt - we feel a sense of despair, a sense of annihilation by death. St Paul tries to snap them out of their despondency. He points out that the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible. “Where O grave is your victory?”
The Gospel reading again offered the listeners hope in the midst of their pain, grief, suffering. Christ's words are poetic, powerful, confident: “There are many rooms in my Father's house...I am the way, the truth and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.”
The priest, who in the '80s was my Latin teacher and my spiritual director as I worked my way through St Ignatius' wonderful Spiritual Exercises, placed a bible and a crucifix on the coffin. The two objects symbolised the sadness and the hope of death.
The offertory hymn was Hail Queen of Heaven (“thrown on life's surge, we claim your care”). We sang the Lord's Prayer, a rousing, quasi operatic version in Latin. As I belted this out in my dining room there was a tear in my eye. A soloist sang Gounod's Ave Maria. Gerard Manley Hopkins' “Heaven-Haven” was recited by one of the brothers (“I have desired to go Where springs not fail.”)
Our friend was Irish, so his great love of Ireland was mentioned a number of times, including a freezing-cold February swim in the Atlantic from a Mayo beach.
At the end of the mass we spent a couple of minutes in silence remembering the great joy which our old friend had brought us.