funeral for fay stranack

Faye Stranack, R.I.P.

All Saints, Denmead

Tuesday 23^rd September

12 noon

There is an understandable temptation – which has become quite a widespread tendency – that when the burial or cremation has already taken place, the actual funeral service becomes an occasion where lots and lots of nice things are said about the person concerned, and grief doesn’t get a look-in.  Sometimes, this can get a bit out of hand, like a very official London service I went to some time ago, which lasted an hour and a half, and consisted of six addresses, all of them very fine in themselves, but so full of praise, that I began to wonder what was going through the minds of those who might just occasionally have found the deceased a little difficult to live with!  I am not suggesting that this is true of Faye.  But she herself would be the last person to want that kind of show.  And that earthed self-effacement was very clear to me from the first time that I met her.

 It was shortly after we moved here, and she was undergoing treatment for the disease that has finally – a decade or so on – claimed her.  I remember going into her room as a new and rather nervous Bishop. All I did was to sit and be with her, and not say very much, until it was time to pray and then go.  The last time that I saw her was a few months ago at Trevor and Lyn’s wedding, when we sat at the same table, and she knew that she did not have long to live.  Little did I know when I first knew her that I would be struck by the same illness, and that gave us a fellow feeling. 

 From the moment that anyone is diagnosed with cancer, you learn to live not in one register but three.  There’s a kind of low level continuous fear that the disease will strike again.  Then there are the various hospital appointments with specialists and others, which impinge on the diary as and when the summons comes for tests, check-ups, prescriptions.  And then there is normality, getting on with a normal life as best one can, and that is affected by both the other registers, for the simple reason that one wakes up each morning thankful to be alive.  It puts a very different perspective on everything you do.  But it does fill life with a dimension of beauty and appreciation like never before.

 The other thing that it does is that it provides a perspective on the whole of one’s life. In all the time in hospital, there is a great deal of space to think, and to ponder and there are occasions when the whole of your life flashes across the memory radar screen, and that includes both the few small achievements, and the things that have gone wrong, the people who have been offended, the relationships that have not worked out.   With her quiet, business-like faith, Fay knew that she was a forgiven sinner, not a great paragon of perfection, and it was on that basis, and that basis alone, that she was able to live a thankful life, and not look back with regrets, but look forward in hope.  She would, I think, smile at the joke once made of a clergy funeral where the  sermon did nothing but praise the person who has died – It was described as
“one priest lying in the coffin, while another priest lies in the pulpit”!

 It is in our weaknesses that our greatest strengths can be borne.  That’s a very difficult lesson for anyone to learn, however developed or sophisticated we think our faith to be.  It’s not a truth that we learn once and for all, whether through a sobering experience in youth, or, for that matter, a serious illness later on.  It’s one of those truths that often keep hitting us, all the way through life, through sharing the experience of others as well because it is at the heart of the Christian gospel.  It is in our wounds that our true humanity is shown. There is no such thing as a “normal” achieving human being - we are all disabled, and all chronically weak.

 This is a far cry from a kind of spiritual sado-masochism.  The Christian faith is not about enjoying suffering, but about putting it to good use.  I remember Cicely Saunders telling us at theological college that “we waste suffering so much”.  As we commend to God a human being whom we all dearly loved, who was as full of weaknesses and foibles and nonsense as the rest of us,  we do so in the faith of Jesus Christ, who took the whole of our human nature upon him, and both blessed, healed and strengthened it forever.

 + Kenneth