Wednesday 14 March 2012

John and Mary - not their real names - were expecting a baby. A day before the due date Mary was concerned because she couldn't feel the baby moving. She thought that it might be because it close to delivery and getting ready for the final part of the baby's journey into the world. However, a visit to the hospital, an ultrasound and connection to a foetal heart monitor, told them that the fear that lay at the back of their minds was a reality. Their baby had died. For not apparent reason, just one day before they were due to meet their first born, he died. Mary had to go through the process of giving birth - a painful experience, but now without the promise of bringing home a bouncing baby son.


Matthew was born and, after a time with Mary and John, he was taken away. Certain tests were done to try to establish cause of death, but the parents were reluctant to add the trauma of a full post mortem examination to what had already happened to them and their son. So, Matthew was collected by a local Funeral Director and this was where I came in.


I was asked to conduct a service for Matthew and his parents and we arranged to meet. It was a good meeting as we discussed what form the service might take. We touched on some of the deeper theological issues and I suggested that the Psalms are full of the cries of people who are angry with God for allowing 'bad things to happen to innocent people', while the wicked appear to prosper. We looked at possible Bible readings and Mary and John liked the passage in Psalm 139 in which Psalmist speaks of God's knowledge of us and how he "created my inmost being," and, "knit me together in my mother's womb."


This wasn't the first such service I had conducted, but it had been a while since the last one. I still knew to expect to experience a visceral reaction when I saw John carry the tiny coffin in his arms. The service went OK. The family and friends were subdued, rather than audibly sobbing. What does one say about the life of a child who died a day before taking his first breath? This is what I said:


One of the particular sadnesses of this service is that at the time when we come to remember Matthew’s life we feel we have nothing to say.


Yet there are aspects of Matthew’s life that we can celebrate. We can celebrate the love of Mary and John that led to Matthew’s conception. While we are deeply saddened that we had Matthew for such a short time, we celebrate the joy experienced by Mary and John and their families and friends through their period of expectation.


Matthew was a person, yet a person that none of us have yet met. Matthew’s life was lived in the safety, security and warmth of his mother’s womb. His fate was not to know the joy of childhood, first love and parenthood, but nor did Matthew experience the suffering that is part of normal human life through all our years. Matthew’s life was different from ours, but no one life is identical to any other and God loves Matthew as he loves each of us. And he has loved us since before we were born and he will continue to love us long after we have left this earth, as this reading from the Psalms tells us.


I then read the passage from Psalm 139, most of which didn't seem as relevant. The passage from Mark 10 about Jesus welcoming children didn't help me much either - I felt that I was saying that "Jesus wanted another little flower in his garden".


Out we went to the grave - a considerably smaller area than full-size, but it seemed disproportionately deep. I led prayers and offered Matthew into God's hands. Rather than sprinkle dirt on to the coffin, the funeral director had some white rose petals which he offered to Mary and John and the other mourners. Things then took a slightly unexpected turn as John asked if he and some of the other male mourners could fill in the grave themselves. I'd only been involved with this once before - a funeral of a man born in the Caribbean - and then the women sang a funeral hymn while the men shovelled. This time it seemed different. There was silence apart from the sound of metal shovels dragging across the plywood on which the Council gravediggers had left the soil. But the sound of the shovels made little impact on the sound of straws being clutched.


As John finished moving the soil he muttered something like, "9 months and it comes to this". It was hard not to agree. For all the words about God's love and his knowledge and caring for the unborn, the truth was that none of us could really make sense of it. And I guess that this is what we - clergy and people - are not good at: accepting that things don't always make sense.