When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you gets fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence.
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.
Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.

There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.

It’s been quite a while since I offered a piece by modern poet Malcolm Guite. An academic and an Anglican priest, he is particularly interested in the relationship between religion and the arts. He often uses traditional forms such as the sonnet to frame his modern take on traditional subjects, such as the Christian calendar.

Here he writes for the feast of All Saints, though we can say that it touches the next day too, All Souls. It helps to read these pieces slowly and maybe a few times. Stay with a phrase that catches your attention, such as “quiet lives and steady lights undimmed”, “the ones we shunned and shamed” or “the gathered glories of His wounded love”.

Though Satan breaks our dark glass into shards Each shard still shines with Christ’s reflected light, It glances from the eyes, kindles the words
Of all his unknown saints. The dark is bright

With quiet lives and steady lights undimmed,
The witness of the ones we shunned and shamed. Plain in our sight and far beyond our seeing
He weaves them with us in the web of being.

They stand beside us even as we grieve,
The lone and left behind whom no one claimed, Unnumbered multitudes, he lifts above
The shadow of the gibbet and the grave,
To triumph where all saints are known and named; The gathered glories of His wounded love.

From “Sounding the Seasons” Canterbury Press

Fr Matthew

We can easily see how these three words and ideas are very closely connected. All of them come from the two Latin words unum and cum – one and with. The Church is a community of faith, and each parish is too. We might even say that the congregation at each Mass is a community, because as Christians we belong to one another. It’s been that way since Jesus called the Twelve, not to be “Lone Rangers” but to form a family, a gang if you like, linked together by bonds of faith, of practice and of the structure of the church around our bishops. So we can say that communion might be a better description than community, as those bonds are so deep and strong. And “communion” evokes the spiritual dimension, which for us reaches its height in our sharing of Holy Communion, the Body of Christ. Through this we share in the ultimate communion – the life of the Trinity.

For all this to work and function we need that third word – communication. To build community and develop communion we must be communicating! It is not surprising then, that in the ongoing Synod process, our parish responses, like so many others, stressed the importance of improving communication in the Church. On Tuesday our two Parish Councils and our Synod team met to discuss moving forward on issues that our Synod reports raised that could be done on a 3 Churches level. Communication in our 3 Churches was centre stage. Issues like our newsletter and website, parish registers, an expanded magazine, an updated 3 Churches Directory, and noticeboards outside and inside our churches – all of these were discussed. The communication of meeting agendas and minutes, information about groups and activities within our parishes, communication with our schools and College, extending the live-streaming – all of these and other issues too were discussed in an open and friendly way.

As a result a small group, a Comms Group if you like, consisting of the officers of our two parish councils, was set up to address and act on this whole agenda. The group is asked to report progress by the New Year. Similar progress was made on the subjects of training for those undertaking roles in parish life such as catechists and parish council members, and the search to improve our provision for children, families and especially young people. Watch this space!

Fr Matthew