This week, the Bloomsbury family has been at a funeral. Given the age profile of our congregation, we actually have very few funerals. But there was one this week. And what made it harder was that it was for a boy of 3 days old. No funeral is easy, but a funeral for a child who has not yet lived has a particular pain.
But we did it. We read the scriptures, and heard the promises and offered the prayers.
And we cried, and we said that we were angry. And we tried to understand, and we tried to accept that we will not understand.
Any death brings us face to face with mystery - and the death of a child most particularly. What is it to be alive? What is it to die? How do we find meaning, and what point is there?
These are questions we can usually pass by, or avoid thinking about because there is so much else to do. But when we stand in a wet graveyard, facing an open grave, then they cannot be avoided.
And I find that I have no answers. I speak the promises and offer the comfort that they affirm. But they are promises, not answers. The questions stay. And it feels very appropriate to Advent; hearing - and holding on, if only barely - to the promises, without being able to see yet what they really mean.
Just as it is is easy to avoid the big questions, the unanswerable questions in being busy, being useful, being fulfilled, so it is easy to move straight to Christmas with its strange fulfilment of promise and its wonderful truth, and to overlook the waiting, yearning, wondering of Advent. I would like never to do again what I had to do yesterday. But if I have to do it, Advent is the right time.