I am going through boxes of papers, photographs, paintings, exercise books and notebooks sorting, throwing away and, inevitably, putting some things back into boxes. I usually travel with a notebook so that if I hear, see, or come across something that strikes a chord or moves me, I write it down.
In one such notebook, with only a few pages remaining, I had written part of the eulogy given by a father at the funeral of his son who had died in a car accident. The father was William Sloane Coffin, some time Chaplain at Yale University. I did not know him or his son, Alex. I cannot remember where I came across this. Alex died in 1983 at the age of twenty four.
’Nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn’t go around this world with his fingers on triggers, his fists around knives, his hands on steering wheels……Never do we know enough to say that a death was the will of God. My own consolation lies in knowing that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.’
I now put this alongside Bishop John Taylor’s saying to me, concerning walking the tightrope of faith and life, in response to my heartfelt questioning about the presence of God should I fall off the tightrope:
”Simon, God falls off with you.”
And, during the Good Friday Three Hours meditation at St Mary Abbots in the 1980’s, when the Venerable Timothy Raphael was giving the addresses, he finished each address with the words:
‘There is a cross buried deep in the heart of God.’