Who will you remember this All Souls Day or Remembrance Sunday and how will you remember them? Will you recall the life of a Saint and their extraordinary life of faith lived out as an ordinary mortal on All Saints’ Day?
The season of remembrance helps us to remember kindly those who have gone before. Like with all our great festivals, we are discovering that not all celebrations are happy for everybody. Recollections of those who have passed might recall difficult relationships – which might have ended with guilty relief as well as grief.
Most often these times allow us to call to mind people we have lost yet be aware of their continuing presence with us as they rest in the arms of God. If we have a strong connection to God ourselves then this sense of being together in the shared presence of one much greater is all the more real. Christians call this shared presence the Communion of Saints.
Recollection and remembrance of those who have died is often, even in this age of online presence, coloured by discovering things about someone after their death that we wish we had known beforehand. Sometimes, there is regret that we couldn’t adjust our views or behaviour in the light of that new knowledge, which has shed light on a personality or even a people for us. At other times, there is joy in the discovery and a story to tell which has fed our soul and which we wish to share in the hope that it will feed others and not chide or chill any.
This Remembrance season has seen the passing of a devoted, much loved and long-serving parish priest in Lichfield Diocese, Prebendary John Pawson. He retired in 2003 but died on 21 October this year. This has prompted the recollection of things that might otherwise have died with him.
Fr John was a member of what was once known as Forward in Faith, who do not hold that the ordination of women as priests, far less bishops, is possible. Yet he is remembered by our Dean, Bishop Jan McFarlane, as her sponsor for ordination when he was priest in charge of St Francis, Meir Heath, the church known as the ‘Children’s Church’ in Lichfield Diocese and the church supported her throughout her training.
The Dean recalls: “He described me as a thorn in his side, but always with a twinkle in his eye.”
How were his actions possible? How even to justify them? Especially to any who might suggest that there was a betrayal of their understanding of Christian faith.
The Dean’s recollections explain further: “We disagreed on most things, other than our love of God.”
Adding, “It was that shared love of God which meant that Fr John recognised in me a calling to some sort of full-time ministry.”
Fr John’s death is clearly felt by the Dean as the loss of a friend and an elder in the faith. “We got on famously well together and he was a huge influence on my understanding of priesthood.”
Fr John remained supportive. When he knew that she, a bishop, had been appointed to a Canon’s post in Lichfield, he gave her his prebendal scarf. “It sits here in my study,” says the Dean who will be among the mourners at his funeral.
Looking in from the outside at this telling of a simple anecdote, there was something that human experience has encountered over and over and described as ‘the exception that proves the rule.’
There is nothing that is going to alter the perception that at first sight, here were two people whose beliefs “Women can’t be priests,” and “God is calling me, a woman to ordained ministry,” were irreconcilable.
What they both seem to have found is the courage and grace to surmount that obstacle and submit the irreconcilable to the light of the reconciler of all things, Jesus Christ.
The Dean might have run to another church, another community which accepted her more readily, but she stood by her roots and allegiances. Fr John might have, faced with the irrepressible call to ministry voiced by the young Jan, dismissed, discouraged or ignored this ‘thorn in his side’. The church would be the poorer for that, losing not just the gifts of the Dean’s ministry but also this story that is now being shared.
The great legacy in this tale is perhaps its embodiment of ‘good disagreement’. Here is a generous and spirited living of the ‘two integrities’ to which our church has bound itself in this age and an example of what we might forego when instead of generosity we grudgingly accept this as a shackle and not an opportunity for love.
Bearing this tale in mind, may we all rise above the things that might make remembrance hard for us this month and recognise that the polarity which communities have been drawn to in recent years is not the only way to navigate our differences.
Arun Kataria
Director of Communications for Lichfield Diocese