Twin Tracks
The Bard was sitting by the side of the road when a traveller came along. The traveller stopped and said, ‘I’m on my way to the big city. Tell me what the people are like there.’
The Bard replied, ‘You tell me first where you’re from and what the people are like there, and I’ll tell you what they are like in the city.’
Quick as a flash the traveller responded, ‘I come from the tiny town of Eire Og and they are all cheats and liars.’
The Bard sighed sadly and said, ‘Alas, those are exactly the same sort of people you’ll find in the big city.’
Not long after a second traveller came along the road. He also said to the Bard, ‘I’m on my way to the big city. Tell me what the people are like there.’
The Bard replied, ‘You tell me first where you’re from and what the people are like there, and I’ll tell you what they are like in the city.’
The second journeyman responded, ‘I come from the tiny town of Eire Og and they are all honest and honourable people.’
The Bard beamed a wonderful smile and replied, ‘Good news, my friend, those are exactly the same sort of people you’ll find in the big city.’
The Leap of Faith
The Mother Superior was very sad. Her convent was in a bad way and was literally falling apart. There was barely enough money to feed her community let alone for any repairs. All year her fellow nuns had been saying to her, ‘We’ll have to leave.’ The Mother Superior always replied, ‘Have no fear. God will provide.’ But as the winter dawned and with the rain coming through the holes in the roof and the wind howling through many of the many gaps in the walls she had a change of heart. It seemed cruel to her to put her older nuns in particular through such hardship.
That night she had a strange dream. She had a vision of walking to the big city and finding a large chest of treasure in the garden with the giant tree. Each night for the next week she had the same dream.
The Mother Superior was not the sort of woman to believe in foolish dreams but in her desperation she decided she would walk to the big city to search for the treasure. The long journey took three days. She spent the nights in lonely stables. If a stable was good enough for the baby Jesus, it was certainly good enough for her.
Finally she reached her destination. Somebody pointed her in the direction of the big tree. Even from a distance she could see that it was exactly like in her dream. A tremor of excitement raced through her body. Maybe her dream would come true after all.
Her joy vanished as she got near the tree. There was no garden, just a big concrete square. She sat on the bench feeling very foolish. Her disappointment became too much and she started to cry. A tall man sat down beside her. He spoke very softly and he was a great listener, so to her surprise the Mother Superior heard herself telling the story. The man said, ‘That’s very strange. Last night I had a dream that I would discover treasure beside a wishing well.’ The nice man insisted on taking the nun into a local inn for a meal. Shortly afterwards, feeling a little more refreshed, she began the long walk home.
Snow was falling lightly when she returned cold and wet to the convent late on in the morning.
She went straight out into the back garden. It couldn’t possibly be, she thought to herself as she looked at the old wishing well in the corner.
To the amazement of the other nuns, she started digging beside the well. Three hours later, as darkness fell, she had found nothing. The only spot left was under the statue of the baby Jesus. It broke her heart to have to break the statue, but she felt she had no other choice. Ten minutes later she shrieked for joy as she opened a huge treasure chest full of gold coins.
That night, as she read her Bible, the Mother Superior smiled to herself as she read, ‘God so loved the world that he sent his only son.’
Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend
Grace could think of nothing only heaven. It was more real to her than America, Scotland and even London. Strangely she had, or thought she had, a very clear notion of Australia. She laboured under the illusion that she had been there two years earlier, having driven there on what seemed an interminably long journey from her family home outside Roscommon. In actual fact, she had only been as far as Sligo.
Her thoughts on heaven were prompted by her unfamiliar setting. She was in her neighbours’, the Atkinsons’, house. The cherubic Patricia, the oldest of the family, was trying to cheer her up by reading stories and letting her play with all the toys they owned. Two days earlier, Grace’s life had been thrown into chaos when she learned that her 35-year-old father, Iarlaith O’Kelly, and her 27-year-old mother, Aoife, had had their lives stolen from them.
Some places and days are unforgettable. Although Grace was only eight years old at the time, 27 October 1984 would be forever engraved in her mind. The day began brightly. It was Saturday. She was happy because there was no school. Her parents were taking her infant brother, Bryan, into town to buy some clothes. Grace was attending a birthday party for her schoolfriend, Simone Atkinson, when she heard a horrible sound. It was like nothing she had ever heard before: primeval and demoniac, part scream, part sob, part gurgled cry. It chilled her to the bone. The only thing that was clearly evident was unimaginable pain. The whole nightmarish thirty seconds would stay frozen like a freeze-frame in her mind. It would come back to haunt her in subsequent years with monotonous regularity.
The howl came from a tear-stained neighbour, Martha Atkinson, her mother’s best friend. It was left to her husband, Paul, to tell Grace in a clear, matter-of-fact voice: ‘Your Mammy and Daddy are dead and your little brother, Bryan, is in hospital. Their car was smashed to pieces by a drunk driver.’
Grace did not cry. She always felt guilty about that afterwards. She could say nothing as if she had been afflicted by dumbness. It was her first introduction to death. She could not grasp the fact that all the most important people in her life could cease to exist without warning and that she would never lay eyes on them again except in a coffin.
The rest of the day is blurred like a badly faded photocopy. Grace was dispatched to cousins for the day while arrangements were made to contact all her relatives. Memories of her father flooded her brain. He was slim, soft-spoken, with thinning blond hair. He stood six-foot-three in his bare feet and seemed to be able to lift anything. He possessed a decency and warmth that overshadowed his great physical powers.
In the springtime, she walked with him as he moved the horse to another part of the farm. The horse needed the minimum of direction as if on automatic pilot. His hooves smoothly and tenderly penetrated the skin of earth, throwing the sod sweetly to the right and then crashing onto a big stone. The horse made his own music with his panted breathing and occasional snorting. It was rough ground and very hard on Grace’s little legs. It was with great relief she saw that their destination was reached. She was so tired that her father had to carry her home, though that was nothing for his big hands.
She remembered the day her daddy sent for the vet to have a look at the horse when he was limping. The vet was a giant of a man who almost dwarfed her father, who she had always thought was the tallest man in Ireland. She suspected that the vet would easily be capable of blocking out all light from a distance of fifty yards. He had hefty shoulders and an enormous bulk around the midriff that must have seen him clock up twenty stone on the weighing scales. It was said that he was ‘fond of sup’, which was code speak for the fact that he was a heavy drinker. He dispatched pints, small ones, large ones and brandies with seemingly reckless abandon. Invariably he wore a grey suit which must have been at least two sizes too small for him. On the surface he was a gregarious man and very likeable, but the more she got to know him Grace sensed he was either desperately unhappy or intensely lonely, if not both. He skilfully diagnosed the horse’s problem within moments. The weather was unsettled and Grace and her father returned home teeming wet and miserable without having made much inroads into their work. She supposed her father must have found her company of sorts because he could not but be tired of her constant barrage of questions. If so he disguised it skilfully.
Another clear memory of her father was the day of the big snow. It was during the lambing season when she went out with her father to look after the sheep. The chill of the late afternoon made Grace shiver as she pulled her heavy coat around her. The winter that year had been cold and stormy. The gales began in late November, seeming to follow each other, with brief interludes, until the end of the following April.
‘You can tell what a winter will be like by the weather on the first of November,’ her father had always said. Grace would put that theory to the test every year after he died. As a rule of thumb it was pretty good. There was a lull that day in the winter-long storm. The sky was blue, but there were battalions of black clouds on the horizon westward which were irrefutable evidence that snow was on its way. The low sun seemed to shiver in the raging northern wind. It was an admission of defeat. Normally, on a winter afternoon with darkness due and snow clouds threatening, Grace would have not been allowed out. This was no day to leave lambing ewes to the elements.
‘God, it’s cold. That cold could kill any baby lamb. Nature is cruel,’ said her father uncomfortably, as if his teeth were chattering in the icy air. The wind-chill factor must have been in operation. There were a dozen ruins scattered here and there around the fields. The sheep sheltered behind those walls in bad weather, as it often was at that time of the year. If young lambs survive in the cold, it is the old wisdom of their mothers that preserves them by finding a snug place for them to shelter.
They searched long and hard before they found the final ewe. She was hiding under a furze bush. Thankfully Grace’s father had the foresight to bring a flashlamp with him. By then the snow clouds had come in from the west and before they knew it they were enveloped in a blizzard. Grace wanted to take shelter like the flock, behind some wall. Her father answered her plea with a hard look, and silence. He would not allow them to be exiled by the snow and took her up in his arms as if she was a precious jewel and ploughed an uneven furrow through the already-ankle-deep snow. Grace had never known such cold. Although the north wind nearly cut him in two, her father was happy to feel it. It meant the snow clouds would be kept on the move. The warm house awaited them like a sanctuary. Thankfully the snow had stopped. The air was quiet again, though another battalion of blue-black clouds were looming ominously on the western horizon. There would be more snow within the hour. The outside light looked more festive and welcoming than a tinsel-coloured Christmas tree in a window.
As they stumbled in the door she saw her mother putting on her wellingtons to head out to find them. She whisked Grace out of her father’s arms and deposited her in front of the range where she began to rub her daughter vigorously to get her circulation going again. The relief on her face and in her voice that they were both safe was palpable. There was a mountain of snowflakes on their clothes and wellingtons. A pool of water formed on the floor as the moisture condensed.
Grace heard herself saying, ‘I love you, Daddy.’ He was surprised but pleased. Grace was not sure which of the three were the happiest. There was the special atmosphere normally only achieved on Christmas night. Looking back, Grace was glad that none of them knew then how few happy family gatherings lay in store for them.
Another day Grace’s mother slipped a bar of Cadbury’s plain chocolate into the bag. It was an exceptionally hot day and the sun beat down mercilessly. A slight wind made it ideal drying weather. Grace could not resist the temptation to have a square while she watched her father working. The one square quickly became two and before she knew it she had it all eaten. When her daddy came along, he knew by her guilty face that she had been up to mischief again. Then his eye caught the empty chocolate paper: ‘You scoffed it all and left none for me.’
He said the words slowly and softly. They were little more than a whisper, a comment rather than a complaint or condemnation. Grace had never felt such a despicable pig. The memory of that incident would come back to haunt her many times during the weekend he died and for years afterwards.
The innocence of small children cast a magical spell over Grace’s father. He had wanted a large family. When pressed further he said he wanted his own football team. Nevertheless, neither he nor his wife had planned to have a child so early in their marriage. As staunch Catholics they were to find that the natural methods of family planning as demanded by the Pope left a lot to be desired in terms of reliability if not in theology. Grace, born eleven months after her parents’ marriage, was a child of Vatican roulette.
Although he was a humourist who laughed at life, Iarlaith was a very spiritual person who was always conscious, or so it seemed, of another dimension. His wife was never sure if his macabre sense of humour was tongue-in-cheek or genuine. He had a fund of unusual sayings:
‘Conversation at meals, like television on a honeymoon, is not necessary.’
‘A big house is like a fat man, hard to get around.’
‘Misfortune is the kind of fortune that never misses.’
‘The truth is a mixture of desirability and appearance.’
‘A camel is a horse designed by a committee.’
Aoife never knew where he got them from or when he would pepper his conversations with them. What she was sure of was that he was a disaster when it came to money. Despite working incredible hours, he was incurring major losses in his small hardware business. Food was put on the table every day because of the work she herself did on the family farm.
Mothering is a complex business. The problems are exacerbated when the one person has to be in many respects both mother and father. It was like landing on an alien planet to begin again a new life, with a new language and culture; experiencing deprivations; struggling to survive materially, spiritually and emotionally. The deprivations of Aoife’s life were also agricultural. There was a tremendous and largely hidden toll to working out in the fields, in all kinds of weather, with little machinery, from dawn to dusk. To be strong and capable was inadequate. She had to be resourceful if the family were to have any kind of future. The practical needs of collective survival dictated that Aoife could not wallow in a dull fog of self-pity. Grace saw her in three roles.
There was the provider, often so immersed in the daily farm work and the business of putting bread on the table that Grace hardly saw her for the whole day.
There was the mother, putting on a show for her in public and sparing her husband and daughter her private torment, anxious to give the right impression, deflecting attention from the enormity of the family’s financial problems to the trivial, using humour to avoid the pain, hiding her feelings even from herself. She continually saved the day with her warmth and optimism, displaying that maternal ability to avoid total despair by smoothing things over, not making a fuss, keeping the peace, preserving the family unit at great personal cost to herself.
And, thirdly, there was the woman: the moments when the mask slipped, and the heartache and struggle became too much.
Aoife was always up an hour before the rest of the family. There she was a full-time farmer, trotting off to work in the fields, occasionally staying up half the night with a sick calf or lamb, doing the washing, matching socks, remembering birthdays, checking homework, peeling potatoes, cleaning shoes, telling bedtime stories and finding the cough medicine in the middle of the night. Some women had it all, but she had to do it all. Then there were the million questions she was bombarded with by Grace:
‘Who made God?’
‘Where’s my teddy?’
‘Can we buy ice cream on Sunday?’
‘Is London bigger than Ireland?’
‘How can a man talk inside the radio?’
‘How do you spell fantastic?’
‘What’s the difference between a goose and a gander?’
As she grew older Grace suspected that her mother must fantasise about a second home, a tiny cottage by the sea, or even a treehouse, where there was room just for her, furnished with a rocking chair, a few books and a radio, no other voices, no other clutter, but space for relaxing and thinking. She must have pined for a little time in the day that was really hers: a little escape which would refresh and rejuvenate her.
The first thing her mother asked Grace one morning was:
‘Did you sleep well?’
‘Okay.’
She sensed Grace’s low spirits immediately.
‘Cheer up, Grace. It’s not long until Christmas. Do you know what we will do tonight? You can write to Santa Claus and I will post it tomorrow.’
Grace’s spirits revived immediately. That was her mother’s great gift. She always seemed to know exactly what to say and when to say it. She always seemed to hit the right note. You could not ask more from a mother than that.
There were so many things for her mother to do that the only quality time she had with Grace was when she put her to bed. She watched her daughter kneel down and say her prayers. Afterwards, she would lay her down in the one bed and tell her a story. Aoife had inherited the art of storytelling from her father. Great storyteller that she was, she could switch at once from gravity to gaiety. Her changes in mood were like the changes of running water. Born into a miners’ family in a remote valley in Wales, she grew up in a culture pre-eminently oral and aural. She was sensitive to language at its rhetorical best, harnessing its layers of potentialities. She had a magical way of making the stories come alive.
Grace learned more about the difference between right and wrong from listening to her mother’s stories than she ever learned at school. They were decisive for her understanding of a wide variety of concepts from honesty and justice to beauty and God. Her stories were the highlight of Grace’s day, more because she had her mother’s undivided attention than anything else. They always engaged her totally, because her mother could read reality in a special way and enhance it; by eliciting signs of richness and satisfaction in the mundane events of life.
Grace always suspected that her mother enjoyed the stories as much as she did. All her worries were put away on the shelf. She would always try to enter the spirit of the narrative, by varying the pitch and speed of her voice to suit the mood, by gesture and by dramatic pauses. The stories were born in the womb of creative love. Baby Bryan became an unwitting prop for the account of Sleeping Beauty. He had fallen asleep and her mother rounded off the story by kissing him tenderly on the cheek. This little gesture connected all with the story.
Aoife O’Kelly would have been a brilliant teacher. Although she generally told the standard children’s stories like Little Red Riding Hood and the Five Pigs there were times when she was more ambitious and went for stories with a little moral. Grace’s favourite was the one about the warrior who was wounded by a poisoned arrow. Instead of pulling it from his side without delay, he spent his time wondering who shot it at him, what sort of feathers were on the flights, and what type of wood the arrow had been made from. While he wasted all his precious time wondering about these trivial questions the poison was spreading through his body. After telling the story her mother asked Grace a number of questions, skilfully encouraging her to unravel the moral of the story.
Such was the power of her narratives that they touched Grace on the sensual level. She was enchanted by the scent of the pine air in the mountain freshness of the breeze. Her brows almost salted with sweat under the glare of the afternoon sun. She savoured the tranquillity of unspoilt places. She feasted her eyes imaginatively on the plunging shadows where rock faces glistened with springs, the skylight on the hazy blue ocean lovingly caressing the leaf-dappled shoreline and the archipelagos of light in the radiant night sky. The mood was often celebratory, though at times a gesture of defiance, a defence mechanism when the pressures of a life of poverty, material and emotional, threatened to become overwhelming. Her mother mixed a glowing passion for life with her tender evocation of the problems of the world such as war.
There were only ten or twelve stories in her repertoire, but Grace never got weary of listening to them over and over again until she knew them all off by heart in every detail. Each time she added a new piece of background information, Grace would repeat it continually in her mind, until it was as much her story as her mother’s.
Grace was always fascinated by her mother’s hands. They were working implements, unused to revelling in fancy, sweet-smelling creams; coarse, calloused and crinkled, with badly clipped nails that rarely sensed the glamour-touch of expensive varnish. Normally their only decoration was a layer of dirt or clay. Yet Grace always thought of them as innately beautiful. They were so gentle when necessary, removing splinters when she tried unsuccessfully at five years of age to launch a career for herself as a carpenter, bathing cuts when she hurt herself playing, creatively weaving pretty pictures on her schoolbooks. They were clumsy with a needle and thread, much happier milking a cow or mending fences. Grace admired their strength and seldom felt their anger. Most of the times Aoife was angry had to do with money. At least the swirling tide of history had liberated her from that nightmare.
On the third day, they were buried. The weather was unseasonably cold, more like the middle of January than late October. The penetrating cold offered an unpleasant contrast with the seasonal yellowness, retiring with russet stealth in autumn. The frozen clay seemed to resent the willing shovels. Tradition in the locality dictated that the nearest neighbours on the prompting of the bereaved dig the grave and later fill the clay over the coffin with a sense of privilege and decorum. Grace’s parents were laid to rest in an austere ceremony punctuated by the clods of earth shovelled on to the grave by the men present. There was a finality about the proceeding that indicated an instinctive acceptance of death that rose from the filled grave and the tap-tap-tap as the back of the spade shaped the remaining mound of fresh clay.
The funeral was a very moving occasion. Grace’s grief, though intensely personal, was generously shared. The local community, as always, responded magnificently in times of adversity. Everyone rallied around. Every seat in the house was crammed with relatives and neighbours, all with mournful faces. Many were weeping. They had good reason to. All the children from Grace’s school attended and made a guard of honour outside the church.
The priest, Fr. Gearoid, had found it difficult to preach the funeral homily. Saying ‘the few words’ seemed so inadequate. He scoured his own personal store of stories to find a new way of saying old things. Crucifixion and resurrection do not find ready echoes in the life of an eight-year-old schoolgirl. It was difficult to achieve the correct balance between eulogy and explication, the pitfall mawkishly sentimental or playing safe with a bland reference to a piece from the Bible. The priest freely admitted that he had no answers to the questions that must have been racing through the congregation’s minds. Although it seemed that she was only half-hearing his sermon through a dull fog of self-pity Grace remembered his words because he spoke with extraordinary beauty and lyricism.
‘Only a God who had been crucified though totally innocent of all that he was accused of, and who suffered death as a true man, could understand what the O’Kelly family went through. Like Jesus himself, Grace has been stripped of everything that gives life meaning. Iarlaith and Aoife have carried their own cross, had their own Good Friday experience, now they are ready for their Easter Sunday. They have walked with Jesus to Calvary and beyond. In their battered bodies, God’s grace has shone like a diamond. For all the darkness of their last few moments on earth they have been children of God’s delight and light. We are not here this morning to be sad. Rather we are here to make an act of faith in Iarlaith and Aoife’s life, what they lived and died for. But our essential purpose is to make an act of faith in their resurrection.’
It started to rain heavily as both corpses were taken out of the church. Nature seemed to be grieving for two of its own. As the final shovelfuls of clay were thrown on the grave, the rain stopped suddenly. The sun came out of hiding like a scene from an autumnal-hued photograph. The symbol surely was the reality. Grace’s parents had risen with the Son.
Only A Winter’s Tale
Simon was a small, slight man. In many ways he was a child who had never grown up. He had three daughters: Maxi, Dick and Twink. He loved a good yarn but was never unduly bothered about trifles like veracity. At heart, though, he was a good man. That was why he gave his niece, Sr. Rita, a parrot for her birthday.
If Sr. Rita had been given her choice that was not the gift she would have chosen, because a convent was not the ideal home for a bird who talked. Her initial instinct was quickly proved to be correct. The bane of her life was the Reverend Mother, who seemed to go out of her way to make Sr. Rita’s life a misery. After one particularly humiliating chastisement in front of the entire community, when she got back to the sanctuary of her room, she shouted out in sheer frustration, ‘I hope Reverend Mother dies.’
She burst into tears because she had never felt so low. Her only consolation was that things could not possibly get any worse.
She was wrong.
From his new home in the corner of his room her parrot exclaimed, ‘I hope Reverend Mother dies. I hope Reverend Mother dies.’
For the next week Sr. Rita’s nerves were fraught with tension because the parrot would not stop repeating that sentence.
Eventually she could take no more and she went to the only person she could think of to help her, Fr. Tom, the local parish priest. He nodded with an expression that exuded kindness and sympathy as he listened to her predicament. At first he frowned because of his bemusement at the situation. Then he smiled in triumph at the end of her story as he announced without preamble, ‘I have the perfect solution. I will take your parrot off you and put him alongside my parrot who is incredibly pious and that will put an end to your problems.’
The next day, Sr. Rita, surging to her feet with a grin of happy anticipation, moved her parrot into the parochial house and the two parrots struck up an immediate rapport and they all lived happily ever after.
Well, they did until the next Christmas morning.
As was her tradition, the Reverend Mother called over to Fr. Tom to give him his Christmas present, a large bottle of Irish whiskey, after morning Mass.
As soon as she went into the living room, Sr. Rita’s parrot said, ‘I hope Reverend Mother dies. I hope Reverend Mother dies.’
Fr. Tom froze.
There was a pregnant pause.
Then the other parrot piped up, ‘Lord, graciously hear us.’
Thank You for the Music
Now thank we all our God
With hearts and hands and voices.
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom this world rejoices;
Who from our mothers’ arms
Hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love
And still is ours today.
These are the opening words of a well-known hymn. It was written in 1636 by Martin Rinkart (1586–1649), who was a German Lutheran clergyman, during the Thirty Years War, which claimed eight million fatalities. Eilenburg, his hometown, was invaded and occupied by different armies. The local people sheltered war refugees. The town was ravaged by disease and it lost most of its young male population through violence and a severe plague.
Martin Rinkart presided over fifty funerals a day. He buried over four thousand people, including his wife. When harsh taxes were imposed, he was able to persuade the occupiers to reduce them. In the midst of all this bedlam, he composed this hymn of thanksgiving to God.
Martin Rinkart doesn’t promise that we will be without troubles. He encourages thankfulness, faith and courage in the face of adversity.
At the end of the Thirty Years War, when the peace treaty in Westphalia was signed, this hymn was sung.
NUN DANKET ALLE GOTT
NOW THANK WE ALL OUR GOD
The Wound that Never Heals
Grief is the price we pay for love.
The greater the love – the worse the pain.
In the face of intense despair, Gerard Manley Hopkins described in Dark Sonnets his sense of ‘Pitched past pitch of grief’. Many people share Hopkins’ deep despair when they get news of a bereavement.
In the immense panorama of futility that follows a serious act of tragedy the O’Kelly family, united in grief, struggled to comprehend the incomprehensible. With an inarticulacy born out of shock, sorrow and incomprehension what William Butler Yeats described as ‘a pity beyond all telling’, things which normally connected for a time no longer did. In the dark days that followed, nothing connected with nothing. A vein of grief ran through their lives. This catastrophe was their stations of the cross. They wondered why God could allow the premature sacrifice of such wealth. Life is full of riddles that only the dead can answer.
The life of the dead is placed in the memories of the living. The love we feel in life keeps people alive beyond their time. Anyone who has given love will always live on in another’s heart. All the extended family are the curators of the loved one’s memory.
One of the phrases I learned in school was: sunt lacrimae rerum. There are tears in the nature of things. The month of November is the month the Church remembers all of those we have lost. It is indeed right and fitting that it should do, as in the days, weeks and months of darkness after a bereavement the wounds are often difficult to heal. It is painful for our shroud of suffering to be replaced by the translucent beauty of the Lord who rose from the tomb on Easter Sunday. We live through what Emily Dickinson refers to as ‘The Hour of Lead’ – a process of mourning that results in a final relinquishing, and an essential thaw.
The message of the Christian story leads us to accept disappointment and loss, but we never lose hope. Storms make the oak grow deeper roots. The Rule of Saint Benedict, the ancient guide to the monastic life, includes the exhortation to ‘keep death before one’s eyes daily’. To some that may sound morbid, but to Christians in times of tragedy it is a reminder that we come into this world without fear and that our passing allows us to return without fear as well, crossing over knowing that union with God is our first and final home.
In November, the Church recognises that people are all the work of His hand, and that He is shaping us each day like the potter shapes the clay. This is so that we can begin to see that we are the work of the one who is the Life Giver and the Light Giver and begin to feel a new sense of our worth and value in life and death. Our loving God is the potter who will shape us to His image.
Only those who believe in the invisible can do the impossible. By the standards of the world, Jesus was at his most useless on the cross, but it was there that He achieved his greatest glory. The Christian experience is shaped by a particular death, the death of Jesus; His living and dying and rising are the energies that shape our identity. In our suffering we will discover that darkness is the shadow of God’s outstretched hand and that a loving God has lowered an arm for us to rest on.
Speaking in Death
One young woman who knows all about suffering is Emma Spence. She shared her story with me:
He was all that we want our sporting heroes to be. Nevin Spence was a talented centre with the Ulster rugby team. At just twenty-two years of age he was on the cusp of making the Irish team. The rugby world was his oyster. But, on 15 September 2012, tragedy struck and he lost his life.
In the worst farming accident in over twenty years in Ulster, Nevin was taken from the family he adored in an attempt to rescue a beloved dog after it had fallen into a slurry tank on the family farm in Hillsborough, County Down. His father Noel (aged fifty-eight), and his brother Graham (thirty), also died while trying to rescue each other from a slurry tank. Such were the bonds of family love that Nevin’s sister Emma also courageously put her life on the line in an effort to rescue her father and brothers before being overcome by the poisonous fumes and waking up in the recovery position.
Members of the Ulster rugby team carried Nevin’s coffin into and out of the church. The then Irish rugby coach, Declan Kidney, and Tyrone Gaelic football manager, Mickey Harte, were among other well-known sporting faces amid more than two thousand people who attended the men’s funerals.
Emma pays an emotional tribute to the three men. ‘Dad was the one you probably saw taking up half the Drumlough Road with the tractor. He is the one that greeted you with a thump on the arm. He is the one who christened you with a new nickname no matter who you were. To me he was the one sitting at the kitchen table with his coffee made in only Mum’s best china cup listening to my every worry and telling me the truth whether I wanted to hear it or not,’ she remembers with a tremor in her voice.
Graham was ‘driven by the thought of improving farming’ and was ‘unashamedly Nevin’s biggest fan. He was a gentle giant who doted on his two children. He is the one who came alive when he talked about farming. To me, he is the one who protected me as I grew up. To me, he is looking at me when I look at Nathan and I look at Georgia.’
She sums all three up: ‘They were hard-working men. They were not perfect but they were genuine. They were best friends. They were godly men – they didn’t talk about God, they just did God. They were just ordinary – but God made them extraordinary.’
Many tributes were paid to Nevin after he died. The Ulster physio remarked, ‘I have no son but if I did I would want him to be like Nevin and have his values.’
The impression of meeting Emma and her sister Laura is of a shaft of light illuminating the darkness of a family tragedy – two noble natures standing up for people they serve and love. Preserving that cherished image remains important for those who see it at first hand. Their testimonies of faith strike not so much a note of hope as a symphony.
The memory of magical childhood moments with her father and brothers lingers for life in Emma’s mind and those who grew up with her, leaving a warm afterglow to light up numerous conversations years later. She remains fiercely proud of her brother’s achievements on and off the rugby field. ‘He was humble. Often I was congratulated on Nevin’s achievement and, to hide my confusion, I accepted the praise for him, then headed home to ask at the dinner table, “So, Nev, I didn’t get the paper today, what have you done?” The answer would be: “Nothing, I don’t know,” only to find he had been selected to train in the Ireland camp, or won young player of the year! Nevin didn’t see these things as important; instead, he reflected what Mother Teresa said, “Be faithful in small things because it is in them your strength lies.”’
Nevin will always live on in Emma’s heart. She says, ‘As my mum put it when he was alive and repeats it even more in the past six years, “Nevin was special.” Maybe what was even more special was if you had the chance to encounter him in your life.’
Whoever said time heals all wounds has not met the Spence family. ‘My dad and Graham worked the farm and were passionate about it, and while Nevin may have been a full-time rugby player, he loved the farming just as much,’ Emma says. ‘At night-time here he milked the cows and the joke was that his best workouts would be standing out in the yard.’
Emma started to see the farm anew, looking at it from the point of view of her dad and brothers. An artist by profession, Emma has literally drawn on her family’s farm for inspiration for her paintings. ‘To most people, looking at something like hedges, they would see only weeds, but I was stopping to look at them and recognising the beauty in them, which is why I wanted to paint them,’ she laughs. But there were, and still are, plenty of down times as well. ‘I remember the first spring after the accident,’ Emma recalls. ‘It had always been a happy time, seeing the cows going out into the fields after the winter. But that first spring tore me apart because Dad, Graham and Nevin weren’t there.
‘Now, with the passage of time, I think of the joy that the boys got from something like that. It still hurts, but I am trying to accept that this is life. I’m not saying I have it all sorted out now, because I think we are all still in the grieving process with the enormity of all that has happened. But I suppose we have no other choice but to try and cope with it and live with it.’
Years on Emma’s sadness at what she has lost is balanced to some extent by her gratitude for what she had. ‘Nevin’s masseur used a verse from the Bible to sum him up. Colossians 3:23 says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord not for human masters.” Nevin’s commitment to his faith reflected in his life. This was the core of Nevin’s life, which mirrored the person he was. He has left a lasting impression on those who knew him. I have heard it said Nevin along with his brother and father have spoken more in death than in life.’