I was very close to my maternal grandmother.
From ever since I can remember, I had great fun with her and loved spending
time with her. In the winter months, we would sit in front of the fire and talk
for hours, and in the summer we would sit outside on the veranda looking out
onto her lovely garden and the fields beyond drinking tea and putting the world
to rights. Sometimes we would go shopping (an absolute favourite pastime of
hers, especially if it involved the purchase of a new hat!) and other times we
would walk down to the church and she would have a tune on the organ (and so
would I, though not very well!). It was very difficult when, towards the end of
her life, she became ill with dementia and gradually became less and less
herself. The last week when she was in hospital was particularly difficult,
seeing her suffer and not knowing how much she was aware of. She was 87 when
she died and, although I was so thankful for her long life and relieved that
she would no longer suffer, I was devastated by her loss.
Her funeral was held on the following Wednesday.
The April day dawned calm and clear and we got ready to go. I put on the
largest and most flamboyant hat I had, knowing that Grandma would have loved
that I was wearing it. When we got to the church, the coffin was already there,
having been in the church overnight. I took my place in the pew, and waited for
the start of the service. My mother, who was playing the organ, struck up with
the notes of the first hymn after which the priest gave the welcome. I had gone
with plenty of tissues in my bag and was expecting to use them quite copiously.
What happened, then, came as a surprise. Not long into the service, I felt an
overwhelming sense of peace, of joy, even. At that moment, and for the rest of
the service, I felt no sadness, rather a deep sense of joy for Grandma’s life
and the way in which she had touched so many others’ lives, including my own. To
feel such joy at this time was an unexpected and extraordinary experience, and
one that I shall never forget. It was extraordinary in the way that I seemed to
be lifted out of the experience I was currently in, that of grief, into
something quite the opposite.
It was recently when I was reading Paula
Gooder’s book “Everyday God” that a passage in her book, in the chapter
entitled “Glimpsing Glory”, made me think about the experience I had had on the
day of my Grandmother’s funeral. Paula defines glimpses of glory as “those
moments when, even for a moment, the veil is pulled aside and we gain a vision,
however small, of who God really is and how he views the world.” She goes on to
say:
The point of all these experiences is that they
are, to a greater and lesser extent, glimpses…After them, we are sent
onwards…and back to our everyday lives…We are to be ready to recognise the
glimpse for what it is and when we see it, to drink it in with all that we
have, to savour it and then to go on living our normal lives; lives that now
will be both the same as ever and transformed utterly by what we have seen and
experienced.
These words spoke to me very much about what had
happened on the day of my Grandmother’s funeral; after this experience, I went
on with the grieving process and one might say my normal life, but I have never
forgotten what I experienced in the church that day.
We may have an experience which is extraordinary
and takes us by surprise, or we may have an experience that at first seems
ordinary but can nonetheless provide us with a glimpse of glory, and Paula urges
us “to be alert to the possibility that this event or that encounter might just
provide us with a glimpse of glory.”
Not long after reading Paula’s book, I had what
I felt was another glimpse of glory in quite a different context, and this time
from my children. My younger two sons and I were waiting in the car to pick up
my eldest son from Cubs. As we waited we played I-spy. Several rounds had gone
by, and it was my turn to be ‘on’, and I chose something beginning with ‘L’.
After a couple of attempts to guess this, my youngest child said “Is it Love?”
His answer moved me, and I thought how wonderful it was that he should offer
this as a response, and somewhere in there was a glimpse of glory; for us to
experience love around us is to lift the veil and gain a glimpse of the vision
of God and how he views the world, whether this is in the relationships we have
with those who are known to us personally, or in the love and compassion shown
between people who are unknown to each other but who are connected through their
shared humanity and desire to love one another as God loves us.
Paula starts and ends her book by reflecting on
R.S. Thomas’s beautiful poem “The Bright Field”, and in particular on the idea
of ‘turning aside’ in order to notice glimpses of glory in our everyday lives:
that in doing so we can become people who can find the pearl of great price or
treasure in the field and, as Paula writes in her closing sentence, “encounter
the eternity that awaits us.”
