Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
the name, because one afternoon
of heat the express-train drew up there
unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
no one left and no one came
on the bare platform. What I saw
was Adlestrop — only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
and meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
no whit less still and lonely fair
than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
close by, and round him, mistier,
farther and farther, all the birds
of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

The poem is extraordinarily atmospheric, it seems to capture something; but what was it that ‘Adlestrop’ captured? The eve of the First World War is nigh on a century ago, it is not as though it is evocative of personal memories. Perhaps it is a sense that this rural idyll is a foreshadowing of the earthen hell of the Western Front, where Edward Thomas would die on Easter Monday 1917, perhaps it is read through eyes that know what is to follow. Perhaps there is something more.

Perhaps there is an evocation of memories of railways and the moods they created. Not the prosaic railways, instead, the ideal of the railway. ’Adlestrop’ evokes an ordered world, where the unexpected is worthy of remark. It evokes a place of safety, of security, of predictability; the feeling of being carried along to a predetermined destination. It speaks of a lost world of certainty, of a lost world of wide vistas and unlimited possibilities.

How prosaic it must have been for an express train to be pulled up at a halt where neither boarding nor alighting might occur, yet the prose of the moment becomes poetic in Edward Thomas’ words. Thomas’ capacity to transform a moment arises from a personality where moments could shift from darkness to light, or, more ominously, from light to darkness.

Suffering depression so deep that he was at the point of suicide on one occasion, Thomas, nevertheless, fears that the loss  of the darkness might bring a loss of the light, writing, ‘I wonder whether for a person like myself whose most intense moments were those of depression a cure that destroys the depression may not destroy the intensity’.

Thomas’ perception of depression sounds a familiar experience. Depression is not like a sudden acute moment that can be isolated and identified,  it’s more like clouds across the sun: light and shadow. There are moments of brilliant light that are suddenly obscured and dark times that are suddenly illuminated by a piercing light. What the medical world seems to offer is a uniform greyness; no dark moments, but no light moments either.

In the dark moments, it is necessary to persuade oneself that this is not the world as it is. But, if the dark moments are unreal, is there also an air of unreality about the light? Is the cost of dismissing sorrow the loss of the counterbalance of joy? Is the price for saying that the pain does not exist, the dismissal of delight as no more than imaginary?

Would it be possible to have a world without the darkness? Would there still be a place  for people like Vincent van Gogh and Edward Thomas? Is the darkness not the price of ‘Adlestrop’?

Spending a Friday meeting at a diocesan meeting, where it would not have been possible to resolve the issues discussed, camels wandered through the mind. If the Kingdom of God was advanced one inch by my presence at that meeting, then it moves in ways far more mysterious than I can possibly fathom. Why do we have bishops if everything must be resolved by meetings?  Why appoint people to wear purple if their only function is to chair gatherings?

Although committed to democracy, I wonder, sometimes, if it is the best way to run church affairs. What would happen in the Bible if they had adopted a democratic committee method?

Moses would have returned with the tablets containing the Commandments and told the Lord that after an extensive consultative process and after a show of hands at the meeting, the people of Israel had decided not to ratify the Law.

Jesus would have told his followers that they must take up their cross and follow him and the disciples would have come to him and said that whilst they accepted the sincerity of Jesus’ words and whilst they agreed with him in broad terms, they didn’t feel able to recommend the programme he advocated.

Christian history simply would not have happened if a committee had been responsible. There is a Biblical mandate for sharing ministry, but there is also a Biblical mandate for getting on and doing things. Prophets would never have had any impact if they had appointed a committee to consider what condemnations were to be issued; Saint Paul’s letters would never have been sent if they had required a committee for their composition, it would still now be thrashing out what way the Letter to the Romans should be written.

Isn’t the point of having bishops that they reflect and then lead? If that is not their role, then what are they there for? It’s a weakness of our age that we regard the common mind as necessarily the voice of wisdom, is that how things would be conducted in any other sphere? Would we remember Einstein or Beckett or Van Gogh if they had heeded the common mind? Isn’t it a reflection of how little confidence we have in our own structures that we think a meeting even necessary?

It doesn’t seem much more reverential than the graffiti in the 1970s, “Jesus saves – but Dalglish gets the rebound” (Dalglish being a striker for Liverpool Football Club, who were then European champions).

Intended to emphasize the timeless quality of the Christian message, its attempt at humour is probably not going to be of much comfort to someone who has just lost their job or their house. A smiling preacher attempting witticisms is not much use to someone who can no longer pay their mortgage and has to tell their children that they must leave their home and their school and their friends and try to start a new life elsewhere with little money and little hope of things improving.

Whilst acknowledging the unchanging nature of the Gospel, a certain cynicism suggests that while Jesus may not save much cash in a recession, there is plenty of scope for some of his employees to do so.

Looking at prices in online January promotions, the thought occurred that having a secure home, and an income that, although modest, was as secure as the house, was a considerably better position than that of most people in the community: Clergy save – especially in a recession. When one has cash in one’s pocket it is tempting to delight at all the price cuts without asking too many questions as to how those price cuts have arisen.

Perhaps it is the lack of exposure to the cold realities of the economy that prompts the silence about the recession in clerical quarters. Checking church news stories, there is continuing debate of human sexuality and lots of clerical news. But what about the Eurozone crisis, the wholesale loss of jobs, the sharp increases in indebtedness, the economic cul de sac that is being faced? Not a whisper.

Back in the 1930s, there was a political poster depicting four men at different heights on a ladder. The man at the top was sumptuously dressed; the man at the bottom had poor clothes. The man at the top was telling those below him that for the sake of the nation, everyone would have to step down one rung. The ladder was standing in water and one step down would put the man at the bottom, who was already submerged up to his neck, below the surface.

One wonders where the average bishop or parochial cleric would have stood on that ladder, and where Jesus, had he been around in the ’30s might have stood.

If church leaders continue their obsession with the private and the personal, saying nothing about the big issues, while living in safe houses on secure incomes, the cynicism will be confirmed.

Rectory children seem to take a second place, sometimes get forgotten completely.  Once when we lived in Dublin, our son, who would have been around fourteen at the time,  was lying on his bed reading. The front door was no more than 15-20 feet from his bedroom door and he heard me key in the intruder alarm code and slam the front door behind me.  Only then did he realize that if he left his room he would break the beam in the hallway and trigger the alarm.

There was a rebuke that evening – this was not the first time I had forgotten him!

Once, when he was three years old, he attended a play group for three mornings each week from 9.30 until 12.30.  One Wednesday came and I was preparing to drive to Downpatrick just after midday; the telephone rang.  I took the call, chatting amiably with the caller who was phoning from Co Wexford.  It was not often to get a long distance call in the days before competition in the telephone market.

After around ten minutes, the call ended, and I returned to what I was doing.  At 1.30 pm, an hour after poor Michael should have been collected, I suddenly sensed that something vital had been forgotten. Flying down the road, the four miles to the town were covered in record time.  He had been taken into the day nursery adjoining the play group and was sat on the knee of one of the staff.  His duffel coat was buttoned, his hood up, his eyes were red and tears poured down his cheeks.

It was pointless to tell lies.  I apologised that I had forgotten and was handed a sobbing bundle with stern words from the carer.

It’s not just the days when I have actually forgotten them; it’s all the days when other things have taken priority.  When things have been planned, or things have been accepted without thought of what other hopes there might have been for the day.

Bizarrely, the one thing that saved me over the years was Harry Chapin’s song Cat’s in the Cradle. When the preoccupation with my own concerns was such that the most important people were forgotten, Chapin’s lyrics cut through.  Christmas and Easter might be lost, but no-one was allowed to take away our month together in the summer.

‘A month is a long time off’, said a person one Sunday before we left for holidays.  ‘Aye”, I said, ‘it is.  I’ll trade you two weeks of it for 104 days of weekends’.  It’s hard to imagine what he would have said if we had left for Christmas.

I should have done; he was one of my own flock.  Bad experiences in the past have caused a tendency to make assumptions.  The experience was similar to one at a Dublin physics lecture.

The man wore an unlikely combination of clothes. A pair of grey cargo pants, a black V-necked tee shirt, a very baggy purple fleece, and a pale blue and white velour hat of the type that might be worn by babies in buggies. The hat held in place a mop of whitish grey hair which hung in thick straggles, unwashed in days. His fresh complexion bore two or three days of beard. He carried a plastic carrier bag out of which he seemed to draw odd items.

His companion was a dark-haired woman in a vivid green summer dress, also with a carrier bag.

They arrived late to the lecture, sitting in the very front row, a few seats away from where I sat. The woman took a reporter’s notebook from her carrier bag and the man took out a hard backed notebook in which there seemed to be many diagrams. Further fishing by the woman produced two pens, one of which she passed to the man.

He leaned forward intently, watching the lecturer, then leant back, placing his feet against the bench in front watching the slides. About half an hour into the lecture, he took hold of the plastic bag and pulled out a large bag of jelly babies which he proceeded to eat.

All this took place within a few yards of the lecturer, but if he was at all discommoded, he showed not the slightest sign of it.

The duo were fascinating. Had I met the man in the street, his unkempt appearance and odd combination of clothes would have gone with the expectation that he might have asked for the price of a cup of tea, but the lecture was one he had paid at the door to attend, and was hardly the most comfortable of places to spend a couple of hours.

When it came to the questions, the woman in the green dress asked about the coalescence of matter into galaxies.

One can hardly go to someone and say they look fascinating, but clearly the man was quite happy in his choice of appearance and dress. He could have afforded to be different, but had chosen to appear as he did. Was it a mark of indifference to the world around? Did his attendance at a lecture on theoretical physics characterize someone who believed reality to be something completely different from the trivial politics and celebrity froth that fill the media?

Maybe he looked at me in an equally curious fashion. Maybe he sat and wondered why someone who preached from a book that says the universe came into being in six days was at a lecture on understanding how gravity held the universe together.

Maybe the man this evening looked at me with a similar curiosity.

Pondering the huge attendances at funerals, there was a sense of a need to try to construct an Irish theology, a presentation of the Gospel in such a way that it made sense to each person in the crowds that gathered on such days.

We are not good at such thinking, the idea of contextualisation brought memories of the Huron Carol. Its tune  was familiar to me from childhood days. It was one of those songs that would have featured in the autumn term of BBC radio’s schools music programme Singing Together. At our Primary School there was a big wooden valve wireless, which remained permanently tuned to the frequency for the schools broadcasts.

Having been blessed with the lifelong inability to sing, Singing Together never really captured my imagination.The BBC songbooks were handed out, a new edition for each term, and we were all expected to pay close attention to the presenter. I don’t remember a single thing about the programme, but a few of the songs still stick in my head, “Land of the silver birch”, “It’s raining again” and “The praties they grow small”. I think we might have been allowed to vote for our favourite song in a nationwide poll, but that might be something my memory has embroidered.

I wish I had paid attention to the Huron Carol because the words are special. The carol, which is set to a French Canadian tune, was written by Fr. Jean de Brebeuf, a Jesuit priest in Quebec, in about 1643.  He attempted in a simple song to tell the story of Jesus in terms meaningful to the Huron people.

‘Twas in the moon of wintertime when all the birds had fled
That mighty Gitchi Manitou sent angel choirs instead;
Before their light the stars grew dim
and wondering hunters heard the hymn,
Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born , in excelsis gloria.

Within a lodge of broken bark the tender babe was found;
A ragged robe of rabbit skin enwrapped his beauty round
But as the hunter braves drew nigh
the angel song rang loud and high
Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born, in excelsis gloria.

The earliest moon of wintertime is not so round and fair
As was the ring of glory on the helpless infant there.
The chiefs from far before him knelt
with gifts of fox and beaver pelt.
Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born, in excelsis gloria.

O children of the forest free, O seed of Manitou
The holy Child of earth and heaven is born todayfor you.
Come kneel before the radiant boy
who brings you beauty peace and joy.
Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born, in excelsis gloria.

Most of the Church still has not caught up with Brebeuf; we still believe we can tell the story of Jesus to our own generation using the language of 4^th century Greek philosophy. What would Brebeuf have said to a crowd in Co Laois on a chill Advent Sunday afternoon?

He had to repeat exams at the end of second year, through a lack of application rather than a lack of intelligence, with which he was blessed abundantly.  I lent him notes and books for the re-sits.  He was a chain smoker and walking into his room was like encountering autumn fog, and when the files of notes and the books were returned , the smell of cigarettes was unmistakeable.  For years after, the scent of cigarettes that came in gold coloured packs attached itself to one of the text books; the aroma bringing memories of the conversations and the laughter of three years of college life.not to have to worry about raising money, or fixing buildings, or doing everything by yourself because there is no-one else; he was wise.

The smell of stale smoke was acceptable, what I wouldn’t have liked would have been bent covers and dog-eared pages; a friend had lent an expensive theological book to another classmate and it had been returned looking like something that had been floating in the Liffey.  There would, of course, be some Freudian explanation for my constant desire to keep books in a pristine condition; ‘anally retentive’, my exceedingly learned colleague in my neighbouring parish would say.

Not just books either, album covers as well.  I have Dire Straits’ first album from 1978, its cardboard sleeve without crease or mark.

Buying ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test 40th Anniversary Box Set’, I put the first CD back into the rack.  Despite being cellophane wrapped, the cover seemed creased and marked.  Taking a second out, I looked closer, it was intentional; it was meant to look like much used vinyl.

A friend used to have album covers like that; they would have contained the work of Deep Purple or Led Zeppelin and they showed signs of constant handling and bore ring marks of coffee cups and beer glasses.  They had a reassuring quality, like a favourite armchair or pair of shoes, shaped by years of use.  We would sit and listen and talk, and in a single evening could put the world to rights.

In thirty years of retrospect: being at ease with the smell of smoke; with creased sleeves  and dog eared pages; with coffee stains and with spilt beer; is the hallmark of some of the best people I have known.

There was a widow who did not seem overwhelmed by grief, in fact, she seemed quite light-hearted about the matter.  Shock often acts as an anaesthetic to the pain of grief and it seemed likely that the moment would come when the pain of loss hit her.  The lightness continued. The matter became clearer sometime later when a neighbour commented that the woman was enjoying herself for the first time in years now she was rid of her horrible husband.

No-one in college days ever suggested that loss was something that might be welcomed and that the prospect of seeing the person again would definitely take the sheen off an eternity in heaven.

William Trevor’s Love and Summer suggests pastoral care at times of bereavement should be based not on repeating platitudes, but a careful sensitivity regarding the relationships between the deceased and the survivors.

The anticipation of personal contentment, which had long ago influenced Mrs Connulty’s acceptance of the married state and the bearing of two children, had since failed her: she had been disappointed in her husband and in her daughter. As death approached, she had feared she would now be obliged to join her husband and prayed she would not have to. Her daughter she was glad to part from; her son – now in his fiftieth year, her pet since first he lay in her arms as an infant – Mrs Connulty had wept to leave behind.

Perhaps Mrs Connulty’s daughter would be as relieved to see her mother depart as Mrs Connulty was relieved to be rid of her husband, yet in both cases, in a real situation, the same words would have been said expressing great sorrow for the person’s loss.

What message is given to people when the church blandly asserts that we shall spend forever with those who have gone before us?  What do we say when we say prayers couched in terms such as:

Strengthen them to meet the days to come
with steadfastness and patience,
not sorrowing as those without hope,
but in thankful remembrance of your mercy in the past,
and waiting for a joyful reunion in heaven.

What if the person felt like Mrs Connulty and had no desire whatsoever for a reunion in heaven?  Are these terms used in funeral liturgies articles of faith?  Does faith in the resurrection mean being stuck with someone forever?

If a woman has had to endure years of being kept short of money to feed her family, of being verbally abused, of being knocked about when her husband came home drunk, of being belittled in front of others, what good news does the church offer when it tells people that they they will be reunited in heaven?

Of course, no-one is going to speak ill of the departed, but, instead of adding to the years of hurt, perhaps the best care can come from not saying things.

Tom was a good friend to me. Thirty years my senior, he was an avuncular figure who kept open the little church where he and his wife and a small number of others worshipped Sunday by Sunday. Tom always smiled, always laughed, always had an encouraging word. Tom was getting better. The day he was told that the tests were clear, he waltzed his wife around the hospital ward.

A few days after the good news, Tom died. It was a cold, bleak winter’s Saturday evening in Belfast and Tom was the second of my parishioners to die that day. I drove back through the Ulster countryside feeling numb. There was no time for feeling sad, it was Sunday the next day and the show would go on. Tom’s loss was a bitter blow.

Tom’s funeral took place on a bright, chilly Tuesday afternoon in the little church he loved so much. There was not space for the community that gathered to bid him farewell. Tom had a daughter in her 20s, bright, articulate and pretty, she was her parents’ pride and joy, getting to college and becoming a teacher. She took Tom’s death with a gentle grace and asked to read at the funeral, choosing the passage from Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for everything”.

I buried Tom close to the churchyard wall, a spot he had chosen for himself, laughing when he showed me it. Neither he nor I could have suspected that the grave would be opened so soon.

I arrived back at the Rectory with a heavy heart. There was nothing cheerful to be said. The telephone rang, ‘Ian Poulton’.

‘Mr Poulton, I am phoning to complain that nothing has been done about the trees at the bottom of the Rectory garden. If they came down in a storm, they would hit our house’.

‘Mrs Smith, the trees have been there for centuries, they are not tall enough to hit your house, and do you know what? I have just buried a good friend and I am not interested in silly conversations about trees. Goodbye.’

I slammed the phone down. Tom would probably have frowned at me for not being more diplomatic, but Tom wasn’t there anymore.

When there are times spent with people on the very edge of life, it’s very hard to cope with the things that really don’t matter. It is a small mercy that there will be no telephone calls this morning.

Their both being there would have been a great source of conversation with the lady, a woman student there in the 1930s when women were a rare presence. Drinking tea one day, she had exclaimed, ‘Your son is at Trinity! I went to Trinity . . . I do wish my head was not so muddled . . . I enjoyed it there’.

The battle for lucidity had not so been so difficult that day.  There seemed a consciousness of threads being lost, a willingness to allow silence, or perhaps just no longer an inclination to try to keep going. Like a pair of actors who had played out a scene on many occasions, the next line of the script provided the necessary prompt for the resumption of the dialogue.

We used to cover the same territory on each occasion, except that day there was some adaptation.  There were new lines, memories triggered by some association.

‘He went away to England?’ It was one of my lines from previous performances.

‘Yes’.  The response each time the question was asked; usually the end of a sequence, but, this time, new material.

‘That was what we didn’t want to happen.  ‘Damn’, I thought.’

Thinking was probably as far as the word went, it was the early-1930s.

To have pressed the question would have crushed the butterfly-like fragility of the conversation.  Sometimes names appeared, only to dissolve into nothingness as soon as one tried to create something of flesh and blood around the name.

There was laughter when we went over details of the school.  Memories of Saturday evening dances to the music of a gramophone brought smiles.

‘It all goes so fast . . . it’s all gone’.

The script was usually complete in about an hour.  We drank tea and ate cake and looked out at the view.

A brilliant mind trapped in a twilight world where shadows can be substantial, or can be nothing at all; her recall of students standing in Front Square, as the campanile tolled the final moments before confrontation with examination papers,  interrupted by pointing at some imagined object in a slate grey sky.

‘An engineer and a medical student?’ she might have smiled, ‘how exciting!’

Perhaps the day is not distant when a combination of research from the disciplines of computer engineering and medical science might ensure that memories of Front Square are never muddled and when the sound of the campanile is recalled with clarity.