Soon after being appointed to a Dublin parish in late-1998, there was a journey south to make practical arrangements. Going to Dun Laoghaire, the view over Dublin Bay from the top of the car park momentarily encapsulated the optimism, the changed perspectives, of those days. Many times in the years that followed, I would drive to that same spot in the car park and stand and stare out to sea and, sometimes, recapture a fraction of the feeling of those times.

There are moments that can cast a light on everything around. Perhaps for a few seconds the mundane and the dull are transformed; they seem different not through any quality of their own, but  through the context in which they have been set. Such moments are rare enough.

On 2nd December 1985, I remember going to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin for the Advent carol service. It was a fine afternoon; the last beams of a watery, winter sun shone through the windows and, as the light died, the air was cut by the voice of a boy chorister. The service was an occasion of astonishing beauty, a moment when we were gathered up from our workaday, worldly existence and taken up to a higher plane. The Irish Times the next day reported that the service was such that even the darkest and dimmest parts of the city seemed to be filled with light. The city had not changed, but, for a moment, was set in a different context.

Sitting in that same cathedral more than a quarter of a century later, Benjamin Britten’s ‘Ceremony of Carols’ was sung to mark Candlemas. The sublime sound of the choristers and the girls’ choir filled every recess of the vast building; the harp accompaniment brought one close to the Sixteenth Century sources of Britten’s music; closing the eyes, January 2012 slipped out of sight. For a moment, the world was changed.

Walking down Kevin Street, the cold rain fell relentlessly. No-one would venture beyond their front door without good reason. Sporadic traffic sent forth jets of spray as it sped through surface water. A day more grey would be difficult to imagine, yet beyond the rainfall the ‘Alleluia’ of treble voices still echoed through the mind.

The hedgerows were deep and ragged where he walked, covered with the lace of cow parsley.  The air had a feeling of purity as though it had never been breathed; it was just starting to be cool with the first breeze of the evening.  From the tall elms he could see at the end of the field there was the sound of rooks, and a gentler calling of wood pigeons close at hand.  He stopped, and leaned against a gate.  The quietness of the world about him seemed to stand outside of time; there was no human voice to place it.

Above him he saw the white moon, early and low above the elms.  Over and behind it were long jagged wisps of cloud that ran in ribbed lies back into the pale blue of the sky, then trailed away in gestures of vapourous white.

Stephen felt himself overtaken by a climactic surge of feeling.  It frightened him because he thought it would have some physical issue in spasm or bleeding or death.  Then he saw that what he felt was not an assault but a passionate affinity.  It was for the rough field running down to the trees and for the pathgoing back into the village where he could see the tower of the church: these and the forgiving distance of the sky were not separate, but part of of creation, and he too, still by any sane judgement a young man, by the repeated tiny pulsing of his blood, was one with them.  He looked up and saw the sky as it would be trailed with stars under darkness, the crawling nebulae and smudged lights of infinite distance; these were not different worlds it now seemed clear to him, but bound through the mind of creation to the shredded white clouds, the unbreathed air of May, to the soil that lay beneath the damp grass at his feet.  He held tightly on to the gate and laid his head on his arms, in some residual fear that the force of binding love he felt would sweep him from the earth.  He wanted to stretch out his arms and enfold in them the fields, the sky, the elms with their sounding birds; he wanted to hold them with the unending forgiveness of a father to his prodigal errant but beloved son . . . nothing was immoral or beyond redemption, all could be brought together, understood in the long perspective of forgiveness.  As he clung to the wood, he wanted also to be forgiven for all that he had done; he longed for the unity of the world’s creation to melt his sin and anger, because his soul was joined to it.

The book was not a spiritual one, not even one by a religious author.  It was Sebastian Faulks’ ‘Birdsong’.  In the hideous grimness of the bloody slaughter of the First World War, Faulks’ character Wraysford is allowed a few days leave and encounters a moment of sublime beauty. One wonders if the BBC dramatisation of ‘Birdsong’ can evoke a sense of beauty similar to that conjured by Faulks’ prose.

Last year, the roads were described as impassable, the temperature was minus fifteen.  In our little cluster of six Protestant churches with an official Church of Ireland population of just 353, an aggregate of total of 317 attended church. While people in Dublin felt the pavements were too dangerous for walking, country people drove miles on packed snow and ice to be present.

What brought them there? What will bring the hundreds of thousands of Irish rural dwellers from the warmth of their homes to draughty buildings, hard seats and singing that has to compensate in quantity for its lack of quality? They will come, regardless.

Who knows what people think? There are those who declare themselves non-believers who will stand at Christmas and join heartily in the carols.  Perhaps it is about tradition, about a sense of community, about connecting with forebears.

The poet Philip Larkin, a definite non-believer wrote a poem called ‘Church Going’, maybe in its lines there is something of what it is that will bring the crowds to the church door.  Under the cover of the throng, perhaps there are many Larkins, present in church, as he was, for some reason indefinable:

Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

There is the line in Sebastian Faulks’ moving novel Charlotte Gray, where Miss Gray is about to be parachuted into Nazi-Occupied France as a spy. An RAF bomber is flying her through the night, deep into occupied territory, and one of the bomber crew announces to her that they are just passing over one of the French cities.

It was a reassuring moment to me, the image of an aeroplane moving through a clouded night sky, almost as though it was tiptoeing so as not to wake anyone. The city below was a place I knew from summer holidays, but it was more than that; there is a feeling of safety, of security, in a community asleep below in the deep darkness. Is it perhaps that sleeping people are unthreatening people, or is it that sleep represents a refuge from all the worries of the world?

I remember reading Father Niall O’Brien’s story of his ministry on the Philippine island of Negros, a tale of struggling against violence and oppression. Many of the sugar workers led miserable lives as day labourers, yet there was one moment where Niall O’Brien describes stepping into a hut late at night to be met with darkness in which he could make out the sleeping figures of itinerant workers. Sleep seemed a moment of relief, a few brief hours of respite from the grinding poverty in which they lived.

For Prospero, in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, life itself is a dream rounded off with sleep:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Sleep looms large in our images of Christmas, whether in the television ideal of children awaiting the arrival of Santa Claus or in the Christian retelling of the Nativity Story. The carol O little town of Bethlehem talks about the deep and dreamless sleep of the infant Jesus, while the Basque Christmas carol Sing Lullaby captures that sense of sleep as an escape from an awaiting harsh reality

Sing lullaby!
Lullaby baby, now reclining,
sing lullaby!
Hush, do not wake the infant King.
Angels are watching, stars are shining
over the place where He is lying:
sing lullaby!

Sing lullaby!
Lullaby baby, now a-sleeping,
sing lullaby!
Hush, do not wake the infant King.
Soon will come sorrow with the morning,
soon will come bitter grief and weeping:
sing lullaby!

Sing lullaby!
Lullaby baby, now a-dozing,
sing lullaby!
Hush, do not wake the infant King.
Soon comes the cross, the nails, the piercing,
then in the grave at last reposing;
sing lullaby!

Sing lullaby!
Lullaby! is the babe awaking?
Sing lullaby!
Hush, do not stir the infant King.
Dreaming of Easter, gladsome morning.
conquering death, its bondage breaking:
sing lullaby!

May our sleep be reassuring and our dreams be peaceful.

Downtown Radio has decided they no longer have a place for such material on a Sunday. This is the script that will be recorded and emailed today,  my last and final thought.

The last Sunday in November, a blue sky and biting cold.

The funeral was two counties away, but at four in the afternoon it would arrive at our country churchyard – much later, and we would be standing in darkness.

‘You’ll say a few words’, had come the request. Many of those who would gather that afternoon would not have travelled to the church service.

They began to arrive before three. Every verge was filled with cars, the driveway of the house across the road, the yard of the neighbouring farm.  Both sides of the road were filled with vehicles, and when the hearse arrived, the traffic filled the middle of the road.

The ground beneath our feet was cold and the chill seemed to travel upwards.  ‘You’ll say a few words?’ It seemed an altogether more intimidating prospect faced with the hundreds of people who now stood all around.

It was the first Sunday of Advent, that time of the year when our church looks forward to the return of Jesus, when we recall that the one who came to us as a baby in Bethlehem will come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead.  It is a time when we recall John the Baptist, the one who prepared the way for Jesus.

A silence fell among the crowd as the coffin was lowered into the ground. Taking a deep breath, I stepped up to the microphone and asked the question that Jesus had asked of the crowd, ‘what did you go out to see?’ When they had gone out to see John the Baptist, what they saw depended upon what was in their hearts.  Why had people left the warmth of their homes on a winter’s afternoon to stand in a Co Laois churchyard? What they saw – an end or a beginning, depended on what was in their own hearts.

By 4.30, the few words, the committal, the prayers and the singing of a hymn were complete.  The chill had grown stronger.  A man from Edinburgh came over and shook hands, ‘A good word, brother.  My father used to preach at open air meetings; you got what he would have called a ‘good hearing’.

There was an invitation to anyone who wished to join the family for a meal at a hotel ten miles distant. 150 people enjoyed a roast dinner – fifteen tables of ten, there was a festive atmosphere.  Saying grace, I spoke of Jesus transforming the grief of Mary and Martha at Bethany into a moment of rejoicing.

How that day was seen depended on what was in the heart of the person there; how we see Christmas depends on what is in our own hearts.

It brings memories of driving along a road in Co. Antrim feeling tired and jaded and listening to the BBC on the car radio.

Christmas was approaching and I had no appetite for it. The season seemed to bring out the worst in people; it brought to church people who had not been seen all year. Being defensive about their failure to appear on any other occasion, they would use their solitary appearance as an opportunity to moan about things. Moaning about things in the Church of Ireland generally means moaning about the Rector – for who else could be responsible? Services, pastoral care, management of the buildings, youth work in the parish, the parish magazine, ecumenical relationships, anything they might dislike could be attributed directly to the Rector.

There was a Radio 4 programme on as I drove. It had the atmosphere of one of those radio programmes that come from a world where old bigots don’t exist and whining church people are only to be found in the pages of Trollope. It was a programme about the great spiritual writer Thomas Merton, and how he had entered monastic life during the season of Advent.

Advent for Merton was full of rich symbolism and imbued with deep meaning. I have no recall whatsoever of the Christmas liturgies in the parish (perhaps a repression of unpleasant memories), but I do remember promising myself that I would try each year to find even a fragment of the meaning that Merton found in those dark December days.

Here’s what he wrote about waiting and expectation in “Advent hope or delusion”,

‘The certainty of Christian hope lies beyond passion and beyond knowledge. Therefore we must sometimes expect our hope to come in conflict with darkness, desperation and ignorance. Therefore, too, we must remember that Christian optimism is not a perpetual sense of euphoria, an indefectible comfort in whose presence neither anguish nor tragedy can possibly exist. We must not strive to maintain a climate of optimism by the mere suppression of tragic realities. Christian optimism lies in a hope of victory that transcends all tragedy: a victory in which we pass beyond tragedy to glory with Christ crucified and risen’

When I feel guilty about running into conflict, that I have not sought and do not like, and feel positively down-hearted rather than euphoric, Merton is a word of encouragement. His words are a companion in the tiredness of the coming four weeks.

Maybe the Church of Ireland has got itself into that situation. In an effort to be all-embracing, it has said that everyone’s beliefs are valid and that the gracious Lord won’t exclude anyone.

Certainly, Jesus accepted all who came to him in faith; but equally those who rejected him were warned in no uncertain terms. Our Church has shifted its ground. We have said Jesus accepts everyone; we have implied that he accepts even those who rejected everything he taught. As Advent arrives again next Sunday, the season of theological shift arrives.

Revelation Chapter 1 verse 7 has the following words in the King James translation:

Behold, he cometh with clouds;
and every eye shall see him,
and they also which pierced him:
and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him.
Even so, Amen.

The words inspired John Wesley to write the following verse in his hymn ‘€œLo! He comes with clouds descending’.  There was no mistaking Wesley’s understanding of Revelation, if you rejected Jesus, then the end of life and the day of judgement would not be a welcome prospect.

Every eye shall now behold him,
robed in dreadful majesty;
those who set at nought and sold him,
pierced, and nailed him to the tree,
deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing,
shall the true Messiah see.

The words ‘€œthose who set at nought and sold him’ were felt by some as being susceptible to an anti-Semitic construction, ‘those’ was seen as referring to the Jews. Such concerns could have been addressed by substituting ‘we’ for ‘those’.

This has happened in the hymn we now sing in churches. Revelation 1:7 is now rendered as:

Every eye shall now behold him,
robed in dreadful majesty;
we who set at nought and sold him,
pierced, and nailed him to the tree,
Lord, have mercy,
let us all thine Advent see.

However, it is not just that ‘€œthose’ has disappeared; the whole meaning has been changed. There is no deep wailing anymore, the day of wrath is something to be welcomed by all, ‘€œLet us all thine Advent see’. The Church of Ireland has no sense of a day of judgment, no sense of there being a day of division.

What then is the point of belonging to a church? What is the point of ethical behaviour? Do we now posit an amoral God who does not discriminate between heinous criminals and those who have striven to live Godly lives? If we all end up with the same reward, sure, what’s the point in bothering?

It was.  There was a persistent  drizzle and the lights were on before half past four.  It was not hard to imagine why this month had held a dark place in the imaginations of the ancients.  There was a sense of being enclosed, trapped.  It was a day that recaptured a moment on a November day in 1989.

I had called at his home before and got no answer.  Being afflicted with a guilty conscience, I tried again, though it took three months to do so.  Stories of the man’s temper and rough tongue filled me with trepidation about returning.  Again, there was no answer.

With relief, I turned from the door and headed down a driveway that had once been the track bed of a railway.  Reaching the entrance gates, which had once been level crossing gates, I met a car swinging around the corner. The driver wound down his window with vigour. “Who are you?”

“I’m the new Rector”.

“What do you want?”

“Nothing.  I was just calling to see how you were”.

“None of your b_____ business”.

“OK”.

“You’d better come in for a drink”.

We went into his very compact home.  “Sit down there!”, he barked.

I sat while he raged about life and the world in general.  “You’ll have to drink this.  It’s all I have”.  He handed me a glass of blackberry wine.

“I make this myself, 350 gallons a year”.

I must have misheard.  “Sorry”, I said, “how much?”

“350 gallons.  Do you not listen when people talk to you?  Of course, I give some of it away”.

Doing quick mental arithmetic; he could give away seven-eighths of it and still have enough left over to drink a pint of it almost every day.  I wondered if he was ever safe to drive.

I did not venture further questions.  The occasional nod and “Yes” was sufficient to accompany him in his discourse on the stupidity of everyone with whom he had ever had dealings, which at least diverted attention from my glass.

Suddenly, he stopped. “I hate this time of year”.

“Didn’t they used to call it the month of the dead?”

“Did they? If they did, they were right.”

It was the first Monday in November.  He pondered some thought deep in his mind.

It seemed an opportune moment to make my excuses and leave before the maudlin mood brought on one of the tempers for which he was notorious.

“Will you not have another glass of wine?”

“Thank you”, I said, “but I must go”.

The parting included a tour of his workshop, an old engine shed twice the size of his home.  There were many more memories recalled as he wandered around, at times touching machinery as if making some physical contact with the past.

Finally, I headed back down the drive; relieved at having escaped without a mauling and without having to drink more of the potent purple liquid.

It was grey.  The sky was grey; the landscape was grey; even the light seemed without life on that November afternoon.  The month of the dead, it wouldn’t have been hard to see how the idea arose.

Primary school teachers in small schools had an extraordinary power to influence us, for good or for ill. They were people held in extraordinarily high regard. In at least one part of rural Co Down, in the early 1990s, the headmaster of the local Catholic primary school was still referred to as ‘Master’ so and so, rather than as just plain ‘Mister’. It made the point that here was a man who was important to the community.

Perhaps it’s not just the attitude we have towards them, perhaps it’s also the way we treat them. Teaching salaries were never going to make anyone rich, but I suspect they used to go much further. School teachers, if they did not live in the schoolhouse, would have had good houses in villages. Now their salaries would not go near buying the sort of houses their predecessors occupied. In a society where someone’s worth is often reckoned by how much they earn, where do we put the teachers?

When I was young we didn’t even know what teachers Christian names were, they were just ‘Miss’, even if they were ‘Mrs’, (in primary schools, ‘Mr’ was rare). I only discovered that the headmistress of the first primary school I attended was called ‘Susan’ at a wedding I attended in Dublin in 1999  - a different country and thirty-two years later to discover that Miss Todd had a Christian name!

I thought about Miss Todd yesterday, working away the years at Long Sutton. She used to have groups of children to play board games in her house at lunch times. I remember having no idea about how to play the game, but at being overawed to be in Miss Todd’s house. (Miss Todd was the niece of the Archbishop of Canterbury and had been to Lambeth Palace – lots of times!) Miss Todd must have felt frustrated at times, most of us would not have been the most exciting or inspiring of pupils, but my only memories of her are of a firm and gracious lady.

On All Saints’ Day, when we recall the good and faithful down through the generations, I think I would want to put amongst them Miss Todd and Miss Everitt and Miss Rabbage, without whose efforts the lives of hundreds of Somerset children would have been very different.

‘I think I’m going to be buried in that graveyard, though perhaps it’s not right to be talking about such things’.

‘Why not? I bought my grave twenty years ago’.

He looked at me. ‘But you’re still young’.

‘Not so young, and you never know the moment’.

My grave is in the little country parish where I served for seven years.  I always watch the news from there with interest, partly out of love for the people of the parishes who were so kind to us during our time there; partly because the Rector there, either the present man or one of his successors, at some point will have to bury me.  I have my grave papers safely secured in my health insurance file – the doctors always fail in the end!

It is a plain and unexceptional place where I am going, but the panorama is captivating and if people are going to have to go to a graveyard for my burial, they might as well go somewhere with a view.

Words from Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful book ‘Gilead’ come to mind.  The veteran John Ames, seventy-six and dangerously ill, commits to the page thoughts that one day might be passed to his seven year old son.

‘To me it seems rather Christlike to be as unadorned as this place is, as little regarded. I can’t help imagining that you will leave sooner or later, and it’s fine if you have done that, or you mean to do it. This whole town does look like whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more. But hope deferred is still hope. I love this town. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love – I too will smolder away the time until the great and general incandescence’.

The general incandescence – I love the idea of being incandescent, I am being buried in a place called Bright!

In the end, I don’t suppose it makes much difference where I am laid to rest, because I won’t be there anyway, but to choose a particular place must be, as Marilynne Robinson suggests, the ultimate mark of affection.