By Mary O’Duffin
A recent visit to the island of South Uist for a family wedding was a rich and bittersweet experience. We journeyed through Skye, and chatted to cousins and aunts and Bishop Brian McGee on the ferry – after the ritual of Cal-Mac fish and chips. The remoteness of island life is a great leveller. Hebridean life is personal and intimate – and the weather and sea remind us all that we are fellow travellers, subject to the same tides
of life.
The familiar ritual of driving and ferrying back to our roots for weddings and funerals, and the joy of seeing the increasing brood of younger cousins and the solace of visiting Hallan, the ancient graveyard beside the Atlantic where grandparents and now parents rest. All these human experiences knitted together by the life of faith.
Memories of long summers and Easters and occasional Octobers in the care of our grandparents, set to work on the croft. One abiding memory I have is lying in bed, cocooned in the attic sleepless and restless but daring not to disturb the grandparent below. They had raised 9 children and now took on 4 or 5 or 7 grandchildren for the holidays. With cows and sheep and hens and dogs, late night visitations with grandchildren were not encouraged.
We developed the art of singing in the dark – usually hymns and in them expressed all the longings, energy, hope and missing-our-mothers that filled our young hearts. Only much later did I discover that this heartfelt music moved and warmed the apparently stony hearts below.
So to with my own sons, dashing to catch a French ferry on the way home from camping in France, our overladen car, with bikes and tent, they would break into singing with rugby-type gusto school hymns, out of season carols and surprising devotional hymns to the Blessed Sacrament – and somehow – drawn into hope – we always seemed to catch the ferry against the odds.
In the chapter 16 of the Acts of the Apostles, St Luke shares with us a very powerful experience of “singing in the dark”. Paul and Silas, beaten and bruised, found themselves chained up in prison, unable to move, with nothing but each other’s company for solace. They could have become bitter, and complained loudly about their plight. It was also possible that they lost hope and shrank into a darker corner of despair than any prison could afford. Instead they sang, praises and hymns to God, and as the Eucharistic liturgy encourages all of us to do, they lifted up their hearts. Suddenly, the earth began to shake and the walls and ceiling of their prison crumbled and a door opened wide, with the light and freedom of possibility before them.
We all have our prisons, the circumstances that we cannot change: Ill-health, separation and loss; grief or addiction; growing old, or being young and without hope. Can we dare to reach out to one another and learn to sing in the dark, trusting that God has plans for our rescue? What would such singing in the dark feel like? Would we discover some hope beyond ourselves? Some transformation and light?
In November, we remember those we have loved and lost. We also remember those who have let us down and disappointed us, sometimes departing from this life before we have been reconciled. We bury all this in the mercy of God. We are united to the unknown angels and saints of our lived experience as well as the known ones. The divide between the living and the dead is no more. We gather up all the sufferings and losses of this present life, all the hurts and desires of our most human natures – and we sing hymns and pray together.
We pray that our beloved dead rest in perpetual light. We pray for lost and poor souls who have no-one to pray for them. United in our faith in Jesus, the Christ, who braved the darkness of sin and death, that we might live in the hope of the Resurrection even if that hope is sometimes lived by learning to sing in the darkness.
Eternal rest grant into them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen.