Wednesday 31 July 2013

Times and tides

I am writing this from far away . As is so often the case, you can do so much in a week of holidays that you begin to get the sense that you have always been away.
Let me go backwards!
Yesterday, Monday, was a visit to the Pearl Harbor memorial site. This was always going to have something of the surreal about it, late in the morning as I watched a movie about the fateful day I felt quite emotionally drained and very sad. I had a similar feeling once before traversing the cemetery on Norfolk Island. We forget that cemeteries and memorials are not just historical curiosities they are also places of death, and death demands some response from the human condition.
Early in my ministry a slightly older priest reminded me to take recovery time after funerals, it has been important to do that . Funerals are not just another thing we do; I am often shocked by the way the 'funeral industry' doesn't seem to know this, or is so busy treating a funeral as a business transaction that we are discouraged from entering into the catharsis.
Any way, by the time we sailed out over the Arizona, the sunken hulk, which no longer resembles a ship, I was over it. And looking back I am glad, and was glad to leave the place.
Good to do, important even, but we move on.

No comments: