On Saturdays I usually pray through the weekly list of departed members of the Guild of All Souls sent round by the Guild to its members. They are all just names, of course, but acquire a strange, tenuous familiarity as they come up year after year - or at least, the same types of names do.
This morning I was praying through the list as usual and 'Alan Bean, Priest, 2009' came up. I supposed this must be Father Bean who was one of the Cowley Fathers and who, when I was at St Stephen's House, was living in the All Saints convent nursing home and was just about mobile enough to be carted to St John's on the Iffley Road for Mass on Sunday morning. Once in a while that was my job. We were all warned to take special care of Father Bean in case his catheter slipped out en route (but, thankfully, not instructions to put it back in). During the procession to the Altar of Repose on Maundy Thursday one year he was actually set on fire with a candle.
Fr Bean's name rather caught me off guard because I've got used to the Guild of All Souls roll consisting of people I don't know. What image do I have of him? He wasn't always a doddery old monk. What image do I have of the dead generally? It tends to be of rows of grey-faced silent people standing beyond a wall, gradually moving back and fading as more arrive, an image which comes from the Earthsea books and which I've never been able to shake. After 15 years, the Guild's names are removed from the daily prayer list and transferred to the Memorial Book where they remain; but I suppose eventually even that annual remembrance would become unfeasible to maintain. In Swanvale Halt we came to the decision that the list of the dead prayed for would depend on whether there was anyone around who remembered each person, a means of keeping the roll to a reasonable length; as a result the dead settle deeper down as time goes on like layers of sediment, gradually disappearing as new names collect on top of them, until those at the lowest layers only God remembers.
How hazardous and small our lives seem, seen like this. How we perpetually fade, and how little we know about what roles we play in the wider picture. It's a comfort, I suppose, that someone remembers Fr Bean, but his process of fading is well advanced.
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God may remember the very lowest levels, but I think we do too - and that is what you are expressing here. The sense of loss and lack becomes more even and generalised, as we take an ever more expansive view. But it never really goes away. Departed people blend in with all the other unwilled separations to create a background hum that is always there if we listen carefully enough, if we choose not to focus on the more intrusive clamour of immediate pain. Our ability to do this is something that we should be eternally grateful for.
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