On the Death of a Relative

She was never “involved” with Jesus. I use that phrase “involved” to avoid the pantheon of evangelical cliches that describe someone as “saved”. She couldn’t stand the botheration of whatever Gospel gunners turned up at her nursing home to run the Sunday service. She wasn’t always polite about it. That’s not to say she wasn’t a polite person, she was. Who knows who had bothered her with religion in the past to make her quietly indifferent. When in her own home she wasn’t bothered but in the nursing home it seemed they were all over the place. I can’t speak for her, I never knew her enough to really know her thoughts and even then only God knows what even she didn’t understand about herself. She slipped away last year in hospital, a squeeze of the hand was enough to give my Dad hope that things were okay with her and her Maker. That was all that was said and I couldn’t push it, it would have been wrong to open up and cross examine that moment.

Yet it has bothered me, in fact it has gnawed at me. I occasionally see her face from those last few days when all I could do was squeeze her hand and hold a carton of juice to her lips. I was never close to her, but I loved her in an austere way (you have to know how our family operates), I didn’t get involved much but hopefully by some glances and little things we communicated with each other past all the noise.

The minister at the funeral said she was a person of quiet faith. Her daughter almost gagged in front of me when she heard him weave such a rewriting of her history. I know what he was trying to do. He was all heart and he didn’t want to spoil the day with his theology. Maybe too many funerals had spoiled his theology. He had to have nibbles with all these people afterwards at a local hotel. He had a jolly red face and a plate full of cocktail sausages.

Yet aside from whatever mystery goes on in people’s minds as they fall into death and aside from the significance of the hand gesture that helped my father, I have no idea “where” she is now. I know I’m not supposed to guess the mind of God but if those who are sure of an eternal destiny are entitled to be comforted then those of us with ambiguous ends are entitled to feel both ambiguity and concern. I can try and put it all to the back of the mind but that seems to me disrespectful, as if I’m switching channels when starving children are on. Ambiguity implies a swinging from two positions, it is not ignorant of the options. When I have tried to face it it leaves me with the ever problematic theological face drainer of Hell.

I find myself baulking against my own theology – for “all have sinned” , the “wages of sin is death” are all in my mind; but the punishment !!!??? I find myself struggling to be on the same side, I find myself wanting to stand on her side. She wasn’t a warm, glowing, affectionate person. She seemed “nice”. The abstract I could handle, the non personal “sinner” linked to Adam by whatever lineage and responsible for his or her own sins. Somehow I could theologically rationalise that. But suddenly it isn’t an abstraction, it is a woman dying, a woman who was a little girl once, who married into a ready made family, never having children from her own womb. She lived as she lived, I do not know all the details. Thrown into hell?

Whatever she was, she doesn’t deserve hellfire in whatever currently theologically framed and culturally sensitive way we have managed to word it these days. However described it is monstrous to consider that as her fate. Yes, Yes, I know… the theology rushes back into my head to reason why God has to judge. But the abstract has suddenly become personal and I have been numbed. The verses of explanation that I have explained myself in public begin to dance over my head like an over complicated maths lesson

And I am tempted, all too tempted to say something ridiculous.

“Then take me as well”.