Going home

I was in at the school again last week. In at the Royal High, speaking at a nine-o’clock assembly for the whole large crowd of third years in the school.

An unscheduled visit.

Unexpected deaths don’t stick to tidy schedules. A young lad just embarking on his third year at the school had died. Knocked off his bike as he did his early morning paper round.

A single, screeching second and the world turned upside down. For him, his Mum, his friends. For everyone involved. A day of desolation and despair.

So they asked me in to help his year group mourn. There are times when it’s far from easy being the chaplain to the school. What do you say at times like that? What can you do to help?

I figured that it’s maybe best to simply sit beside them in their grief: to share the screaming silence of their pain and their perplexity: to let my own tears fall and mingle with the steady, snuffling streams of broken-hearted weeping in the hall.

But that was not an option. Wheeled in with the figures of authority – the Rector and the year group Head – and stuck up on the stage. Some twenty feet at least away from any of the pupils in their serried ranks, a metre up above them – and that before I ever got to stand up on my feet and speak behind the safety and officialdom of microphone and desk.

It doesn’t take a genius in geometry to understand those measurements and angles of formality are hardly that conducive to a sympathetic sitting with these youngsters in their grief.

I spoke. That was why they’d asked me there. As if some words could somehow staunch the flow of grief that had been haemorrhaging from their hearts.

I didn’t mention Jesus even once. They didn’t need a lecture. They needed only love. I figured that it wasn’t any reference to him they’d need: just the experience. The sense of his presence, calming, caring, soothing, seething – sharing with them all the dreadful cauldron of emotions in their grief. Bringing help and hope.

That’s, I guess, the challenge in these days. ‘Jesus’ is for most of them no more than just a swear word at the soft end of their spectrum of profanities. To speak of him is easy – but abstruse. To bring him is the more demanding challenge – and the only thing that counts.


And then there was the funeral itself. Yesterday. How quickly all our dreams and all our futures turn to that word ‘yesterday’.

Again I wondered what on earth you say. How can you put in any words the truth we need to hear? What words can any mortal find, no matter how voluminous or fine, what words can any mortal find that help convey not truth so much as him who is himself the Truth?

I ended up by using words the boy himself had penned. A simple little story from his P3 days at school.

When frog was a tadpole he went for a walk to find spring; because he’d been told that spring was just around the corner.

He went to the woods – and did he find spring? No.

And so his simple saga carried on. He went here and there, all over the place: and every place he went, that simple, haunting question once again – did he find spring? No.

And then at last..

He went home. And what did he find? He found spring.

At home.

I said that like the tadpole in the story this boy wrote, it’s spring that all of us are looking for as well. And finding spring is really, as that P3 boy once wrote – finding spring is really coming home.

To help folk make that journey and to get them on that road – it’s that, I guess, I’m challenged now to do.