A Birth or a Death?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Did T.S. Eliot guess, when he penned those now famous lines that he would be striking a note that resounded down through the years and remains poignant and memorable a century later?

'All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different'.

The Coming of the Magi still has the power to charm us each time we hear it read in a seasonal repetition of the Nine Lessons and Carols. It leaves us pondering the depths of age old questions. Is there maybe less of a chasm between these two realities: birth and death than one might think?

Time after time, a soul departs from this earthly life into what, if we are honest, none of us really know - what or how or where or, least possible to contemplate of all, into nowhere. Simultaneously, as if to fill the gap, somewhere another new life is born. An old friend, recently bereaved, wrote us a touching letter, saying that he was strangely comforted, after the sad death of his wife, to hear of the birth of our first grandson, born to the 'little girl' who had been bridesmaid at their wedding, as if somehow nature was compensating for its losses and providing a measure of joy in the scales of life that at least equalled the sorrow on the opposite side of the equation.

Eliot recorded the joy of a new birth, the birth of a King, a Saviour, a Redeemer of the human race, but at the same time the death of an epoch, of an old way of life and the anguish of a journey under impossible conditions. He set down the dissatisfaction that ensued after experiencing a wonder, with the Magi returning home to the old dispensation which had now lost forever the power to satisfy. Was it a birth or a death?

My grandparents, Ida Lucy and Albert, lay side by side, buried in a little churchyard in the village where they lived for most of their lives. The grass grows around their graves, the moss covers their headstone and they rest, together in death as they were in life. It's a peaceful place. My parents, both cremated, have no such lasting memorial and I am forced to wonder whether the old ways were best.

 

Today I am sitting gazing at another churchyard. Behind it the old parish church of Dolgellau stands square-towered and solid, built of local grey stone with the golden, autumnal trees as a backdrop. It nestles in the hollow of the hills, close to the banks of the river Mawddach. It is a place of considerable charm, despite its crop of grey tombstones, a quiet and safe resting place for a host of former inhabitants of this small, friendly Welsh town. A place of death, but also, for its visitors today, a place of warmth, vibrancy and restoration. There is time in this grey churchyard to rest, to contemplate and to be recharged: it is a place of life. The lines, it seems, have been partly erased between those ultimate questions of death and life and the quiet spirit that lives on in this churchyard is both a death and a rebirth.