The Fall

1989 (Year C), 5 November /
Pentecost 25                         

St Peter de Beauvoir Town and All Hallows Bow

We’ll meet again, don’t know where don’t know when;

But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day;

Keep smiling through just like you used to do,

Till the bright clouds make the dark clouds fade away.

Song writers have written about it, poets have composed lines about it:

 I will not go to Finsbury Park

The putting course to see

Nor cross the crowded High Road

To Williamsons’ to tea,

For these and all the other things

Were part of you and me.

I love you, oh my darling,

And what I can’t make out

Is why since you have left me

I’m somehow still about.

And there’s not one of us who has not been affected by it – it’s the separation of those who love each other. It doesn’t have to have happened because of anything as momentous as death, there could be any number of reasons, the need to seek work, illness, arguments. Sometimes of course the separation is caused by the things that we’ve done wrong. At worst the wrong doing might result in our physical removal, but there are some families who contrive never speak to each other again because of things that have happened in the past. No matter what the cause they all result in waves of sadness, anger, grief and deep down a longing for this period loneliness to come to an end.

So who has caused these kinds of feelings in your life – who is it that you could hardly bear to be parted from and why would that be? Just think about that as we go on.

Perversely the feelings are so strong that when they come to an end and the two who are in love are brought back together again all they can remember is their pain and hurt. (There are the most amazing emotions going on inside my stomach at this very moment I can tell you). We carry this with us and then blame the other for the pain we feel. So instead of some earth shattering reunion great arguments ensue and punishments are handed out. There was a time when I went away Hannah would barely speak to me when I returned. On occasions it was so painful it made me wish I’d never come back.

Now the Church has, even if you haven’t, started its period of preparation for Christmas, and with that preparation come massive themes for us to wonder at. Last week we had creation – this week we’ve got the Fall and just for good measure and purely by accident we’re in the festal period of All the Saints.

And the Fall is essentially about separation – separation between God and the things he had made. Separation just like all the songs and the poems, between the lover and that which is loved.

The story about Cain and Able is an incredibly imaginative story. I don’t believe for one minute that whoever wrote it thought they were writing down history as we would understand it to be. They were simply trying to describe this desperate feeling of separation which they recognised existed between God and themselves. No matter how close we feel ourselves to be to the Divine there always seems to be some division, a sense of that things are not as they should be. The man, for I think it probably was a man who wrote the story, couldn’t describe the situation in detail – how could he – he didn’t have the words. So he told a story. It’s a great big, incredibly bold, brush stroke. It speaks of the condition and the pain that the condition brings.

Now the Saints are not the incredibly holy ones – those who have overcome this separation between themselves and God. The reality is that they are likely to be those who are most profoundly aware of its existence They are those who have recognised that the choices that we make often take us farther away from God rather than nearer to him and so the gulf is increased.

Yet there are also those who enable us to see that this need not always be the case. And what’s more we are united not with recriminations but by embraces. At the Eucharist yesterday which marked the end of the Stepney Area’s Year of Worship, prayers gave thanks for the courage of Martin Luther King and the love of Mother Theresa, who in their own way, and very different way, have shown that this separation can be overcome and that communion between God and creation is the result.

May God give us all grace so to love each other and him, that we might become saints in this place and bring to an end all that divides and separates us from each other and the Divine. And may the blest communion of which we sing today become a reality. AMEN