Sermon Archive
Getting through in a dangerous world
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Holy Communion on 7 September 2003
Proverbs 22.1-2, 8-9, 22-23 ; James 2.1-10, 14-17 ; Mark 7.24-37
In The Independent newspaper one day last week a journalist wrote a column on how the widow and daughter of the late Dr Kelly described their everyday family life up to the time of Dr Kelly's tragic death. It appeared under the headline "Voices from a Britain we thought had disappeared." In the paper's correspondence column the next day, a reader from the English Midlands responded. "Who is we?" she asked. The journalist's article, she wrote, "gives a picture of Britain as I and my family and friends certainly know it: duty, work, family, privacy - the Kelly's family life, centred on home and the local community, with dedication to public service, sounds entirely familiar." "Journalists and politicians", who think this way of life has disappeared, she concluded, "are obviously completely out of touch with Britain."
Now that may be rather hard on journalists and politicians, who ply their respective trades in the harsh glare of publicity, from which most of us are mercifully shielded. From a safe distance, we blame politicians for not working miracles for us, and journalists for not giving us good news. If they are out of touch therefore, it may be as much with what we wish the world were like, as with what it actually is like. Yet many of us, I suspect, will also sympathise with the lady who wrote that letter: "a family life, centred on home and the local community, with dedication to public service" does sound "entirely familiar", at least as what we aspire to. It is an aspiration reflecting what our first lesson, from Proverbs, advocates: "A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches".
Yet what we aspire to, is not what always turns out to be the case. The world, outside our home and local community, can break in and disrupt it, often disastrously, as in the case of Dr Kelly's family. It is no use saying, "Why don't the politicians and journalists and financiers and terrorists just go away and let us get on with our lives?" For the fact is that they won't, and maybe they can't. We live, as our recent Festival of Spirituality put it, in a dangerous world. How can people get through that dangerous world, when their lives have been disrupted - by death, disease, or personal disaster?
Well clearly there are many practical ways in which different people have answered that question for themselves; and it would be impertinent to offer gratuitous advice to anyone in such a situation. But let me tell you how one woman learned to answer the question. I was brought up on the shores of the Cromarty Firth, so I couldn't but help know of Hugh Miller, the eminent 19th century Cromarty stonemason, geologist and journalist. I had read My Schools and Schoolmasters and some of his other writings. But I knew nothing about his wife, Lydia, until back up North on holiday this summer, I read a new biography of her, written by Elizabeth Sutherland. Lydia's life was certainly one disrupted by events, not least the great Scottish Church Disruption of 1843, in which her husband Hugh played a leading part. But the greatest disruption, for her, was Hugh's suicide in 1856, precipitated by overwork and his fear that he was going insane. Perhaps he was; and when it was publicly concluded that Hugh's "reason had given way", it "removed some of the social stigma" from his suicide. But Lydia was left, not only with four young children to bring up, but also with the anguish of not having been able to save her husband from himself.
Lydia was forty-four when Hugh died and she lived another twenty years. How did she get through them? Before her husband's death she had written and had published anonymously about a dozen children's storybooks and one not very successful novel. Two or three more storybooks were to follow. But in the first six years after Hugh's death, in addition to bringing up her young family, she set herself the task of editing the mass of papers he had left behind, on geology, topography, folklore and travel. Seeing Hugh Miller's work through editing, proofreading and publication, to great popularity, was a major achievement. But as in his case, work took its toll. Never very well physically, Lydia tried various alleged cures for her persistent spinal and neck problems; and also, on at least three occasions, she had to be admitted to psychiatric hospital in a manic state and suffering from delusions. On each occasion, fortunately, she recovered fairly quickly: her biographer suggests that her breakdowns were the result not of "any intrinsic mental instability in [her] make-up?]", but of "overwork and unsuitable use of drugs prescribed by doctors". For the rest, she saw her children into adulthood, travelled a little, and spent her days quietly, if sometimes a little eccentrically, with her family, friends and relations. Lydia got through, in other words, as countless others have done - not ideally certainly, because at times she lived beyond her psychological resources, and sometimes she fell out with people. But with the help and love of her family and friends, and by her own determined efforts, she got through.
Yet that is not quite the whole story. As a young girl, her biographer writes, Lydia was "well educated, intelligent, but somewhat naïve and impulsive". What most characterised her however was "her intrinsic courage in coping with the many difficulties of her life". She reminds one, perhaps, of the Syrophoenician woman in today's gospel, whose courage and impulsivenesss Jesus could not resist.
But how did she sustain her courage? Lydia left too few of her own innermost thoughts on record for us to do more than speculate. She had a strongly Evangelical upbringing , and with her husband was fiercely committed to the Free Kirk. Consequently her own writings were rather moralistic, and perhaps the reason why her one novel for adults was not more successful. But through the conventional language of her 19th century piety, a hint of something more universal shines through. Shortly after Hugh's suicide, in a shakily written note to her mother, Lydia wrote of "how kind the Lord has been in these deep deep waters - without that wonderful testimony of strong affection in that awful moment I know not how I could have stood."
The "strong affection" she felt in her darkest moment, Lydia makes plain, was in part mediated by the "deep love and tenderness" of her family and friends. But its source, she believed, was deeper yet, deeper even than the deep, deep waters of her desolation. Her experience, here again, is that of countless others whose everyday lives have been disrupted by disaster. Not everyone, of course, nor at first, and sometimes not ever; and why this should be, we do not know. In the darkest night, I believe, it is more natural for human beings to cry out to a compassionate, fellow-suffering, God, than to remain silent. But not all do, and not all who do, hear more than the echo of their own cry.
Lydia's way then, is not the way of everyone whose everyday life has been disrupted by disaster; and as I have said, it would be impertinent to offer gratuitous advice to anyone in such a situation. But what she felt in her darkest moment, although others may describe it differently, is the ground of hope on which countless women and men have stood and sustained the courage to get safely through this dangerous world. We are more than we know. Like Lydia, we set out on life with high hopes, which life again and again threatens to crush. Our lives, broken on the wheel of events, are lived in fragments which often seem to make no sense. But then it is sometimes given us to see that the ultimate ground of our high hopes is no illusion, but life's deepest mystery. Our lives are hid with Christ in God. Our fragmentary lives are more than we know, more than we can know, until "the instant where everything will be enveloped in love". That of course is not something we can prove intellectually. To prove it, rather, we need each morning to open our hearts anew to the eternal love, and each day learn to love one another more nearly as we are loved.
Lydia, Wife of Hugh Miller of Cromarty by Elizabeth Sutherland, is published by The Tuckwell Press, East Linton (2002). ISBN 1 86232 221 X
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