The rain that was lashing down beforehand has eased enough for the long procession to make its way out of Worth Abbey as the funeral ends. The sounds of Be Thou My Vision fade behind us, and the 100 or more priests stand on either side of the path in a reverent, thoughtful silence as the undertakers bear the coffin to the hearse.
Before me is one of the most beautiful views in the south of England, across the Sussex Weald, its deep woods and hollows hung with mist, and in the distance, outline shapes of the South Downs dark against a grey sky. Hamlet’s line about “That bourn from which no traveller returns” flits into my mind.
We have just celebrated the funeral Mass for Fr Dominic Rolls. The loss of so good a priest so young bears heavy on us even at the same time as we are full of hope. They are two aspects of the same revelation: the frailty of flesh and the mystery of our promised redemption.
A good funeral is a great comfort, and this is true of priests’ funerals too, with their poignant details, like the coffin with its head resting nearest to the altar. In former times Dominic would have stood there in persona Christi capitis (“in the person of Christ the head”) to intercede for God’s holy people. Now a chalice and stole atop the coffin remind us. And God’s people are here in huge numbers to pray for him. So too are his brother priests to offer sacrifice for his eternal rest.
If you can tell a man’s character by the friends he keeps, then the presence of so many of Dominic’s former parishioners, friends, students, converts, admirers and appreciators was tribute to his apostolic zeal to be all things to all men. And there are many exceptional priests from all round the country.
I had allowed ages for the traffic because there was a train strike on Southern rail, and in fact arrived very early. I went to find the Blessed Sacrament chapel, which was full of priests on their knees and remained so until it was time to vest. There was little of the usual clerical bonhomie which can abound at priests’ funerals, for like family funerals they can become a time when everyone meets. There was a keen sense that we had lost one of the best of us, and a sober desire to mourn in a spirit of faith in Jesus’s Resurrection and not, as Mgr Patrick Burke put it in a beautiful panegyric, merely to canonise him in some sentimental way which would not do justice to what we were feeling.
Even with priests’ funerals, though, the same comfort in ritual and word and sacrament all finally face this last, silent procession. Now the finality begins to sink in. And of course, just as every ordination I attend reminds me of my own ordination, so the funeral of this good priest, who was exactly the same age as I am, cannot fail to make me reflect that I myself will be asked to give an account of how I have used my talents, not in any self-realising way, but in the original Gospel sense of whether what I have done will have enhanced the value of what was given to further the Kingdom of the Giver. In Dominic’s case, there’s no doubt he did.
I am increasingly struck by what Dominic wrote shortly before he died about the importance of loving oneself. It was written amid his own surrender to the horrors of cancer. I think that “the key is to love oneself enough”, far from any foolish egoism, is faith that the dignity which God gives us is not impaired by suffering, nor is suffering some kind punishment. If I do not love myself, that is, affirm my own dignity in God’s eyes, the alternative may well be that I will take refuge in self-pity, and in the process look for someone to blame or something to compensate for my unloveliness. If I do not love myself, I will have to take it out on someone or something.
Loving myself is not the self-satisfied thing it might sound, it is trying to see myself with the dignity and tenderness with which God sees me. It is the equivalent of the psalmist’s “I trusted even when I said, ‘I am sorely afflicted …’ ” It is such a trust which leads on to the realisation: “Oh precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his faithful; your servant Lord, your servant am I, you have loosened my bonds.”
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