A Visit before a Departure

Ten days ago I found myself in prison for the first time. Now, don't worry, I wasn't there as an inmate, I promise you.

I was there as a visitor.

It was a planned visit, I'd arranged it with the prison chaplains to meet a prisoner who we'll call Callum. Now, Callum first got in contact with me a couple of months after I arrived here in Shoreham via a handwritten letter sent out of the blue to the vicarage. It turned out, as Callum explained in his letter, that a few years ago he had nicked some money, £70 in fact, from the church wallbox in St Mary's Church.

Fast forward a few years and Callum is now sadly in prison, serving a custodial sentence for other more serious offences. But prison has been a time of change and transformation for him.

He had, he told me, come to faith, having previously only encountered church at Christmas when attending Midnight Mass. And this coming to faith had led him to a deep feeling of contrition. So could he, he asked, pay back the £70 once he was released?

Well, of course, I wrote back to Callum, thanking him for his letter and telling him that yes, of course he could pay back that £70 in due course.\

A correspondence begins

And there began the start of a series of handwritten letters between us over the last year or so. He has become, I suppose, a sort of spiritual pen pal, writing to me with reflections and insights and questions about some of the core challenges of living a Christian life like forgiveness, repentance and hope.

When I announced my departure as vicar a few weeks ago, I knew immediately there was something I needed to do before I left Shoreham. I needed to visit Callum.

And so it was that ten days ago I found myself taking 24 hours out of a very busy week to drive over to the West Country to meet this man who I'd got to know by letter but never by sight. And I found myself in a small room next to the chapel waiting for him to be brought over from his cell.

Words cannot convey adequately how deeply I was affected by the hour I spent with Callum. We are, it turns out, the same age, born less than a month apart. Although as one of the prison officers commented, you wouldn't know it by looking at us, he's had a rather harder life than me.

He is a truly remarkable man, kind and thoughtful, curious and honest, realistic yet hopeful. He is, it's fair to say, a man who has lost almost everything that is counted as valuable in life. And yet he sat and spoke to me with the warmth and nervousness of a new-found friend.

A lonely Christmas Eve

He told me, for instance, how on Christmas Eve he wasn't able to go to Midnight Mass in the prison as planned because they were in lockdown. And so he sat instead in his cell and decided to think about me preparing for Midnight Mass and prayed for me instead. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus delivers these words to the crowd of onlookers who gather with his disciples.

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”

I am so glad that for my final sermon at CoGS we had these words of Jesus in our Gospel reading, for they are for me the very essence of the Gospel in a nutshell, the great paradox that lies at the heart of our Christian faith.

The truth that it is not by our striving or our efforts or our strength that we find God, but rather through weakness, through sorrow and through loss. That loss of life that Jesus talks about can come in many forms of course.

And here we're speaking not so much about physical life as spiritual life, about that sense of being whole and intact and in control. 

For oh, how we wish that we could find God in that controlled way, through a kind of gentle growth into fruition, a seamless blossoming into maturity.

A necessary shattering

But the truth is that it's through death that we discover life, through the shattering of our fantasies and aspirations, through the loss of all that makes us feel secure and comfortable, through the painful fracturing of our ego and the brokenness that alone can make us whole.

Now this isn't an automatic process mind you, and the instinct to fight against that weakness can remain with us until the very end. What makes a difference, I think, is somehow yielding to that weakness, surrendering but not to despair.

No, surrendering to the one who alone can beat us in our weakness, to that one true source of love who reveals himself in such moments as Father, who tends to us and brings us, brings hope out of desolation, life out of death.

Meeting Callum was for me more than just a social call to someone who I'd got to know by exchanging letters. No, it was for me a re-encounter with the heart of the Gospel, with the truth that it is those who lose their life for Jesus' sake who really find it. For in his smile and his demeanour, his words and gestures, his thoughts and reflections, Callum brought me back to the possibility of life amidst death.

He showed me that Jesus' words are true.

A much-needed reminder of the Gospel message

This reminder of the Gospel message, that it is in losing our life that we truly find it, is one that we all I think need to be reminded of periodically, lest we fall back into that delusion of thinking that it's all under our control, that it's all about our own effort.

And it's a reminder that I need especially now, as I face the rather terrifying prospect of leaving behind all of you, and of facing that particular death that feels to me almost unbearable, almost impossible to follow through. But friends, we do not need to be afraid of death. We do not need to be afraid of loss or sorrow, painful though they will be.

For there is one who holds us, even in our sorrow, who accompanies us even through our tears, and who, yes, brings life to the broken-hearted and to those who are crushed in spirit. And if I can be permitted one parting plea to make to you, it is this:

To never ever let go of the courage to surrender to God amidst sorrow and weakness. For in that surrender, life will be reborn and joy will be found anew.

So, please pray for Callum. Please pray for me and for each other, that as we each experience the death that will inevitably come our way, we will not despair. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel will save it.