"Vicar, do you know that poem about death?"

I took a funeral this week, in which the family chose as a reading the notorious poem Henry Scott Holland, "Death is nothing at all"
It's a poem I've never really appreciated, since it seems to minimise the reality of death, and it's frankly uncomfortable to stand among the weeping mourners and assert feebly, "I have only slipped away into the next room." I've always assumed it was a piece of British stiff-upper-lip sentiment, but I discovered this week, thanks to Giles Fraser, that it's lifted from Scott Holland's 1910 sermon in St Paul's cathedral after the death of Edward VII. And it takes death seriously: "It is the cruel ambush into which we are snared. It is the pit of destruction. It wrecks, it defeats, it shatters".

Sometimes we feel pressure to make out that death doesn't really exist, that human beings just keep going in another realm under slightly brighter lights and with fewer creases in their clothes. It's good to find that the slightly sickly sentimentality of Henry Scott Holland has some real bottle behind it.

Caution, gentle reader

What follows is the musings of an occasionally-frustrated, sometimes fascinated Anglican priest with both feet firmly planted in Aotearoa New Zealand. It will contain lectionary speculations, my thoughts on matters related to the dubious art of preaching, and the odd sermon or two. I'll probably be unable to resist commenting on the more eccentric offerings of the Anglican Communion either. Oops.

To preach - to get up into the pulpit and have the sheer brass neck to speak- is a curious mixture of power and vulnerability. It's about living between able and unable, knowing that for every opportunity you have to change things, your words are just as likely to corkscrew off at a tangent, or limp away quietly and expire.