If you should die, I would cry; I would cry

But will I see you again?

I don't know how or why

Or where or when


Maybe we gather together

In Beulah Land

I can't say whether

Or not I understand


Love doesn't have grounds

For how or when

Though it knows no bounds

From now nor then

Sir Thomas Browne, shortly after his medical graduation in 1643 from the University of Leiden , wrote the book Religio Medici (The Religion of the Doctor). It was the only book that William Osler, the great Canadian physician, ever kept at his bedside as he was dying. The book is, as one would expect, hidebound and archaic given the era in which it was written, and riddled with the church dogma at the time, but nevertheless, there is one quotation that serves to it's redemption in my mind and it is this. "--thus there are two books from which I collect my divinity: besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and publick manuscript that lies unto the expanse of all : those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other."

My friend Brian notes that the spirit of the age is instant gratification. That those of us who waited patiently for the cookie or lined up in the queue without shoving are now in our dotage. I have to give that some thought since we carry the same software that was and is always consistent but it has to do with expectation and  that Zeitgeist applied to the young. It is not anyone's fault. We have instant food, instant information,instant friendships and separations,fast travel and instant holiday destinations, instant new job changes and instant loans, along with instant bankruptcies. The efficiencies of the gratification are compelling and have shortened the process and magnified the goal. We have to be careful we don't milk out our pool of human kindness in our effort to achieve.Those of us who waited for our cookie have only to hustle when we have to get out of the way. I am not complaining. I just think that the contrast of goal versus progress is the key to the matter. I have written of it earlier in a similar context. Those quilters who love their activity hate to finish the spectacular quilt because they have to begin again, and the process as well as the goal was something that endeared them to the activity. Goal seeking activity, at least, relentless goal seeking activity may be destructive, if not to you, at least to me if I get in your way.

" when Elizabeth heard the greeting from Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit " . Wow!  That was fast. What an ordinary sequence of events leading to a manifestation of the mystery of faith; so extraordinary. What a stretch of credibility for some that a mother would hear and believe from the womb and confess it to Mary.  That faith would lead to the groundwork of the relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist. Such is the mystery of faith, ever a gift. I guess Elizabeth was the first person to know about it, but it wasn't from Mary. She just knew! What's the point?  Well, I guess that despite the  supposed rhetoric from Mary it was a shock and an elder woman and a friend would have been consoling and shared an insight that was God given as well. Matter of fact we are in a realm of fragility about these matters and holding onto a stretch of credibility that is easily hammered. Fragile? Me OK, TS Eliot, OK, but Mary and Elizabeth and poor old Joseph. Why not? They were just folks.

I wrote of a eulogy of Septimus Harding in A Braided Cord and having read it again, was thinking about famous eulogies in general, of which there are many, including that of my brother,given at my mother's funeral which I also have referred to, or more properly, to which I  have also referred, not therefore ending with a conjunction, since she was a school teacher. Elegiac writing generally can be very evocative for those of us perched on a thinner branch and the eulogies of Charles Dickens in his descriptions of the death of Little Nell never failed to bring tears and a gasp to my head. Dickens famously toured the United States extensively, reading from his novels, and famously he was also always brought to tears when he read his paragraph on the death of Little Nell. The other Dickensian eulogy that is a throat catcher for me is the reflection of Sydney Carton on those he loved as he rolled on the tumbril to the lady guillotine. It comes here, from someone whose life was always self serving, in the moment of impending death, when the novelist allows him to redeem himself.
Dickens and Trollope often painted a serious picture of the spirit of mankind, revealed at the last.