Thought for the Day
Radio Scotland
Good Morning Scotland
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

It may come as no surprise that I’ve been organizing a funeral this week. It’s one of the things that clergy do.

You should know, however, that I planned this funeral with the person whose funeral it is going to be. This sort of illness can turn quickly. The conversation had to happen on Friday. I am very pleased. We’ve planned the hymns and the readings and we’ve ironed out a few details which have nagged at us at funerals in the past.

It’s how it ought to be – that we should have the freedom to name the thing that is on everybody’s lips. Once these things are named and the feelings associated with them are identified they can be worked with. They then become clay on the potter’s wheel.

A small child will frequently put his or her hands up over their eyes. It’s part of the game of peekaboo which takes place when the child is at play and the world is fine. It is also something which the child will do in circumstances that are frightening or awful. There’s a sense with very small people that the world can be made to disappear by putting their hands over their eyes.

In other situations family members have sometimes wanted to intervene. Please let’s not talk to dad about death. Let’s keep his hopes up until the very end.

As brutal a juxtaposition as it might seem, I was thinking yesterday about Radovan Karadzic refusing to show up for his trial at the Hague on charges of genocide. The witnesses were there – the court clerks running around with documents whispering to each other in Dutch, somebody in a uniform adjusting the microphones.

And the prisoners’ dock empty.

Everybody knows that both the past and the present require language in order to be known and understood - this and that ‘spoken’ – the tyranny of silence – ‘broken’.

What we don’t say may always haunt us, frighten us and control us.

What we can speak and give a name to – that’s quite another thing.

That we can work with.