he also returned with an unexplained and never-before sense of exhaustion: ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me: I’ve never felt so tired in my whole life. Maybe it’s just because I’m getting older and I’ll pick up again when I get some rest . . .’ But he didn’t. When I asked him to describe what it felt like (on the way to the hospital), he said, ‘Usually my mind is reaching out for things – for ideas and information: all the time, but now it’s as if I can’t . . .’ And within days he was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour. A friend, who is a doctor, said to us: ‘Just pray it’s not a GBM.’29 But it was. All he needed was enough time, and from that moment he began to talk with Peter every day about the contents – ‘their part’ – of this book.
Notes
1 ‘Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus . . . and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him’ (Luke 24.13ff.).
2 At the time of writing I do not have enough distance on his life and death to be able to call him anything but ‘my father’.
3 Cf. Arvo Pärt (one of his favourite composers): ‘I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener’ (On Alina: Spiegel im Spiegel, ECM New Series 1591, 449 958–2, ECM Records GmbH 1999).
4 Micheal O’Siadhail, Hail! Madam Jazz, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1992, p. 14.
5 K. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.I, Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1958.
6 ‘Truly my life is one long hearkening unto myself and unto others and unto God. And if I say hearken, it is really God who hearkens inside me. The most essential and deepest in me hearkening unto the most essential and deepest in the other. God to God’ (Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life and Letters and Papers from Westerbork, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995, p. 204).
‘When I pray, I hold a silly, naïve, or deadly serious dialogue with what is deepest inside me, which for sake of convenience I call God . . . I repose in myself. And that part of myself, that deepest and richest part in which I repose, is what I call “God”’ (Hillesum, Interrupted Life, p. xv).
7 A deep infection of the bone – in his case, his left shin, following a soccer injury.
8 Doctorate of Divinity.
9 Jubilate: Theology in Praise, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1984. Now available under the title Living in Praise: Worshipping and Knowing God, second edition, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2005. Also published in the USA as Praising and Knowing God, Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 1985.
10 Published 13 October 2007.
11 Ephesians 3.14ff.
12 ‘Scriptural reasoning or SR for short, refers to a way in which those of different faiths share their scriptures together, originally derived from a practice called “textual reasoning” among a group of Jewish scholars out of which Scriptural Reasoning has evolved. It’s a way in which Christians, Muslims and Jews share their scriptures together (texts from the Bible, the Qur’an and the Tanakh – often quite difficult and challenging texts). What makes it work is the very open, trusting and enquiring spirit within which it is done. One of the ways Dan described it was “discovering the patterns of Scripture and how they relate to patterns within other faiths”.’ For further information about Scriptural Reasoning visit http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/jsrforum/pastconferences.html (University of Virginia). There is also a film: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week1106/cover.html. SR is growing fast in a number of countries around the world as a means of inter-faith dialogue.
13 My father died during the week when he had hoped to be at the annual SR gathering at the American Academy of Religion. Days before, when I told him that Peter wanted to come to see him, he protested (knowing how much SR meant to Peter) that he should go San Diego instead. When Peter decided to come anyway, he was only pacified when we agreed that we would do SR here, so that he could be part of it too. Sadly, Peter arrived just after he had died, but it seemed very fitting to honour this commitment anyway.
14 The New Jerusalem Bible suggests that ‘the land of Jordan and Hermon’ (v. 6) might refer to a place/stage on the route of the Israelites in exile.
15 Daniel Hardy, ‘Thoughts on a lifetime so far’, unpublished paper.
16 But he was later deeply encouraged by the appointment and vision of Will Storrar as one of his successors there.
17 When we discussed various options for his funeral, he said adamantly: ‘The most important thing is that it’s an act of worship, and that the person and place facilitate that.’
18 ‘Autistic’ in the psychoanalytic sense of the word: see Frances Tustin, The Protective Shell in Children and Adults, London: Karnac, 1990.
19 See Chapter 5, pp. 102–03.
20 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, New York: Macmillan, 1955, p. 125.
21 St George’s Church, Flushing.
22 Only at the time of writing did it dawn on me that this was the psalm we studied together at the vigil before his funeral (see above).
23 Paul Ricœur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and the Imagination, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.
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