TIME AND TIME AGAIN we’re rediscovering at St Michael & All Angels Bramhall the hunger there is – somewhere in the depths of our humanity – for silence. Earlier today – at 3 celebrations of the Eucharist in the parish church and a very large gathering of citizens at Bramhall’s Public War Memorial – shared silences united.

This evening at our Annual Service of Light and Remembering – a focused Thanksgiving for departed loved ones – deep silence, prayer, the simple naming of names, and the slow and careful placing of “resurrection lights” binds as one those who share the common human experience of bereavement and grief, who, in being so bound, thereby recognise themselves nearer loved ones “gone before”.

A war veteran well into his nineties, shivering in the cold, told me this morning “I wouldn’t miss this silence for all the tea in China”. A very recently bereaved widow told me tonight that “this place and this silence have brought me exactly where you prayed they would: to another shore”.

Tomorrow evening we’ll celebrate another of our silent Monthly Monday Meditations. We’re learning again that there is, most assuredly, something to be celebrated in silence. And Silence, to speak of something else we’re learning, is all the time celebrating, and still Creating, us.