Image: Booklet designed by Robert Shoveller.
‘This much at least … much more’
Andrew Collis
Funeral for Patrick Ralph Pound
(4/11/1932 – 9/6/2024)
Woronora Memorial Park
John 14:2-6
A poetic utterance by Jesus (in the context of friends troubled, bewildered) evokes all manner of settings. Rooms, mansions …
There is space, Jesus assures them: personal, community, green space; freedom, spaciousness.
There is room … for difference … for silence.
The words call to mind capacities, chambers of the heart: memory, affection, imagination, forgiveness.
The ethics is one of compassion, inclusivity. We pray, after Jesus, for habitats, homes … affordable housing … for hospitality (overcoming hostility) … “on earth as it is in heaven”.
The metaphysics (the bigger picture) connotes biodiversity.
We might call it creation or country/ngura – land, water, sky … plants and trees, animals and angels, ancestors.
A beautiful world/cosmos of living things … with space even for dying, death …
Dying and rising, wonder, glory, new life …
All this.
This much at least … much more.
God, you renew the face of the earth. Receive Pat whom we have loved, and grant to him those things that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart imagined; through Jesus Christ, our Saviour in life and death, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God/Love, forever and ever. Amen.
