I cried when I saw the photograph. Was it because the grave was of someone who had died when they were only 45? Was it because she was a relatively young woman with three teenage children? Was it because this was the mother of the architect I had been researching for the centenary celebrations of two churches? Or because she was the wife of a well respected and much loved Primitive Methodist Minister in the nineteenth century? Or, again, was it because we had spent ages searching for the grave on a Saturday morning in the old Downham Market cemetery and hadn’t found it? And, here was a photo – sent to me by a local Heritage Society member who had looked up the grave number.
Probably, I cried for all these reasons. My companion thought I was daft, crying for someone I had never known and knew very little about. I reflected on this. It seemed to me as if – if it is not too ‘New Agey’ a statement – that we are all connected with all other human beings, whether we know them or not, whether they live now or lived 150 years ago. John Donne’s ‘No man is an island’ is often quoted and surely, if this is true, we are all ultimately connected with each other – with maybe many connections in between, but all joined up in the end.
And now I think about it, are we not all connected through a spiritual plane that exists above us, around us, through us? Are we not all connected in Christ? I love the verse in Colossians 1 v 17. The second half says ‘in him all things hold together’. That is certainly the case for all of us who ‘abide in him and he in us’. In some mysterious way the risen Jesus, who is above gender, time, the limitations of existence, holds all those who love him (if not the whole of humanity – who knows?) together in a cosmic group hug.
Sarah Jane Scott had loved her husband, had borne him three children, had shared his faith, had supported him in his work, had done her own visiting of his congregations. But, when her children were 14, 12 and 6, she died. I await a copy of the death certificate to discover why. Today, I have visited Downham again and, armed with my photograph, I found the grave. I cried again. Somehow, I feel that my tears are caught up into the ongoing tears that God must shed for his humanity – the sadness of early death, the joy of having faithful servants, the interconnectedness that binds all people to each other and to God, if we allow it. RIP Sarah Jane.
Jacqui Horton
2014