All Souls

This is Holy Trinity Church tonight, as we remembered All Souls - all the people we had known and loved and wanted to commemorate at the altar. They are represented by the small flames on the stand towards the foreground, and in the darkness and in the silence and during the music as the names were read the memories returned, as they do every year.

This is one of the services for which I am grateful to belong to a church that provides for beauty and drama to provide a pathway, as it were - a space for the emotions that too often in Scotland we keep hidden away until drink releases them. And I'm grateful for such clergy as are sensitive to the importance of using the attributes of our building to the full, to the power of darkness and candlelight and not allowing the mundane to dispel the moment.

You can find a poem and some more thoughts here