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‘Outside my house is a cactus plant / They call the century tree / Only once in a hundred years / It flowers gracefully / And you never know when it will bloom’

Funeral Address for Anne Duffin by Revd Richard Carter, given on 31 January at St Michael’s Chiswick. 

It was 1986, and I was in northern Israel. A few weeks before I’d asked my uncle where it was that my grandparents had lived when they were there in the early fifties. It was that address that I held in my hand as I wandered around Haifa one August morning.

Here’s a story I’m sure you know. Once when a Lion was asleep a little Mouse began running up and down upon him. This soon awakened the Lion, who placed his huge paw upon the Mouse and opened his big jaws to swallow him. ‘Pardon, O King,’ cried the little Mouse, ‘forgive me this time. I shall never forget it

I have just been reading a book called The Character of Virtue that I received for Christmas. It is a book of letters that the American theologian Stanley Hauerwas wrote to his Godson Laurence Bailey Wells. When Lawrence was born Sam Wells asked Stanley to be Lawrence’s Godfather. At that time they were living on other sides of the world.

I’d gone to one of the best social enterprises in the city. It was widely known. I’d used it as a customer: they did a nice line in house removals and lawn care; and were a good source of picture frames. It was a great place to take students on my ethics and social engagement course: they could accommodate a lot of students at one go, tolerate their questions, and make their community open to scrutiny and enquiry.

The poet Mary Oliver’s ‘Instructions for living a life’ from her poem Sometimes, will, I think, help to shape our reflections about this feast of the Epiphany which we celebrate today.  In a line from that poem, she says: “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.