The minute’s silence

As we prepared for our Challenge Walk at Pusey in Wiltshire, we were asked to stand for a minute of silence to remember the victims of the Manchester bombing of 22 May. The talking stopped. The drinking of coffee stopped. People stood with heads bowed, almost motionless. Only after a word from the organiser of the walk did the hall, which was our venue and starting point for the walk, come to life again.

It was a significant moment for me because it brought home what a crime victim had said in an interview some weeks before. I can remember nothing about the interview other than the person’s description of how they felt afterwards. It gave me a very clear impression of what such an experience must be like. “It’s as though you are frozen in time. Life stops from that moment on” (or words to that effect).

Frozen in time. Life stops. It is not so much as though you were caught in a photographic freeze frame. You still go through the routine of the day, each and every day. But that part of your life which was invested in the person that died has come to a halt. You will not wave them off to school or to their place of work the next working day. You will not watch them develop as people and personalities. You will not see how they are shaped by the various landmarks that occur in life. All that is placed on hold, never to resume – not in this life, at any rate.

Those involved in bereavement counselling will tell you that mourning, even though it goes on long after a person’s friends think they should have “got over it by now”, is in fact quite reasonable and natural. It only becomes toxic when the person, as one of my tutors put it, “gets stuck somewhere”. Somehow the person fails to move through the recognised stages of mourning to a point of acceptance. Queen Victoria never stopped being dressed in mourning after the death of Prince Albert. She never allowed any change in the rooms they had shared together – they stayed as monuments to the past. She, and in some ways her family and court and the whole nation and empire, suffered as a result.

But, certainly in the case of a bombing, who can you blame for grieving victims being frozen in time? Surely not them. It is, purely and simply, the bombers and their accomplices.

What can free us from being frozen in time, functioning like that word from the walk organiser which ended the minute’s silence? The Lord of time and eternity – Christ Himself. He came announcing that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Before then, when the angel announced to His mother Mary that she would give birth to Him, these were the angel’s words:

“… you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:31-33 ESV).

Time may or may not have stopped for you. But you can come over to One in whose presence time will no longer matter.

Crown Him the Lord of years,

the potentate of time,

creator of the rolling spheres,

ineffably sublime!

All hail, Redeemer, hail!

For Thou hast died for me:

Thy praise shall never, never fail

throughout eternity.

Matthew Bridges, 1800-94 and Godfrey Thring, 1823-1903