Children, I begin today with a story about a park—St James Park in central London. A Welshman, R.S. Thomas, wrote a poem about his visit there. While walking around the park, he thought about life; and he invites all of us—children, teenagers and adults—to think about our lives.

In the poem, R.S. Thomas writes:

I am invited to enter these gardens
As one of the public, and to conduct myself
In accordance with the regulations;
To keep off the grass and sample flowers
Without touching them; to admire birds
That have been seduced from wildness by
Bread they are pelted with.
                                          I am not one
Of the public; I have come a long way
To realise it. Under the sun’s
Feathers are sinews of stone,
The curved claws.
                                I think of a Welsh hill
That is without fencing, and the men,
Bosworth blind, who left the heather
And the high pastures of the heart. I fumble
In the pocket’s emptiness; my ticket
Was in two pieces. I kept half.”

For me, a key line is “I am not one of the public; I have come a long way to realise it.” In other words, like R. S. Thomas, we are not people of the world who are supposed to live “in accordance with the regulations” and demands of the world. We are Orthodox Christians who together “have come a long way” in our understanding not only of nature, but of ourselves, of other people and of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The story from today’s Gospel of St Luke, chapter 7, is about a widow whose only son has just died. Jesus meets the funeral procession coming out of a city called Nain, in Palestine, and “when the Lord saw [the widow] He had compassion on her and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’ And He came and touched the bier [that is, the stand on which the dead man had been placed] . . . And He said, ‘Young man, I say to you, arise.’ And the dead man sat up, and began to speak.” Last week, a widow whose husband died nearly two years ago, said to me, “I think God looks after widows especially.” I agreed, but you know, God looks after each of us especially—children, single adults, married adults, divorced adults, widow, widowers—whoever we are, God looks after us.

At times in our lives, each of us are likely to be in the same situation as the widow of Nain—a person we love will die and we will mourn. Jesus Himself, was the only child of Holy Mary, the Theotokos, the Mother of God; and she deeply mourned His death when she stood at the foot of the cross and for many years thereafter. The fifth century Patriarch, St Cyril of Alexandria, has written of this Gospel passage:

The dead man was being buried, and many friends were conducting him to his tomb. Christ, the life and resurrection, meets him there [in the funeral procession] . . . Christ is the One in whom we live and move and are. He is [the One] who has restored [humanity] to that which it originally was and has set [us] free . . . from the bonds of death. He had mercy upon the woman, and that her tears might be stopped, He commanded saying, ‘Weep not.’ Immediately the cause of her weeping was done away.

St Cyril of Alexandria points out that Christ not only said a word but also touched the bier; and St Cyril asks:

“What is more powerful than the Word of God? Why then did [Christ] not work the miracle by only a word but also touched the bier? It was (answers St Cyril) that you might learn that … the flesh of the almighty Word is the body of life and was clothed with His might. . . . The flesh of Christ also has the power of giving life and [destroys completely] the influence of death and corruption because it is the flesh of the Word, who gives life to all. May our Lord Jesus Christ also touch us…. [that] He may unite us to the assemblies of the saints.

In other words, St Cyril is reminding us that receiving Holy Communion today has the power to unite us now to Christ and to the saints—to comfort any sadness within us and to bring alive any parts of our personalities that are dead.

R.S. Thomas called that poem I read earlier, “A Welshman in St James Park.” Clearly, Thomas was writing about the beauty of the natural world without human intervention. Also, with the phrase, that the men of Wales were “Bosworth blind,” the poet is referring to the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, when Henry Tudor marched through Wales, gathering many Welshman to fight Richard III, so that battle can rightly be seen not only as a victory for Henry and the beginning of the House of Tudor but also as a victory for Wales over England. Poetry, like life, has meaning on many different levels. When Thomas writes of how the men of Wales left behind “the high pastures of the heart,” he is writing of the loved ones left behind to fight in the War of the Roses. However, for me, R.S. Thomas, a priest in the Anglican Church in Wales, is writing not only of the beauty of the natural world, of the possibility that Wales can become free from English control, and of human love, but also of my life as a Christian.

When I receive Holy Communion, I let Christ come into what R.S. Thomas has called “the high pastures of the heart.” That deeper and deeper relationship with Christ only happens fully for me, if I pray and reflect on my life and how my life is linked to the salvation that Christ brings to me and to each of us. Thomas reached into “the emptiness” of his pocket and found that his “ticket was in two pieces” and that he had “kept half.” My life is certainly not empty, but I may not yet fully understand the gift of life in Christ of which Father Gregory was speaking to the children last week. My experience of life, and perhaps yours, is in two parts that need to be joined together: on one hand, an awareness of the world and its problems and our own problems, but, on the other hand, there is the experience of the love we share with each other and the love that Christ offers to each of us. When we receive Holy Communion, as St Cyril of Alexandria has reminded us, we join ourselves to both the Word and the flesh of Christ, leaving behind the problems of the world and the stresses of our own lives.