Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 16th February 2025

Dear Friends,

My moderate Christian upbringing gave me a solid moral basis for living for which I am deeply grateful. Included in this, however, was the scary prospect of judgement when I die, allowing three options for future travel.

Apparently, if I had been less than saint-like I would need to spend a period of time in purgatory; the length of stay presumably dependent on the quantity and quality of my misdemeanours. If I had been seriously transgressive I stood a good chance of going to hell. On the other hand, if I had led a perfect and sin-free life I would be ushered directly into heaven. I doubt if many clergy hold true to this pre-enlightenment teaching but I am not aware of an alternative narrative within the church.

Luckily, the idea of what happens in the afterlife did not often need to come into my thoughts when I was younger (although I was aware of it in the background as a subconscious form of control), but it cannot be put off forever. The grim reaper is not directly in my eye-line at this precise moment but my sight is not what it once was so I feel a need to have a rethink.

My present imagining of what follows our demise is very different from that of my youth. I suspect all of us who use silence as a spiritual practice, in whatever way we do so, will have experienced the sense of love and peace which can infuse our being when we get beyond the chattering mind, the ego.

This chattering mind, this ego, is surely also what nature lets go of as part of the dying process. It is my fervent hope that freedom from this surface consciousness releases us into the deeper awareness we experience to varying degrees in our contemplative prayer or meditation. It is a peace we can merely glimpse whilst we live but perhaps, and it is perhaps with a capital P, it is what we know fully only when we leave our earthly body. It almost sounds like something worth looking forward to instead of fearing.

Advices and Queries urges us to “think it possible we may be mistaken”, so it may turn out that heaven, hell and purgatory do indeed exist or, alternatively, that death is just the end, a full stop.  I hope, however, that my concept is nearer to the truth, that at the time of our departing this world we are enfolded in the embrace of a warm, all loving, all forgiving, divine presence and know a true, deep and bottomless peace of which we can scarcely conceive.

Judy Lee

on behalf of the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (Patricia Cockrell, David Hitchin, Sharon Krummel, Tim Pitt-Payne, Caroline Pybus, Theresa Samms)