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In Memoriam The Revd Canon Ian Halliday Eve 1933 – 2023

Jesus Appears to Mary Magdalene

11 Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb 12 and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

13 They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?” John 20: 11-13

Mary: I am known – here is intimacy. God knows us and calls us by name.

One Movement of our service today is to remember- to say that Ian was really known to us.

To share memories of this larger than life gifted human being, who shared a loving and caring relationship with Shirley, with Susan, Andrew, Katherine, your families, the party of young people who walked beside him into the church   

Shirley you and Ian seemed to complement each other so completely.

The poet Rumi says:

When I heard my first love story

I started looking for you

Not realising how blind I was

Lovers don’t finally meet

They’re in each other all along

Some of Ian’s sermon notes and handwriting.

Ian Eve,

What a journey as a priest,

a Fish Hoek lad who sensed a calling

to serve his Lord.  

Curate at St Saviours,

the harsh wheat fields of Malmesbury,

the west uplands of Scotland’s

Dumfries and Galloway,

and the Scottish Episcopal Church,

residential Parow and St Margarets,

bustling St Saviours with its Schools,

the yachting seascape of Salcomb,

Devon and the Church of England

Christ Church Constantia

with its mountain slope vineyards.

The seacapes, landscapes and the

inscapes of Christian communities

especially here at naval St Francis

that shaped, and formed your ministry

and that of the lives of your young family

Ian you came as my second rector

I still a curate in training

you flung open the doors

of humanity with your laughter

smiling us into a team

open and trusting

allowing the tension of ourselves

to ease into our prayers and gatherings.

And where we messed up

crashing the parish car

and our words hurt others

you advised us go back

and to say I am sorry.

You took on young fiery –haired Donald Stephen

who could not put up with the rigors of his rector

welcomed him with warmth

and gave him space to grow into the priest

he was meant to be with his

deep spirituality and anarchic humour.

I was fascinated by your reading in early

Celtic and Saxon history

and your flowery handwriting

which created the ebb and flow of your sermon-

voice of a warm clarity that could rise powerfully

to invite us in, children and adults

to a God who was small enough

and present enough

to laugh with us at our quirks and love us –

a voice to inspire us to think beyond

the boundaries of our thoughts

and trust that a future is possible

despite the iron curtain of apartheid.

Your home harboured fugitives clandestinely

and brought people together across

the lines of their political placements.

Your voice was strong in synod forums

to create the new dioceses of the Cape

to streamline the Church for mission

to prepare clergy and people for its future.

Yours was an inclusive voice of the church

to invite people in first and then to assist them

with what they wanted the church to do for them

when they met you they met warmth

and not rules drawn in the mind to divide.

The churches where you served flourished.

And could you have served your God Ian

without Shirley beside you, behind you, before you?

To caringly guide and protect you

her humour and hockey-stick commonsense

filled your home and your life

Too often she worked during the day

to make a your family of girls, boy and labradors happen.

When clergy were poorly paid and times tough

you appeared to be such a loving and to-gether couple

for each other and your burgeoning family

In old age and confined by illness

you Ian read prodigiously and absorbed

the learning and thinking of grandchildren

spicing and challenging your ground of faith

with the new science of quantum and cosmology

When your body was weak, your mind was alive

with new ways of understanding and living your faith

What a legacy of priestly love and service, passion and discipline, dedication and humour, The Eucharistic Lord of all life fashioned in and through you for others!

Fare forward yachtsman

Some words of a poem by Ylva Eggehorn

Stand still in the Pain

Stand still in the pain,
Rooted in that in you which is light.
Let the sword go through you.
Maybe it’s not a sword at all.
Maybe it is a tuning fork.
You become a note.
You become the music
You always longed
To hear.
You didn’t know you were
A song

Stand still. Let yourself be found again in a new way. {Richard Rohr writing on prayer recently.

“For Jesus, prayer seems to be a matter of waiting in love, returning to love, and trusting that love is the bottom stream of reality. Prayer isn’t primarily words; it’s a place, an attitude, a stance, a way of facing life, its joys and crises.

This place of Standing Still is a place from which you can be found in a new way and emerge more courageous and human with a wisdom and understanding so many of our friends and family will need in the days ahead.}

Ultimately Resurrection reminds us that our life story is part of a greater story. Not just some of our stories but all of our stories. It tells us that our physicality is part of the eternal truth, and forever matters to God.

What matters in our lives is that we die to all the false selves/the masques that emerge in us to experience something of our true self, the self which overcomes greed, success and self- centredness – and which knows enough about our woundedness, and suffering, and hurt of ourselves and those around us.

The self that expands beyond ourselves.

St Paul says that there are three things that last forever – faith, hope and love. But the one that take us to the very centre of the being of God is Love.

The resurrection affirms that this true self, our deep soul, will continue its journey into God, into Love. Gerard Manley Hopkin’s calls this, “immortal Diamond.”

As in birth we emerge from an interior life

To a larger world of wonder

So in death

We emerge

“for a further union, a deeper communion”

Stand still. Wait in love family, friends for God to do God’s work of healing and wholeness in you, so that you can be found in a new way and carry Ian’s story, his knownness and connectedness with you into the future….

We bid you farewell Ian with the rhythms of that Celtic poet W B Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

Fare forward yachtsman

One comment on “In Memoriam The Revd Canon Ian Halliday Eve 1933 – 2023

  1. anncorry says:

    Wonderful words and pictures – I do remember him from ages ago

    Like

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