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