THE young Father lies in his vestments in the glass coffin. His stole is purple with the gold design of his beliefs braided into the fabric.
Beautiful people of India surround and cry uncontrollably.
Father Jerome, just 33, has taken his own life. No one can say why.
And, of course, Newry and Mourne doesn’t escape the great suffering of unexpected death. The caring man at the graveside told me, “the same thing happened to me last year. I lost my son”.
Another fought back tears as he spoke of his beautiful daughter and how she had died from a viral infection. He had brought her a present of sweets in the time just before death.
And a third said: “There are things we are simply not meant to understand, and I’m not talking about how the world began or where we end up after passing on.
“A young mother, dead, children left behind. It’s not meant to happen that way.”
“And then, in my mind, I hear the Prophet speak his truth from a place high behind the golden sun above the forest glade, words especially for grieving parents.
“Swallows are on the wing in the warmth of the afternoon.
“If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song.
“And if our hands should meet in another dream we shall build another tower in the sky.” Gibran.
We walk the road from home to chapel, a slowmoving band of the bereaved and of those who love them.
The muffled noise of shuffling feet falls from the breeze lightly on the ear. It’s a strange sound, soothing even, like the whispering of a great ocean rolling its wave up across the pebble shore. Softly.
Eleven and we stop at the chapel. Our bell sounds its sad welcome for our much-loved bundle of broken humanity now at ease, at rest.
And then, in harmony, the bell of the clock tower of the other church in the village, takes us through the moments of the 11 o’clock hour. One bell calls, the other answers.
We’re not so much a congregation but a community, shoulder to shoulder with the now broken and leftbehind.
So many faces are known to me, a family has gathered.
They walk to the communion cup and, like the pious in an Andalusian procession for the veneration of the Saint, they touch the hunched shoulder of a grieving father and move on past.
Touch after touch, nothing said, just the touch and they pass by to the altar and to the cup.
There is gentleness, love and friendship surrounding.
And, of course, the tears.