My neighbour has just suffered two family deaths and therefore the anticipation of two funerals. ‘We don’t want anything religious. Just ‘All things bright and beautiful,’ she told me. I was sad to hear this denial of religious matters, as I so often do, that the funerals were not to have anything religious about them. It seems anything goes now, except religion. Maybe subconsciously people are afraid of it’s power. Contact with a living with God is a powerful thing
I went back home humming the words to myself, ‘All things bright and beautiful,’. Wait, as I thought about the words, written by Cecil Frances Alexander, I realised how religious they actually were. In the five verses it makes mention four times that ‘God made it all.’ Sounds religious to me! And the last line tells us ‘ How great is God Almighty who has made all things well. This hymn might have been written tor children but the words are a complete sermon in themselves.
Throughout the hymn there is reference to God’s creation ‘the pleasant summer sun’, ‘each little flower that opens,’ ‘the ripe fruits in the garden’, ‘the cold wind in the winter, You made them everyone.’
Like it or not my neighbour is going to get ‘religion’ at her funerals.