Spotlight on a Celtic blessing- 'from the end of my dear Dad's funeral'

debbiethrower0
May 31
2 min read

BRF's Press and Media Officer, Eley McAinsh, chose this prayer as 'the perfect words to say goodbye' when her father died during the pandemic. This month she highlighted the Celtic blessing from Holy Island when asked by Church Times to write the paper's Prayer For The Week column:

May you be free as the wind, as soft as sheep's wool,

and straight as an arrow, that you may journey into the heart of God.

Amen.

'The words were suggested by a rector friend,' Eley writes, 'and they were perfect.' She and her sisters were at the end of a 'tough, often heart-breaking seven years' which her father Ken had borne with 'extraordinary grace and dignity.' What she had wanted most for him was freedom, comfort and homecoming which was why the words of the Holy Island prayer resonated so strongly.

Eley recounts poignantly how the Covid restrictions meant that after March 2020 the family could no longer see their father in his care home. 'Increasingly locked in the fog of Alzheimer's, he gradually became frail. Susceptible to falls, he broke a hip, and then fractured a disc. We longed to wrap him in lambswool for comfort and safety.'

It was not long before he contracted Covid himself. The family were calling him every day, 'but it was heart-breaking thinking of him alone in his room, feeling confused and abandoned.'

The article pays tribute to the staff for going above and beyond in those weeks as they struggled to look after vulnerable people in their care, while 'worried for their own families, endlessly torn, stressed and afraid.' For the last three nights of his life a carer phoned each of his closest relatives in turn and held the phone to Ken's ear 'so that we could say goodnight'.

He died on April 21, 2020. If they had known then what they know now, she writes, 'we would have pummelled the locked doors... until they let us in to be with him.'

The article brings into sharp focus what so many families experienced during the pandemic's enforced separations and the memories that are still vivid today.

Eley takes comfort from the blessing, as well as her father's favourite verses from St Matthew's gospel, chapter 11: 'Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' 'Jesus's promise echoes in the prayer with which we sent dad home, into the very heart of God: the ultimate and eternal embrace.'

You may read her full article, available online here.