HOMILY AT THE REQUIEM OF BASIL GARSED 08.01.2015
First, our very real thanks to Tom Garsed for his masterful summary of Basil’s life in under ten minutes. You can see why he is doing so well in the packaging business! My task is to reflect on Basil as a man of faith, a stalwart member of the Church in a huge range of roles from parish financial adviser to Eucharistic minister and member of the choir. But I want to suggest that his life experience really does take us to the heart of what it means to be disciple of Jesus Christ.
And in the time that I have, I am going to focus on one of Basil’s recurring questions: what is life about?
In one sense, Basil’s choice of readings for today takes us very firmly in one particular direction: who can know the intentions of God Martin read for us; who can divine the will of the Lord? It is hard enough to work out what is on earth; who then can discover what is in the heavens? So, prays the philosopher: send down your wisdom from above by the power of the Holy Spirit. Men have been taught what pleases you – by wisdom. I think all of us can attest to Basil’s wisdom and wise judgement in any number of ways.
But was ‘wisdom’ to be enough? For, despite his willing, hugely loyal and generous support of the Church from his school days at Our Lady of the Rosary in Staines, to his parish links in Birmingham, his connections with Ealing Abbey and here at Sacred Heart, Garry’s illness in 1993 proved to be testing beyond anyone’s imagination, not least towards the very end of those eight years of self-less, devoted care when she was barely able to recognise him. Of course the gardening helped: it was his sanctuary and the means of keeping his sanity but the struggle was legion.
After she died, it was hardly surprising that Basil crumpled. He found it difficult to get up out of bed and all that legendary smartness and self-discipline collapsed under the strain. Even Guy (his devoted Jack Russell) needed to be walked by others!
What was the point of getting up and going places? His spirit and his caring had been exhausted – and, for the moment, his encyclopaedic knowledge, his skill at the Bridge table and his delight in music, art and the lives of others, “his wisdom”, had deserted him. The intellectual resources that had held him in such good stead could not sustain him any longer. He had shown throughout his life all the virtues described in the letter of James which Jo has just read. He was a peacemaker, a creative mind, a person of the deepest integrity. But right now, they couldn’t help.
When all fell apart in his life, the prophet Elijah went up into the hill country and heard God asking him why he was so out of sorts? Elijah’s response was the story of just how lonely he felt.
As you will recall, God didn’t lecture him about his mistakes or try to reason with him; he simply came alongside Elijah – in the form of a still small voice, the one-to-one warmth of someone who says: this isn’t the time for extra knowledge or rational argument: you need someone to be with you. Here I am.
It was a similar kind of experience that another TrinityCollegeOxford man, John Henry Newman, experienced, becalmed in the Mediterranean, somewhere off Sicily. Basil loved his association with Trinity and he was very proud of the Newman connection. The hymn, Lead kindly light, amid the encircling gloom, was Newman’s Elijah-experience. What was he to do when his Church seemed not to be offering the answers he sought? And his realisation, as we shall sing in today’s second communion hymn was simply to pray: Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see the distant scene: one step enough for me.
Keep thou my feet is, of course, a plea that God would guide him with the same compassion certainty that God reassured Isaiah. For underneath it was the same for Elijah, for John Newman and for Basil Garsed: all of them experienced that inner heart-ache and each of them needed someone to love them out of the depths in which they found themselves.
For Newman, now a Roman Catholic, the answer came in the way his new friends helped him to produce the wonderful 1870 Essay, the Grammar of Assent. Here he talks about the difference between just a notional, intellectual ‘there is a God but I don’t have to do much about him’ kind of faith – and the full hearted, real assent that comes when we fall in love with God and know in our heart and hearts that he loves us and wants us to thrive. That is what Newman’s terribly difficult journey of faith had taught him and all the crises along the way made him more sure that fixed opinions were worthless unless he was engaged, heart and soul, with what God had in mind.
And Garry’s tragic illness and his hitting rock bottom was the catalyst for Basil’s transformation too. Grim though this crisis was, the support of the Sharps Lane community, the support of his burgeoning family and then his meeting with Alice Ryan and the events of these last ten years, have been the wonderful flowering of a new Basil. Nothing from the past was lost – nothing regretted, nothing thrown away. Instead it has been the time when his talents and abilities have been restored to him like a contemporary Job, restored - and expanded. New insights have emerged alongside a new tolerance, a new diversity (even politically!), a broader vision … and of course a new audience for all his stories!!
In his writings, Cardinal Newman talked about illative faith – the ability to judge issues not just from logic and reason, but through a proper consideration of every relevant factor – including love. How wise he was.
For that is surely what Christianity is all about: revealing over and over again that dogma and principle have their place but they are always secondary to love: so not for nothing Basil chose this Gospel text for us: This is my commandment said Jesus, that you love one another as I have loved you.
In his final days, holding the hands of all those whom he loved to the uttermost, listening to Elgar and Rachmaninov who show us how our feelings are often beyond words, Basil Garsed slipped into the closer presence of God, showing us that we will all be tested in life – sometimes beyond what we think we can bear.
But the purpose of these crises is always to strip away our self-reliance on our own abilities, our own limited knowledge and our feeble grip on human wisdom - and to replace it with an openness to God’s wisdom, the wisdom that is always mediated through the love of other people.
So to return to where we started: what is life all about? We have come here today to celebrate the life of Basil Garsed, that most talented of ‘gentle-men’. But most of all we have come to give thanks for this most generous of people whose life has revealed so wonderfully the way in which Christ sustains us in our moments of need: Christ doth call one and all: ye who follow shall not fall.
With Basil we pray, in the words of one of his other favourite hymns, which we sang together last night:
Drop thy still dews of quietness, till all our strivings cease;
take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace, the beauty of thy peace.
May Basil Garsed rest in peace and rise in glory. Amen.