In 2019, my mother died, and I chose two contrasting but complementary readings of poetry for her funeral (read by my now-also-departed friend Fr Jeff Engel). The first was Nothing Gold Can Stay, by Robert Frost:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
The second was an excerpt from Easter, by George Herbert:
Rise heart; thy lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delayes,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcinèd thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more just.
These reflect the twin realities of the present age: In the Frost, that we are and will return to dust; and in the Herbert, that Christ, made gold in the Resurrection, takes, lifts and transforms us with him. We are caught between the age of death and the age of life.
Yesterday I experienced this tension once again, when the cat my mother had adopted and loved died. Lucy was 16 and in increasing pain and discomfort from a complex assortment of health conditions. With hard tears, I had to let go of the beloved pet whose presence provided such a tangible connection to my late mom.
What comfort the words of St Paul from the letter to the Romans (8.18-21) give, assuring us that all creation is included in the redemption:
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
Without the two disparate realities, there is no gospel. We look at sin and death, and we can only conclude that nothing gold can stay. And yet in Jesus Christ, we are made gold of an everlasting kind.