roots

There wasn't a huge crowd of people by the side of the grave today. Twenty at most, I'd have said.

It was out at Kirkliston, the cemetery right by the church. And the lady who'd died was a good 94, so most of her contemporaries were either dead themselves or not really up to the thing.

A cousin of the lady's son (her nephew, I suppose!) was speaking to me at the end. Appreciative of what I've said and how I'd managed to compress into my words the essence of the person that she'd been.

But informing me, in a casual sort of way, that the family had been there for 400 years and more. A settled sort of life, down who knows just how many generations of the clan. For all of them it's home.

It has to be. It's in the blood. It's in the genes. It's in the very air they daily breathe.

That sort of settled living over time allows the sort of roots that people need, creates, like few things else, a sense of real belonging.

I remember reading, a good few years back now, a book called Soil and Soul by Alastair McIintosh. I think it argues a similar thing - among a whole load else. The connections we make with the land on which we live. And the way we treat that land, of course, as well.

Those connections are largely lost in the context of city life. The land has been largely covered - with concrete and buildings and tar.

And the people are more transient. Moving around, not quite with no fixed abode in the legal sense - but at a deeper, truer level, that's the truth. No real fixed abode at all.

Not like the folk at Kirkliston! I'm learning a lot from them.

Not least because of the lack of genuine roots, the city's often now 'dysfunctional'. Detached from the land, and with little by way of real roots, the folk have kind of lost their basic bearings.

I was struck by that again when calling on the mother of the man who'd died last week. The young man, aged just 37 or so. And I was round to see his mother and his partner in the latter's home. Just down the road from here.

What a struggle to make life work. They're good and kindly folk. And my heart goes out to them, I have to say. I was there quite a while and we really had a good and easy time.

Relaxed and all-encompassing in terms of what we spoke about. And I tried to help them put down roots in ending with a prayer.

Because the roots we need are bound up with the Lord as with the land. The latter far more basically than often we assume.

The land is his, for one thing. The day-by-day expression of the Lord and all he is. Right in your face. As it were.

But as well as that, it's from the land, from the dust of the ground as it's put, that we derive. There's a very close connection that we have with what we stand on day by day. And one we ignore at our peril.

Which is pretty much what we've tended to do. At least in city life. We cover the land. Smother the 'mouth' of the 'herald' of God, so to speak.

We lose our bearings. And these two folk - lovely folk, I'm bound to say - these two folk, his mother and his partner these past months, I think they've sort of simply lost their bearings in their lives.

It's hard and it's sore at the best of times. Bereavement. It's harder when it's someone like your son, a very part of you.

And harder still when in the face of the gales of grief which blow across their hearts there are no roots. I think above all else I'm simply trying each day to give such people roots.