The book of life

Revelation 20.12 (NIV):

Another book was opened, which is the book of life.

My great-grandmother, Louisa Ellen Hird (née Thornton, and known as Nellie) was born in 1877. Her father owned the mill at Cottingley in West Yorkshire, and that was where she grew up.

Here she is with her sisters, the one on the far right.

I was lucky to have known her when I was a child, by which time she was the only one left of those sisters in the photograph.

My mother loved her dearly, and when I was a child I heard so much about her and her life, about my mother's childhood on the farm in the same village where Nellie Hird lived once she was married. Everything about the lives of my mother and her sisters, and my mother's mother, and her mother — Nellie — and Nellie's mother, Mary Gott, was so vivid to me, woven into my making as a person, my attitudes to life. Here is Mary Gott, my great-great-grandmother, sitting on the steps of their home at Cottingley with her daughters. Nellie is sitting next to her mother.

It was because my mother loved her family so much, and we spent our school holidays up in Yorkshire with them, and I heard so much about them, that they became part of me and I became part of them.

When I grew up and married, I had five daughters of my own, and sometimes I wonder if they will be known and loved and remembered, or if they and I will just be like waves on the sea that arise and are lost, indistinguishable from all the others, here for a moment then merged with the great ocean as if they had never existed.

In this video, my daughter Alice is playing the bodhran, and Grace is playing the piano, and Hebe (who you might not even notice if you don't have sharp eyes) is turning the pages of Grace's music for her, and singing alto.

I love that video. It catches a moment in time, a memory. Because not that many people know our Alice well. 

She is an artist, who makes the most beautiful things. Here's an icon she painted.

And another one.

Here's a stained glass panel she designed and made.

And another one (this one, of St Joseph, is in the enclosure with the Carmelites at Thicket Priory at Thorganby near York)

Here's a stone she cut and gilded..

Here's a panel she painted for an Orthodox Church (the one on the right. Her sister Hebe painted the one on the left).

They work together.

Something I love in the video where she's playing the bodhran (she also plays the hurdy-gurdy and the French horn and the guitar and the flute) is that it brings out something of her personality — is her stance (she is also a dancer) — and her strength; because there never was a brighter soul or more true and clear.

The thing is, Alice is a quiet person. Very few people know her at all, and even fewer know how funny she is and how original in her thinking, what extraordinary poetry she writes — a person who thinks outside the box and is full of surprises — and how pure and authentic is her faith. 

So I was thinking about how these people, these individual lives, these bright flashes of creation and personality, arise so vivid and then they go, like shooting stars, the gift of a moment, coming out of the darkness and back into it again.

Who is there to remember them, to catch and treasure what they were?

Alice is so very like my Auntie Jessie, my mother's sister, who was my godmother, and I remember her so clearly — she was gentle, she was funny, she was perceptive and kind.

Only a handful of people in the whole earth ever knew my Auntie Jessie or are left to remember her. And yet, she was lovely.

But there is this; these souls, so dear, so loved, with so bright and clear a radiance — their names are written in the book of life.

For life is eternal; and love is immortal; and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.

(Rossiter Raymond)