St Nicholas' Church, Gloucester

St Nicholas' Church, Gloucester, I was fortunate to enter. Normally locked and used for concerts, a rear door had been left open, and a kindly piano tuner, waiting for someone official, bade me enter and look about. An air on antiquity hung about the place, and well might it, seeing as it was built in the 1190s. The spire is rather peculiar, being described as ‘truncated’, as though it had been lopped short of its point. In 1643, it received a cannon ball and this is most likely the cause, along with eighteenth-century attempts to tidy it up a few generations later.

A couple of memorials attracted my attention. One, to a ‘Margarett the wife of Evan Seys’ dated back to 1651, a year approaching the height of puritan triumph. Leaving behind her husband and three children 'to fulfil their appointed time in this life’, it simply concludes with a final word: ‘Silence’. The family home, even a wealthy one which could afford such a fine memorial with its many servants, would now be characterised by quiet. Mistress Seys’ singing voice, chatter, admonishment or household management would no longer be heard. The dead are silenced.

The second appeared a few decades later, and is dated to 1717. It recalls the 23-year-old Rev Richard Green. It rather mysteriously claims that ‘the sermon preached at his funeral finished his ministry’, for ‘breaking a vein in Oxford finished his ministry’. Whether he caught some infection in his blood and died slowly, giving him the time to construct his own funeral sermon, seems unusual but not impossible. Curiously, the handsome memorial was attached to a part of the chancel wall upon which the thick black strokes of Reformation-era scriptural texts may still be seen in the gaps. So like Mistress Seys, Parson Green is also now silenced (regardless of whether his own words were heard at the funeral), yet God’s words in the painted text may still be read (just about) beneath.

Amidst our grief and sorrow, may we hear God’s voice in God’s word, for this is the greatest comfort we can ever receive when our loves ones are taken from us, when their silence would otherwise deafen.

Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: John 11:25

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