It has been said that ‘The Church is the Fifth Gospel’ and in our services we sometimes feature an additional Gospel reading, from the Gospel of this Church.
On Easter Sunday 2025, we heard a reading from the Gospel of St Luke’s West Holloway, according to George Nelson.
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‘Wouldn’t it be a waste of all this life we live, if it ended when we die?’
‘Life and things in general.’
That is a quotation from Larry Hayworth, a radio broadcaster whose programme we used to listen to when I was growing up in Trinidad. ‘Life and things in general.’
I will be 88 on my next birthday and I have fewer years ahead than are past. I like company - and my son Terrence calls every day - but I am on my own a lot and so I tend to think about life and things in general.
I’ll give you an example: when I was young another child in the neighborhood died but I don’t remember thinking too much about it. Or being that sad. Did we think it was normal? Did we just carry on?
But in 2012 my dear wife Idalia died unexpectedly and that hit me very hard. Then in 2020 my daughter Janelle also died. She was a school teacher, working in Brent Cross and only in her forties. This loss was devastating.
I look around my home and see the many things she bought me and that makes me think about life and death more often. I begin to dwell on what life is all about. But in the morning I see a photo of my wife or my daughter and I say, ‘Well, a pleasant morning to you ladies.’
Life and things in general.
I tell myself: your mother died, your father died, your wife and your daughter, they also died, so what is happening now is that you are facing life as it really is. People who mean so much to us and then they are gone. Here today, gone tomorrow. I conclude that we should live this life so that we leave others with pleasant memories of our time here.
All through the ages, all of us people have been thinking that there is someone, somewhere greater than we are. My conclusion is that this is Nature. I say God is Nature. Look at the trees as I do and you have to conclude they are part of something greater than I am and that this is Nature itself.
We arrive in this flesh, in these bodies, and then we return to the ground and we become dust after a while. In time - after one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years - in time you can’t distinguish us because we have all been assimilated back into the soil from which we came.
In some mysterious way we are related to the plants and trees we see around us and we will in time go back into the earth and replenish it and come back again in ways we can’t explain. Who knows?
What I do know is that we are a lot more than we appear to be.
It was in 1971 that I landed at Heathrow from Trinidad. If it had been possible I would have run off that plane and got straight onto the next one going back home.
What a dismal looking place I thought. What am I doing here?
I was 34 at the time and I had come on a scholarship to study accountancy. Fortunately for me, no sooner had I visited the Trinidadian High Commission in London than I was off to study in Glasgow, where I would spend the next four years of my life.
Glasgow was so much prettier than London. I was single at the time and lived in the YMCA, going to college in the daytime and spending my evenings watching the news. On the news here I felt I could learn so much more about what was happening in the rest of the world.
But not just the news, also the Eurovision Song Contest.
I remember watching it one year with a room full of people at the YMCA, the year that Sweden won with a group called ABBA and a song called Waterloo.
I made good friendships in Glasgow but it was a condition of my scholarship that I had to return after graduating to work for the government at home.
While I was living in the UK I had been corresponding with Idalia, who I had known from home since my twenties. Idalia had come to the UK ahead of me, to study nursing, and at Glasgow airport, before returning, I proposed to her and she accepted.
We travelled to the United States to get married as my mother had moved, with my sister Pearl, to New York and in time we set up home in London. Not long after along came Terence, our son, and then Janelle, our daughter.
Our children went to a local catholic state school in north London because my wife had been raised Catholic.
Sometimes I would go with them to services at the Catholic Church but more often I would go to the Church of England as my home church was Holy Trinity Cathedral, the Anglican Cathedral in Port of Spain, capital of Trinidad and Tobago. That’s where I made my first communion.
I first came to St Luke’s in 1984 and in recent years I have been coming every Sunday.
The company I worked for in England was in social care, supporting families of children with special needs or with disabilities but it was not always easy as a black person arriving to live in England.
You observe behavioral patterns which are not necessarily in keeping with what you would expect or hope.
You school yourself that you're living in a world comprised of people of different characters, behaviour and passions.
Even when people's behavior towards you is less than ideal, you have to remind yourself that this is the world and your task is to navigate a way through.
When life is difficult I find saying the Lords Prayer very powerful - asking that our sins are forgiven as we forgive those who sin against us. We cannot withhold our forgiveness of others if we expect forgiveness for ourselves. This is a prayer that asks us to be generous and loving and kind in our forgiveness.
It is important to me to make the effort of getting to church on a Sunday. On the mornings when I wake up tired and may not want to do it, I think of going to church as a kind of penance - you are letting the Lord know that you are trying your best.
In recent times I have been asked to help distribute the communion, to hold a chalice as people receive the wine. This is a privilege as I never imagined I would be able to do this. It is also very helpful that a younger, stronger person, like David or Joe, stands with me to support me, just in case I wobble.
Life and things in general.
I love to spend time with my son Terrence, his wife Jeanette and my grandson Ethan and I think… wouldn’t it be a waste of all this life we live, if it ended when we die?
I have no idea in what form we will continue to live but I have faith and, as we say in church during the communion service, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.