June 3, 2016

A door of utterance (Col. 4.3).

8.00 am. An early morning email cull and blog broadcast, before a period of reflection and utterance prior to the challenges of the day. An hour later, I continued where I’d left off last night — updating the general website, as well as my professional presence on sites such as Academia and LinkedIn. The texts needed sharpening and my histories, brought up-to-date.

At 12.30 pm, I made ready to attend Bill Williams’s funeral at Holy Trinity Church, which is near the Edward Davies Building. There he’d worked tirelessly until his retirement in the 1980s. The eulogies revealed a humble man of private faith who’d excelled as a husband and widower, a father, a grandfather, a great-grandfather, a chemist, an educationalist, and a musician. There are so many perspectives to be had on a person’s life. As individuals, we can know another only ‘in part’. The complete portrait of Bill (and today we fitted together just a few more — albeit important — pieces) comprises, at the very least, the witness and testimony of everyone with whom he’d ever had meaningful contact during the course of nearly ten decades. But now he’s fully known, even as he, now, fully knows (1 Cor. 13.12):

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At the entrance to the reception, following the church service, there were photographs of Bill as a young man — here, in his role as an RAF training pilot during World War Two:

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A year ago, Bill informed me that he wanted to arrange a lunch at Llety Parc (where the reception was being held) for all his friends. He was intending to be present. Today, he fulfilled his ambition, in absentia. ‘Dad’s projects always came to pass’, one of his daughters told me. And this one was his last.

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At evening:

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I returned to the necessary mundanities of personal website updates. Ah! Too much of me, me, me. What I’ve attained professionally appears to get fainter and less fulfilling with every passing year. What was momentous becomes momentary. The things we make and say are mere shadows cast upon the wall, and then only until the sun goes down.

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June 4, 2016