Bishop of Clogher’s homily at the funeral of Jimmy Ellis
Full transcript of the Homily by The Rt Revd John McDowell, Bishop of Clogher given in St Mark’s Dundela:
You might well be asking yourselves (with some justification) what can this clergyman add to the words that have already been spoken. Spoken by people who knew Jimmy Ellis best and who loved him most.
And although it might not sound like a very promising start I want to begin with a few words written by a second century bishop. And the words are these:
‘The Glory of God is man fully alive.’ (Ireneaus of Lyon)
And that was my experience and the experience of so many of us here today of Jimmy Ellis. A man fully alive. Fully alive to himself and to those around him. Fully alive to both the majesty of human existence and to the tragedy of human experience.
Alive to great art and alive to the ordinary scramble of daily living and of putting bread on the table. Alive and open to the wisdom of the ages and also all too well aware of the great band of immensely successful chancers who lurk not far from the proscenium arches of life.
Many of us view the goings on of the world around us as though from a balcony; spectators for whom life and the universe are simply objects of study. Others, including Jimmy Ellis, experience life from the road … the place where life is tensely lived, where thought has its birth in conflict and concern, and where choices are made and carried out in the thick of it.
The last time I had a long conversation with Jimmy Ellis was at the funeral of John Hewitt. We were sitting at the counter in the upstairs lounge of the Morning Star in Pottinger’s entry. It doesn’t get much more ‘Belfast’ than that.
Those of you who were there may (or indeed may not) remember that there was a free bar, courtesy of John for the first couple of hours. I was sitting chatting to Jimmy for much of that time and he had some interesting observations to make about actors and free bars. However …
It was an unusual occasion, although we had a pretty long one– to– one conversation even in those circumstances, and it is amazing what ground you cover about life and belief and the profession. And it helped me to understand why Jimmy was such a very good actor.
He was of course professional to his fingertips. He had taken the trouble to learn the craft before he presumed to practise the art. He was not a contortionist or a plate spinner or a tap dancer. He was an actor. Someone who made words live and who breathed life into characters.
And it struck me quite forcibly that day that he was able to do this not just because of his careful professionalism, but because (and I borrow a phrase from the gospel reading) ‘he knew what was in men’s hearts’. He knew about the great paradoxes which life throw into our path.
We inherit greatness and we breathe it in. The beauty of a morning in Spring and the mist over the long wet bog. For Jimmy, the prodigious greatness of Verlaine or Rimbaud; of Shakespeare, and indeed of the whole of the literature of the West. Perhaps even the greatness of the shipyards where he was born and certainly the graciousness of the many human profoundly human encounters along the way.
But as the sun rises there is a rising cloud. In every human life there is a frail seam, an old wound, a tender sore. Even at the best of our endeavours we find ourselves halting in our stride. And achievement falters and the high becomes low and the hour is short and the brief candle is out and what is man that he is to be accounted of?
And the greatness of the soul sometimes seems clearer in the greatness of its misery than in the triumph of its powers.
Perhaps Jimmy was such a good actor and such a good companion because he had faced up to life. For Jimmy his life was not lived on the surface, nor was it a path of unbroken sunshine. He asked the questions and looked for the answers and had allowed the experience of living to deepen his humanity and not to stunt it.
I’m not even going to attempt to provide all the answers today, particularly the answer to so painful a thing as death and bereavement. And even if I had all the answers, the pain of loss would hurt just the same. Even if Icould explain the whole world, leaving nothing out andtying up all the loose ends,it wouldn’t save us from experiencing life as a confusing mixture of light and darkness.
God does not often give complete answers despite our craving for tidiness. Instead he gives us faith and hope and prayer and Resurrection.
But above all else He gives us a Son, in whose company, however slowly, the questions are fully answered.
So today Jimmy Ellis rests in the hands of the God whose answer to the pain and heartbreak of human existence is not in words but in an action. He simply bears them Himself.
That is the God in whose nearer presence now lies until the day of Resurrection when with Jimmy we shall all stand before those searching eyes.
I wonder is it too trite to say (I think I will say it anyway) that Jimmy has passed over the bridge for the last time. Passed over from the land of shadows into the great energy of light and love which beats at the heart of heaven.
+John Clogher
21 March 2014
St mark’s Dundela