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PETER W. BOCOCK
November 20, 2007
This past Sunday during the 11:00 service, there was a moment of painful and audible silence that grabbed the St. Thomas' community by the scruffs of our necks. In this moment the absence of Peter Bocock was heard. When the bread has been elevated and torn in half and we recognize the gifts that God has blessed us with, it was at this point Sunday after Sunday, Holy Communion after Holy Communion, suspended in the air along with the bread was the audible gasp, the release of breath, the sigh of the lover for his love, Peter's gasp in response for how dearly our courteous Lord loved Peter. "For me he died", he once said to me...can you really believe that? Yes, Peter, I can and do believe that, he died for poor sorts such as you and me and the rest of the rag-tag communities of faith all over this world who can make such a mess of things and thank God, we keep trying over and over again, to get it right! And indeed, Peter had the temerity and courage to continue to try, over and over again, to get it right!
Peter Bocock lived a long-ish life, though not long enough for us. He was a product of British Boarding School and later Oxford where he learned to love learning. It was at Oxford that Peter met Vicki. They were married and had two children-Peirs & Claudia. Peter was hired by the World Bank, embellished his flair for politics and friendships of long duration. Listen to this glimpse of one friendship, in a note sent in response to learning that Peter died:
We first met over 47 years ago when we went up to Magdalen in October 1960... He asked me round for a drink in his room, and we were friends from that moment onwards. As a demy (scholar) he had a better room than I had, and I blush now to think of the hospitality he unstintingly dispensed with feeble reciprocation on my part.
We played bridge and poker, went to concerts, the theatre and opera, dined out and of course put the world to rights with others far into the night. We were both reading PPE and were two of the three in our year in Magdalen who, for prelims, did symbolic logic with an eccentric don, who had us in stitches of laughter which we vainly tried to conceal. All these memories come flooding back, and, although of course I never again saw so much of Peter, every time we met we took up exactly where we had left off. He was an extraordinarily able man, endlessly kind and generous, who did not treat himself with the same kindness he showed to others. He was hard on himself both emotionally and physically, but through it all he remained the same marvellous human being. We will all miss him appallingly, but he will surely now, with all restraints left behind, go from strength to strength.
Strength to strength is one best way to honor those we cherish. And Peter was/is cherished. His curiosity was unquenchable. One of my favorite memories of Peter was his participation in a small group this past Lent that gathered to read about the earliest church mothers and fathers and what they still have to teach us about prayer. Peter was struck not just by their piety - though that did have a strong resonance with Peter's own deep spirituality - but by the authenticity and honesty with which they lived. It was during this class that Peter decided he needed to make his confession. Not only did Peter make his confession, he produced a 10 page preparation paper he insisted I read and comment on before we ever sat together in sacramental intimacy mutually baring ourselves before God-beloved. Peter was a fine churchman, and The Episcopal Church provided the frame from which Peter could find his fit in life. I think it was the nakedness with which he lived his faith that drew our younger members to Peter. They found themselves awed by his love of our church, the liturgy, the smells and bells kind of worship and the greatness of Anglican music...his bowing and dipping and even prostrating in front of our Lenten cross. That a grown man would lie themselves down in the aisle in front of the cross, for all to witness unnerved most of us...and yet, it was Peter in full dressed -up- in- flesh- piety!
And that voice! We probably could have increased weekly attendance here at St. Thomas' Parish simply by having Peter serve as a lector, reading lessons from Scripture, every Sunday, rather than just regularly. Peter's voice spoke not just from a different place, "across the pond," as he sometimes put it, but from a different time, transporting us into a cultural world that we did not share, and back into the historical time-line of stories he read from the biblical texts.
Peter was fond of showing off just a wee bit by being able to recite virtually the entire text of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" from memory. There was a line from the "Four Quartets" for every occasion, as the line from "Burnt Norton" where Eliot writes of "time past and time future, what might have been and what has been" - all those memories and dreams that came true and sometimes did not in Peter's life, but which made up the man we knew and loved and admired. "At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; ... there the dance is, ... Where past and future are gathered. ... Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance." None of his friends had to see more than the twinkle in his eye, the moment his face would come together in an all-encompassing smile, to know that inside Peter was "the dance" of life that he shared with us.
It was perhaps Eliot's lines from "East Coker" that Peter recalled when he read of the desert fathers and mothers and their appreciation for the virtue of humility - not humiliation of oneself, but the holding back of enough of one's own desires that there is space for those of another. Eliot put it like this:
"Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
And indeed in the unassuming person who was Peter, humility was endless, for there was endless room in his world to invite all sorts of others in as well. For example, in Peter's last months with us, he took on a new role as part of the Inclusion Committee - he rediscovered the joy of being host to newcomers and bearer of hospitality on behalf of us all...holding our doors wide open for ‘the newest stranger' to be embraced and encountered by God!
Peter had known enough of the hardness and disappointment of life, and he was too well aware of his own failings, ever to be naïve and cheaply optimistic. His saint, Eliot, wrote for him the words:
"I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing."
Life for Peter was always whole, and rich, and sometimes broken, and always waiting in courageous hope. And his life wasn't finished when it was unexpectedly over. So perhaps it is fitting not to conclude these words of goodbye with something from the end of Peter's favorite Eliot poem, but from the middle where the second of the four quartets takes pause with the words:
"Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."
Peter, we thank you for the dance. We miss you and give thanks for your final Amen among us.
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