“A rolling stone gathers no moss”.   Aubrey was no rolling stone and so gathered lots of moss which is why so many of us are here to-day – we and many others are his moss.
 
I  knew Aubrey for slightly less than 10 of his 92 years – many of you will go back much further than that.   Some of you may have voted for him(or voted against him!) in the 1950 election.   Some of you may have been around, indeed possibly present, for his institution as Vicar of Feering.   All of you will in some ways have been touched by him in his life as a man and in his ministry as a priest.

 As I thought about what I wanted to say this morning I found myself thinking of Aubrey as a small boy, even as a baby.   T.S. Eliot said ‘In our beginning is our end.’ and in recent years when I came to see him I felt I was meeting a rather mischievous, though very intelligent, small boy, as he looked at me wide-eyed through his spectacles.

Aubrey’s father was killed in the first weeks of the First World War, when Aubrey must have been about three, and he was brought up by his grandparents.   I wonder whether it was then that Aubrey, in the face of what must have been a rather disturbed period of his childhood, began to discover the reality of the love and goodness of God, which seems to have been so central to his life, and more so in these later years.

That wide-eyed look that he would give me seemed to express wonder that everything was so extraordinary, so filled with mystery and meaning – cows, flowers, geese, huggable Harry, parishioners, friends, Holy Communion, a Baptism or a Confirmation, Feering Church with its roots deep in Essex history – all was charged with the fullness of God’s presence, and Aubrey had the gift of seeing it and of helping us to see it too.

It is the child Aubrey who keeps peeping through the adult Aubrey – he could be quite naughty, mischievous, sometimes even (and I am sure the churchwardens and others who dealt with him regularly could see this) sometimes even quite obstinate, even autocratic.   And there was a tenaciousness about him, which meant he often got his own way.

This church building benefited from that tenaciousness for he fought battles for it and indeed occasionally (I’m sure quite innocently!) went beyond diocesan rules for it.   He was determined to leave this church in good, beautiful and dignified order, a place worthy of God and worthy of the people and village of Feering – with a strong future.

There was something very youthful about him  even in old age (perhaps it is this that that made him able to communicate well with children) – the twinkle in his eye, his gentle sometimes wicked humour, his quite original ideas, his delight in curiosities of all sorts, and that sense of wonder.

But he was also old-fashioned, and I don’t think he would be offended to be called that – it doesn’t mean out of touch.   A year or so ago he surprised me by sending me a copy of David Jenkins’ (former Bishop of Durham) autobiography “Call of the Cuckoo” which he had read and liked – not such an old-fashioned thing to do!

But he was old-fashioned in his concept of what a parish priest should be and what the world was meant to be.   He belonged to a gentler, quieter, slower world of courtesy and consideration in which people did their duty and where people took responsibility for each other and for the community – everybody, rich and poor, had a part to play and everybody counted.   The parish priest’s job was to reflect this and hold things together when there was a dispute or difference of interest and to make sure the less important people were not excluded and the more important were not oppressive or proud.

He himself saw his place as Vicar as a way of life not a job and I remember that when we first met he told me quite firmly that he did not believe clergy should retire and that he had no plans to do so – he would go on to the end as clergy used to do.   He nearly made it – indeed by staying in his Vicarage there is a sense in which he did make it – but infirmity did incapacitate him so that he realized that he could not go on doing the work that being Vicar involved.   In a sense he stood down without really retiring.

David Reynish, his successor, has said that we shall not see a ministry of this length or character again, and it is probably right that that should be so for the world has changed and the church has changed and the role of the parish priest has changed for all sorts of good reasons.   But it has been good while it lasted and Aubrey has been a sort of personification of a rural Church of England that has contributed deeply to the character and life of this county and country.

When I heard that Aubrey had died I felt a sense of relief and of the rightness of it – I am glad he does not have to face further discomfort and indignity.   Together with all of you I thank God for him and for all that I have received through him – many of you will miss him very much for he has been an important part of your lives, especially for those of you who have cared for him in these last few years and months of his life.   This of course includes his nurses, Graham, who has been for so long a tower of strength to him, and his many friends who have occasionally or frequently visited, encouraged, fed him, or generally helped – enabling him to stay in his own home.

A landmark in Essex has gone, though the memory will remain and strengthen people for a long time to come.   We commend Aubrey with thanksgiving into the hands of his God and our God, the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who throughout his life and ministry Aubrey has served faithfully and well and who has in turn blessed Aubrey greatly to the benefit of us all.   Amen