Philip Carpenter RIP

Extract

Martha says to Jesus, ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ (Jn.II:21) Lazarus’ death breaks up a home, a family. The family of Mary and Martha and Lazarus was one of the places in which Jesus rested and refreshed himself, and it is a home that is broken by death and by the apparent absence of Jesus: ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died.’

Many of Philip’s friends will experience his death in much the same way. Whenever one came to see Philip, one was made to feel immediately at home; one was made welcome, as he put a large gin and tonic into one’s hand and one relaxed into a deep, comfortable chair. And he communicated a sense of the Church as a large open home, in which anyone could find acceptance, peace. A place where, as St.Paul said in the second reading no one would be despised.

Perhaps the roots of this vision of Christianity lay in his own sense of family. He was devoted to his family, to his brother, Gilbert, a priest of the Church of England, to his sister-in-law, to his nephews and nieces. His house was filled with family furniture and pictures of ancestors. And he shared this open hearth with all sorts of waifs and strays who came his way.

This was why he was such a good University chaplain for eleven years. He claimed that this saved him from being narrow and dogmatic; it opened his mind. But that was because he opened himself to anyone who turned up, and especially to foreign students, when he was based at the Overseas Students’ Chaplaincy from 1966 to 1973, before he came here.