麻豆社

At the funeral of Fidel Castro this week, his brother Raul told the huge crowds that in accordance with his dying wish, there would be no statue, no memorial and no streets named after the former Cuban President.

And one of the lenses through which inevitably polarised commentators have been interpreting Castro鈥檚 legacy is the writing of George Orwell, who, in contrast, will be memorialised we learned this week by a statue outside the 麻豆社. Other public figures have expressed their views about memorials: under the Dome of St Paul鈥檚 Cathedral in London is written the only commemoration wanted by the architect Christopher Wren: visitors are often surprised to see that the person whose architecture still shapes much of central London today has a very simple grave, with no ornate headstone or bust. And under the Dome is written in Latin 鈥淩eader, if you require a monument, look around you鈥�. In contrast, the thoughts of Edith Cavell, Emmeline Pankhurst or Amy Winehouse about their statutes are not known: (and it has to be said there are many, many more men than women memorialised in this way in the public spaces of the UK).

For most of us, we might both struggle with and perhaps are curious about what will be left of us when we are gone. The dangers of hubris are clear, hauntingly expressed in Shelley鈥檚 poem about a vast ruined statue found in the desert, with trunkless legs and a shattered visage, while the lone and level sands stretch far away.

For Christians, Advent is a season to reflect on the big questions of life and legacy; the traditional themes for meditation are death, judgement, heaven and hell. Caught up in these themes are our own thoroughly human anxieties about what our lives mean, what effect we might have had on the world, what we will be leaving behind. Christian spirituality teaches us that everything in this life is penultimate. However solid and unshakeable it seems now, these buildings, this career, these achievements, are all penultimate, preparing us for a different reality, and an even deeper existence after death. However hard we try to make choices about how we are remembered and by whom, however much we might try to exert control over our legacy, personal or public, the truth is that we can鈥檛. What will remain of us in the end is what we have given of ourselves, expressed movingly in the lines of the Philip Larkin poem written on his stone memorial unveiled on Friday.

Our almost instinct almost true 鈥︹�︹��.What will survive of us is love

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