Preached at St Oswald’s, Widford
Psalm 121; 1 Corinthians 15.50–58
“Therefore, my beloved brethren … know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”
The life of St Oswald, on whose feast day we gather in this church dedicated to him, might easily be accounted a failure. He ruled Northumbria for nine years, before dying in battle aged just thirty-eight in the incessant wars between Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and Picts, themselves multiply factionalised, that disfigured these islands in the 7th Century. Providence decreed him a more important role than might be supposed from those bare facts – after his father’s death in war, he had spent his childhood in exile in the Kingdom of Dál Riata, home to the great monastery of Iona. In exile, he converted to Christianity, and full of fervour on his return to Northumbria, he granted the island of Lindisfarne to Bishop Aidan as the site of another monastery. That Holy Island had such a significant impact on Church history that Oswald’s cult spread deep into continental Europe. As far away as Slovenia, the town of Ožbalt is named for him.
The great Bard was wrong. The good that men do is often not interred with their bones – indeed, seeds sown in our earthly lives are often only ready to be harvested long after our deaths. We all admire the person who plants trees that will only reach maturity in the time of their great-grandchildren.
It is in that light that we should look at Caroline’s political career. She joined the Secretariat of the Conservative Group in the European Parliament in 1974, before being elected herself a decade later, serving in the European Parliament until 2009. For more than a third of a century, she served the British people and those of the whole continent, during a period of extraordinary change which saw the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Iron Curtain, the European Economic Community’s transformation into the European Union, and its expansion firstly to the newly democratic states of southern Europe, and then to the formerly Communist East – to Ožbalt in Slovenia, and well beyond.
Caroline developed significant expertise in environmental and public health matters, and was one of those British MEPs who made a serious contribution not only to the detailed legislative work of the European Parliament but to the construction of Europe – work of which she was immensely proud.