I was sent a link to this story and these stunning photos today. Three things about them made me weep. First, it brought back many memories of where I used to pastor in the Isle of Lewis. Although my congregation was based in the largest town on the island, I conducted and attended a number of funerals like this in the outlying villages looking out across the Atlantic to the USA. Second, it was the funeral of a young woman, Linda Norgrove, who died being “rescued” from kidnappers in Afghanistan. But the saddest news of all was that it was a humanist funeral. That’s extremely rare in what is one of the last bastions of Reformed Christianity in the UK. The fall landscape of that barren isle is beautifully bleak. The funeral is just bleak.