When I first heard of the cricketers death I had little idea who he was. For some this may be surprising since I’d been such a big cricket follower for most of my life and played the game obsessively through my teenage years. Perhaps it was the constant winning streak of the Waugh/Ponting era that led to my gradual boredom with the game. Following this our trinity of national treasures Gilchrist, McGrath and Warne retired with little promise of any replacements on the horizon. Plus I really detest the incessant invasion of advertising into every nook and cranny of the game. Sure there are still many cricket followers who know exactly who Phillip Hughes is. But this does not explain why the nation shares in a collective grief for the man’s shock death at the hands of a State Cricket game bouncer.

Why Phillip’s death is so close to the bone

When Princess Diana died suddenly millions of people grieved. I wasn’t one of them. But I regretted being so unempathetic to that collective grief. I wasn’t the only one, as I read this week of Malcolm Knox’s opinion piece in Saturday’s sports section or Sydney Morning Herald (Fear of Failure a Factor: players will find it tough to move on from Hughes’ death).  As he astutely noted,

‘The shared emotional response is not about the intrinsic qualities or achievements of the person who has died. It is about the fragility of life and the capacity of some events to knock us down not as individuals but as a community’

If Phillip Hughes had died in a car accident, the impact of his death would have been far less severe on the general populace. Because he was doing something that we identify as intrinsic to the Australian culture and way of life, his passing strikes much closer to the bone for many more people. Something simple, something that we just take the granted, something we believed never opposed any real threat has invaded our false sense of security and woke us up to our mortality.

A similar thing happens on a smaller scale whenever we have a shark attack. Every time someone gets killed in Western Australia by a shark, the water empties for a week or so. Then gradually people return, going about their usual habit of enjoying the Aussie way of life, in what is a spectacular part of the coastline.

Two ways to find comfort

There are two ways we can comfort ourselves.  The first I saw cartooned in my local rag. It was a drawing of Phillip Hughes looking lovingly and peacefully down from the clouds on the start of play of the first test. The players discuss how they can play on without Phillip. The answer is ‘he is still with us’.  Absent in grief are the cold comforts of atheism.  Instead we clock back to pre-Christian- Roman times where the deifying of self extends into the afterlife.

[caption id="attachment_474" align="aligncenter" width="599" caption="Not the one I was looking for but in a similar vein"][/caption]

The other solution is, in the wise words of Ecclesiastes 12:13:

‘Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgement’

Jesus saw the collective fear and grief in people’s faces when a tower collapsed killing many people in Siloam. Just as people were going about their lives doing what they normally love doing, a tragedy occurred shattering their false sense of security. Life is fragile. Life is a mist, one day it appears the next it is gone. So Jesus said, the tower is a warning that each one of us needs to be ready to give an account to God.

So who is Phillip Hughes? His family and friends know exactly who he is and we are not really sharing in that particular grief and loss. No, Phillip is you or me. An Australian going about doing what Australians do.

Each of us fail to live up to the whole duty of man, but Jesus, whose birth we celebrate every Christmas, lived as the perfect man in order to one day give up his life to bring us to God. In Him we have all the comfort we need.