In the midst of life, we are in death. Three Royal Marines, young men with everything to live for, were approached by a 13-year-old boy who was pushing a wheelbarrow. Seconds later, they were all reduced to flying body parts. One moment they were vibrantly alive, the next moment their lives were over. The human wreckage from the blast included the devastation visited upon their loved ones.

At the funeral of Damian Davies, a 27-year-old father from Shropshire, the padre of the commando training centre, said: "A pre-pubescent child is sent to his death with a barrow-load of explosives. That is wickedness. Damian was killed in this act of wickedness." Mr. Davies's widow, Joanne, and his 18-month-old son, Matthew, were among the congregation that filled the family's local parish church at the end of last week. The congregation heard that, while home on leave last month, Davies celebrated an early Christmas. Weeks after he returned to Afghanistan, his wife discovered she was expecting the couple's second child. The proud man delightedly told his colleagues about the happy event. Within days, his earthly life was over. Floral tributes at the funeral included the word "Daddy" and, from his wife, a note attached to the flowers read: "To my darling Mr. sexy husband man, you sleep tight now and I will see you again one day. Love always and forever, your Mrs. Princess Tinkerbell, Joanne. xxxx". She had already written in Facebook: "You are safe now and we will be thinking of you always. You were everything to me."

Too much information, perhaps, but the heartfelt, heartbroken note provides the merest glimpse into the extent of this family's profound loss. Their festive celebration of an impending new birth has morphed into tragedy in one unspeakable moment. And what of the catastrophe of a 13-year-old boy, turned by cold-eyed adults into an exploding angel of death?

Yet these events have, sadly, become commonplace, and every single one has a human back story of desperate loss. At least the deaths of the young British servicemen and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been recorded and publicly acknowledged, which is much more than can be said for the "collateral damage" of Iraqi civilian dead. Well, they don't really "count", do they? Meanwhile, women in Gaza and Jerusalem weep over their dead or disfigured young.

I want to make a wider point, though, as we approach this new year. Scotland's Hogmanay is a celebration with dark overtones. The season's exuberance is shadowed by something more emotionally disturbing. You don't have to be Proust to see that New Year involves remembrance of uneasy times past; recent and old losses and woundings haunt the feast. People who have pre-empted the midnight hour by looking into a glass, darkly, find submerged griefs resurfacing even as the cheerful bells ring in the new.

We are living in a time of cultural, as well as personal, bereavement. We sense the shaking of the old foundations. We have lost the old myth of perpetual progress, and the sense of control over our lives. We move into a new year with some foreboding, with a sense that the horsemen of the apocalypse are warming up.

Now if you've read thus far and had been intending to invite me to your Hogmanay party, your invitation will now almost certainly be withheld. After all, the last thing you need at your knees-up is a Scottish Presbyterian carrying a skull. I simply want to say two things. The first is that the only thing worse than counting the dead is not counting them. The second is that human - and perhaps divine? - relationships are what matter most. And within that sphere, hope is fundamental. The human spirit is unquenchable, and these yearnings are also present in the new year celebrations. We need poets to help us. Here's Seamus Heaney:

History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave,

But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme,
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.

Believe that a farther shore

Is reachable from here.

In the meantime, as other service widows have to do, Joanne Davies will, probably, bring up her young son and her yet unborn child in a way that would have made her brave husband proud. And sentient human beings - daring to believe that a farther shore is reachable from here - will continue to yearn and work for a sea-change which they hope will sweep away the deceit and injustices at the heart of so many lethal conflicts.

In the midst of death we are in life. Have a good new year.

RON FERGUSON is a former pastor and leader of The Iona Community now living on Orkney Island (Scotland) as a writer and broadcaster. The column first appeared in The Glasgow Herald and is used by permission.

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