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It was announced yesterday that a family Bible is going to be put up for auction. In the front cover is written the year 1899, there’s a reference from the Book of Revelation and on the opposite page, in beautiful copperplate handwriting, is written “God is love”. So far, so ordinary. But the Bible is also inscribed with the name of its owner. Eleanor Rigby. Paul McCartney said that the name might have entered his subconscious as he and John Lennon met at a church fete in Woolton, Liverpool in 1957, and used to use the churchyard as a short cut where her gravestone is. Eleanor Rigby died in 1939, a month after war broke out, aged 44. Her life bears no direct relation to the Beatles’ hit song. But as soon as her name is mentioned, I can hear the song. McCartney’s scoring is brilliant; he uses violas and cellos which agitate under the heartache of the story. They’re the instruments that are most closely expressive of the human voice, and provide to my ears something of a chorus of protest that accompanies the sadness of this woman’s loneliness. And maybe it’s because I’ve done it myself, but I can also picture clearly in my mind, the fictitious Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear. The poignant statue of Eleanor Rigby, on Stanley Street in Liverpool, shows a woman sitting on a bench with a shopping bag at her side. She’s looking at a sparrow perched alongside her. Tourists are drawn to sit next to her but if social media is anything to go by, of course they sit with her but don’t look at her, in order to take their selfie. Perhaps the character Eleanor Rigby strikes such a chord with us because she touches our deepest fears; that we will be lost somehow to the world. In the song, McCartney supposed that at her funeral, “no one is saved”. A bleak moment at the graveside of a forgotten life. “God is Love”, wrote the real Eleanor Rigby in her Bible. The reality is that this utterly extravagant, overwhelming, unconditional divine love that pulses through the pages of Scripture, that is at the heart of Christ’s teaching, seems far away from many in a society that has never been better connected, but is full of lonely people. And so as well as hearing the isolation in this most evocative of popular songs, I also hear an agitation, urging me not to look away from the shattering loneliness that can consume a life, and, inspired by the Bible that bears her name, to do whatever I can to relieve it.