The Revd Robert Stanier writes:

THE Revd Sarah Eynstone, who was found dead in her home at Tring on 1 December, had been a senior student at Westcott House in 2005, when we were students together. She served her title in Hampstead, and left there to become a Minor Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral. Her years there encompassed the anxiety experienced by the Chapter when “Occupy” camped in the cathedral grounds. She had a pause from full-time work after St Paul’s, while she was researching a book, although she had permission to officiate, and served voluntarily as Associate Priest of St Saviour’s, Pimlico.

Sarah had to monitor herself physically, perhaps as a result of trauma received after she was in a motor accident in the week before she was due to take finals for her first degree. She was in a coma for several days.

She spoke about this experience, movingly and profoundly, in a piece on a CD released by Westcott House students of that era, Glimpses of God, in a meditation on Psalm 139. The person she asked to read out Psalm 139 on the CD, her fellow-student John Hughes, is also prematurely dead, killed in a motor accident in 2014 (Gazette, 11 July 2014).

Sarah was a calm, thoughtful priest, whose gentle tone could mask quite a steely core. She had a wry sense of humour, and could certainly laugh at herself and at the Church at times. Nevertheless, she communicated her sacramental spirituality with grace.

She had been licensed in Tring only as recently as six months ago. She will be greatly missed.