All Saints’ Church,
Southern Shores
June 3, 2013
Thomas E Wilson, Rector
Proverbs 31:10-31 (KJV) 23rd Psalm (KJV) 1 John 3:1-2 John 11: 21-27(KJV)
The children
picked the Hebrew Testament lesson from Proverbs because they knew
Joan as a mother and helpmate with their father. Her husband Gale
dedicated one of his books to her and made note of her help in other
forwards. It is a beautiful passage and speaks of their love and
thankfulness. When I thin k of Joan I don't just tonk of a mother but
about this woman of strength of one of the lines from the Proverbs
lesson about “She girdeth her loins with strength, and
strengtheneth her arms.”, because Joan is a woman who just sucks it
up and goes on.
When I
think of Joan I look to the passage of John's First Epistle and am
reminded that Joan is in a relationship with God as God's child, and
the Christ within her resonates with the image of Jesus and his
relationship with two friends in trouble. For Joan, relationship is
important, and a passage from Micah comes to my mind: “He has told
you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your
God?” And that is what she did. The Christ living in her gives her
the strength to meet and honor the Christ in others.
I am new to Joan's life as I have only
known her for about 10 years. Her husband had died the year before I
came, and she was making her life without Gale. I was impressed by
her strength and her compassion. So many of you know her better than
I, as you knew her as mother, or aunt, or grandmother, or friend, but
the majority of our conversations were as two old MSW Social Workers
comparing notes on the way we had worked with institutions, people
and children. We would bemoan the great cultural and political
degeneration that we saw and about which her late husband had
written. She would talk about her trips and the wonder of seeing
something new. She is a joy to talk with and to hear her laugh at our
own foolishness and to see her walk in humility about her
accomplishments.
When I left town for a conference two
weeks ago, I went to see the people who were in fragile health,
making them promise not to die while I was out of town. I never
thought to check on Joan because she always declared that she was
“fine”, and I assumed, such was her energy, that she would live
forever, even though she and I together both ate more than the
government recommended nutritional levels at Captain Franks, but I
continued to hold on to the fantasy that we all have plenty of time.
When I speak of Joan I tend to use the
present tense for, as with most of my friends who have died, I see
us all connected together by a luminous silver thread on the great
river of energy that begins and ends in God. I don't see Heaven as a
place of reward high up in the sky when we die, but as the reality of
the presence of God in which we live, move, and have our being from
before we were born in the water of the womb and out of which we
flowed, joining the streams in which other swimmers of life joined
us. For a while we swam together in the eddies of that river but each
at a different current and, while seemingly separated for a time, we
all wash into the ocean of love out of which we had entered into the
womb. As T.S. Eliot notes in Little Giddings from the Four
Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of
all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the
place for the first time.”
She would work as a volunteer in the
church office, and she would bring her books to read as she answered
the phone or was there in case I did counseling with a woman. She
understood the need for confidentiality and, although she never saw
the need to talk about dealing with any problems, she had compassion
and hospitality for those people who limped in from the brokenness of
life. She would make derogatory sounds about how unimportant her
volunteer work at the church was, but she took it seriously, even
when she refused to take herself too seriously. There are a series of
promises from the Baptismal covenant in the Book of Common Prayer and
the last two, which she exemplified, are: “Will you seek and serve
Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” And “Will
you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the
dignity of every human being?” This is how she treated the people
she met who come in to see me. That dignity is how she treated her
friends and her clients.
We can train or educate Social Workers,
but all we do there is to turn out technicians because, at its core,
it is an art not a science, and the best ones are the ones who are
born with a passion and love for people. She knew that at the center
of the helping relationship is the Trinity of Reality, Empathy and
Support. It is a Trinity because if any one element is missing the
whole thing collapses. Reality without Empathy is harsh, Empathy
without Support degenerates into pity, Support without Reality is
enabling. We call the Helping Relationship the “Trinity” because
it is one of the ways we understand the Holy Trinity. God is
relationship: The Father is the one who created the universe and the
ground of our being- Reality; the Son is the one who entered into and
understood our lives – Empathy; and the Spirit is the power
available to us – Support.
If you want to remember Joan, you can
make a donation to the National MS Society, but if we really want to
Re-Member Joan, to bring to life again the essence of Joan which did
God's work, then do what she did: “do justice, and love mercy, and
walk humbly with your God”. And when you do that, you will hear
her wondrous laugh and you will know she is still working through
you.
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