A Homily at a Memorial Service for Thomas Reid
Blocher All Saints’,
Southern Shores
June 5, 2013 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
The first reading for today is the same reading that
Jesus used when he began his ministry, and it became the Icon of what he was to
do for the rest of his life - “to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up
the broken hearted and proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners”.
This is what we are doing today. This is the reason we are gathered together as
we remember Tom. This is a moment when past, present, and future all collapse
in on each other and live in the same moment, which is both a religious thought
and in line with Quantum Physics. Einstein wrote to the family of a friend who
had died, “Now he has departed from
this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us,
who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and
future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Tom was a man who loved and was loved, but he was
also a captive and held prisoner by his addiction and, in the process, broke
many hearts and left oppression in his wake. We come together to tell stories
about how he could love and also to ask for strength from a power greater than
ourselves, what Isaiah and Jesus called the Spirit of the LORD, so that we
might set ourselves free from the shackles of resentment and rejoice that he
finally is at peace.
As you
have heard Tom came
early to the Outer Banks and came back to grow with it, being on the edge of
the land facing the ocean kept drawing him here. Living here on
the Outer Banks, we find metaphors for life journeys in water images and thus,
we can imagine ourselves immersed in a river of energy that begins and ends
with the love of God. We are all connected to each other by a silver thread
through our DNA, sharing most of our genes in common and participating in the
collective unconscious of all the world’s experience and imagination. God
created every one of us and dwells deep within us, constantly nudging us in
this broken world toward the conscious living of a life of wholeness and peace.
We are not robots but given choices on how we might deal with our particular
combination of heredity and nature. We are all born in the water of the womb
and when the water breaks, we flow out to join in the river of life with
others. We learn how to read the water and find the currents for our lives.
Along the stream we will swim with others, learning from them, and always the
stream continues, constantly changing as we change. Plato quoted Heraclitus as
saying “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river
and he's not the same man.” We will be separated by different currents until we
all arrive in the great sea of God’s love, which is where we began. As T.S.
Elliot wrote in his poem Little Giddings
from his 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.”
I do not see heaven as
a place above the sky but as the awareness of the presence of the Divine
intersecting with us and dwelling within us, and of which we get fleeting
glimpses through what the ancient Celts called the “thin places” between this
world and the next. Paul in the lesson from Corinthians reminds us “For what
can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”
As with all of us who
live on this place which the early explorers called “the goodliest land under
the cope of Heaven”, we all have those fleeting moments when everything seems
to make sense or fit together, like walking on the beach in the early morning,
with the sun coming up and the dolphins playing beyond the surf. It would seem accidental that we should have
the eyes of our soul opened to see, but as the spiritual mystics remind us, the
practice of contemplation make us “accident prone” for these temporary glimpses.
I believe that there is a consciousness that continues after death, where we
enter fully and completely into the presence of that mystery which, for lack of
a better name, we call God. The problem with religion is that we spend a lot of
time and spill a lot of blood trying to nail down definitions of that which
cannot be defined, as Voltaire wrote in his notebooks, “If
God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.” However, Anselm in
the 11th century said: “God is greater than that which can be
imagined and if we can define it: that which we define is not God.”
After the service we
invite you to join Terry and the family for a reception in which you can share
stories of joy about this man you love. Today we come together to give thanks
to that which we cannot define for sharing Tom with us and allowing him to love
us and be loved by us. We come together to ask that which cannot be defined to
hold Tom in arms of love so that he may know fully that wholeness and peace
which he knew only infrequently in this life. We come together to ask that
which cannot be defined to give us the strength to meet the days ahead as we
forgive Tom and ourselves and wish him well until we meet again.
And we will, for as Jesus says in the Gospel
reading for today: "Everything – repeat,
Everything - repeat again, Everything that the Father gives me will come to me,
and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away.”
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