A Reflection on the Celebration of lifefor Marie Nesbit

A Reflection on the Celebration of Life for Marie Motz Nesbit

Gallop Funeral Home, Nags Head, N.C.

October 20, 2013

Thomas E Wilson

Revelation 21

King James Version (KJV)
1 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
2 And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.
4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
5 And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.
6 And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely

Today we gather together to give thanks for the life of Marie Motz Nesbit. When I talked with the family about her the first thing they told me was that “she went her own way”. The more we talked the more that phrase “went her own way” seemed to mean three different things; the first was that she was very particular about the way things should be done like in setting a table or in cleaning a house or how people acted or in how a woman should go outside with full makeup and dressed well. The second was she especially had difficulty putting up with churches and businesses and sometimes family members with two notable exceptions her mother and her grandson, Michael Lee. She was a tough woman to fully know and she kept a lot of things deep inside her. She loved God but she was at time deeply ticked off with the God who would not answer the prayers she offered up in the way she wanted them answered. The third was that in her way there needed to be light, more light, more light shining off bright things as a way of keeping the darkness of mundane everyday life from gaining sway. In her way there needed to be movement, more movement like dancing to keep the grinding of the world at bay. In her way the most important was that there needed to be more compassion to keep to keep the selfishness of the world away.

Compassion, for in going her own way there was a deep longing longing for connection and in making the world a better place. Frederick Buechner, in his Wishful Thinking wrote “The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." She was that way when she took care of her mother for she knew her mother’s deep hunger for connection and worth as her mother got older. She was that way when she would suddenly show up with an unannounced and unplaned for guest, a stranger guest for thanksgiving, a guest who needed to be connected. She was that way when she would work at Hotline. She knew that the deeper hunger the people at Hotline needed was not for clothes but a feeling that someone really cared about them as a full human being. If Marie had been in charge everything would have been given away. This is how she showed compassion by giving away, giving away time, giving away things, giving away love. At the end of life your life will not be measured by what you have but by what you have given away.

She gave away love and God gave away God's love to her. There are times when we want to ask God why God did not make it easier for Marie but God does not promise to be a good luck charm to keep bad things from happening to us. God only promises to give us strength to walk through the valley of the shadows and to anoint us as God sets a place for us at God's table in the presence of our enemies. God loved her and she loved God.

When the family was talking with me about Marie and they were talking of light and shadows and her deep faith and a vision of being reunited with family, I was reminded by a poem by Pablo Neruda, a Chilean poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 and died in 1973. It is a sonnet about love.

Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Today we remember Marie who while she did not care much for flowers had the light of many hidden flowers in her life and has fallen asleep so close to God that her hand on her chest was God's hand, so close that when her eyes closed she was in God's dream and there she stays forever along with all that have ever loved and been loved. If you want to remember her show compassion, don't judge their worth except by God's love for them and every time you show compassion Marie lives in you and you in her.