A Reflection on the Life and Death of Marjorie Sayre Wallwork
October 14, 2013
All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC
I have been doing a lot of thinking about beginnings and
endings this last week; in fact, I did a sermon about that idea in the Sunday
services yesterday. Maybe I should have saved it for today because this service
is about beginnings and endings. On one hand, we gather together to say that
Marge's life on earth has ended. However, as we gather around the table later
in the service, we will declare that Marge is still with us on the other side
of the table, as she has begun the next stage of her life by walking through
the gate of death.
If we only lived in the physical world, we would always be in
beginnings and endings, for every day is a beginning of the future and every
day is an end of the past. Yet life is never that easy for those of us who have
also lived in love. My mother died a few years ago and it was a strange feeling,
living into being an orphan in my sixties. I am all grown up and while it is
right and natural that the next generation should die before the younger, I was
unprepared for the hole that was left in my life. I still think of things I
want to share with her, and I realize that I will not hear her voice. It is
only in my memory and imagination that I can hear her laughter about what I
wanted to tell her. She went through that after my father's death decades
before. She would tell me that she would see something and she would turn to
share it and say “Bill”, before she realized that she, on this earth, was
beyond hearing him except in her hopes, memories, and imagination. Yet they are
both alive, part of my DNA in how I think, how I evaluate, how I enjoy, how I
laugh, how I cry. The relationship with them made me who I am. When they died,
there was an ending and a whole series of beginnings. As Paul reminds us in the
first lesson from 1st Corinthians, “Behold I show you a mystery; we
shall not all sleep but we shall be changed.”
Marge understood that all of life was, at its core, a
mystery, all will be changed. Marge would talk about how much she missed her
husband and how when she died she would be reunited with him. The end is not
the end; the gate is open to a new beginning.
I think the world in this life is divided into two groups,
the first who say, “It all begins with me” and the other who say that “It all
ends with me.” When I first met Marge a little over 10 years ago, I was
impressed by how gracious she was. I had then had a couple decades of history
dealing with Altar Guilds and getting fish eyes from them as they looked
askance at some of my ideas, as they thought with longing about the last good
rector - who was always the one three before me, the present incumbent – and how
dear Saintly Father Whosits would not have approved. As I talked with her about
the Altar Guild, I noticed the steely center of her will as she suggested how
things should be. I knew that things she did for the guild would be done right
and I need not worry about it. But at
the same time I remember thinking to myself, “I better not mess with her about
a bunch of changes I have in mind; she is tough.” I made the mistake of thinking
that she was an “It all ends with me” kind of person, the kind who wants
everybody else to change and for her to be in control. While I was never wrong
about the strength I glimpsed, I was so wrong in other ways - for the more I
saw her over the years, I saw her as an “It all begins with me” kind of person. She was open to changing things in
her life while the core of her heart never changed. Marge saw everything
through the eyes of thanksgiving and mercy.
Part of being a Pastor is visiting people and listening to
their complaints. I remember priming the pump and asking her about how
difficult it must have been to leave her friends and independent living in New
Jersey, having her children living far away, moving in with Betsy and Chris.
She looked at me as if I did not have a brain in my head. She was not to spend
time feeling sad about the past. She had
decided to look at the present, look at each new day as something for which to
give thanks. She would tell me how wonderful Chris and Betsy were to her, how
grateful she was to her caregiver Maggie, how good it was to see her daughters
and grandchildren and how she was so glad to see her friends here. Try as I might to open the door to
complaints, it was one door she was not going to enter.
I would ask her “How are you doing today?”, knowing she was
in pain, and she would say, “Oh I am fine.”
She was not lying; oh, she was hurting - but why should she complain
when there was so much for which to give thanks. She saw, in the middle of all the
losses, the blessings of all the graces that surrounded her. She was too busy
giving thanks and had no time to complain.
When someone would bring up boorish behavior on someone else's part, she
would reflexively find some excuse – “Maybe he was feeling bad, maybe she had a
stomach ache.” Life, she thought, was too short to carry around resentments and
memories of people not being at their best.
Every day Marge would read her meditations, and she put
herself in a right relationship with God and neighbor. If you are an “It all
ends with me” kind of person, you carry around a list of people with whom you
want to get even, for you live in a universe of scarcity because you are the
center of your life. If you are an “It all begins with me” kind of person, you
forgive people before they ask, for God's love shines through you as you see
joy in a universe of abundance.
Today we give thanks for Marjorie Sayre Wallwork’s life. We
give thanks for her witness of living faithfully into the Great Commandment of
loving God and neighbor. We give thanks for the resurrection in which she is
raised up and reunited with all that she has ever loved, and in which we will
be reunited with her.
Today we bless the Christ candle that is given in Marge's memory
to honor her. The Christ candle is lit at baptisms, funerals, in every service
during the Easter Season, and on special occasions to show the presence of
Christ, the light of Christ shining in the midst of the gathered community. The
last one bought by the church was about fourteen years ago when the church was
built. I am so cheap that, for over ten years, I kept telling the Altar Guild
not to buy a new Christ candle because we could always make do. I guess when I came here over 10 years ago, it
was about five feet tall, and this year it had burned down to a foot and a half long.
This month the Altar Guild finally put its collective foot down and said
we need to get a new one. At that time, Marge's family asked if they could give
something in her memory. I thought of Marge and thought that the new candle
made sense, for she was a light to us on how to live a life of thanksgiving and
forgiveness, a light on how not to live in the shadows but in the light of
love, a light to shine into the unknown futures, a light to remember the
endings and celebrate the beginnings.
If you want to remember Marge, be a light in your world to
show a better way to live. Let your light so shine on your beginnings and
endings that people may see your good works and glorify your father who is in
heaven.
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