Bettly Clissold Dayenu

A Homily in Celebration of the Life and Death of Bettye Clissold 

April 26, 2014                            All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC  

Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 61:1-3 Psalm 121, 2 Corinthians 4:16--5:9 John 14:1-6

These are the hard days. We are over our initial relief at the end of her suffering, and we now move into the full awareness of her loss. We think that Bettye should not have died since there were plenty of other things she needed to do. She wanted to make sure that John was alright. She wanted to make sure that her sons were happy. She wanted to see her grandchildren grow up into full adults. She wanted to sink her roots deeper into her new space on the Outer Banks. She wanted the time to see her old church in South Carolina healed. She was an amazing woman and she could have made more of a difference if only she had not gotten sick. 

 

It is a habit of mine to get ticked off with God when things do not go the way I like them. I fuss and moan and I tell the Divine off and start to feel put upon because of my loss, because I think the world should cater to me. The problem is that it is not all about me. In this case, it is about Bettye and her Lord. If I live my life as if it all about me, then the world can be an empty place. Yet, when we live a life where it is about the connections, the space between us and each other and our God, then the world is so full. Bettye would say her life is not about her; rather it is about the short time she had when she could be about connecting to others, neighbors, family, friends, strangers, and to the Divine Other to whom she was devoutly connected in love. 

 

Bettye picked the music and lessons for today as a way for her to share her faith. The 121^st Psalm, which is 8 verses long, gets it strength from a one Hebrew word repeated six times in the psalm - “shomer”, meaning “guard”. There are two additional instances which show a guarding action - “the sun by day and the moon by night”. When I was in Israel in the Judean wilderness, these verses came alive to me for we had to watch out for sunstroke and dehydration in the merciless sun, that masculine symbol of both destructive and creative energy. The ancients believed that the moon, that feminine symbol of the unconscious, could cause one to be “moonstruck” which they thought was a form of mental illness. The Psalm reminds us that the world is a dangerous place which does not revolve around us, but we get through it when our guard is walking with us, one step at a time, to keep us from stumbling. 

 

The Psalmist believed that God was present in the everyday moment. Our modern life, however, separates us from connections. We live in heated and air conditioned houses, and we drive in our heated and air conditioned cars to go buy things from strangers in heated and air conditioned stores, and we worship God in heated and air conditioned buildings, along with people who mostly are strangers to us. We are dis-connected from nature, neighbor, and God, so we have this tendency to think that God is far away, up above the sky, and judges us from afar. But God is here and now, within our true selves, and guiding to join us with the fullness of the divine vision of connectedness with all of creation. The passage from 2^nd Corinthians, which she chose, echoes that reminder, that in our journey through this life, we walk by faith, God’s sight, the divine vision, not our own limited sight. 

 

Bettye also chose the Isaiah passage where the prophet sings that, in the middle of everything going wrong, the Divine is in the midst of us and throwing a feast for us and many people don’t even see it. There is a line from the play and movie Auntie Mame in which Mame exclaims, “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!” Bettye could see the banquet, and she gave thanks for it every day. She would come to church with her grandchildren and beam in their presence and found the experience of connecting with others exciting. I saw her in the hospital and at home and, even when she was in the midst of dying, she was reveling in the joy of being with her husband, her children, and grandchildren. It fit so well with the song she chose: “He walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own.”

One of the things we do in the Episcopal Church is to offer Holy Communion at the time of celebrations of life and death. Jesus participated in the Passover Celebration, that celebration of connectedness with what it meant to be a Jew, connected to God and our forebears, and celebrated the journey through the waters of the Red Sea and the Wilderness, and the presence of God in the gathered community. In Passover, a song is sung of how God is with us wherever we are, and a refrain of thanksgiving is sung – Dayenu, which means “even that would be enough”. Jesus added another dimension by saying that, even in the days to come when he could not celebrate Passover with his followers, he would still be present with them, he was still connected with them. We have this idea that whoever we love, though we are separated by distance or time or space, is alive on the other side of the same table, feasting with God in that other dimension. 

 

I invite you all to come forward - all may, some should, none must - and see Bettye connecting with all creation, nature and divine. This is not about creeds or theology but about the ultimate reality that we are all connected - which Bettye understood.

If Bettye had only been born and never been loved by her parents - Dayenu

If Bettye had only been loved and had never loved - Dayenu

If Bettye had only loved and never made a full commitment to love – Dayenu

If Bettye had only made a full commitment to love and had no children – Dayenu

If Bettye only had children and never taught them to love – Dayenu

If Bettye had only taught her sons to love but had not taught them to be responsible and faithful citizens – Dayenu

If Bettye had only raised responsible citizens and had never forgiven their failings –Dayenu

If Bettye had only forgiven their failings and not filled them with unconditional love – Dayenu

If Bettye had only given unconditional love for her family but not poured out that love to the new generations – Dayenu

If Bettye had only given love to her family and not shared the same with her community and us, her friends and neighbors – Dayenu

For all that we have received from Bettye and for her continual and new life with God - Dayenu.

Sermon For Easter- "Don't Be Afraid"

A Sermon for the Feast of the Resurrection               All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C. April 20, 2014                                                                Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Jeremiah 31:1-6                                Colossians 3:1-4            Matthew 28:1-10

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek”, wrote Joseph Campbell about our dreams, myths, and stories about fear. In the Gospel story for today, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary see the open cave and they are afraid. “Don’t be afraid,” says the angel to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. And in the same story Jesus says to the two women “Don’t be afraid.” 

Have you ever been afraid?

When I was a child, my older brother and some of his friends “liberated” some lumber from a building site and hauled the lumber down to a cove and across the rapids to an island in the middle of the river by our house and built a rudimentary fort in a tree. This was their secret hideout, and one day I went across the rapids when no one else was there and climbed the cross pieces nailed to the tree, reached out a long way - I was shorter than my brother and his friends - grabbed the edge, and pulled myself onto the platform. I idolized my brother and I wanted to be just like him in every way, but he was fearless and I, to my shame, had more caution, which I saw as craven cowardliness. But on that day I congratulated myself on having the courage to go behind my brother’s back and go to the fort I had been warned never to go to upon the threat of being beaten up. I had climbed that big tall tree, about 30 feet above the ground, all by myself and I was now the master; I was now as fearless as my brother. Except that, when I wanted to leave, I realized that I was not all that sure where the cross pieces of wood were, and all I could think of was that when I lowered myself I would not be able to get purchase on the cross piece and would have to hang there until I dropped - dropped all the way down. There was another way down - the slide for life. They had attached a pulley to a limb and then ran a rope to a couple feet off the ground on another tree; you held onto a rope and slid down the steep incline until your feet touched the ground. I stood there and held onto the handle of the rope, and all I had to do was jump. I looked at the steep incline and I saw the hard ground. For the life of me I could not get my feet to leave the safety of the plywood floor. It was a new experience, and I was afraid the rope would break. I stayed up there an hour and then my brother and his friends came and they told me to get down. I told them I was scared and needed help getting down, but I was not going to take the slide for life. My brother did not beat me up, and after a while he climbed up part of the way and guided my feet onto the cross pieces - and he guided my feet to every step until I reached safety.

Back to Joseph Campbell, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” I think, yes, my fear was partly of being hurt, but I feared more deeply the thought of catching up with my brother, for then I would have no excuse not to go into new ground that he had not already trod. I did not really want the responsibility of entering into the unknown. I realized that later when my brother died, and a year later when the depression really hit, I realized that I was now older than my older brother and father would ever be.  Freud said that people do not really want freedom because, if they claimed that freedom, then they would have to take responsibility for their own lives. 

A year later when I was taller and in the 5^th grade, I returned to the tree fort which had seen a rough winter, and the tree didn’t seem as tall.  I took the slide for life and I wondered why I had ever been afraid. Once I claimed it and went beyond it, I was able to fully live for a few moments without fear.  I had to enter that fear or I would be lost.  My story of fear is like the rest of your stories of fear and the universal stories and myths that populate our dreams and our unconscious and conscious lives.

It would be nice to say that fear left my life, but as I grew older, I found more things of which to be afraid and, in my fear, I would have moments of paralysis and incompetence. The fears were many:  not making the team, getting turned down by a girl for a dance, not passing the course, taking an unpopular stand which might place me and those I love in danger, having a child, not getting a job, losing someone’s love, not having enough money, changing a career, accepting a call, making a change to an unknown future, and the final fear - dying. Nelson Mandela wrote: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

Easter is about facing and conquering fear. The angel tells the women, and us, to not be afraid because there is a power greater than ourselves who can give us the strength to conquer the fear we have; we do not need to face the fear alone. Don’t be afraid of entering the cave, the angel says, almost echoing Campbell: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” The women face the cave and are afraid they will find that Jesus is not there, and then they will have to enter a new kind of living. The strength to enter the cave is a gift given them by the angel’s presence. Caves come in so many disguises - and so do angels giving us the strength to enter them. Jesus, the one who went through death itself, tells the two Mary’s, and us, that no matter what we go through, it will all be redeemed. Death does not have to be only a cave but a gate. When we die to ourselves, we start to face our fears and we do not need to be ruled by them. 

The message of scripture is uniform.  When the angel came to Mary to announce the coming of Jesus, the angel said “Don’t be afraid, I have something wonderful to tell you.” From before the beginning of his life to after the end of his life, the message is the same - “Don’t be afraid”. Frederick Buechner in his book Wishful Thinking defined Grace as the power given to us to overcome our tendency to fear:

Grace is something you can never get but only be given. The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you. I created the universe. I love you. There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.”

Easter is a gift of the strength not to be ruled by our fears. “Don’t be afraid.” 

Baptized into Christ's Death.

A Homily For Easter Eve                                           All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC  April 19, 2014                                                                 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21 [Israel's deliverance at the Red Sea]                  Ezekiel 36:24-28 [A new heart and a new spirit]   Zephaniah 3:14-20 [The gathering of God's people]             Romans 6:3-11            Matthew 28:1-10

Paul in the Epistle reading from Romans for today tells us that “we have been baptized into Christ’s death”. That is heavy stuff. In the early church Baptism was a time when the person being held under to water tasted death. They changed their name to a name by which they would be known in this underground organization dedicated to following a ruler other than Caesar in their life. To be a Christian meant to die to the world and enter a new kind of reality. Later on, the church no longer continued as a criminal enterprise but became part of the prevailing culture. The institution gained a great deal of prestige in this world, but it was at a cost of, at times, losing it soul.

The central message of the Gospel is that we have to go through death - not around it, not over it, but through the void. Jesus did not want to die; he spent hours praying, sweating blood, to hold on to life because it is precious. There are so many things that are lovely that we want to hold on to, to cling to. Who would we be if we are dead? What would we have if we lose everything that defines us?

Thirty two years ago I did my chaplaincy training at the University Hospital at Chapel Hill, and I was assigned to a floor in which patients were dying on a regular basis. I had given up smoking my pipe when I went to seminary the year before because I would not be able to afford the kind of pipe tobacco I enjoyed. In the meantime I smoked other people’s cigarettes, and so it seemed a cruel joke to have me on this wing, thinking that at times I was dying for a smoke, and I might indeed have set myself up for dying because of my smoking, Since I was going to be around people who were dying, one of the first assignments given to me by my mentors was to write a reflection on my own death; to enter into a prayerful meditation on what it would be like to die. Most of us want to continue the denial of our own death. We want to be fat, dumb, and happy until our last thought, which would be, “Hey, what was that?” In his book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker says: "... the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity--activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man."

At the end of that summer, I stopped smoking for good but I continued to work on meditating about my death. I find I have to keep doing it in order to grow deeper in my faith, to die to myself. To steal and paraphrase from the opening paragraph of Melville’s Moby Dick:

It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation (of my soul). Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea (into the depths of my soul) as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

The death of self is the only way we can come to the true self, the deeper self, the connection with the divine, without the constant ego thought “What is in it for me?” Kathleen Dowling Singh, in an article “Living in the Light of Death”  and quoted by Richard Rohr  in his mediation for Maundy Thursday, said: “Surrendering the exclusivity of self-reference—in love, for love, arms wide open on the cross—he (Jesus) emerged into Christ consciousness, transcending the smallness of self, obliterating the separation self imposes.”

But we want to hold on so that we don’t have to face the void. In the lessons for the Easter Eve Vigil, the theme of entering into the unknown keeps coming up. The Hebrew children have to walk into the Valley of Death as the waters of the sea form a wall on the right and the left. In the Ezekiel passage the people of the exile have to give up the old heart and spirit of self , to die to the old self in order to receive the new heart and spirit, to be born into a new life of being fully connected to God. In the Gospel Lesson from Matthew the women want to hold onto the feet of the Risen Lord and worship him. They want to hold on to that moment, to say Jesus’ death was just a blip on their radar, but he seems to be back like the good old days.  It is the idea of petrifying that moment, making sure it does not change. But Jesus is not a resuscitation – he did not go up to the gate and came back - but a resurrection.  He went through death and came out the other side. He tells these women whom he loves that they have to let him go and to be open to the unknown future., as they have to be open to the new future. They have to die to the past, however good is was, however strong the nostalgia is, die to the past in order to be alive to the real present, and to the future, of new life.

That is the struggle of the church, for we want to hold on, to safely and permanently set in stone, to petrify, to set in amber forever, but it is only when we are able to let go, when we are open to the places we cannot control, and go into the void of the unknown, the mystery of the unknowable, that we are able to live into eternal and abundant life.

On this Easter Eve, we gather in the dark, entering again into the death of Christ in order to trust in a new light.  We go through the valley of the shadow of death, rising with Christ, saying: “Hallelujah, Christ is Risen! The Lord is Risen Indeed, Hallelujah!”

Good Friday: Who is Responsible?

A Homily for Good Friday All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC April 18, 2014 Thomas E. Wilson Rector

John 18:1-19:42 Psalm 22

Who is responsible for Jesus’ death? Was it God who needed a debt to be paid for all of our sins? That answer makes a twisted kind of legal sense but is repulsive because it reflects a kind of God who is backed into a logical corner and is locked into a simplistic answer. 

 

Is it the envy of the religious establishment that wants to rid itself of this outsider? Jesus was an outsider and a disrupter of the way things always had been. Most establishments can put up with a little bit of variation, but religious institutions are notoriously in need of an outward stability so they can proclaim so called timeless truths that are nothing more than fossilized habit. I can see where they would want him out of the way - life would be so much easier.

Was it the fear of the occupying forces that the situation might get out of hand and some blood needed to flow to stop the unrest? Ruling forces are always ruled by fear; fear of rebellion, fear of exposure, fear of the next cycle of decision making. Until fairly recently, most countries used public executions for the dual purposes of entertainment for the masses and putting the fear of the state into people’s hearts. The theory went that executions reduced murder rates and especially lowered the murder rate of the state’s law enforcement personnel. However, that theory falls apart as studies have consistently shown that, in the US, the states with the highest rates of death penalty convictions also have higher murder rates and especially higher rates of murder of law enforcement personnel than those states with no death penalty. But logic has never deterred people from their strong beliefs based on fear.

Was it the people in the crowd who always enjoy violence toward others as entertainment? We have had a love affair with violence long before we invented video games where we can practice killing people as we kill time or produced television shows or movies that demonstrate the oh-so-many entertaining ways that we can bloodily dismember people with our weapons. And how we adore our weapons! Every year brings a new crop of murders where someone walks into a public place and slaughters innocent people. Every year we shout “No more!”. Except that shout turns into a whimper if it is suggested that the end to our love affair with violence and weapons begins with us, and we end up closing our eyes, crossing our fingers, and hoping that the annual slaughter does not return.

So, the envy of religious rivals, the fear of the ruling authorities, and the blood-lust of us humans were all partly responsible - that is, if we see Jesus as a victim. But John’s Gospel, which we read for today, doesn’t see Jesus as a victim but as the one who chooses the time and place of his death. Jesus is in charge, and he acts as a mirror that reflects (a) the religious authorities who have replaced the God of love with the God of hate to project their own hates, (b) the political authorities who try to create fear, projecting fear as a way to cover up their own deeper fear and (c) ourselves and our complicity with violence toward fellow images of God.

Jesus is not a victim; he is the gift giver. He gives himself. In John’s Gospel, the authorities come to take Jesus by force, but they fall on the ground. Jesus gives himself over to them. He is brought before the religious authorities, and he gives himself to them as the truth that they refuse to accept. Jesus is brought before Pilate and shows Pilate how weak and fear-ridden Pilate, the one who is supposed to be in charge, really is. 

 

Jesus is brought before the crowd and offers himself as an alternative to the bandit Barabbas, and they choose Barabbas, the one who embraces violence, as the one who is closer to their hearts.

Jesus gives up his mother to the beloved disciple to help heal the pain that the disciple and mother both feel.

Jesus gives up his spirit; it is not taken from him, but it is a gift from him to God and to us. 

 

In the end Jesus will give up his death as he allows himself to be risen, and his new life becomes a gift he keeps on giving.

We call it Good Friday, because Jesus gave himself as a gift for us to see ourselves and to enter new life.

Dayenu-- Maundy Thursday

A Homily for Maundy Thursday All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C. April 17, 2014 Thomas E. Wilson Rector

1 Corinthians 11:23-26 John 13:1-17, 31b-35 Psalm 116:1, 10-17

 Dayenu

We tend to remember the gathering of the disciples in the Upper Room with a great deal of solemnity. When it is filmed in the Bible movies, it is usually shot through a gauze filter of extreme reverence. But it probably wasn’t a staid service as it was a Passover celebration, and those are meals of great fun. I want to believe that there were moments when they danced wildly around the room and sang songs of joy. There is a part of the meal when the people sing a song of fifteen stanzas which lists fifteen gifts that God has given them - five stanzas of how God helped the people in bondage in Egypt, five stanzas of how God was with them in the wilderness, and five stanzas of how God has been with them in the promised land. After each stanza, the people would dance and sing a response, “Dayenu”, which means “even that would have been enough”.

If He had brought us out from Egypt, and had not carried out judgments against them Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!

If He had carried out judgments against them, and not against their idols Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!

If He had destroyed their idols, and had not smitten their first-born Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!

If He had smitten their first-born, and had not given us their wealth Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!

If He had given us their wealth, and had not split the sea for us Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!

If He had split the sea for us, and had not taken us through it on dry land Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!

If He had taken us through the sea on dry land, and had not drowned our oppressors in it Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!

If He had drowned our oppressors in it, and had not supplied our needs in the desert for forty years Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!

If He had supplied our needs in the desert for forty years, and had not fed us the manna Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!

If He had fed us the manna, and had not given us the Shabbat Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!

If He had given us the Shabbat, and had not brought us before Mount Sinai Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!

If He had brought us before Mount Sinai, and had not given us the Torah Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!

If He had given us the Torah, and had not brought us into the land of Israel Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!

If He had brought us into the land of Israel, and had not built for us the Temple Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!

But God keeps on giving and for that we give thanks.

This week we have been looking at “Incorporation” in the church, and I have been looking at it in my life. On the church level we are trying to create a better system of making sure that those people who God calls to our faith community are welcomed and brought into the body of this church. As we heard at the meeting on Tuesday night, the word incorporation comes from the Latin word corpus meaning “body”.

I came to the meeting a little bit tired because I had spent the day out of the office at a service of a Reaffirmation of my Ordination Vows along with most of the other clergy in the diocese. I traveled three hours there and three hours back which gave me a lot of time to think about why the heck I ever became a Priest. I became a Priest because I am, first and foremost, a servant of Christ, and this path was the best way for me to live into that service. Tonight on Maundy Thursday we conduct our service because we are called to reaffirm our incorporation of Jesus Christ into our lives and we reaffirm our identity of being servants of the Risen Lord.

There are two parts to this service; the first part is the remembrance of Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist during the context of a Passover meal. Passover is a time when the Jewish people would gather together to remember why they are Jews and what it means that they are Jewish. They remember that their ancestors had a relationship with God and the Spirit of that God which led them out of bondage in Egypt and through the wilderness, where they were fed with bread from divine hands and brought into a Promised Land where they would give thanksgiving with the wine that was the fruit of the earth. Even if that would have all been enough, Dayenu, Jesus tells them there is more that God continues to do. Jesus takes the bread and reminds his followers that they are still reaffirming that they are heirs of the promise of a relationship with God, that God’s spirit would lead them out of the bondage in which they find themselves, through the wilderness times when they fear there is not enough for them. Yet in the wilderness they are given nourishment for the soul from the divine hand, so that they are delivered into a new place of living in the soul, tasting the gifts of God and discovering the True Self. Jesus says to his followers to take the bread and wine of the Passover and add another layer of meaning and see that he, Jesus, is giving his life, his body and blood, so that they might obtain the promises of being children of the living God.

The second part of the service is when Jesus demonstrates another way of giving himself to them and kneels down and washes their feet as their servant. He urges, indeed commands, that they become what they eat. As he is the servant of the living God and they symbolically take him in, his body into theirs, incorporate him into their bodies, so they become servants as well.

For the last 30 years I have reaffirmed my ordination vows on the Tuesday of Holy Week. Dayenu.

For the past 40+ years I have reaffirmed my servant identity almost every year on the Thursday of Holy Week when I allow my feet to be washed and when I wash another’s feet. Dayenu.

Each week I continue to reaffirm my dependence on the Spirit of the Living God when I commit to taking into my body the promises that God gives us during the Sunday services. Dayenu.

Each day I continue to reaffirm whose I am when I wake up in prayer and go to sleep in prayer to the One who gives me life. Dayenu.

God keeps on giving each minute of each day of each year. Dayenu.

Living into Mystery

A Reflection on the Occasion of the Celebration of the Life and Death of Mary Marvel Adams

April 5, 2014

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC

Thomas E Wilson

Lamentations 3:22-26,31-33 (The Lord is good to those who wait for him) Psalm 23

Revelation 21:2-7 (Behold, I make all things new)

We have had two of Mimi’s friends remind us about her as we celebrate her life. Now it is time for me to talk about celebrating her death as the gate to greater life. You would think that after almost 30 years of doing funerals, I would be able to understand life, death, and the afterlife better. Yet, I stand here and tell you that it is all a mystery to me - and I am comfortable with that. 

 

There are two different meanings for the word mystery. The one meaning most people know is used in the sense of a “mystery” novel, in which a puzzle is finally solved on the last page when all clues are revealed and there is a solution and peace at the last. The second meaning of mystery is that awe and wonder which beggars the imagination, where words lose their meaning, where emotions reach their limits - “thaw(ing) and resolve(ing) itself into a dew” - a mystery which is never solved. There is no neat ending, and the last page is the first page of a deeper mystery which we live into by faith. It is the valley of the shadow that the Psalmist was speaking of in the 23^rd Psalm that we read earlier. We live in the mystery, and we do not walk there alone. There is someone setting a table for us and blessing us in the middle of the mystery. Death is the gate we walk through into another mystery.

Death is all around us, but our society tries so hard to ignore it. Voltaire said “One great use of words is to hide our thoughts,” and so we use euphemisms to avoid saying the word “death”, such as “He passed” or “crossed over” or “breathed his last” or “is pushing up daisies”. Monty Python has this wonderful “Dead Parrot” sketch where dozens of euphemisms are used. We are so afraid that we end up making it a practice to whistle as we go past graveyards. We try hard to make the assumption that death is what happens to other people, but the church keeps reminding us, not always successfully, that death is part of life. One Lent, I devoted a five part series to dealing with death, and it was one of the worst-attended Lenten series because people thought it would be depressing. There is an old Latin 8th century song which Archbishop Thomas Cramner translated and used when he wrote the beginning of the Burial Office for the first English Book of Common Prayer in 1549: “In the midst of life, we are in death.”

This is helpful for me because I can accept my death and say, “That is just the way life is; all things die, and while the form of the body is destroyed, the molecules of the body are transformed into a different constellation of structure. The ashes of my body will nourish the earth and out of them new life will grow.” The mystery is not about the physical stuff but about the animating principle which is in, under, around and through all of the senses. That animating principle is what I believe continues as we are walk through the gate. The awareness of death as mystery allows me to enter into the fullness of life as mystery.

The 20^th Century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: "Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits." Wittgenstein was an agnostic, but I would suggest that eternal life, abundant life, begins here and now as we pay attention to all that God gives us each day. It is my belief that living joyfully into the mystery of this life, the skills of wonder and awe of that which is greater than ourselves, prepares us for entering into the unknown mystery after death.

There is a prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi:

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.

Eternal life begins now; the resurrection life begins now. After we are dead, the mystery continues for body and soul. I urge you to live faithfully into the mystery. If you want to honor Mimi, then practice living joyfully in the mystery. There is a poem by Mary Oliver, “When Death Comes” which I shared with Jennifer, Mimi’s daughter. Let me read it to you:

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mimi didn’t just visit life she lived into the mystery fully; in honor of Mimi go and do likewise.