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
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 121st
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 2nd
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
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