Sunday, April 27, 2014

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

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



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