A
Reflection and Poem On the Occasion of a Memorial Service for Kay Melson
O’Brien
May
14, 2016 All Saints’ Church,
Southern Shores Thomas E.
Wilson
Honey
The Passage from Isaiah for today is part of a
series of end-of-the-world visions by Isaiah, the prophet of Jerusalem, in the
8th Century Before Christ. The more that archeologists dig, the more
they find, and when we look at Isaiah’s vision, we find that many of the verses
are repeats of visions from The Poem of Baal, which tells of the Canaanite god
of the dead, Mot, being defeated by
Baal, a storm and weather god. The Hebrew faith had no need for competing gods,
and Isaiah repurposed the earlier song for what he saw as a vision of what
Isaiah’s God would do.
Eight Centuries later, the followers of Jesus who
saw Jesus come back after death interpreted the Isaiah passage as a foretelling
of the Resurrection event in which Death no longer had lasting power over us.
Paul writes in his letter to the Romans that since death has been robbed of its
power to make us live our lives in fear, then we could be free to love as Jesus
had commanded us to do in the Gospel lesson from John. We are to live as if
there is no cloud over our lives, for while death can seem to win a temporary
battle, the war is surely lost for death.
The end has already been decided.
Jesus, Paul and Isaiah repurpose the past to set us
free from its dominion of fear and offer instead a present filled with love and
a future of hope. We cannot change the past, but we can live as if it has been
redeemed. We come together today to admit the fact that Kay’s body let her down
and she died, but we also come to say Kay still lives in another dimension of
God’s creation and has left behind for us a treasure of repurposed life.
Kay grew up in Columbia, North Carolina, a place I
came to know well as the place where I would get caught speeding time and time
again. My first, second, and third impressions were that it was a wide spot in
the road that needed a four lane highway to bulldoze its path through. But for
Kay, it was home for she saw the love there. Armed with love, she was able to
repurpose the pettiness of small-town life as only the result of us not being
able to see the deeper joy she knew with wonderful and flawed people.
That repurposing love she carried with her when she
went off to college in Raleigh and fell for a bright young boy from Charlotte
attending NC State across town. They traveled to different places and she made
a home in every place, finding what was best and forgiving the worst,
repurposing it with laughter. That is the way she was with her friends, her art,
and her faith.
She loved the churches she attended and she worked
hard for them, even sharing the dreaded job of stewardship. But she never took the institution too
seriously, for the difference between a visitor to a church and a devoted
member is that the visitor stays as long as it meets the visitor’s approval and
the devoted member repurposes its shortcomings with laughter and commitment to
its deeper purpose of healing the world.
In her art, she took discarded objects and looked at
them until they spoke to her about the deeper beauty. Worn tables became canvasses
of herons, used toilet plungers became Queen’s scepters, scared stools became
shy cows made for children to perch upon for tea parties, wasted space under
stairs became castles for her two princess granddaughters who knew her as
Honey, for she was part of the sweetness of our lives. She took left over yarn
and knit it into shawls, outward and visible signs of loving prayers
surrounding us.
With her friends, she was a gift for she refused to
take us as we are, persons worried about our own self-importance, but saw the
worth in us even when we could not. She treated us with respect without taking
us too seriously – because we were always good as a story.
None of us wanted her to die. We need her laughter. And it is still
here. I get my theology from a lot of
different places - the Bible, the earth, the stars, children poems and
literature. One of my favorites is from the children’s story for grownups. The Little Prince, which I used to read
to my daughter when she was growing up. The little Prince says before he dies:
All men have stars, but they are not the same things for
different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others
they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars,
they are problems... But all these stars are silent. You-You alone will have
stars as no one else has them... In one of the stars I shall be living. In one
of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars will be
laughing when you look at the sky at night… You, only you, will have stars that
can laugh! And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you
will be content that you have known me... You will always be my friend. You
will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for
that pleasure... It will be as if, in place of the stars, I had given you a
great number of little bells that knew how to laugh.
Thank you God for Kay, who knew how
to laugh.
Honey:
A Poem in Thanksgiving for the Life of Kay Melson O’Brien
After
the last paint daub dries. After the last story has been again told,
loving
laughter alone remains. Her laugh started with her eyes
and
then spread down the face into the shoulders, into her arms
rolling over the chest down finally her feet softly stomping.
There
were some old jokes but her fondly observed and remembered
people
so full of themselves were those catching her attentive mirth.
In
a small town she knew lots of \ characters in the comedies and
melodramas antidoting boredom passing for daily
life.
Even
in larger cities her eyes caught the swagger over dropped banana peels.
Friend,
family and she were not spared those dart sings of enlightenment
endearingly piercing bubbles of self-importance.
Why
settle for the surface when beauty is so accessible if you look deeply, seeing
with
eyes filled with loving laughter where plungers became scepters
and falling short folk towering as royalty graced
with awe freely?
We
humans tend to ration approval fearing arithmetical loss from own meagre store,
but
those blessed with Divine sense of grace observe as treasures freely given
by
the One Giver and grace returned geometrically to others.
Love
is not given based on deserving but on the laughter in the givers eyes and the
beauty
that is conferred has always been seen there. Psalmists sing that Love is
the Divine Judgement as sweet as Honey dripping from
the comb.
The Proverbs sing in reply that this Honey is sweet
to the Spirit and health to the bones.
For sharing the Gift of Honey, we give thanks to the
One Giver..
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