Norah's Creed

A Reflection On the Occasion of May 20, 2016 Memorial Service for Norah Mitchell

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC              Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Romans 8:14-19,34-35,37-39             Psalm 121,       John 11:21-27

Norah’s Creed

The Hymn we sang at the beginning of this service was Jerusalem, which is from a poem by William Blake, And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time. It is a reflection on an old Druid myth that was updated with Christian characters where the child Jesus first came to England with his uncle, a tin merchant Joseph of Arimathea, checking out the tin mines in Roman Empire Days. The story went that every step that the young boy took blessed the land and, in Blake’s time, the Industrial Revolution was fouling the air with sulfurous smoke from what he labeled “Satanic mills”, creating a tension between Heaven on Earth and Hell on Earth. You may have recognized the tune as the theme song from the movie Chariots of Fire and the song that the church ladies would sing, as some rolled their eyes, in the movie Calendar Girls.

If you are unfamiliar with that film: in Skipton, Yorkshire England, the local Women Institute (WI) tries to find a way of raising money for helping the local hospital with cancer research. Usually they have a bake sale, sell plum jam and serve tea. One of the women comes up with an unconventional idea that these mature, middle-aged women of the WI would put out a calendar featuring 12 of their members topless. It was based on a true story and they raised a great deal of money for the hospital cancer treatment center. There is a little speech given by the character Chris, played by the actress Helen Mirren, to try to get permission to do the calendar. Norah and I loved this speech, and she would laugh heartily whenever one of us brought it up. I looked it up and it goes:

I'm about to commit heresy. Look, I hate plum jam. I only joined the WI to make my mother happy. I do, I hate plum jam. I'm crap at cakes, I can't make sponge. In fact, seeing as it's unlikely that George Clooney would actually come to Skipton to do a talk on what it was like to be in "ER", there seems very little reason for me to actually stay in the WI. Except suddenly... suddenly I want to raise money in memory of a man I loved, and to do that I'm prepared to take me clothes off for a WI calendar, and if you can't give us ten minutes of your time, Madam Chairman, well then, frankly, guys, I'm going to do it without council approval. Because there are some things that are more important than council approval. And if it means that we get closer to killing off this shitty, cheating, sly, conniving bloody disease that cancer is, oh God, I tell you, I'd run round Skipton market naked, smeared in plum jam, wearing nothing but a knitted tea cozy on me head and singing "Jerusalem".

Norah would laugh and she promised that, if she finally beat this cancer, she would do exactly that - I told her I would find a tea cozy for her. She had a fondness for the song because it projects the England of her youth as a place of paradise, which also had some satanic mills as well. That was her experience. She shared the times of growing up in England as moments of paradise and metaphorical Satanic Mills, when she remembered the time of the bombings by the Nazis during World War II when many of the children were sent on trains to small towns and villages, places where the Germans would not bother to bomb. Norah was one of those children. The train would pull into a station with their names and information pinned to their coats, and the townspeople would look them over and decide who they would take and could still be a benefit, not a burden, to them on the farms or around the house. Some were treated wonderfully; Norah was not.

The good news of that experience is that it helped solidify compassion in her for all of God’s creatures. Her favorite service in the year was our St. Francis Day Blessing of the Animals when beloved pets of all kinds are brought to church and we bless God and them for sharing love. There is a quote from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man, and bird, and beast;

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things , both great and small;

For the dear God, who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.”

If you want to replicate that kind of compassion that Norah had, a suggestion might be to make a contribution of time or resources to the Dare County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. An interesting historical note: when I was teaching Social Work in a college before I went to seminary, I used to tell my students that child welfare action to prevent the abuse and neglect of children had a hard time getting started in this country because there was a resistance to interfering in a private home. The first case of child neglect was brought to court under the ASPCA’s sponsored law about the Protection of Dumb Animals because they considered children “dumb animals” unable to speak for themselves.

For years, even after she was reunited with her mother at the end of the war, Norah was filled with seething rage at how she had been treated by the woman of that house - I will not call it a home - in which she felt like a prisoner. She was unable to speak of it because everybody wanted to put the war behind them. Years later she went back to England after she had moved to the states and she visited that village, looked up that house and told that woman off - and especially reminded that woman that she, Norah Mitchell, had survived in spite of that woman and was living a good life in spite of her.

Norah was not at all interested in forgiving this woman, but she was doing the next best thing - getting on with her life. Norah got on with her life; in the face of how badly she was treated, in the face of the heartbreak of death of friends and family, in the face of disease, she kept on going. The religious functionary within me at first suggested that she had to go through the process of forgiveness, but she took a page from another teaching of Jesus, and she “picked up her bed and walked.” It worked for her, and she would do that with the treatments involved with her cancer.  When they were over, she would pick up her bed and walk - and if she could take a trip to Spain, so much the better. I am not about to condemn the path she took because I do believe the words from Paul in today’s Romans’s reading:

Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?    No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Wherever she was, she was never separated from God’s love, for as the Psalmist promised her: “The Lord shall watch over your going out and coming in; from this time forth and forevermore.”

She put in a lot of coming and going.

Norah’s Creed (Poem)

“Well, that was an experience!” Muttering,

“Not wasting any one bit more time crying

over some bad milky memories cluttering

a life full of things need to do afore dying.

I want spending more love, gotten and given

riotously. I’m not leaving this earth regretting

the waste not treating this place as if heaven

is here every moment before last sun setting.