Angels and Judy Engelken

A Reflection of the Occasion of a

Service of Celebration of the Life and Death of

JudyEngelken

March 8, 2014

All Saints Church, Southern Shores, NC

Tom Wilson

Judy and her family

How do I describe Judy’s faith? It is something like she is all for for the concept of God but organized religion is a trial for her. All the doctrines and creeds are seemingly like a waste of energy to her. She is not afraid of dying but is curious about the afterlife. The numinous, the sense of the Divine is very real and she sees God in every place and is frustrated when people try to corral God’s Holy Space into  one particular creed or building.  She reminds me of part of the poem Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

And truly, I reiterate, nothing’s small!
No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee,
But finds some coupling with the spinning stars;	55
No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere;
No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim;
And (glancing on my own thin, veinèd wrist),
In such a little tremor of the blood
The whole strong clamour of a vehement soul	60
Doth utter itself distinct. Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware	65
More and more from the first similitude.

There are some people who worry about “getting into heaven” as if heaven is the reward for saints who do good things and avoid bad things. The problem with that is that means we turn people into reward seekers who, as the old saying goes “are so obsessed with heaven that they are no earthly good”. For Judy Heaven is not found above the highest star or at the end of the world but in the Holy space of the flower opening up in the well-kept garden.

The strength of heaven is found in the patience that Judy shows in dealing with each development in the treatment of the cancer.  

The presence of the Holy is in the family gathered together around a holiday table. When members of the family, like her mother and brother, were not there she missed them terribly. One of the things we have to learn now is to see her every time we gather around the table; just because we do not see them does not mean they are not there. That is what we do with communion service when people ask me how many attended the service- I usually say well there were the angels and arch angels and all the company of heaven- so the place was packed; just most of them are on the other side of the table. 

For Judy the sacred is when a loved person is held in her arms to wipe away the tears. Our task is to feel her arms when there is no body to hold onto and to feel the tears being wiped away. I asked Blair what attracted him to Judy in the first place. He answered;

“Besides the physical attraction Judy worked at a pre school and I was very impressed with how she cared for the children patient and loving and made her time with them fun too. I was very interested in having a family and I was sure she would make a great Mother. She also had a quiet strength.

Judy’s body may have changed form but the love, patience and fun remain; we just have to be open to hear them in the midst of our sadness. 

When my father died almost a half century ago; I was really ticked with God because I needed his strength and I thought I would not have him to walk with me. Yet after I spent a lot of years being angry and sorry for myself; I continue to find him walking with me. He is very silent but his strength is there. A week ago we were on our way to a dream conference in Western North Carolina and stopped for the night with my sister at Chapel Hill and she had unpacked an old box of my grandmother, my father’s mother, and it contained all my father’s old report cards from school. He was an “A” student every year until his senior year and then his grades nose-dived; even in Math. Now you have to know that my father became an engineer and used Math all the time and when he was in the Marines in World War II, he was an artillery officer and used math to figure out sines and cosines to plot a trajectory for the shelling. But in his senior year he seemed to be interested in something other than math.  I laughed at the humanity of the old man and soon after I felt his shared laughter. He was there around my sister’s kitchen table in the space between us to remind us that failure is not a measure of one’s worth but an opportunity for a new beginning. Judy’s death is not a failure of medicine or of Judy but a chance for a new beginning for her and for all of those she loves, not loved but loves.

It seems redundant to commend Judy to Heaven for she knows it well; for heaven is the place where God’s angels pass through and have their home. 

Chagal: Jacob and Angel

The word “Angel” comes from the Greek word meaning messenger, specifically a messenger from God, something which contains within itself God’s message to people who are open enough to hear. What form does an angel” take? It depends on the form that the message is accepted and recognized for it is a part of the Spirit spiraling to those who are in need of love and strength. The form takes the shape necessary for the listener to the message. The old Medieval struggle to find the answer to the question: “How many Angels dance on the head of a pin?”, ends with the answer “As many as want to.”

Judy saw and had encounters with angels and that defines who she was; a person who encountered angels. She is stubborn and strong which invites people to be around her to gather some strength from her. Judy is not going to Heaven she is just passing through the door from one part of the Holy into another part.

You may have noticed that I use the present tense to speak of Judy and that is appropriate but part of the reason for this service we do today is to claim both the present and the past at the same time as well as hope for the future. Her body, in the shape we know, is not here but her angels are here and her spirit is carried by those divine angels who bring her to her rest.