Jennifer Beckett

A Reflection on the Occasion of a Memorial Service for Jennifer Beckett  December 16, 2017 All Saints Church, Southern Shores, NC              Thomas E Wilson, Rector

Lamentations 3:22-26             Psalm 46          2 Corinthians 4:16 - 5:9          John 14: 1-6

Jennifer Beckett

I write poems to figure out what is going on in life. On the day Jennifer Beckett died I finished a poem that I had been working on as she entered her final days:

Jennifer Beckett

Wait, you are not supposed to die

‘fore outlive us longing to be lover

so at all our funerals you’ll hover;

that way, we would not have to cry,

yell at God for depriving us of you

and the care you so freely showered

with a la-di-da laugh that flowered

each shrug leading to that hug true,

punctuating a word of love and kiss

of peace and hint of praise bestowed

as effortlessly out of you joy flowed

that soul time spent with you is bliss.

Come memory, flood us once again

with Jenn’s laugh soothing our pain!

One of the things happening in our society right now is how we see things. We have been treated to disputes to something called “alternative facts” which means that “facts” are the result of one’s agenda and that which does not correspond to one’s agenda is “fake news”, a euphemism for lies. Truth in this view is determined in how loud and often we parrot an agenda and how many people agree with it. Jennifer Beckett did not lie because she knew how to face facts with courage. She did not try to find alternative facts but she could see beyond them and that vision throughout her life and death is why we love her.

When I look at the world that I cannot make sense of; besides poetry I look for a movie to give me a clue. The movie I look to often is the 1946 French movie directed by poet Jean Cocteau; Beauty and the Beast. It is a move about seeing things with imagination that requires the audience to enter into the imagination. Most of you have probably seen a couple of animated or live action adaptations of the story but I urge you to watch Cocteau’s film poem. You probably know the story that when Belle meets the Beast she only sees what the audience sees; a monster. The change is when Belle is able to see with her imagination into the soul of the Beast and that vision changes both her and the Beast. 

There were many things I loved about Jennifer Beckett, but most of all she had imagination. Wendell Berry in his 2012 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, “It All Turns On Affection” wrote:

The term “imagination” in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the full richness of the verb “to see.” To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with “the mind’s eye.” It is to see, not passively, but with a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with “dreaming up.” It does not depend upon one’s attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the qualities of things seen or envisioned.

Jennifer picked the lessons and the poems and wrote a reflection on Psalm 46 and they all have the same theme of living with a vision charged with imagination:

from Lamentations “to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord,

from Psalm 46: ‘Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved, and though the mountains be toppled into the depths of the sea”,

from Corinthians; “We do not lose heart . . . for we walk by faith not by sight” ,

and from John; “Do not let your hearts be troubles.”

This whole walking by faith business is hard stuff because any sane person going through the same path as Jenn’s life and struggle would be tempted to scream out that there is no God or at least if there is a God, he, she or it is not at all up to the job of a first class deity. There is loads of evidence that point to a successful case for gross incompetence and breach of trust against the Supreme Being. Yet, each day she pulled herself up to lower herself down to pray to give thanks for being surrounded by grace. All evidence to the contrary, she saw God and gathered strength from what seemed to many as the abyss, but she, to use Berry’s words, “grasps securely the quality of things seen or envisioned.”

She would do this with nature as she looked deeply with her imagination and found beauty and majesty, on the mountains or the shore, even in the middle of what she called “Hurricane Alley”. She did that with situations in her life as she shared in her reflection on Psalm 46 which we read today. She did that with pets loving all sorts and conditions of dogs. She did that with friends which is why she had so many of them. She did that even with those who let her down which is the reason her soul was not burdened with resentments, for she forgave promiscuously.

I would call Jennifer a Prophet which why we read her reflection as one of the lessons. Prophets get a bad rap in that we want to see if prophets can tell the future. Prophets were called “seers”, people who see; they see not the future but rather into the soul of the present. They hold up a mirror to a broken world and us and ask if we want to live as part of that brokenness of that we might think again, change our minds, or to use the Biblical term “repent” so that we will not be who we are afraid of turning into, but we can rise to the holy vision that God has with those who are loved

This church benefited from Jennifer’s vision’s imagination. This church is called All Saints but even a cursory examination of the people who attend here will see that it could as easily be called “All Sinners” for we fall very short of being plaster saints. But she looked deeper than surface reality and saw us wretches who operate under the delusion that God is with us. As she looked at us, she demonstrated the Quantum Physics theory proposed in the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle that the observation of quanta particles effects a change in those quanta particles. She saw what was deep inside us and we moved to claiming into what she saw.

In the Gospel lesson that Jenn picked for today, Jesus has just heard that his friend Lazarus has died and he tells his disciples not to be afraid. He was calling them out of the tombs of their fears so that might go with his to call Lazarus out the Tomb of his earthly life. I give God thanks that I was lucky enough to be around when Jennifer was casting her gaze. I am a product of her imagination, a better person because she saw clearly behind my posturing and, like Lazarus hearing Jesus, I heard her calling to come out of my tomb of my own inadequacies and find joy in her loving vision of me.

I wrote a poem of words I never got around to saying to her when she was living on this limited plane of existence but in my imagination I hear her listening to all that we have said and all we wish we had said before time ran out:

Jennifer Beckett’s Vision

Jennifer we so do love the imagination in your eyes

looking into the core of who we’d really like to be

with your love reinterpreting all the things you see

lift us heavenward with Shelley’s Skylark’s songs rise.

Not to a place up, or out, where only good go to paradise

entering through some mythical gates securely guarded

by Apostles checking Big Book of how we’re regarded,

but heaven is when we observe others as beyond price.

Your loving eyes appraised us misfits, strays and dogs

wandering past you on path; not really looking for you,

but rather bumbling past the past but hoping for the new

Princess who might be tempted into kissing some frogs,

giving us the strength we joyfully transfused from time

spent in your loving gaze loved beyond reason or rhyme