In Memory of Jeanne
Friday I was writing a tribute to Jeanne Schenck, in the form of a
homily for this service. It is easy to get inspired when you
think about Jeanne, she was a bright light, and so accomplished in her
life and career, and I had written what I thought was an inspiring
account of her virtues and attributes. The children were arriving
for Vacation Bible School, the timing seemed just right. I put
the last period on the last sentence and poof! All the words
disappeared! Just like that! All gone! A blank screen
stared back at me.
Death is like that, isn’t it? What a great and unfathomable
mystery death presents us with. Before us is a person in life, a
person we associate with and even identify with the body in which they
express themselves. And yet, we have some dim knowledge that the
person must be more than the body, more than our associations and
images, more than the words we use to describe them, more than the list
of events, accomplishments and personality traits that we use to sum
them up. And then, death comes, and there is only the body, only
the associations and images, only the words we use to describe them,
and we know now that this is not that person at all. Where has
this person gone? Where has Jeanne gone? Where is her
essence, her presence, which is so much larger than all this?
Where?
And what does all this little chatter mean in the face of such emptiness?
(silence)
I realized as I stared at the blank space before me, that I wished for
more time with Jeanne. And really, I wanted to ask her more about
her spiritual life, and especially her deep devotion to the
Eucharist. I wanted to know if this woman had any idea of the
quality of light that so many people could see radiating out through
her. What was her inward experience of the Spirit? What was
her inward taste of Communion? Where did this light come from?
I suspect that even when words flowed easily from her tongue, even at
the height of her considerable powers of memory, articulation and
intelligence, had I asked her such intimate and unanswerable questions
she would, appropriately, not have answered in words. Perhaps
that wonderful smile would have lighted her face, and that mischievous
brightness danced in her eyes, as if to say, how can mere human beings
speak our little words about something as great and beyond our telling
as God? How can we ever explain the glimpses we get of that
invisible light in all this chatter.
Even so – we do try. And in this ancient ritual that we enact
each Sunday – we try to point towards the mystery of it all, the
mystery of life and death, and beyond death, the Eternal and Invisible
from whom all these bodies, all these visible manifestations, all these
outward and visible signs of an inward and invisible grace, flow.
Our prayers are eloquent in what they do not try to explain, and
eloquent also in their poetic language and use of allegory in this
un-poetic and most materialistic of historical ages. Here in this
time of great misunderstanding of the poetry of the Bible and other
sacred texts, we aspire nonetheless to praise God with the mystical
poetry of the prayer book, the Psalms, and Scripture. And we hold
dear the carefully repeated and oh-so-mysterious words of Jesus himself
about the pouring out of his life for us, for the feeding of our
spiritual and essential natures.
We come to communion to be lifted up to the higher state of
consciousness reflected in these things. We do not come to remain
mired in the mud of endless arguments, debates, judgments and
criticisms, fears, worries and all the anxiety that such being stuck in
small thinking generates. We come here to be lifted up to a
perspective from which we can see that so much of what we take to be
important is very, very small in the light of Eternity. We come
here to be lifted up to the place where true love reaches us, and can
reach us, not just sometimes and some places, but every day. We
come here to be fed by Christ and taught by his presence that the
Gospel is living and active in the very depths of our hearts, in its
secret and inward place. We come to be lifted up to this true
love that knows no opposite, that knows no decay or diminishment, this
love that bears all things and is infinitely patient and kind.
We are lifted here to a place where the Spirit can reach us and teach us by that Eternal Love.
And like the true and sincere disciple spoken of in today’s Gospel, the
woman who recognized the divine and let the divine love fill her heart,
undaunted by the harsh and hardened hearts of the Pharisees around her
– like that sincere disciple about whom Jesus said, what she has done
will be told in memory of her – like that sincere disciple, this is the
essential gift that Jeanne has left with us, the gift she offered from
her own essential self and offered with her life and work and
presence. She sought to lift us up, to encourage us, to lighten
our darkness and despair, to lift us, at least for a moment to the
place where the Spirit could reach us, where hope and love could reach
us, and strengthen us to stand. One place where her spiritual
being shone was in the sacrament of work. Consider what it takes
to be a good physical therapist, and to teach and train others in this
art. You have to go to people who are imprisoned by their
physical pain and their emotional despair, people whose thoughts are
saying, “I can’t move,” and convince them to do exactly what they do
not want to do. You have to convince them to move into greater
pain, greater despair and stronger thoughts of resistance, to move
until they are lifted up to that place where the pain and despair and
resistance seem small by comparison with the real vision that “I will
walk again,” or “I will move this part of the body that seems beyond
movement.” I will, with help from a higher source, I will get beyond
this imprisoning pain, and there is something beyond it that beckons me
to work harder at it until I get it, something that pulls me to keep
going. Consider the spiritual dimensions of such work – it is
right out of the baptismal covenant, isn’t it? I will, with God’s
help.
Jeanne must have been truly great at this work. I say this
because she was still encouraging people right up until the end of her
physical life. I have often reflected on the unexplainable fact
that after a visit with Jeanne, I felt renewed in the Spirit. It
was not anything specific that she said or did, although she did make a
real effort to be uplifting and positive in her speech, in her tone, in
her smile. But it went much deeper than that. It was a
spiritual uplifting that came through all that she expressed. It
came from deep within her, from her essence, and it touched me in a
place beyond words, in an essential place within my soul. Leaving
communion with Jeanne, I would find myself in a place of communion
where the Spirit could reach me with love and hope once again.
So this is her gift to us still – to lift us, at least for the moment
(and the moment is where Eternity touches time) to the place where the
Spirit can teach us inwardly in our hearts about the questions that
this contradictory human life raises.
Why are we compelled to seek the Infinite when our bodies are so
clearly finite? Why do we reach for limitless love even when our
own daily affections are ruled by such small limits of liking and
disliking, attraction and aversion? Why are we drawn to hope for
wholeness when the world seems to be forever fragmenting into smaller
and more isolated pieces of disorder? Why do we seek an invisible
God so much larger than all of this when the visible world captivates
our attentions so very much?
“Friend, come up higher,” says the Host to the guest who humbly takes
the lowest seat at the banquet. Come up higher for a more
expansive view. Within each one of us is the seed of Eternal
life, well hidden in this mortal shell.
But Shakespeare said it so much better in the Merchant of Venice:
“Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with
patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb
which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still ‘quiring to the young-ey’d cherubims;
Such harmony is in immortal souls:
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.”
It is fitting that we remember Jeanne here and now in this
Communion, for she is here with us. She is here, invisible to the
eye, but so very present in her most essential being. She is here
and still inviting us to lift our own hearts as she has done, lift up
our hearts to receive the love and delight of heaven, and be fed in
Eternity, for Eternity, right here and now. Amen.
The Rev. Edie Bird
June 17, 2007
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