corrected post

Here is a continuation of THIS POST UPTHREAD.

Today we laid Kelts' wife Claire to rest.

This here is a matriarchal culture. The men are the muscle and sometimes the heart, but the women-- ah, now, they're the glue.

At Claire's beside a few nights ago, that strength of a matriarchy was evident. The matriarchs-in-training of the generation that followed Claire and Kelts... gathering the family, including the "girls," Claire's grand-daughters. Again, family gathering.... saying last goodbyes of amazing gratitude: praise for the woman who had helped to raise them all under a strong, intact umbrella of loving strength. Words of intimate memory and appreciation for all she had given, all she had been. Telling her they were strong enough that she could go. Looking forward to seeing her again. Giving her messages for Kelts, till they can see him again, themselves.

And it was evident how well-suited to their too-soon roles of leadership are these excellent young women, the grand-daughters, whose lives are beginning to bear adult fruit. Breathtakingly fit for assuming Claire's shoes, and not thinking a thing about it yet-- focused at that moment upon wishing Claire a good journey.

(Such is the privilege of ministry-- to see all this implicate beauty and watch it begin to unfold.)


Ah well, so later that evening she passed, "surrounded by family" as the sparse obituary language puts it. Such wondrous love that it makes 'most any witness want to TELL it.


And today, in due course, the funeral. The family spent the morning in the parish house, preparing a gracious and welcoming reception for all Claire's friends and family-- all the touches Claire herself would have loved to arrange, and would have arranged without fuss. While they worked, I occupied a nearby room where I could be asked last-minute-help questions, work on music choices for the upcoming Pentecost season of the Saturday Night Service, and think my way through Scripture lessons due for those weeks to make GOOD music choices.

When the time came, we all went into the big ole church to say our prayers together.

And within all the things I did to "work" the "event"-- as one little molecule among the many molecules that make life happen here in this mountain-town culture-- there was another tiny molecule containing all the love there is... this one miniscule glimpse, that held my attention in the middle of the service. The bulletin guiding us through the prayers simply said, "Ave Maria, Sherri Bodine, Liszt." BINGO.

I guess they call it a "backstory" in today's news-speak.

Sherri is a well-known, well-loved local woman whose roots here are so deep that she sometimes has difficulty articulating what it means to be "from here." She's a friend, a parishioner, and the glue that holds a local home-hospice program together. She's a "social worker" whose joy in lay ministry is to go to the homes of the dying. There, she loves the dickens out of them with a wait-ful, watchful strength that knows how fine human beings really can be when the chips are down. She's the lady who drives all over and all around our crazy-hilly roads in any season-- whether the roads are dry or iced-- to share the timely privilege of allowing death to take its course when the time comes to do that with dignity. She's the one who organizes an annual Grief Camp for local, equally-inarticulate kids-- a place to come together to feel and say the inexpressible loss of a parent, a brother, a close young friend. A place where the grief can give way to play and laughter.

And she sings. She SINGS, oh my she sings. She could have left this community at any time in her life to become a world-class opera singer, but she stayed.... and she sings.... from the heart, songs she learns by ear.

Sherri, to make a long story a bit shorter, sang the arrangement the family loves, for Kelts' funeral. They had just talked about it in Claire's room. So of course she sang it for Claire..... of whom I'd had a bedside vision that she was waiting before passing, not only for the 2 grandkids who live farther away, but to "put on her wedding dress" for Kelts. Who, like the lady she was, was getting ready with joy to walk into her life with Kelts as she had once done, years and years ago. Who had waited patiently, these long lonely years, to do it again, and this time, REALLY forever. Who, in her casket last night at the local funeral home where so many families take their turns greeting and being greeted by friends, had the most adorable small smile around her eyes as her earthly remains lay before us.

But back to Sherri. I had wondered, as the service progressed, where the heck she was. I had not seen her before the service got underway. "Oh Lord," I worried, "It would be too funny and too awful if everyone had assumed someone else had called Sherri, to ask her to sing, but no one DID?" But my worry was bootless.... At the right time, she quietly stepped up from behind the organist's position, took her place, and sang that Ave Maria the way only she can sing it.

It struck me then-- for all I knew, she may well have zoomed into the parking lot, miraculously finding a space open, in between house calls. She may have seamlessly gone from one bedside, to church, to the next. ("May she go from strength to strength.") She's that immersed in her ministry, and is so well-suited for it, that she'd be able to do that, completely relaxed, with no worries.

The point is not that she DID do that (I didn't ask), but that she so easily COULD.


That's the kind of ministry to which I aspire-- that ability to be the right molecule at the right place, at the right time, to be used as God calls someone who is willing to be used.

And THAT, once again, is WHY I SING.

~Susan