December 11, 2008

December 11, 2008 Burial Office

Lucille Fitzsimmons December 31, 1905 - December 3, 2008

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God. And everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God.” This great passage from the First Letter of St. John, as great-grandson Hunter read it for us just a moment ago, runs in a highway directly to the heart of the deepest mystery and the deepest beauty of Christian life and Christian faith.

A simple statement, yet so very deep, with layer upon layer of complexity in the way we would understand who we are, in our relationships with one another and in our relationship with God, our heavenly Father. All the ways God manifests himself to us in love.

It seems to me the right passage of Holy Scripture to lift up this morning, as we come together, with I know a sense of sadness and loss, but with even more a sense of joy and thanksgiving, to offer back to God with such a sense of gratitude this act of worship—as we would commend to his unfailing care and love Lucille Mariah Higgins Fitzsimmons, whom we know here today as mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, as friend, as a member of this parish family, as a neighbor here for so many years in her home just a few blocks away on Jancey Street.

Born at the dawn of the 20th century, she lived to see it all, and into this new century as well. A remarkable story, a remarkable life, just a few weeks short of 103 years.

I mentioned to David yesterday that I have found it just plain impossible to talk about Lucille in the past days, and in the weeks and months before, as she began her last journey—impossible to talk about her without beginning to smile, to smile with real enjoyment. Thinking about her way of speaking, her frank, open, genuine, honest sense of being directly-to-the-point. A graciousness, a tenderness, a generosity, a vulnerability, for all that: but on the other hand, I don’t think I’d ever want to be on the other side of her in a debate or an argument. (Perhaps some of you have had that experience.) Not pulling any punches; calling things as she saw them.

Of course who she loved was you all, most of all. Her family: her “boys” and their families. A life that began in such difficult circumstances, with instability—and from that she built a family. With hard work and all her energy and passion. I think about the parable of Jesus, about the man who built his house not on shifting sands, but on solid rock. Wife and mother and grandmother, and with a spirit of family that then extended out to so many others.

It was interesting to me, and really touching and meaningful over the past year and these past months especially, as Lucille began to drift often away from the sense of being connected to the realities of what was going on around her, that in her mind and imagination she would talk often about how she was hoping, as she would say, “to get out of this place and go home.”

I know that was sometimes partly confusion. But it was I think more than that, and there was a sense of depth and meaning. She had spent a lifetime in love, making a home, and it seems just right that she would use that language to talk about this last turning of her life. She would talk about people from long ago as though they were in the next room, and to say that she expected them to return to her soon. She was this Baptist Catholic Methodist Presbyterian Episcopalian, and a mystic, I think, in her own way. Though maybe a little more straightforward than we usually expect mystics to be . . . . “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God. And everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God.”

The gospel reading from John 14 is appropriate at every Christian burial, but especially today: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” Some of the more contemporary translations say, “in my Father’s house are many rooms.” It may be a better translation of the Greek, but I’m going to stick with mansions, if it’s all the same to you. “I go to prepare a place for you, a mansion, that where I am, there you may be also.”

Lucille knew she was headed onto the next leg of a journey that had begun so long ago, and she spoke about that always just as she would: with confidence, with expectation, with a sense of Christian hope.

It has been for me a privilege over these past few years—and more than a privilege, truly a pleasure, to know Lucille as a member of the extended parish family, and as a friend, and to come to know your family at least in a small way, and I give thanks for that. We gather to worship, and as there is a sense of sadness, of loss, of the end of an era, it is for us at the same time in that right to give thanks and praise and to know the victory of our risen Lord and Savior. Lucille sang in church choirs in her earlier years, and I’m sure she did so with the “gusto” that she did everything else, and it’s fitting that we should have this wonderful music this morning. A tribute to her, and a reminder of the song of new life that God has placed in all our hearts.

May her soul, with the souls of all the faithful departed, by the mercy of God, rest in peace. May Light Perpetual shine upon her.

Bruce Robison