Astilbe
Yellow Loosestrife
Japanese maple
Bugbane
Not long ago, I found myself in a position to write a letter to a young person who, I happened to know, was not well.
You can appreciate, I hope, that this was a peculiar act. For one thing, you and I may be old enough to understand what a letter is, and the concern that might give rise to its creation, but this young person? Even as I sat down to write, I was pretty sure receiving a letter from me – a rather peripheral person in their life – was going to cause them very real confusion.
To make matters more difficult, even though I was convinced they were having profound difficulty functioning in the world, I was not at all sure they knew it! It was possible that my concern itself would be a mystery to them, and so, my advice would be equally mysterious. Why, they would think, is this misguided old man giving me advice? Who does he think he is?
These were all good reasons for me to stop writing, screw the letter up into a ball and send it flying across to the far corner of the room where the trashcan was sitting. Maybe I could bank shot a three pointer. That was about all I could hope to achieve with that letter.
And yet I wrote the letter anyway.
I am telling you all of this because, in spite of all the misgivings I have just enumerated, I wanted terribly to let this young person in on something. I wanted them to know something important, that I thought just might change their lives for the better.
I wanted to tell them about Gwen’s recipe.
**
Astor
Brass Lantern
Rose of Sharon
Jacob’s ladder
It is a fact well known among the locals in these parts, that Gwen Niskala and her daughter Cindy liked to walk.
If you happened to be over on Squantum Road in the middle of the day on a weekday – as I sometimes was – chances are you’d come upon them – two women in quiet company, walking under the shadows of the ancient Maples and Oaks.
I have a distinct memory of just such an occasion when, having recently come from somewhere nearby – a pastoral visit to Good Shepherd, no doubt – I happened upon the two of them where Squantum veers off from Howard Hill Road. It was during Covid, because I’d been swept up in all the social distancing, all the public health precautions, paranoia and fear… and I remember the sight of Gwen and Cindy walking there soothed my soul to a very great extent. Here was simple evidence that life could still be faithful and good – that there were still souls out in the world who were true to the rituals that nourished their spirits. I had the feeling, as I stopped and rolled down the window of my car, that the four horsemen of the apocalypse could gallop by trumpetting out the end of the world, and these two ladies would smile knowingly and keep walking, unconcerned by all the hooplah, keeping an eye out for May flowers they might find on the skirts of the road.
“Well, Good afternoon Ladies!” I said.
Recognizing me, Gwen blessed me with a little smile and, with a note of pleasant surprise in her voice, replied,
“Well! Good afternoon to you Pastor!”
Never before had my title sounded so good. It is a beautiful thing, indeed, to be recognized and appreciated by a woodland saint.
“Out for your daily constitutional, I see!”
“Yes,” Cindy said with a smile.
“We walk two miles,” Gwen said proudly, “three times a week.”
“Wow!” I said. “That’s wonderful.”
I already knew this of course, but “wow” and “that’s wonderful” were still the best responses I could come up with.
“I’m 92 years old,” she said, and paused for effect. “Not bad is it?”
“Not bad at all!” I agreed.
Cindy looked on with quiet pride.
“Well,” I said, “It’s a lovely day, I’ll let you ladies get back to it.”
“It is pretty,” Cindy agreed.
“Goodbye” I said, and, before rolling up my car window “its delightful to see you!”
I glanced at them in my rear view mirror asEvery now and then, the lake, which was a mere stone’s throw away , would peak through the lush canopy of midsummer.
Near the end of her life, I’d taken similar walks with my mother, and though they had not been as faithful or as long, those walks had been sweet beyond measure – giving me something I’d been too rushed to ever know before – the gift of a love expressed in a shared silence. I saw it once again with Gwen and Cindy – how, in their walks, they shared a love so long it did not need to be spoken.
Gwen’s recipe for a long and happy life, has three ingredients.
With this little tale Gwen herself has offered us the first ingredient: movement.
Keep moving!
***
Gooseneck Loosestrife
Baptista
Bleeding Heart
Lady’s Mane
It is a fact well known among the locals in these parts, that Cynthia Hamilton wore a purple hat and carried a flat wicker basket.
When I was in my office, and I heard someone on the stairs, I would smile when the first hint of purple would come into view.
“Well Hello Cynthia! To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“Hello Reverend!” Somehow, Cynthia always said this with an inflection that let it be known (but only between the two of us) that it really was just a bit silly that someone the likes of me could be given such a title. It was not a critical inflection – on the contrary. It was a playful conspiracy, almost a wink. She knew, when she came to my office, that there would invariably be two or three things that I had completely forgotten about, that she would have to remind me to do, and she took a certain amount of glee in this.
On this day, as on most other days, there was something in that Mary Poppins basket of hers that she wanted to show me.
“Does the name Alyce Brooks mean anything to you?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.
As usual, I had not the foggiest,.
Nor could I make head or tail of the piece of paper she had handed me.
“Uhh, no.”
Cynthia proceeded to tell me in great detail, as she was wont to do, about a lady – the aforementioned Mrs. Brooks – who’d grown up in the Monadnock region, had been a bit of an artist type, but was best known for being the lunch lady down at Jaffrey Grade School. She was not a member of UCJ, but she had always admired the work that our church did in the community, and had, Cynthia thought, occasionally shown up at Triple D… maybe. Anyway, the point was that she had recently died and left the church some money.
A dim light appeared in the foggy reaches of my brain. I’d seen a recent email about a small bequest.
“Is this…” I said.
“Yes?…”
I opened up my computer, and soon discovered the email in question.
“Does this have anything to do with Darlene Hedstrom?”
“Yes… it does!”
This Darlene Hedstrom – in fact, Dr Darlene Brooks Hedstrom had emailed asking for my signature on a form that would allow the NH probate to release a $300 gift to the United Church of Jaffrey.
“Well…” Cynthia skewered me that eye of hers… “Did you sign it?”
“No.”
Of course I hadn’t signed it! God and Cynthia were clearly in cahoots. If there was ever anything that I had forgotten about completely – that would be the thing that she would ask me about.
But, as it turned out Cynthia was not really there to make me squirm about unsigned documents. What she really wanted to do was brag about Darlene Hedstrom, the deceased’s daughter.
“Did you notice Dr. Hegstrom’s credentials?” Cynthia asked.
I looked at the bottom of the email. Alyce Brooks’ daughter, Darlene, was now an Associate Professor in Christian Studies at Brandeis University. She was also the Chair of the Department of Classical and Early Mediterranean Studies.
“This woman is quite the scholar,” I said.
These words were music to Cynthia’s ears. This was exactly what she hoped I would say.
“That girl,” she said, “used to come into the library everyday. She was a delight… an insatiable reader! You could not stop her. She was interested in everything! Once I gave her an elementary little book about the archeology of Ancient Egypt, and that was it! She never turned back!”
Before retirement, Cynthia was the Jaffrey town librarian.
She, like no one else in town, was skilled at awakening and exciting in someone, the staggering capacity, that is our inheritance as human creatures – to stretch out the fingertips of the imagination and tickle the very edges of the universe.
Cynthia brings us, elegantly, to the second ingredient of Gwen’s recipe for a long happy life:
Interest!
Keep interested!
The humble town librarian is the gatekeeper who swings wide the portals of curiosity. The child is awakened to a kind of noble purity that can be found in an idea. Thumbing through a picture book, a young mind fixates upon something beautiful that will come to define her whole life.
***
Sweet woodruff
Anemone
Iris
The names of the plants that I have recited now and again during this service in case you have not already figured it out, are the names of the plants that are growing in the United Church of Jaffrey memorial garden.
These are plants that many of us, in this congregation have donated from our own gardens.
And also, in case you have not figured this out – Gwen’s recipe for a long and happy life, is printed on the back of today’s bulletin:
Keep moving, Keep interested and Keep a good attitude.
So, as I am sure you HAVE figured out, it remains for me to talk about how Mary-Lu taught me how to keep a good attitude.
This is not hard for me to do, because, where I was concerned, Mary-Lu had a bit of a habit.
She had a bit of a habit of giving me books.
I have two of the books that she gave me, with me here, that I will read from.
It was not hard for me to find passages that recommend having a good attitude in times of trial.
This book is called “Old Age, A Beginner’s Guide” and if it makes light of some things that you should not be made light of, that is precisely the point… and in this book is a chapter that is entitled “In Defense of Denial” and it begins like this:
If you are going to get a serious disease, it says, and unless you prefer to die violently and young, you are probably going to, Parkinson’s is not your worst choice.It is progressive and at the moment incurable, but like its victims it tends to move slowly. It is not generally considered fatal, meaning that there is enough time for something else to get to you first. This gives the Neurologist who first diagnoses you something positive to say. “You’ll still have time to floss,” is how mine put it…”
OK, so, if you have Parkinson’s, you can still have clean teeth.
This book is called Soul Stories by Gary Zukov… another book that Mary-Lu gave to me, and in this book I found a nice little section about Responsible Choices… and it says:
You choose your future moment by moment, decision by decision. You do this whether you are aware of it or not. If you are not aware of it you create your future unconsciously. That is what happens when you don’t know about all the parts of yourself. The parts of yourself that you don’t know about do the choosing. When you are aware of all the parts of yourself, you do the choosing. Which future would you rather live into? One that you choose, or one that ou have not thought about, and you might not want to happen. “A dog with short hair and a dog with long hair are always fighting inside of me” a man told his friend, “but I am not worried… I know that the dog with the short hair will win.” “How do you know?” she asked. “Because, he replied, “that is the one I feed.” You have dog’s fighting inside of you too. Your anger fights with your patience, your greed fights with your generosity. If you choose anger, you feed that dog. If you choose patience, that dog grows stronger.
Gary Zukov.
And then, near the end of her life – just a few months ago, I visited Mary-Lu over in Jaffrey rehab.
Laurie and Pat Cournoyer and I were there to give her a prayer shawl.
At that point, Mary Lu could hardly speak.
We laid the prayer shawl on her, and after Laurie and Pat left, Mary Lu and I took hands and prayed together again.
She was tired. She was weak. She was near the end. She opened her mouth and said:
“I appreciate.”
I squeezed her hand.
“‘preciate.” she said again. “‘preciate.”
**
“We are like Grass” says the prophet Isaiah.
Perhaps we are like
Lily of the Valley
Hyssop
Rose
Perhaps we are like the Iris or the Gooseneck Loosestrife or the Bugbane or the sweet woodruff that are in the Memorial Garden.
Our lives are short.
We live for a moment in a sea of eternity.
And our ashes go to mingle with the Baptista, the Bleeding Heart, and the Lady’s Mane.
But in our brief life we are accompanied by a God who picks us up, as a shepherd, carrying us to our mother sheep. A God who brings us to the hilltop, and lets us look out on the world.
Thank you God for blessing us so that we can keep moving. So that we can gather May flowers in the spring.
Thank you God for blessing us so that we can keep interested. So that our lives can be full of meaning.
Thank you God for helping us keep a good attitude, so that we can help each other,
Help each other
to the very last.
Amen.