Eulogy for Jeanne Bodfish

On behalf of  Jayne, John, and all of Jeanne Bodfish’s family, thank you all for being here to celebrate her life and legacy.  We all loved your mom and grandmom, and it is a testimony to her that we all felt like she was so close to us. Even though we cannot imagine what the loss of Jeanne means to you, we are here grieving with you. 

Jeanne was a modest theologian with profound insight.  She was able to communicate her life long journey into clear thoughts that rang deep and true. She lived the beatitudes and spoke of God’s all-inclusive love in her daily life. There is no need to preach on her behalf, she has already done it. She preached first that life is not fair, and bitterness is no traveling companion you want to embrace. She instead took a journey that led her to the 12-step tradition and into a deep and abiding faith. I remember her at Church of the Resurrection taking classes and copious notes. She would then summarize a whole class in a single sentence that would get to the heart of it. “Honey, God wants us to be well.” 

She preached that God’s greatest gifts are free for the joy of giving and receiving.  I have an old fossil rock she gave me to put in the driveway at our house.  It was a big one from her rock collection. She said once when a tour bus she was traveling on stopped, she saw a beautiful rock by the door. “Can I have this rock?” she asked the driver. “Madam, England would be honored for you to take that rock.” 

She was a natural storyteller and laughed as freely as she cried at tenderness or felt the righteous indignation rising in her at the injustice and oppression of others. But all of that is just dancing around the edges of what Jeanne preached with her life. The heart of what she preached was love. That is as plain and as simple as I can say it. She preached love like Jesus would want it preached. She preached it without guile, with unaffected modesty, and with power. I am sorry for our loss. I am sorry we will miss that preacher’s voice in our community. 

There are so many preachers in town who learned from Jeanne and who knew her to be a great preacher. 

The Rev. Charlie Strobel, founder of Room In the Inn, said, “When I think of Jeanne I think of someone whose embrace is bigger than her arms.  She could envelop you in love long before she ever got her arms around you.”

My brother, the Rev. Dr. Gladstone Stevens, Vice Rector of St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park California and former Sunday school teacher of Jeanne’s,  wrote, “When I think of Jeanne the first thing that comes to mind is the way she prayed. She was always a bit out of step with everyone else but prayed with more intensity and devotion than anyone else. My experience is that the manner of one's prayer is indicative of that person's way of life. She was perhaps one of the most spiritually developed humans I have ever met. I, too, will miss her.”

The Rev. Dr. Gordon Peerman, beloved Episcopal Priest and leader of Buddhist contemplative practices and communities, wrote, “What a sweetheart. Not only was Jeanne always there, she was the first person there when the doors opened on Sunday morning. I can just hear her gravelly voice and see that twinkle in her eye with which she always greeted me so lovingly. She was like the elder stateswoman poster child St. A's parishioner: left-leaning, all-including, loving everybody. Everybody.”

I will always see Jeanne in the pages of the Gospel. I will always hear her in the liturgy of this chapel. I will always feel her as I continue to try and live out the corporeal acts of mercy that she cherished:  to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty, to visit the prisoner, to comfort the sorrowful, tend the sick, and bury the dead. She was a gift. She taught me how to be a good pastor, especially how to visit people in the hospital. When I thought she was dying fifteen years ago with a broken hip, I sat by her hospital bed and cried. I couldn’t offer her communion and she comforted me and asked me to read Psalm 131. Then, the next time I visited her when I thought she might not make it about five years ago, I made it through the opening prayer with her, but when she talked about Gracey the cat I couldn’t hold it together. Again, she said she would be fine and I just needed to do the communion service. 

Jeanne knows everyone here is mourning her. She would want me to quote a scripture or maybe St. Julian, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.  Jeanne knows that death is hard for us all to face and spent years contemplating the meaning of life and death for her. She would want me to share with you that she was never abandoned by love and that you will never be abandoned by love. Jeanne makes it possible for me to believe that someday we may be able to return to dust and still make our song, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. 

---Given November 5th, 2012

New Year's Resolutions

There is a 4,000-year-old tradition of making New Year’s resolutions according to history.com. The year-end is a perfect time to reflect back and set goals. I haven’t set very many New Year’s resolutions apart from my continual resolution to lose 5 and exercise more. I just wait for Ash Wednesday and make my resolutions then. Resolutions are simply decisions to either do something, or refrain from doing something. We resolve to make amends or change, not just on January 1 or on Ash Wednesday, but when we feel like we need to do something different. It isn’t hard to make them. The problem lies in keeping them.  

We need community to keep resolutions. For example: If you resolve to practice yoga in 2013, it helps to have a friend to sign up with, a class to go to, children who are patient when dinner is late, and a workplace that offers you time to go. Anyone seeking recovery knows they need a community to hold them up and hold them accountable. We need each other because the role the community plays in the nature and implementation of resolutions is huge.

But beyond community helping foster individual resolutions, there are communal resolutions, because as the community thrives, our individual lives of faith thrive. Common resolutions foster the common good, which affects us all. The gift we offer one another is to live out our faith together. We promise to be there for one another in good and bad times, that we will hold each other up and hold each other accountable, and that by being together the sum will be greater than its parts. Common resolutions should be at the heart of our resolutions, since they are key to living in gratitude and meaning in our lives.

St. John Chrysostom lived in the 4^th century and was the archbishop of Constantinople. His preaching echoed the themes of hospitality and charity as noted in Matthew 25, “when you did this to the least of these, you did it unto me”. He spoke eloquently about the need for all Christians to work together towards the common purpose of caring for one other. "This is the rule of most perfect Christianity, its most exact definition, its highest point, namely, the seeking of the common good ... for nothing can so make a person an imitator of Christ as caring for neighbors."

The early Christian communities were rooted in a common concern for one another in worship and service. In the readings this week for the celebration of the Holy Family, the letter of Paul to the Galatians says that we are all children of God. In other words, related. We are all heirs together, bound by the wellness of the whole community. The story of the birth of Jesus as told in the Gospel is the story of a community of faith, recognizing the gift of Jesus, celebrating with the family, and ultimately helping make sure the child was safeguarded; not just for Mary and Joseph, but for the sake of the whole community.  It took the shepherds, the magi, the parents, and a slew of people to get the Holy Family to Egypt and back.

Recently a new resident came to Magdalene directly from prison from another state with nothing. She came into community with common goals and purpose. She told me that when she arrived her new roommate gave her clothes, shampoo, new underwear, and towels. She said she had never been treated with such kindness. Right after she said it, I wanted to say, “Well, you know, it’s because your roommate had just received all of those things so she just gave you what was given to her.”  But as soon as the thought popped into my head, I knew that is just what we all do. We think at first that we give to others as if it was ours in the first place, when truly it was given to us and we just share it - whether it is a towel, a prayer, or a common resolution to share with the world.  This is the week to celebrate and make some common resolutions for 2013.  My hope is that we can resolve to:

1.  Celebrate each week the newest people in the circle as the honored guests of the banquet.

2.  Launch the cafe and the sewing studio.

3.  Hone the message of inclusion and love without judgment.

4.  Open a new residence inside and outside the prison walls.

5.  Cast our nets wider and speak unapologetically as a unique community without formal membership about freedom offered when we focus on right action, not right thought. 

We are called to love the world, so we all have to keep changing to love it better.  We need a community with a common resolve to help us live into our resolve for the sake of the world.

Peace and Love,

becca

The Timeless Gift of Christmas

Time seems rigid; it marches us forward and waits for no one.  It ticks away years off lives, and carves our pasts in stone.   Tonight we celebrate that Christmas doesn’t adhere to the rules of time.  Time turns to liquid in Christmas’ presence.  It becomes merely a fluid concept through which we can travel.  All at once we can be carried back two thousand years to the story of the birth of Jesus and then in the next breath we can remember a Christmas from childhood, or wonder about what tomorrow will hold.  It is a powerful spirit that can break open time and offer it to us like a soothing hot tea.   When we drink from it we move into the space where the temporal and eternal kiss and believe things we spend our days questioning. When we taste the Christmas spirit we can imagine a peaceable future, a reconciled past, and present filled with the gift of hope.

Last week in the circle at Thistle Farms the spirit of Christmas settled into the room.  We had outpaced all internet sales, had raised enough money to open the new cafe to welcome 7 new employees, had hosted under Carole’s leadership 51 events, and watched Latisha, who works in shipping, drive up in what she calls her first, “legal car”.  So 50 of us gathered like we do every week and immediately the tears flowed.  Time was set aside in that space to make room for a spirit that held us captive.  Women, without prompting or rehearsal, recalled Christmases past spent on the streets looking for money and eating White Castles out of hotel rooms rented by the hour.  Women remembered childhoods of visiting their moms in prison, or grieving having no memories of Christmas at all.  Women wept as they grieved relatives and friends they had lost or who were sick this Christmas.  Then a woman talked about celebrating the birth of Jesus for the first time in her life.  The conversation moved freely into comments about Christmas present and the joy of being in community.  In that circle we traveled through Christmas seasons with each other, not boxed in by time but moving through memory and hope.

The story of the birth of Jesus in the gospel of Luke begins this way.  He sets the time and place.  The emperor Cesar Augustus in 4AD called for a census.  Quirinius was governor of Syria.  Into that un-peaceful occupied nation burdened with the same themes of suffering and politicizing that we know, the story begins.  It begins by rooting the birth in the stump of Jesse.  It seems like into this space the people will need a militaristic messiah who can fight against all the injustices.  But even as Joseph and Mary entered Bethlehem and had a baby, the birth broke through it all like an angel.   Into that particular time and location where the violence of poverty called Mary and Joseph to birth in a barn, Love, manifested in the Christ Child burst forth and shattered time and space.  Suddenly Angels sing from dark nights.  When we taste the eternal present in our midst, our hearts stir and we rip open the box we have been held by.  Inside is the vision of Isaiah that promises the yoke of burden and the rod of the oppressor are broken and the boots of the tramping warriors will be burned as fuel for the fire.  For a child has come to break through all time and space, and he is named wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, prince of peace.  When time is torn asunder in the presence of love all the other mythical absolutes that we are bound by are shattered.  We are allowed to dream timeless dreams and speak of peace and hope.  We are welcomed into a new space where “then” and “when” turn simply into “here and now”.  And it will be this way forever.

So the gift is offered to you and to me this night.  We are given the gift of standing together, the homeless and cosseted, the wounded and innocent, the cynical and guileless, and work towards women's freedom and healing from the oldest wounds this world has known.  Accepting the gift means that the Christmas spirit lives in us and tomorrow is already here.  Whether we grieve or shout for joy in this moment; whether we are run ragged by solitude or family; whether we believe it all or not; the gift is given to us.  

Merry Christmas

(December 2012)