IN MEMORIAM : Alice Dabney Parker

IN MEMORIAM

 

Alice Dabney Parker

 

Sermon by her daughter, The Rev. Fleming Rutledge

 

April 27, 2007, being the third week of Easter

 

Emmanuel Church, Franklin, Virginia

 

You may wonder why we chose that reading from the Gospel of Mark about our Lord healing the epileptic boy. I pray and hope that by the time we finish, we’ll know. Because funerals, as you know, are really not for the dead, but for the living. These words are for those of us who are here today in this “queen of seasons bright,” this Easter season of fifty days stretching between Easter Day and Pentecost.

 

Mother, who had very refined taste in music, loved the Easter hymns especially, more than the Christmas ones. Not everyone knows that for eleven years in the 40s and 50s Alice Parker sat in that organ loft—where the old organ was, where the Franklin Book Club is sitting today—and played the organ for the services. More than that, she was the director of a small but select choir of mixed adults and children. That’s why Betsy and I both know all the words of scores of hymns. Jeannette Purrington remembers those days; when she heard of Mother’s death, she called about altar flowers for the service. So these flowers, beautifully arranged by Gayle Urquhart on behalf of Emmanuel Church, were given by one of Mother’s former choir girls.

 

Mother’s devotion to Emmanuel Church was total. In the years after our father died—he who was many times senior warden—Mother visited the sick and the bereaved of the parish. We found the lists she kept of all the little gifts of food, flowers, books and other items that she had taken to people, not just Episcopalians but people all over the community. We had no idea how much of this she had done until after her death. She felt the sufferings of others very deeply. People sensed that. Three different people said, this week, “I loved your mother—everybody loved your mother”; “I was devoted to your mother—everybody was.” I think they knew she was devoted to them and that she grieved when they were sad, sick, or hurt.

 

It’s unusual for an intellectual to care so much for people, yet Mother was an intellectual in the true sense; she placed the highest value on the life of the mind and the pursuit of ideas. We used to say that she knew everything and that she was always right, and we said that not in resentment, but in admiration. She didn’t know everything, of course—for instance, she didn’t know much about science, though she certainly respected it. Within her very wide range of knowledge of the humanities, however, we almost never knew her to make a mistake, either in facts or in discernment. Alex Haley is reported to have said that the death of an old person is like the burning of a library. Alice Dabney Parker’s library was vast and we are inconsolable about its loss.

 

Mother was the epitome of a Christian in her determination to do her part in relieving the sufferings of others. Her outpourings of gifts to charities resulted in huge pile-ups of appeals for money arriving in the mail every day. Because of this concern for others, and even more, because of her personal demeanor, people have frequently referred to her as sweet, gentle, and kind. That’s true. She was indeed both sweet and kind, and gentle too at times. There was another side to her, however. Ed Pickup said, “God forbid that Alice’s funeral program should have any apostrophes in the wrong place!” She was positively ferocious in her concern for the proper ways of doing things, especially in regard to the use of language. She came by this passion early in life. At age six, she was reading Dickens, and the last book she read at the end was a biography of Charlotte Brontë—which gives you an idea of her love of writing and writers. All of her life she took literary tours, following the steps of Thomas Hardy, Keats, Byron, T. E. Lawrence, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf. Because she read only the greatest writers, and because of her fierce commitment to the truth about things, she was passionately opposed to sentimental distortions. She thought that it was dishonest and lazy to gloss over the dark side of life. She wanted precise, unblinking honesty. I will never forget her telling me, not many years after the end of the Second World War II, that millions of Jews had been put to death and that we needed to face up to that. Everybody talks about the Holocaust now, but in the forties, very few people cared to know about it. That sort of thing made her extraordinary.

 

Now we are coming closer to our Scripture passages. Mother envied those who had the gift of unquestioning faith, because she did not have it. I feel sure that there are many people here today who can understand that. Faith is a gift, not an acquisition. Those who have been given it can only be thankful for it; we can never boast of having faith. Mother had the type of mind that relentlessly probes after things that others sometimes try to ignore or smooth over. Ben Duffey will remember the little position papers she wrote back in the 70s when she and he would talk at length about faith and doubt.

 

Mother’s doubts took a form that every serious person will recognize. They emerged from her temperament as I am trying to describe it. She could not bear for people to suffer. At the very end of her life she was still lamenting the loss of the son of friends who had died in tragic circumstances 20 years before. She had great difficulty reconciling such things with the promises of a merciful God.

 

In the reading from Mark, we hear of a man who, in desperation, brought his son to Jesus hoping against hope for some help. He didn’t know who Jesus was; he had only heard that he was some sort of religious wonder-worker. He calls Jesus “Teacher,” because he hasn’t the vaguest idea that he is the promised Messiah. He just wants to get help for his son. He describes how his boy suffers and he says to Jesus, “If you can do anything, please help us.”

 

Today we would say that the boy had epilepsy, but that’s not what the story means. The story means to convey that there are enemies loose in the world, enemies of God, enemies that have power to destroy human lives. It is that enemy that Mother railed against. Human beings are under assault by the power of Death in its many forms: disease, war, crime, violence. How do we understand these things in the context of our faith in God?

 

There is a common theme in all the Scripture readings today. All of these passages, in one way or another, speak of the power of God to overcome evil, suffering and Death. Listen again to Isaiah: “The Lord God will destroy…the covering that is cast over all peoples…He will swallow up death for ever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces.”

 

And listen again to St. Paul: “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” And Psalm 121 says, “The Lord will preserve you from all evil; he will preserve your life.” God has the power to give us the victory over Death. Only God can do this, and he has promised to do this. The difficult thing is that the completion of these things lies in the future, in the day of the Lord. Therefore we cannot know these promises except by faith.

 

The man who brought his son to Jesus had no faith in the Son of God; he did not even know who he was. He only knew that there was a healer in town attracting big crowds. When he says to the Lord, “If you can do anything, please help us,” Jesus challenges him with a remarkable answer. Repeating back his own words, the Lord says, “If you can do anything! All things are possible to him who believes.” Do you see how the Lord is summoning him first of all to put his trust in him? The call to believe is prior to the actual healing. The man’s response is even more remarkable. In fact, it has been called the greatest cry of faith in the New Testament. When Jesus says, “All things are possible to him who believes,” the man instantly responds, “I believe! Help my unbelief!”

 

“Help my unbelief!” This has always made me think of Mother. We think she was saying this all of her life. She wanted to believe and she never gave up. That’s why she was so faithful to the church. She wanted to be in the place of belief. Even though she herself did not have that full conviction, she wanted to be with people who did. She never ceased to want the sort of faith she saw in others. She was saying “Help my unbelief” all of her life. And that appeal, we may believe with all our hearts, was enough. It was certainly enough for our Lord, who, hearing the frantic father say those words, drove the enemy from the boy instantly with all the power of the original creation of the world.

 

In the Gospel of John there is a story which perfectly sums up the reasons for Mother’s lifelong dedication to the church, and, in particular, to all who serve the Church of Christ. The early days of Jesus’ ministry were very successful, but as time went on more and more people turned against him. In John’s Gospel we read that some of his early disciples drew back and no longer went about with him. Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

 

Whatever her struggles of faith may have been, Mother knew that it was Christ the Lord who is himself the Word of eternal life. He has the power to overcome all our disbelief. And so we may all say, today, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

    AMEN.