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“A
Celebration of Life For Veronica Clarke*”
July 31, 1928 – March 4, 2018 Meditation Delivered By Rev. Dick Stetler –
April 29, 2018 Centenary United Methodist Church
Psalm 23; I Corinthians 13:4-8, 13; Proverbs
31
A number of years ago,
I was asked by an Eagle Scout in my church if I would help him put
tarpaper on the roof of a cabin that he and his dad had built in the Charlie waited until February and then asked, "How about this
Saturday?" He picked me up and off we went to the cabin.
While we had all summer and fall to complete this project,
Charlie procrastinated. On
that Saturday the temperature had dropped to 12 degrees.
The rolls of tarpaper were frozen and had to be unrolled
extremely carefully or it would tear.
I had a lot of thoughts about being on a roof in the middle of
winter, but I kept them to myself.
They would not have been helpful, nor would they have changed the
circumstances. As our work continued, we had tacked down one and a half sides of
the roof, when something remarkable happened that made my irritation and
frustration with Charlie evaporate in seconds.
It started to snow.
This snow was unlike anything I had ever seen before or since.
Individual crystals were falling on the frozen tarpaper.
Charlie and I stopped work at the same time.
We could not resist the invitation to enter one of nature's
fabulous art galleries. No ice
crystals even remotely resembled any of the others and they were falling
for miles around us. The world has a population of over seven billion people and each
of us is one-of-a-kind. We conform to socially acceptable patterns, but
how we process our experiences is what makes us one-of-a-kind.
Besides wearing different faces, the spirit by which we live is
our individual choice. Recently, my sisters spent the week with us.
They were born identical twins.
Now, they are seventy years old but their inner worlds, their
interests, their interpretation of the world, and their attitudes were
not identical. Each
communicated through a spirit that was uniquely different.
Veronica was one of these individuals who possessed qualities
that made her distinctly different.
She possessed a vivid imagination and was a consummate
story-teller. Not everyone has created an art form out of story-telling.
Most people do not take the time to learn how to tell a good
story. She told a story about Ian, how she fell in love with his voice
long before she saw him in person. She had stories about all the places
she lived in She was in a play where she had one line to say.
Ian showed up at the theatrical performance with a group of his
friends. Once Veronica
spoke her one line, Ian and his buddies burst into thunderous applause,
rose to their feet and carried on as if she had played the main
character. Veronica was
mortified. In December 2013, Veronica entered the Dr. Stanley Ratteray
Memorial Christmas Short Story Contest sponsored by the
Royal Gazette.
Her story was entitled,
The Warm Red Coat. She won first place in the Adult Category as well
first place overall. For a woman
who was born on the last day of July 1928, still possessing her skills
as an author was typical for Veronica.
Aging had not taken many of her qualities from her. Once I asked her what she thought about God.
She looked at me, knowing that I would accept whatever she said,
and answered: We just don't know
about God. What I do know
is that I have felt God's presence throughout my life.
If God has looked after me in this life, I simply trust that I
will be looked after when I leave.
I do not think about things that are overly complicated. Life is
too short to worry about anything. All of us, in spite of what we
believe, are in the same boat.
She possessed a quiet wisdom that could be highly opinionated at
times. In a close game of
Scrabble, she would use the oddest words that may have been known only
to her. Her son-in-law, Mark, suggested that she used three
dictionaries, the official English, American, and the one she used in a
pinch -- the Clarke edition.
What has happened to such
a colorful, loveable character? Many years ago,
there lived a baron in One night he found
a diseased, graying stump among his flawless roses.
He instructed his gardener to remove it.
To his chagrin, day after day, the stump was still there.
This was unlike his gardener not
to follow-through. He found the gardener and repeated his request to
remove the old, gray stump.
The gardener responded, "I will remove it if you really find it
offensive, but first I want to show you something." The two walked through the garden and left through the gate at
the far end. They walked
around to the side of the wall where the gardener had built a trellis.
On that trellis were rose vines with countless roses in full
bloom. The gardener said, I was in the
process of removing the stump as you had requested when noticed that a
healthy growth from that gray stump found a small crack in the wall.
Sir, what we are observing here are the fruits of that gray
stump. Seeking more light,
the alive part of the rose bush grew through the crack in the wall and
is now blooming on the other side. There is no way to capture the essence of Veronica Clarke with
words. She lived her life as a senior the same way she lived during her
younger years. She never
lost her passion for children, for keeping her life as
poetry in motion, for
blooming wherever she was planted, and for her constant stress to
members of her family never to stop learning.
This is the woman that we knew here at Centenary. She was
one-of-a-kind that lived her life the way she wanted to.
The opinion of others did not seem to matter.
She has not died, she has simply graduated from her physical form
to bloom on the other side. CONGREGATIONAL PRAYER
The Prayer of St. Francis
Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. PASTORAL PRAYER Eternal and always faithful God, what a
joy it is to experience life as an adventure.
We recognize that when we were born, you had already placed
within us the potential to develop all the marvelous and wonderful
talents and abilities that enable us to flower and create fruit as we
make our contributions to those around us. The adventure of living gives us
mountains to climb and valleys through which to walk.
Each experience offers us the opportunity to define ourselves.
Every episode of life gives us choices that weave the fabric of
our lives.
As we experience
uncertainty and many outcomes that remain unpredictable, it is during
such moments that we find and develop our skills, it is there that we
discover our strengths and weaknesses, and it is from these that we
eventually leave the bonds created within our families to create new
ones within our own family. Today, as we celebrate Veronica's life,
we recognize that she was a self-starter, a fast learner, and had a
knack of making subjects fascinating for her pupils.
Through her storytelling, she gave transparency to the spirit by
which she lived. She knew how to convert her losses into
stepping stones that gave her
the courage and faith to trust you implicitly for the outcome of all
things.
We thank you, God,
for the many ways and forms that Veronica had discovered how to make her
understanding of love to become visible.
We pray these thoughts through the
loving spirit of Jesus Christ our Lord, who taught us to say when we
pray . . .
*This was Dick's first attempt to combine a worship service with a
celebration of life of a long-time church member, Veronica Clarke.
Veronica had been living in |