Last week, I celebrated the ten year anniversary of my time at Christ Church, Waltham, where I came to work in 2015 when the bishop asked if I’d be interested in an appointment at a little church west of Boston. Ten years later, I still love these people. I cry at their funerals and their baptisms, trying to thread the needle between having my feelings spill all over everything and being a human person with real relationships. This past weekend was a tough one—a beloved sometime-parishioner died after a seven months long struggle with a series of medical catastrophes from an AVM in her brain.
After having joined with astonishing
vigor in 2006, over the years, Paula came to find that she and Jesus were
working through some differences that felt irreconcilable to her. The amount of
translation she found herself needing to do to be in church was just too much.
The mystery of God for her was silence and stillness, out taking pictures of
dead weeds. God was harder to find for her in the particularity of Jesus and
the practices of church community. We
emailed off and on throughout her sojourn away, and she turned up on Sundays
once in a while. Last December as we
were emailing afterwards she said it felt good, but that she felt like her
vocation was in the “outer darkness.” Naturally I chose the prologue to John
part for the Gospel at the funeral—“The light shines in the darkness, and the
darkness did not overcome it.” She had a lot of light.
The funeral was marvelous. We had amazing singers, full
incense and fiery processions. I did cry, sniveling through “Let all mortal
flesh keep silence” after
communion, a hymn that I love and a particular favorite for a person who was,
as her husband said in his euology, “the most beloved misanthrope there ever
could have been.” She was indeed happiest when fleshy mortals were silent.
A few people have asked, so here’s my
sermon. (you should also look at her blog--www.paulashouseoftoast.blogspot.com, which is BRILLIANT).
…
In Memoriam, Paula
Tatarunis, 1952-2015
There is a section in
one of the addenda to the Episcopal Book of Common prayer politely titled The Burial of one who does not profess the
Christian faith. You can have whatever reading you want at a funeral, and
it really doesn’t matter what part of the Bible it comes from. So the headings
are not important. But when I was putting things together to talk with Darrell
about what to do today I just kind of caught on that expression. To profess the faith. To believe it, to say
it out loud, to identify. Paula’s relationship with the Christian faith was
just never as simple as professing it.
When she was preparing for confirmation, Paula made a comment about how
the cross inscribed on her forehead when she was baptized as a child had
endured there, without her knowing it, an invisible claim made by God on her.
That claim followed her and held her, when at moments she would have professed
something pretty different from the traditional creeds of the institutional
church.
Whatever she professed,
Paula’s faith, however, I would trust
to pray me out of the belly of any whale, as our first opening acclamation from
the book of Jonah said. Paula’s faith
was in unfathomable beauty and grace and clarity and vision and justice and
peace. Paula’s spiritual life was that of a theologian, as in the classical
understanding that defines theology as “faith seeking understanding.” Paula’s faith was always, always, always seeking
understanding. And as I think about her faith, she was one of the most
Christian, most theologically grounded person I’ve ever met. She did not simply believe, as though a crowd of people in a stone building saying
words together could make them true. She
interrogated and imagined and made poetry out of the most random shards of
life. She wrote in her blog once about Jesus as the chimera of eternity and
history. The chimera of eternity and
history. She was never sure of how, exactly, to believe in Jesus—but I am sure
she knew him.
What has
come into being in the Word was life, and the life was the light of all people.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
It might be a little
weakly transparent to use imagery of Word and light at the funeral for a poet.
It might a tad too obvious to talk about how Words and Light are part of the
reality of God at the funeral of a poet and photographer. The work of poetry and photography is to hold
time still, just for a moment. It’s to say “Look, here! Something important is
here!” But that was part of how Paula
was a theologian. I remember once when we setting up for Good Friday services.
We set up a huge wooden cross next to the baptismal font for Lent, and part of
preparing for Good Friday is to cover all the crosses with black veils. So you
cover it and tie it at the bottom under the cross bar. And the first year we
had the big wooden cross Paula asked me what I thought. This was not long after the photographs had
been released of the atrocities in Iraq and I kind of shook my head and said,
“I think it looks too Abu Ghraib.” And she said “Well, is that bad? Isn’t that
the point?” Which, of course, is
exactly the point. She got it, whether or not she always claimed it. The point
of Good Friday is to say that God is able to face the worst of humanity, not to
shy away from it, but to enter into our violence and say that it does not have
the last word. The violence and suffering of the world are always defeated by
the love of God.
Paula had an amazing
gift for the particular, for the things
of life in this world. When Paula found
her way into helping with the altar guild, a solitary ministry done for the
community, but completely alone—she said it was her anchoress work, like Julian
of Norwich having visions in her little church hermitage. She took it on with such astonishing
precision and understated grace that when she left, suddenly everyone realized
how we’d all be unconsciously leaning on her to straighten us out behind the
scenes. Where was the screw that somehow transforms a paschal candle into an
advent wreath? Everything, though, came
from this amazing core of dedication and rigor. She would get here at 8am in a blizzard,
just in case someone else showed up for church and I needed help (not many
did).
This piece from John
this, too, is a story of creation and origin. It’s not Jesus born in a stable,
and it’s not Adam and Eve walking in the garden. Those stories tell us one
thing, and this one tells us quite another.
This one reminds us where we have come from, and the One to whom we
belong. The one whom Paula sought and sought and wanted and desired after, who
sought and sought and desired after her. This is the scandalous story of the
Christian faith—that God chooses humanity and pitches a tent here with us, in
the person of Jesus. Jesus turns over tables and casts out demons and heals and
does all of these wild things with all the wrong people. And the powers of empire and the world just
cannot handle it. You just don’t act like that with no consequences. The world
does not work that way. It still doesn’t.
And all the power of the empire that can’t
imagine such love nails him to a cross. And the love doesn’t stop. His friends
see him. He eats with them. They find him when they are together. And this love
that couldn’t be defeated by death continues. In them, and through eons and
days and over years through shadows, and brings us here. To this love and
grief, terrifying and beautiful. The same love that moved mountains is the love
that catches us, and catches Paula. It
is that invisible seal on her forehead, the crown on her forehead, and the bond
that will keep our hearts and hers united in God’s love forever.
September 19, 2015.
