Family Memorial Service

MEMORIAL SERVICE

LUCILE ADRIENNE LATHROP AMES

1-888.833.2935 Code: 4060011

Friday October 23, 2015 7:00PM

OPENING COMMENTS:

Lucile Adrienne Lathrop Ames calls into being this unique community of relatives and friends by the riches of her life and the enormity of her death. How inadequate are our words to talk about the death of Lucile or ourselves.

Yet the human community strives to hone words that touch us even in such depth of concern. The Book of Worship of the United Methodist Church has these words to lead us in prayer:

PRAYER:  Eternal God, who commits to us the swift and solemn trust of life; since we know not what a day may bring, but only that the hour for serving thee is always present, may we wake to the instant claims of thy holy will, not waiting for tomorrow, but yielding today. Consecrate with thy presence our thoughts and meditations on Lucile’s life and comfort us in our sorrow. Lift us above unrighteous anger and mistrust into faith and hope and love by a simple and steadfast reliance on they sure will. In all things draw us to the mind of the Eternal that they lost image may be traced again, and thou mayest own us as at on with him and thee. Amen.

Many words of scripture speak to death.

SCRIPTURE:                                                  Psalm 121

I lift up mine eyes to the hills.

>From whence does my help come?

2 My help comes from the Lord,

    who made heaven and earth.

3 He will not let your foot be moved,

    he who keeps you will not slumber.

4 Behold, he who keeps Israel

    will neither slumber nor sleep.

5 The Lord is your keeper;

    the Lord is your shade

    on your right hand.

6 The sun shall not smite you by day,

    nor the moon by night.

7 The Lord will keep you from all evil;

    he will keep your life.

8 The Lord will keep

    your going out and your coming in

    from this time forth and for evermore.

Revised Standard Version (RSV)

A vast body of poetry speaks to death including this example from nearby New Englander, Emily Dickinson.

POETRY

DEATH

Emily Dickenson

The bustle in the house

The morning after death

Is solemnest of industries

Enacted upon earth;-

The sweeping up the heart

And putting love away

We shall not want to use again

HOMILY

There is a horror in death—the finality—the end of contact with experiences that have sustained and enriched our lives.

There is a completion in life. A life, another art form, is completed.

Peter Schjeldahl, an art critic for The New Yorker, experienced Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, shown together in a New York exhibit. He commented that, “Much that is hurt and disappointed in me feels momentarily allayed, and almost healed, when I am in the spell of [Frida Kahlo’s] art. Like the serene Madonnas of Giovanni Bellini, with their hints of the coming Crucifixion, her portraits assure me of two things first that things are worse than I know and, second, that they’re all right.” (“All Souls: The Frida Kahlo Cult,” The New Yorker 11/05/07, 92-94)

Frida Kahlo (Mexico and New York, 1903-1954), Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940, mixed water, oil and tempera (egg yolk), 16x24”, Ransom Center's Nickolas Muray Collection, U /Texas, Austin.

Giovanni Bellini (Venice, Italy 1430-1516), Madonna of the Meadow, 1505 oil on wood transferred to canvas in 1949, 26 x 34”.  Prado>National Gallery, London.

Lucile has died and we still affirm that her life and ours are worth it in spite of death. There is a victory in death.—the worst happens and we still affirm life.

We are embraced by a cosmic hope symbolized for Christians by the Christ concept.

I am drawn into this meditation by a recent newspaper article about a harpist who plays music for the dying, people in the last stages of living. There are first stages of death like birth and childhood and, for that matter, all of life is part of the process of dying. The model of art enriching death implies that art can enrich all of life and we are all dying—and living.

A couple of weeks ago a friend lay on her back beneath a magnificent oak tree listening to classical music being played on the carillon in the MSU bell tower. She exclaimed, "If heaven is like this, I am ready to die." She was affirming that she was experiencing something of heaven right then that made her ready

or live.

We are often aware that life is sometimes heaven. Just as the joy of life is interrupted at times by the deadly pain of some moments of life, so the deadliness of life is interrupted by the joy of ecstasy in other moments of life.

Those latter experiences, moments of ecstasy, are windows into Heaven—like the musical image created by the harp player. Part of the Heaven of an after or beyond life may be the leaving of the things we will not miss and we have long lists of such things: like dentistry, committee meetings, canned asparagus and boredom.

Along with the music of the harp and other arts, there are things we will miss when we no longer have our bodies, like lying on the grass beneath a great oak while listening to beautiful music. Each of us has a long list of such things—eating favorite food in favorite places, reading powerful books, viewing the Rocky Mountains or Picture Rocks or being with a loved one—a few examples among many possibilities.

It is being torn from those experiences of windows into the transcendent that is the base of our distress about death as it is expressed in the Psalms and elsewhere. It is not fear of extinction that gives death its ultimate power, but the expectation (fear?) that all windows and connections with God, ultimate values, will end. 

Windows are the experiences of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

These fruits of the Spirit are the essence of the rich moments of Lucile’s life—her immersion in music through the violin and her voice with community orchestras and choruses, her love and care of children in the community, with Head Start, the church and in foster care of children in her own home—her concern for the afflicted of the world that sent her on mission trips like a trip to Guatemala

“We are headed toward a portal that transcends space and time.” That is a quote, not from the Bible or Methodist Book of Worship, but from Stephen Hawking, the world renowned physicist, in the last chapter of his book, A Brief History of Time. The Bible, throughout its many books, says that choosing life, spiritual things, rather than being preoccupied with material things, is just such a transcendence of space and time and the deadliness that accompanies them and distracts from life. Amen

COMMENDATION OF LUCILE TO HER NEW STATE OF BEING

The name “Lucille,” from lux in Latin, means light: We commend Lucile to the care of the divine with these slightly amended words of the Requiem Mass, words that work with the Latin root of her name.

Domine, Requiem aeternam dona Lucile, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

O Lord give Lucile eternal rest and may perpetual light shine on her forever. Amen

BENEDICTION: May the Lord Bless us and keep us; may he make his face to shine upon us and be gracious to us. May he lift up the light of his consciousness upon us and give us peace. Amen.

RESPONSES TO LUCILE’S LIFE FACILITATED BY SUSAN.