The seed in the earth

Today we gave thanks for the life of a woman who loved deeply, and taught others the meaning of the word love.

Funeral homily for Margery Devost

A church is a place of prayer.  It is also a place where people create community, and a place where people come to look for guidance.  For Margery, her church was all this and more.  In fact, the parish church was more important to her than her place of work … but even her church was outranked in importance by the family home, and that is as it should be. 

Still, Margery would often come to the church when she celebrated the joyous moments in life, like the day she married her beloved Lionel, or the days on which she witnessed the baptism of each of her newborn children, or on occasions such as parish picnics when she would prepare enough pies to feed everyone who was going to be there.

She would also come to the church to look for guidance if she had to deal with a worry or a concern about how to be the best mother she could be, and of course there was no greater pleasure for her than to watch her sons as they donned their freshly starched soutanes and assisted the priest at the altar.

Running a dairy farm, and later a cattle farm was hard work, but even today, people who are closest to the soil can teach the rest of us some very valuable lessons: a work ethic, generosity, the ability to laugh and to enjoy simple things, the value of an honest day’s work.  In the language of the bible, these are the people who know what it’s like to witness a grain of wheat that falls into the earth and dies (cf Jn 12:24).  All seeds need to be planted, to give of themselves to the point where it is impossible to distinguish the seed itself because it has become one with the earth around it.  Only then can it give birth to a new plant that sprouts and bears fruit.

Each of you who have known Margery in this life can attest to the fact that everything she did was for the good of another, and the more she did for others, the more she was loved in return.  The same is true for the relationship we have with our heavenly Father: the more we get to know him, the more we learn how to seek his advice, the more we try to do his will, the less we tend to focus on our own desires, and the more we seem to be concerned about the needs of others.  Whether she was serving a customer, or pushing a vacuum, or doing laundry or preparing a special feast for a birthday party, Margery was always doing things for others.

God granted her sixty-five years to spend in the company of her beloved husband.  When people have that much time to spend together, they get to know each other very well, even the point that they could sit in a room together and not have to utter a word.  The Book of Ecclesiastes says that there is a time to speak and a time to keep silence (Ecc 3:7).  Merely being in one another’s presence was enough.  As they sat together on such occasions, I wonder whether Margery ever reflected on the life she had lived: the moments when she had known the joy, the struggles she had endured, the successes she had celebrated, every one of them an occasion for giving thanks to God.

In her latter years, the liberty of youth was constrained as she found herself confined to a wheelchair.  The warmth with which she would have welcomed conversation gave way increasingly to frustration as she lost more and more of her hearing, and then the ravages of dementia wrapped their arms around her.

She who throughout her life had poured herself out in service to others found herself being poured out in a different way.  Where once she would have been the one to take care of others, she now needed to allow others to take care of her, yet she could rightly utter the words that Saint Paul wrote to his apostle Timothy and apply them to herself: I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith (2 Tim 4:7).

Today, we commend her eternal soul into the loving arms of our Father in heaven.  We give thanks for all that we have known and loved because we have known and loved her, and we ask her to intercede for us now before the throne of God so that when our time comes, we too will be found worthy of the crown of righteousness which the Lord will give … to all who have longed for his appearing (2 Tim 4:8).