Two days ago Betty Sawyer died, a giant in faith and service to the Episcopal Church, a woman whose twinkly eyes and faithfulness to prayer were consistent invitations to join her in practicing the Christian way. Her walk with Jesus always seemed to me both contagious and selfless. Betty Sawyer was a leader in the church long before women were ordained to the priesthood; I can imagine that if the door to priesthood had been open to her she would have walked in that path many years ago.
In the last couple of years she began to be a little confused. There were moments--sometimes within the same sentence--when she was crystal clear, alert, and filled with insight, then suddenly she’d be addled, unable to complete the thought that had begun. One day, about four months ago, she insisted that I was one of the brothers from the monastery. When I assured her that I wasn’t, but that I was “Thomas, your rector, from the Epiphany” she said, “that’s ridiculous. They’d never have you be the rector!” I’m not sure if that was an indictment of the Parish of the Epiphany, or of myself, or both! When I laughed, she smiled graciously, and she seemed wholly herself again, and then with every ounce of gentleness and genuine concern, she said, “how are things going for you?”
She loved the world and everything good in it. But that’s not to suggest she was inexperienced with either pain or death. Maybe it was the holy combination of loving what was good and knowing about death that made her so generous. In a way, Betty Sawyer always impressed me as one who was willing to do everything she could, and to give everything she had to save the particles of her life, and to invite others to do likewise. She raised the level of life by the level of her own call to “do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God.” It was her way in life and in death; at home, at church, at work; when she was busy and when she was idle; when she was sick in bed, and when she was up, and well and active.
When I first arrived at Winchester, three years ago, she gave me a copy of William Temple’s book, Christian Faith and Life. I don’t consider it a coincidence, but rather a profound gift of serendipity that yesterday afternoon as I walked into the kitchen door of a neighbor’s cottage to borrow green olives, there was lying open on the reading table Temple’s Nature, Man, and God. Not the same book, but what’s the likelihood of that convergence? In that book...the one at the neighbor’s here in Thousand Island Park, there is a prayer which Temple wrote for a series of lectures at Oxford in 1931:
O Lord our God, from whom neither life nor death can separate those who trust in thy love, and whose love holds in its embrace they children in this world and in the next: so unite us to thyself that in fellowship with thee we may be always united to our loved ones wether here or there; give us courage, constancy, and hope; through him how died and was buried and rose again for us, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Betty’s requiem will be Saturday, 22 September at 11:00am at the Parish of the Epiphany.
Thank you Thomas for such wonderful words to remember a women we all were so honored to have known.
ReplyDeleteSusan