Each
year on this first Sunday in November, we set aside time during worship to
remember those individuals in our church family and in our own families who
died during the past twelve months. However,
this year – with the recent mass shooting in Pittsburgh - I cannot help but be
aware of others outside of this congregation who are also being remembered –
perhaps today even - in other churches and faith communities - those who died
tragically and unexpectedly through gun violence – in homes, on streets, in
schools, in churches and synagogues, at festivals. So – before we look inward, let’s look
outward – beyond these four walls - for a moment and silently remember those in
our country who have been victims of gun violence…..
Each year, as I
prepare our own congregational all-saint’s remembrances, I seek a theme or
commonality among these people who have passed away - something we might learn from
them that is worth tucking away in our own hearts and minds.
This
year, I realized that only one person, Rita Gerry, was from our own church
family. The others were parts of our
individual families. I also discovered
that one was young, a life cut off too soon, and the others had been blessed
with long and fruitful lives.
Once again, I found myself wondering what
we can learn from those who died young and those who lived well into their 80’s
and 90’s.
When
I thought of BRIAN JOHNSON, Lois
Waldron’s son and Chuck’s stepson, the phrase “only the good die young” from
the Billy Joel song kept going through my mind.
Brian’s life and untimely death had nothing to do with the lyrics of the
song, but I contemplated what we can surmise when the good do die young. After all, we have such a tendency to only
mourn their passing and its effect on family members left behind. However, surely there is more.
BRIAN died in a motorcycle accident in
Mexico pursuing his dream of completing an around-the-world motorcycle
adventure with two close friends. Brian
was a commercial airline pilot and a true adventurer, his life defined by
unending curiosity about people and places.
He was described as a man who befriended everyone, helped whomever he
could, and treated people from all walks of life with a deep and genuine
respect.
Brian earned his
first pilot’s certificate shortly after he graduated from high school and
finished pilot training during his university years. In addition to flying, he loved scuba diving,
spear fishing, caving, and especially sky diving. Brian traveled to every continent except
Africa and Antarctica, lived in New York and Paris, and finally settled in Guam.
There he hiked in
the jungles and up and down the rivers, brewed his own beer, and rode his
motorcycle all over southeast Asia. His biggest and final motorcycle adventure
was not simply for the sake of saying that he had done it, but it was a way to,
as Lois said, “bring a world without borders to a society that seems more
fragmented than ever.”
Brian can teach us,
what? Maybe what we can learn is embedded in these quotes:
One day
you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve
always wanted. Do it now.
You
only live once? False. You live every day. You only die once.
Life is
a brief intermission between birth and death. Enjoy it.
If you’re listening to this, two things are true:
1. You’re going to
die.
2. You haven’t yet.
The rest is up to you.
The
others we are remembering today were all part of the so-called Greatest
Generation – some smack in the middle and others on the cusp. Tom Brokaw coined that phrase in his book of
the same name. In it, he celebrated those men and
women who persevered through the Great Depression of the 1930’s and experienced
WWII either in the military or on the home front.
RITA GERRY, a longtime and active
member of this church, was on the cusp of that generation. Rita was a Mainer through and through. She graduated from Standish High School where
she was a cheerleader. She and her
husband, Ivan, settled in Raymond on a property she called “Merrywood” where
they lived for decades.
I enjoyed many
afternoons of tea and cookies with Rita and learned that she loved all sorts of
animals and birds and was a horse back rider and school bus driver for many
years. In that job, she was strict but fair, and many of those students still
kept in touch with her decades later.
Rita’s gardens were
the envy of the neighborhood, and she generously shared cuttings and
seeds. She knit endless numbers of
scarves and pairs of mittens for family members, friends (like me), and for our
Christmas Fair. She had a strong
community spirit and was part of the Raymond Fire Department Auxiliary. Rita was also an active church member here for
many years, serving a Deacon and elected an Elder. She made prayer shawls, worked tirelessly at
the pot roast suppers, and was in worship every Sunday.
RICHARD ALLEN was my father and was at
the other end of the Greatest Generation, living to be almost 98. He grew up in Montclair, NJ, graduated from
Penn State where he was in a ROTC unit for all four years. Upon graduation in 1942, he received the only
commission that year to the Marine Corps and was sent to Harvard and MIT. There he trained in the new field of radar
and met his future wife, Barbara. Though
told it was a war marriage and would never last (they only knew each other for
four months before they tied the knot), they would be together for nearly 75
years.
During WWII, he served in the Pacific and
was an officer in the 51st Defense Battalion, the first Marine Corps
combat unit ever comprised entirely of African American enlisted men. After the war, he remained in the Organized Reserves
of the Marine Corps, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel.
He worked for Pfizer for 35 years in human
resources, significantly expanding the company’s minority and veteran hiring
practices. In addition, he was an active
church member, serving on Pastoral Search Committees, among many others, and
participating each year as a prophet in the annual Christmas pageant. Both at Pfizer and at church, he actively
worked for minority rights during the turbulent Civil Rights years.
Upon
retirement, he and my mother traveled – playing in mixed doubles tennis
tournaments in Germany, riding motor scooters in Bermuda, and ballooning in
France. He also began to fulfill a
lifelong passion for collecting vintage movie posters, at one time owning over
a thousand of various sizes – including the likes of Gone with the Wind, King
Kong, Casablanca, and Citizen Kane. In
addition, he co-authored what is now the definitive text on movie posters.
He was known
by all to be gracious, unassuming, and always the gentleman.
JOE FORAN SENIOR was
Joe’s father and my father-in-law. Joe
was quite introverted. However, if you
took the time to engage with him, you found that he was a gentle, thoughtful,
and very intelligent man. He was a hard
worker and loved his family most of all.
He took
great delight in what has become a Foran family “Friday evening after Thanksgiving”
tradition – singing every Clancy Brothers song ever recorded along with other
Irish songs they did not record – either led
by a paid Irish singer, as Karaoke, or simply unaccompanied. “Wild Rover” was by far Joe’s favorite.
Joe, my
husband, said this about his dad: “A true member of the Greatest
Generation. Before WWII, he wasa
knuckleball pitching prospect for the St. Louis Cardinals. As a Navy Signalman during WWII, he was strafed
repeatedly on the signal bridge of the Amphibious Command Ship during the
invasion of Okinawa and witnessed firsthand the Japanese surrender in Tokyo
Bay. He was father of eleven kids (as
far as he and his wife, Lois, got toward their goal of a ‘baker’s dozen’). He was a career advertising man. In fact, many of the plots of Madmen episodes
came from his ad agency in New York.
Conservative, but thoughtful & analytical, he adored devoting hours
to dissecting politics and current affairs with his children.”
LEO FORAN is
Joe’s uncle and my favorite uncle-in-law.
Leo was thrilled when my sister and I did our 60 mile breast cancer walk
in Michigan, where he lived. He was at
the finish to greet us and saw that we were well-fed and taken care of both
before and after the walk. Joe said this
about his uncle: “A Korean war veteran, and like his brother, Joe, he was a
gifted athlete (though playing basketball rather than baseball). For 34 years, Leo was a judge in the Michigan
District Court for the western suburbs of Detroit.
In spite of ironically naming himself the
“Hanging Judge of Dearborn Heights”, he was an active life-long progressive
Democrat, as liberal as his brother, Joe, was conservative. An ebullient Irish extravert, he was a great
and prolific storyteller. And even when
he got older and began to tell the same stories over and over, his skill was
such that they never lost their charm.”
I would add that Leo was elected a judge six times without opposition,
even as the demographics of the area he served transformed from a predominant
population of Irish-Americans to African-Americans to Middle Eastern Arabic
immigrants.
DOROTHY
LAYTON is my aunt and my father’s sister.
Dorothy was both the only girl in the family and the youngest – a half
dozen years younger than my father who was the middle child. She probably could not help but be a bit of a
tomboy, always trying to keep up with her brothers and join – uninvited - in
their games.
When I was growing
up, she and her family spent every Thanksgiving with us, and, in turn, we
traveled from Montclair, NJ to Darien, CT each Christmas Day for a wonderful
dinner of turkey with all the fixings.
Dessert was always the climax of the meal because it was a flaming plum
pudding that she had made from scratch weeks before.
In fact, she is the
reason that I continue that tradition to this day and make those same puddings
that age for at least a year before being served each Christmas.
Dorothy
loved the outdoors and particularly loved our rustic family cottage in
Algonquin Park where she went until the last two years of her long life. If the Layton’s had the cottage for the first
part of the summer, she would be there beginning in mid-to late June, often by
herself until other family members could join her. Though we do have a quasi-indoor shower at
the cottage, Dorothy took great pride in never using it, instead only bathing
in the lake, no matter how early in the season or how cold the water.
Dorothy
was kind and gentle. My mother
remembered her as always having a smile on her face – and I would agree with
that.
MARIAN LUM is the mother of Susan, Peter,
Christopher, and Charles, all of whom have a connection to Raymond through
their summer home (fondly known as the family compound) at Kings’ Grant. Peter often comes to worship here during the
summer when he is in Maine.
I met Marian years
ago when she stopped by the church one morning while on a walk. She had seen my name on the signboard and
wanted to know if I was Richard Allen’s daughter.
Her husband,
Donald, had worked with my father at Pfizer in corporate human resources for
many years – and had been a sort of mentor to my Dad. Marian joined in worship periodically over
the years and made several very generous donations to our church.
She
spent much of her adult life in Garden City, NY and was an active volunteer in
scouting, the local garden club, and the Garden City Community Church. Following her husband’s retirement, they
moved to Tucson, Arizona, and she immersed herself in all things Southwest. They also hosted my parents several
times.
Marian later moved
to an active retirement community nearby, purchased the summer home in Maine
and split her time between delightful Maine summers and the warmth of Tucson
during the winter months until the very final years of her life.
LOU
NERREN – Lou was a transplant from the Deep South who never quite
lost her Southern drawl. She and her
twin sister grew up as two of seven children on a cotton farm in
Mississippi. She played on a state
champion basketball team in high school, graduated from Penn State, and taught
physical education and math – all this before joining the Marines in 1950.
There she was a procurement specialist, but
also averaged 31 points a game on the travel basketball team and even starred
in a recruitment movie. Lou and her husband later moved to Raymond where she
once again taught math.
She was a lifelong Democrat, an advocate
for women in politics, and an accomplished seamstress who loved creating
costumes and fancy dresses. In addition, she sewed hundreds of fleece blankets
for those she loved or those who needed their warmth. She donated many to the
Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital at Maine Medical Center and Camp Sunshine. Some
of our youth even took a stack of them to HOME when they joined other UCC
middle schoolers on a weekend mission trip.
Lou owned a small shop in Raymond. She loved bridge and while living at the
Maine Veterans Home, she became quite adept at poker and bingo.
Religion and
theology deeply interested Lou, and she was a practitioner of centering prayer. She wanted little to do with organized
religion, so she never turned up here for worship – though she was open to the
possibility of coming to hear one of my sermons. However, she much preferred reading them on
my sermon blog.
However, Lou actively participated in Lenten studies here,
keeping all of us on our toes with her very liberal theology and
thought-provoking questions. In addition,
she always wanted to know how she could support our mission projects.
When I think
of this “Greatest Generation” – whether you think they were in fact the
greatest or not – and consider what they
offered us from their experiences, I came across these five attributes in a
blog post I read this week that certainly characterized the people that we
honor today:
1.
Personal Responsibility - We live in the age of blame. If we can’t
find someone at fault for our trials, we will just invent something. In their day, to be given responsibility was
an honor and was seen as one of the great lessons of leadership.
2.
Humility - In their day, there was an expected norm of dignity and
respect. It was a high cultural standard, and humility was at its heart.
3. Work Ethic – During their time, being idle was simply not an
option. Everyone worked to survive, both personally and as a country. They took
deep pride in their work and service as well.
4.
Prudent Saving - In the 30’s and 40’s, everything was saved
down to the last penny and the last green bean. To be frugal and thoughtful
about spending was the discipline of the day.
5.
Faithful Commitment – Committed love and loyalty was valued highly – whether in
a relationship, family life, or job. A
lot had to happen before one gave up and moved on. There was a recognition that commitment takes
work, not necessarily unpleasant, but work none-the-less.
In conclusion then, maybe, when all is said and done,
whether you do not live to be 50 or you live to be nearly 100, the bottom line
is this: “In the end, it's not the years
in your life that count. It's the life in your years.”
May all those we remember and honor today be at peace with
God, knowing theirs were lives faithfully and lived well, and that each one of
those years was a year that God blessed.
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