[Oe List ...] "In my house..."

[cla9ken8 at ecentral.com]

Dear Del,  Thank you for your witness to the words in Charles’ memorial.  I read with great gratitude what you wrote, because your experience was so like mine, especially from kindergarten until I graduated from college, which I had named as my release from my past.  Of course, it returned to haunt me and sometimes still does for moments.   I am now able to say that I am who I am and the pressures of others or the pull of the majority no longer wear me down with doubts and the turmoil of grief.    For me, the key word came as ‘authenticity’, and I needed to decide what mine was/is and move through that to ME!  I came to it through some reading that discussed the Sin of Apostacy.  I decided that that meant I need to be myself, my Vermontness, my own self as that was the one thing that could keep me from life after death.  I think being asked each Sunday at House Church “Have you been faithful to ...” made me the woman I have become and have learned to respect and love.

Wow!  That’s a lot of stuff I did not know I could express.  Thank you so much for your words.  Amen

With love and respect to both of you,  Clare

From: Del Morrill via OE 
Sent: Wednesday, June 03, 2020 3:50 PM
To: Order Ecumenical 
Cc: Del Morrill 
Subject: [Oe List ...] "In my house..."

Dear Doris, Marsha, Shelley, Pat, Scott and the rest of the family and mutual friends around the world.  

During the service for Charles I was struck by the New Testament line, “In my house are many mansions,” a favorite of mine and, if I understood correctly, of Charles’.  At the time, I quickly jotted down just a few words, thinking to reflect upon them at a later time.  In the wee hours of this morning, when I could not sleep, I looked at those few words and asked myself why, when I reject so much of religious language, do these words particularly strike me? And why might Charles have chosen them?

I realized that, most of my life. I have been bothered whenever others have been left out by language, style or action because their language, style or action doesn’t “fit”. This concern, no doubt, arises from my own struggle to belong. Somehow, as I was growing up, and even as an adult, I just did not fit in the way it was expected and either shunned or, more often, pressed to fit in. Many times in my journey I experienced the pain and loneliness of that. This, and my difficult health journey, affected, ultimately, my choice of career in later years and how I viewed those who came to me – wounded perhaps, but still accepted by the same creative force, and courageous for having come this far.  As a counselor, in order for healing to take place, it was necessary to be receptive to the views of others, trying to use their eyes to understand what’s behind their way of knowing, doing and being. 

It has been a long journey in learning from others’ views, their religions, their cultures, their processing of the world.  It was late in my life that I finally was able to shed the judgmentalism that so pervaded my being. I no longer feel that I must argue my point against another’s. I am more likely to perceive the “other” as traveling the earth in whatever way creation has taken them; and unless they are doing harm to themselves or others in a way that allows me to interfere positively and safely, I will not quarrel with the path they have chosen. The knowing, doing and being of each person on this earth creates an amazing patchwork quilt of existence in which is joined different scraps of color and design in odd shapes which, through patience, fit together perfectly to create something that is strangely beautiful in its wild design.     

In no way assuming that someone had the same journey as I, and realizing that no one is fully known by another, this is the Charles I think of , choosing this section of the bible. As I listened to the remembrances of others, I realized that the quotation reflected his life  – a man who believed that all are accepted at the table; receptive to the views of others, therefore not prone to argument, the quiet listener, a man of practical solution, responding only when he felt it necessary and, most of all, allowing whomever he met to be part of the quilt. 

 

Thank you, again, for finding a way that would allow so many of us across the world to celebrate his life, and for giving me an opportunity to reflect upon my own.

 

Del

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. 

(George Bernard Shaw)

 



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