I went to see Dr. Ryan, the eye doctor we have used for years. He used to be 12 minutes away in New Haven, but several years ago, he transferred to the office in Ansonia, which is over half-an-hour away. I started going to Cheshire's branch but Bern wouldn't give him up. And four years ago, I agreed and started going to Ansonia.
I have the beginnings of Macular Degeneration. I notice no loss of sight yet, but he sees me every six months now to keep on top of it.
I asked him today how long it would be before my sight began to fail.
"What if I told you 30 years?" he asked.
I'm 73. "That would be great!" I told him.
Then he said, "what if I said 16 weeks?"
"That would be awful!" I replied.
Apparently there is no way to know how fast MD increases.
He's brutally honest--which is one reason we trust him so.
Bern went with me and sat in the car because the stuff they do to me makes me unsafe to drive.
It makes me remember Bill Penny. He was a priest from New York who retired to CT and would come to our Tuesday morning clericus meetings at St. John's in Waterbury. We always began with Eucharist and Bill would take his turn celebrating. Though he couldn't read the pages of the altar book because of his macular degeneration, he had the text memorized and usually got through it with no prompting.
I've made a point over the years not to memorize the service. I'm always a little surprised by the words since I don't know them by heart.
Maybe, because of my eyes, I should start to memorize them.
Here's my sermon at Bill Penny's funeral.
SERMON FOR THE FUNERAL OF THE REV. BILL PENNY
9/18/2007
The best job
I ever had—best by far—was being Bill Penny’s chauffeur from time to time.
I am only one
of a multitude of folks who were Bill’s chauffeurs—and though I always thought
I was his favorite driver, I am as sure as sure can be that
everyone who gave Bill a ride felt like “his favorite driver”. Bill simply had
the God-given capacity to make whoever
he was with feel like the best and brightest and most beloved. That gift of his
is beyond compare, fondly to be wished, a holy gift.
And there is
this: I was Bill’s driver to the General Convention in 1997.
We’d drive
into Philadelphia each morning from Bill’s sister in law’s house and go to the
convention center. I would feel like the one person entourage of an
ecclesiastical “rock star”. We couldn’t walk ten steps without someone coming
over to hug and kiss and love on Bill. And he would hug and kiss and love on
them.
There were
coveys of nuns who descended on him like teenagers around the Beatles—Bill was
Paul and John and George and Ringo all rolled into one. There were bishops who
would walk away from important conversations just to come over and bask in
Bill’s presence. Just walking through the convention center, priests by the
dozens and as many lay-people, would be
drawn from whatever else they were doing to come and hold Bill near and feel
his oh-so-fierce hug in return. (Sometimes, when he hugged me, I felt he was
about to dislocate my shoulder or break some bone….Bill was a world class
hugger…..)
I had known
before that trip that Bill was a “special person”—what I hadn’t realized is how
wide spread that realization was! Everyone he ever met, it seems, was made to
feel so wonderful by just being with him that they never forgot it….And could never forget it.
And now Bill
is dead. I hate this part. I want to rant and rage against God and the cosmos
and the powers that be and say, “No, give him back to us…we still have great
need of him….”
And we do.
His family needs him and we as individuals and we as a church have “great need”
of him—of his never-ending compassion, his great, good humor, his gracefulness
and generosity of spirit, his wisdom about what was old and his openness to what is
new, his love and his guidance and his eternal optimism in the face of
life’s cynicism and his undefeatable hope in the face of fracture and fear.
We have need
of knowing that whatever the evidence to the contrary, life is
TERRIFIC….Really, life is Terrific….That’s what Bill believed, believed
always, believed absolutely, without a shred of doubt….
“Enough about
me,” Bill would be saying about now, “Proclaim the Gospel, Jim. Proclaim it….”
And this is the gospel I
proclaim—the gospel Bill gave his life to; God is Love.
Not
complicated at all. Not subtle in any way. A simple three word sentence that
gathers up and contains all we know and all we need to know.
GOD IS LOVE.
In one of
Kurt Vonnegut’s science fiction novels, there is a robot named Salo that had
been programmed to travel the galaxies endlessly, searching for the answer to
one simple question: “WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?”
Salo finally
finds his answer from a lonely, forgotten woman who was marooned on one of the
moons of Jupiter. “THE MEANING OF LIFE,” Beatrice tells him, “IS TO LOVE WHOEVER IS AROUND TO BE LOVED.”
I believe
that would have been Jesus’ answer as well.
And I know it was Bill’s answer.
From Bishops
to power-brokers to the people who run the fish store to clerks at Starbuck’s
to folks down on their luck—Bill simply loved whoever was around to be loved.
Whether he was pleading for compassion from the powerful or sitting on a bench
on the Waterbury Green with the homeless—he loved whoever was around to be
loved. And in that he proclaimed the
gospel more eloquently and profoundly than any preacher can convey.
God is
love—and love is stronger than death could ever be.
The Buddhists tell us that the illusion
of separateness is the cause of human suffering. The illusion of separateness is the cause of
human suffering. If that is true, then the acceptance of unity is the pathway to
joy.
That, I believe, is the gospel
truth that Bill embraced, leaned into and lived from. He didn’t seem to notice
the separateness of the powerful and powerless, of brokenness and wholeness, of
hope and hopelessness, of death and life. Bill seemed to accept, in ways both
obvious and profound, the “unity” of God’s creation. He loved whoever was
around to be loved.
And that is the good news I
proclaim for him and from him.
He taught us to love by loving—by
his eternal love of his precious Natalie, his blinding love of Priscilla and
all her family, his loyal love to those he ministered to and with, his
unflinching love of “the least of these” in our midst, and—most, most of
all—his quiet and grateful love of the one who is Resurrection and Life.
My invitation to you is to carry
from this holy space, this gracious time, a little of Bill’s Spirit—a sampling
of his love, a touch of his humor, a dollop of his compassion. And my
invitation to you is to carry from this service, this memorial, the unity of
God, who is resurrection and life.
If we can carry that good news with
us into the world, Bill will be pleased. If he were here, he would say that was
“Terrific”, absolutely “Terrific”.
