Euology for Gracie

I've been on vacation this last week. Nan and I just got back from the coast where yesterday, in something of a family reunion, we all boarded a boat at Depot Bay, motored out and around into Wale Cove, and spread the ashes of my wife's aunt Gracie into the ocean. We had a small memorial service there on the boat where family members shared thoughts and memories of Gracie, after which I delivered the following eulogy:


One of the many things that convinces me of the existence of God is the innate human need for meaning. If we were the product of a random universe and the accidental mixture of chemicals and electromagnetic discharge that Darwinism claims we are, there is and can never be any meaning to our lives. At times like these, when we celebrate the life of a loved one no longer present, our hunger for meaning is foremost in our minds: the meaning of our lives, the meaning of her life. When I think about Gracie, it seems that a lot of that meaning can be discerned from her name: Grace.

When Gracie's parents, Lester and Mildred, named her, perhaps they were thinking of nothing more than the clever inversion of Mildred's first two names, but reflecting on the course of her life and her beautiful personality, I can't help but think that in their action was an element of providence.

There's many definitions to the word, grace, but I think that two find particular expression in Gracie's life. The first is this: a disposition to be generous or helpful; goodwill. As we all know, Gracie had spent the better part of the last eight years of her life volunteering at the Pikes Peak Hospice, spending time and giving comfort to those facing their final painful days. What better testament could we find to Gracie's loving and giving nature?

But all of us who knew her had experienced it. Personal examples of her sweet and gentle character will endure with each of us. My own fondest memory is the last time I saw her, in her and Uncle John's home in Colorado Springs. She asked me to sing for her and tears welled in her eyes as I did. Then she showed me pictures of her daughter, played selections from Tatiana's CD, and spoke lovingly and with pride of her only child. A disposition to be generous or helpful; goodwill.

The second definition of grace I find fitting to Gracie's life is that of theology: the undeserved favor of God's redemption. At Uncle John's request we started this memorial with the Serenity Prayer, a prayer that had played a central and persistent role in Gracie's struggle with the darker chapters of her life. She wrote about this herself in a poem she called, "The Now." Let me read a few excerpts:

I struggled with life, and made it complex. I wandered in a fog, a chemical fog, where I kissed the door of death, and finally I had to die in order to find life. For years I ran from myself, never knowing the real me, yet always wanting to find myself. --and a little farther on in the poem-- Today I can accept those things I cannot change and strive to change the things I can. She finished the poem with this: I am living in the now-- Loving life on life's terms, one day at a time.

Gracie's life is an example to us all of God's grace; a life turned from the brink of death and the horrors of self-destruction, and transformed to the beauty that became the second half of her life. When she surrendered herself to God's mercy, relying, as all who follow the twelve steps do, on his "higher power," she experienced not only the blessing of her own life, but in turn blessed all of us who came to know and love her.

As much as we yearn for meaning, we also yearn for transformation, to be changed from our propensity for selfishness, and self-destruction. That which is commonly called our conscience is a universal human code that describes, not what we are, but what we know we ought to be--not our actual behavior, but what we inherently sense our behavior should be. The tragedy is we are helpless to effect that change on our own; we are trapped in a perpetual loop that the Apostle Paul described this way to the Christians in Rome:

After all, the Law itself is really concerned with the spiritual - it is I who am carnal, and have sold my soul to sin. In practice, what happens? My own behaviour baffles me. For I find myself not doing what I really want to do but doing what I really loathe.
When I come up against the Law I want to do good, but in practice I do evil. My conscious mind whole-heartedly endorses the Law, yet I observe an entirely different principle at work in my nature. This is in continual conflict with my conscious attitude, and makes me an unwilling prisoner to the law of sin and death. In my mind I am God's willing servant, but in my own nature I am bound fast, as I say, to the law of sin and death. It is an agonising situation, and who on earth can set me free from the clutches of my sinful nature? I thank God there is a way out through Jesus Christ our Lord.

It reminds me of a line in the film, As Good As It Gets, when Jack Nicholson's character tells Helen Hunt's character, "You make me want to be a better man." We all want to be better men and women, don't we? But we can't, not on our own. And even if we could, what about all the bad things we've done in the past? There's still a price to be paid, they don't just "go away" on their own. And that's where the grace of God comes in. Jesus paid that price, took our punishment upon himself, and, when we surrender to that grace, he begins the transformation of our lives we so long for.

Gracie experienced that transformation. Her life was a living expression of it. It was a process that began when she finally submitted herself to her "higher power," Jesus Christ. As Paul said to Christians in Corinth,

And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.

As we remember and celebrate Gracie's life and the blessing and joy she brought to all of us, I hope you'll join me in rejoicing that the transformation that started with her surrender to God's grace, is now complete; for we have this promise from the apostles. First from Paul's letter to the Christians at Philippi:

Jesus Christ will re-make these wretched bodies of ours to resemble his own glorious body, by that power of his which makes him the master of everything that is.

And then from the apostle John:

Dear friends, we are already God’s children, but he has not yet shown us what we will be like when Christ appears. But we do know that we will be like him, for we will see him as he really is.