Sermon for the Funeral of Br. Will Brown, OHC

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

The Funeral of Br. Will Brown, OHC - Tuesday, February 28, 2023

 

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

 

 

The Psalmist tells us, in a not entirely complimentary passage, that the human heart and mind are a mystery (Ps 64:7). The inner workings of the mind and heart and soul of another person, no matter how familiar or intimate we might be with them, always retain a hidden dimension, one that is never totally transparent to others. In fact, the same may be said of ourselves: at some level most of the time, perhaps all the time, we remain somewhat opaque even to ourselves. Our actions and intentions and motivations, our sorrows and joys, are seldom, if ever, completely available to our own examination or consciousness. Indeed, the great monastic tradition beginning with the Desert Fathers and Mothers draws our attention to this, encouraging us to cultivate the practice of nepsis, of awareness so that we might see a little more clearly where we are coming from and perhaps get where we want to be.

I've lived in this monastic community for almost 35 years and have, from time to time, thought that I really knew my brothers. And in a sense, I did. But there was always more to know, more to discover, more to appreciate and to treasure than I ever realized at first. As well as much that was hidden, sometimes in plain sight. This became more obvious to me as I accompanied brother after brother through sickness, dying and death. What happened, almost inevitably, was an outpouring of appreciation from those who knew this brother in ways I never quite imagined. People spoke of how this one had saved their life or how that one had given them hope in a season of despair or helped them turn from addiction to recovery or spoke a healing word or helped them find or renew faith in a living and loving God. I hope such things will be said of me and of you.  And they have certainly been said of our Brother William Johnstone Brown.

Brother Will was a man of many stories and anecdotes and of consistent and sometimes quite stubborn patterns of behavior.  Anyone who ever stayed at Mount Calvary Retreat House in Santa Barbara when Will was resident there will remember him plodding down the Galleria with a tray of cups at 5:00 o'clock in the morning, making countless pots of coffee, and placing each cup in its exact location for, as he always said: “That cup lives there.”  Michel Choban, a friend and frequent visitor wrote: “He [Br. Will] was part of every retreat, giving the introductory talk at most of the last 20 or 30 of them which spelled out the house rules, what they wanted from us, what we could expect from them.  My favorite caution, mentioned once each year at the first Mount Calvary, up in the hills:  Don't leave the doors open or the rattlesnakes will get in.”  Good practical advice.  
Michel continues:
“Although I know nothing about his inner life or about his life before he became a monk, and he must have had one, because he was over 50 when he took life vows, what I do know about him was what I saw, which was Will going about his life day by day, quietly, often humorously, working and praying, which is the Benedictine way.”

Will had a very easy way of making friends throughout his life, even and perhaps especially as he got older and older.  He was, as most of you know, a trained horticulturist and was a docent at the Santa Barbara Botanical Gardens as well as a volunteer at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. A friend says:
“Will and I met during the middle of 2018 when I became an employee at the museum. I would sit with him and just listen, hanging on to every word he would say, and I would just imagine how he was as a young wild-eyed boy experiencing this great land back in the early years. He had a quiet demeanor about him, but don't be fooled because he had a great sense of humor as well. Will was really a gardener deep down and he loved nature so much and his walks were a testament to that love…. When I met Will he was 92 and I could not believe how healthy he was. And we would walk together occasionally, which was such a joy because I really got to see things from Will’s perspective…relaxed, with purpose and taking it all in while making every second count.”
 

Will was an immigrant to America. He left his native England in 1952 when he was 27 at the invitation of a horticulturist he had met at the garden of the Royal Horticultural Society. He ended up in the Deep South working at the Callaway Gardens in Georgia and then teaching horticultural programs at the Fernbank Science Center in Atlanta GA. He became active in the Episcopal Church and his beloved Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, while working at the university there. And then, quite by accident or Providence depending on your theology, he ran into a novice from the Order of the Holy Cross who, I assume, was there on a preaching mission. This chance encounter revived in Will an interest in the monastic life which began in his boyhood in Burton-upon-Trent.  A neighbor was doing research on Mount Saint Bernard’s Abbey in Leicestershire, and that piqued young Will’s interest in the monastic life.  It wasn't until he was 51, however, that he entered the Order as a postulant, not making his life profession until 1981. His was considered a very late vocation, and few could have imagined that he would be around and active and contributing to the life of the Order of the Holy Cross and to God's Kingdom for another 46 years. A late vocation yes, but not a short one.  

In his years in our Order, Br. Will lived and served at our monasteries in South Carolina and Santa Barbara and in Berkeley where he was Co-Prior with his friend Dom Robert Hale at our small joint community with the Roman Catholic Camaldolese Benedictines. He lived for various periods of time here at West Park and even served for six months at our monastery in Cape Coast, Ghana, going there when he was in his mid-60s. People often referred to Will as the Energizer Bunny who never seemed to stop. I have a suspicion that he is still on the move. His friend from the natural museum history says of Will: “I can see him now, head down, walking stick in hand and walking with purpose right up to God and with his sense of humor saying, I'm here, sorry it took so long."

The human heart and mind are indeed a mystery. The gift of vocation or place or purpose in life is a mystery. Life is a mystery.  And we rarely know much about each other, all things considered.  But I do believe that Brother Will had an interior life that was rich, if very, very private. We, his brothers, caught glimpses of it in his love of beauty and art, of nature, of the liturgy, and even occasionally in our communal sharing.  Those in his circle of friends caught hints of other facets of his character, as did those in his 12-Step Fellowship or his colleagues at the botanical gardens or natural history museum and the many, many guests and retreatants that he befriended and ministered with and to.  It is only in the mind of God now that all those facets are held together, integrated, polished and illuminated with a Divine Radiance.  

One of the great traumas of Will’s life was the loss in 2008 of Mount Calvary Monastery to a wildfire while living there for many happy years. The brothers had perhaps thirty minutes to escape the oncoming inferno and had to take what they could grab quickly and in the dark. All of Will’s books, papers, photographs, mementos of family and friends and all those little things that even monks hold on to that remind us of our place in the scheme of things were taken from him and from the other brothers residing there as well.  To deal with his loss and grief, Br. Will joined a poetry therapy group and became a quite prolific writer. I want to share with you one of his poems which was published in the Mount Calvary newsletter which says much about grief and loss but also about our brother Will. It is titled, After the Fire:

Let go, let go of lots of things-
Of clothes, of books, of cherished things
Of pictures, souvenirs-
Of shaving brush—all gone,
All gone in flames of night.
And there was more-
Beloved house, so cherished
And refurbished—
So loved by many, near and far
For safety and refreshment—
And more in prayer and daily
Sacrament that feeds the heart
And soul—all is not lost in
Blackened ash for see
A rabbit hides when I appear
And chipmunk always sprightly
Runs over charred beams-
A bird flies out-and I
Walk up the hill to where the
Cross once stood.
I see Yucca Whipplei—Our Lord's Candle-
Now like pineapple--symbol of hospitality
And the new green leaves sprout from the tip
All is not lost—the sun still rises in the East and sets in Western skies-
“Only a house” I said when gazing on the ruin
A special house—but we and countless lovers
Are not lost in trust.

This poem reveals Will, close to his true being, sharing his grief, sharing his hope, sharing his faith in prayer and Sacrament and fellow lovers and above all in God’s mercy. Today we remember him with thanksgiving.  We give thanks for Will’s long life. We give thanks for his vocation. We give thanks for his humor. We give thanks that he now stands in God's presence leaning into the very heart of God and being known finally and fully for who he is: a beloved child of God.

I close with words from the tribute Michel Choban shared: “I think of him as someone who found a way to live, work, and pray that was a true expression of the essence of who he was, perhaps, after all, of who he was born to be. Isn't that what many of us are working toward, that simple, true life?... So farewell, Will. I hope I will not forget you till I am forgotten myself."

May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.  Amen.  May his memory be eternal!

The Funeral of Richard P. Vaggione, OHC - November 9, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC

Br. Richard Vaggione's Funeral - Tuesday, November 9, 2021

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Br. Richard P. Vaggione, OHC

Our brother Richard Paul Vaggione, having entered the land of light and joy, is now, with the saints, our witness in the great cloud.  He is in the nearer presence of the One who made him and loves him fully, whose compassion is endless, and whose eyes pierce into and illuminate every secret place, every sorrow and joy, every act done and left undone.  Death reveals the fullness of the union that is already ours by grace. And though his response to that union was imperfect as is ours, ever in need of the light of Christ’s presence, that union prevails, it triumphs, it overcomes the isolation within and around us and plunges us into the abyss of love.

For we who continue our course on earth and await eagerly the hour when we will graduate and pass through the gate of eternal life, our work in this liturgical work of the people is to be done, as the Prayer Book says, with “quiet confidence” until “we are united with those who have gone before…”. In that spirit of quiet confidence we give thanks for Richard’s life. We give thanks for his priestly and monastic vocations, his pastoral and academic gifts and contributions, his mind that sought understanding and offered original scholarly contributions to the life of the early church. We offer to God’s mercy our brother Richard as a sinner of your own redeeming.  

May we inter him into his resting place in the sure and certain knowledge that as his sins are put away and remembered no more, so may we, with Christ, rejoice with him in his redeemed and forgiven life. We lament the ways in which Richard was abused and harmed, an innocent victim of acts that traumatized his body and impaired his capacity for the fullness of relational presence.  We share with Christ the pain and grief of the evil done to our brother. We trust in God’s righteous vindication to bring about the only perfect and ultimate judgment.  When we are reunited, we will know a glorified Richard whose arms and legs and whole self will be made new.  As we continue our earthly pilgrimage, taking St. Benedict’s imperative to heart, “remember every day that you are going to die”, we encounter afresh the beautiful vision of St. Paul in Romans 8. Of first interest are the verses, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God…” Authentic human life is wonderfully realistic and hopeful.  The sufferings of this present time are real; the sufferings of the world, sufferings in our relationships, sufferings of our bodies. To be human is to face inevitable and unavoidable suffering.  But just as real is the glory about to be revealed, an apocalypse of eternal light and joy in resurrection.  Suffering is short and small compared with eternal rest.  St. Paul goes on to note that it isthis very creationthat is the stuff of the glory to come.  At the grave we remember that our bodies, like Richard’s body, are bound for death. But that very death is only a prelude to what is to come, a gate, not an end.  Our vocation at the grave, whose gate opens to us in our memory, is to wait with eager longing for the revealing.  When we were young, that longing was perhaps far from our minds. When we are strong and healthy and energetic, our bodies are a quite comfortable place to be.

As we age, the awareness of suffering and mortality increases, our bodies teach us how to long eagerly. As this flesh begins its long journey to the dust, bones and muscles and organs complete their earthly mission and anticipate resurrection, a new home comes into view. One of the great evils of trauma, among many, is the damage to the capacity and safety of being in our bodies.  If the body is violated, if our very physical matter is a cause of shame and abuse, how can it learn to long for its full life? Recent research in the science of mind-body connection explains how our nervous systems and thoughts and emotions and physical health all relate to each other. Consciousness is not limited to our brains.  Our stomachs have consciousness, our livers think, our hearts are aware of what is happening around us.  All of it, all of us, is alive at more than just a physiological level.  And this is, of course, what Saint Paul is getting at. It has been in the text all along.  He is assigning consciousness to matter that does not “think” in the way we imagine, yet has a knowing, a participation, in the world of creation. This longing is not about escaping creation, but about being more present in it, perceiving its full beauty which includes the physical and which is beyond a this-worldly perspective. What we see with our eyes - growth, decay, death - the cycles of nature, which, even in all their beauty, are just stuff, is not all that is there.  Glory lives in potential, it sits secretly and invisibly at the center of every living thing.  

The way home is to perceive this secret presence, even as creatures who are mortal and suffer and die. This hope - as invisible and unbelievable as it sounds - is home.  Love and compassion are the antidote to trauma. Entering our vocation to wait with eager longing heals our whole selves, restores what was harmed.  The divine image, present at creation, which plants within us a desire for connection, for discovery, for love, for home, casts us out into a world where sin and evil seem to thwart and mock that desire. So we are caught between the inescapable quest for a true home and the temptations of false ones.  The danger of separation looms large. So the second note in Romans 8: “Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ?”  

The source of our eager longing is Christ himself, who fills all things with himself. We find quiet confidence in the midst of affliction when we remember that the One who descends into every human hell we create or imagine, every human hell done to us or by us, is the very One who sits at the right hand of the Father in glory, thus filling even the place of pain and suffering with himself.  Separation can seem so very real at times, but it is an illusion.  It appears when we forget our vocation of eager longing, taking our eyes off the glory to be revealed. WIthout that grounding in our true identity our bodies will become coffins used to move our heads from place to place. Or we will succumb to the body’s every impulse and craving, becoming subservient to it rather than its steward.  The memory of our own death is all about the present moment, all about living here in these bodies with other bodies as we watch for glimpses of the glory appearing.  “All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”  May our watch at the gate of death awaken us to the truth of our identity and quicken us to finish our course so that we may pass that gate to receive its light and joy. What will separate us from the love of Christ? Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

Amen

The Funeral of Roy E. Parker, OHC - Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
The Funeral of Roy E. Parker, OHC - Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

Click here to watch the full funeral service on our Facebook page.

Last Wednesday I received an email with the intriguing subject line: “Hello 30 Years later, and condolences for the passing of Br. Roy Parker.” It was from Eric Seddon, and it had indeed been 30 years since we were last in contact. Eric's mother was the guesthouse director here at Holy Cross Monastery in those years, and...well, let me let Eric tell the tale as he posted it in his blog “The Jazz Clarinet.”

“I learned just yesterday, via the NY Times obituary that one of the greatest of all clarinetists, William O. Smith (better know to jazz audiences as Bill Smith) passed away last February 29th. He was 93 years old, and lived a life wherein he contributed not only some of the finest jazz of the past century, but expanded our understanding of the clarinet, continuously, for decades.... I can't help but share one little story, of how I first heard Smith's music.

I was a teenager in the 1980s, immersed in clarinet playing and specifically jazz, when I happened to meet a monk from Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, NY. My brother and I used to spend time volunteering there--we'd clean the guesthouse before retreats. One of the monks was named Br Roy Parker, and though a soft spoken man, known for the masterful calligraphy he drew, he was in fact a huge fan of jazz, and while working in his shop would often listen to Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, and the like. He soon learned of my love of Goodman, Shaw, and others, and we'd talk jazz regularly. One Sunday afternoon when I was there to clean, Br. Roy announced that he was switching over his whole collection of cassette tapes to the newly introduced CD format -- and he gave me first pick of anything in his shop that I wanted. I don't remember all the tapes I took home that day -- but I remember the most important: Near-Myth/Brubeck-Smith.

I had never heard of Bill Smith before, but that album opened new vistas for me as a clarinetist.... For me personally, his art remains the most fascinating and satisfying of modern jazz clarinet.

The day Bill Smith died, I'd actually been messaging a friend about his music, how much it continued to inspire me. And when I learned just yesterday of Smith's death, I tried to find contact information for my old friend, Br. Roy Parker, who I hadn't spoken to in over thirty years. I wanted to let him know about Smith's passing if he hadn't already heard, and to thank him for introducing this music to me. But it turns out Br. Roy passed away just nine days before Bill Smith. Br. Roy was a great artist in his own right, and appreciated all the technical nuances jazz musicians navigated - he would ask me all about those things with great interest. He was a great listener, and learned from what he heard. I hope and pray that he and William O are swapping notes in heaven right now.

The greatest music is so powerful that it impresses itself right onto one's life story. Br. Roy's kindness and Bill Smith's celebratory brilliance will forever be connected in my mind.”

Great music, great art, great people do impress themselves onto one's life story. And today we remember and give thanks for Br. Roy who impressed himself so indelibly onto Eric's life story, onto our life story and, I'd venture to say, on the life stories of countless others. He was, as his memorial card says, “Priest – Monk - Artist” all of which came together in a remarkable synergy characterized by gentleness, humility, kindness, creativity, passion, discipline and devotion.

There are many ways to speak of a life, many ports of entry, if you will. I want this morning to remember Roy through his art, which is to say, through his calligraphy. Though his artistry came out in so many ways. Who can forget the many years he devoted himself to baking bread, wonderful whole wheat bread and sourdough bread? Yes, sometimes it came out a little heavy, but it was always nourishing and delicious and was made with patient, loving care. Roy delighted in feeding others, whether through his bread, or through his presiding at the Holy Eucharist, which he did with Zen-like grace and recollection. Or through his preaching, which was always carefully researched and prepared. I would see him in the library for hours on end studying biblical texts, often in the original Hebrew or Greek, and consulting countless commentaries, and then, as like as not, have him appear with an outrageous prop to illustrate his point.

Br. Roy and the "Markan Sandwich"

I remember once when during his sermon he pulled out two pieces of bread surrounding bacon, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise...an apt (and yummy) illustration of the Markan “sandwich” that he was expounding. And for those of you not in the know, a Markan sandwich is a stylistic device used in the Gospel of St. Mark and characterized by the insertion of one narrative episode between two parts of another one. Got it?

Roy fed in other ways as well, especially when he served as an AIDS chaplain at Manhattan Plaza, a residence for artists in New York City, at the height of the AIDS crisis. I think it was precisely Roy's reticence and inner stillness that made him effective in this ministry. And of course having himself the soul of an artist. Cor ad cor loquitur, says the psalm: “Heart speaks to heart.” That speaking went well beyond words. It went straight from Roy's heart to that of the other.

So in the spirit of Roy, I produce my own props, works of calligraphy that Roy executed over the years. There were many, including private commissions. There were greeting cards and posters. There were names on our doors and texts both sacred and profane. And these are a few which, at least to me, capture Roy and his way of being a man of God and a man for others.

The Glory of God is the human person fully alive.

The first is the quotation from Irenaeus of Lyon, “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.” Roy, like all of us, struggled to be fully alive, but his struggle was not his own, it was I think, also for the glory of God. From his early days at MIT and its jazz band—Roy was a drummer—to his years in the Society of St. John the Evangelist and then in the Order of the Holy Cross, Roy struggled to grow and become ever more alive. And as is true of us all, this was a journey of fits and starts, of peaks and valleys. But Roy did become more alive and transparent as the years went on, more his own man and therefore more available to others. More fully alive. It is no wonder that this simple and I might add, best-selling piece of art went through several iterations over the years as did he. What is true of art is so often true of us all as well.

The second work is simply a recipe...it is Roy's recipe for whole grain bread, beautifully penned and illustrated. It begins with the words “In your favorite breadmixing bowl whisk honey into ½ cup lukewarm water & add yeast.” In your favorite breadmixing bowl...which presumes we have one. Maybe we do. All of us. It is the container that holds the ingredients of a rising and nourishing life.

A recipe for whole grain bread.

Third there is the Buddhist gatha:

“Let me respectfully remind you: Life & Death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to Awaken. Awaken. Awaken. Take heed. Do not squander your life."

I feel a certain personal connection with this piece as I first saw the text through the Maitri Hospice in San Francisco in 1991 and some years later shared it with Roy and the Mount Calvary community. It speaks so honestly and directly to our mortal human condition, of which we are now perhaps more aware than ever before—and gives us our marching orders and our deepest aspiration: “Do not squander your life.” Roy did not. And with God's help, neither shall we.

When life sucks...

Finally, there is this piece of calligraphy that I found in Roy's studio. I don't believe I had ever seen it before. It says, somewhat enigmatically: “When life sucks & hands you lemons...I say beat the crap out of it and demand some California oranges as well.”

Well, as we know, life handed Roy lemons in the last year of his life, when disease took away first his ability to sing, then to speak clearly, then to speak at all, then to swallow. But through it all, Roy beat the crap out of it and demanded California oranges. He demanded and succeeded in retaining his dignity and self-direction even as he became more and more dependent on others. And he did so with unfailing courtesy and patience. This nobility marked even his passing. For on the afternoon of his last day he wrote on his note pad to Br. Bernard and me: “I want to lie down and die.” And so he did, within hours. Lemons, yes, but California oranges as well, as befits someone descended of Yankee stock but born in sunny southern California.

When we planned Roy's funeral for today, we did so because we thought our guesthouse would be open and going at full tilt throughout Lent. Tuesday, March 31 looked to be a quiet day, and all the brothers planned to be home. We had not realized however that in the Episcopal Church calendar, today is also the commemoration of another great artist, the 17th century poet John Donne. Donne was, like Roy, a priest. He was also a notable preacher to British royalty, perhaps the greatest English preacher of his day. But he is most remembered for his poems. And none more than his famous “No Man is an Island”

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

The bell does toll for Roy today and for all of us. But through and beyond that mournful tolling there is also a hope and a promise lying within Donne's other emblematic poem “Death be not proud.” As he puts it:

One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

John Donne, the Christian priest and poet, knew just as our Br. Roy knew and, I trust, as we too know: that in Christ Jesus, death is overcome. And so today we proclaim with the church throughout the ages that:

“Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tomb bestowing life.”

Oh death, be not proud. Oh death, thou too shalt die.

And you, dear Br. Roy, may you go from strength to strength in the life of perfect service in the heavenly kingdom prepared for us all from the foundation of the world through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Br. Roy Parker, OHC  1933-2020  

Funeral - Br. Douglas Brown - 10 May 2006

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
Sermon preached at the Requiem for Brother Douglas Brown, OHC
Wednesday 10 May 2006

A Resurrection Life

The essential message of the Easter proclamation has always been: Christ has won the victory. Death has been trampled down by death, and Christ now gloriously risen invites us to join Him in faith, and when we do, His victory will be ours as well. And so it will. The victory of Christ on the Cross has opened to all the world the possibility of resurrection, and our hope as committed Christians is that all will come within the reach of that saving embrace. On Easter morn we sing, "Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia. Our triumphant holy day, Alleluia." His rising makes our day holy.

That's our proclamation. But how do we get there? How can we be transformed by the resurrection?

There are so many Easter symbols of new life: The new fire, the flowering cross for the children, the festive food, the Easter eggs and chocolate in baskets, the bunnies and chicks and other soft and fragile offspring which remind us of the newness of spring and the renewal of life. When I was a boy, we used to get new shoes for Easter. The week or so before the great day, the stores would be full of parents and children trying on shoes, which we children would eagerly compare on the great day. The Black Church has an image for heaven: it's the place where all God's children got shoes. All God's children are loved and gifted and privileged. A child's Easter is a festival of sweet and tender newness: The victory of the Resurrection is given as a free gift, from adults to the children, from God to us, new life and love unbounded, uncomplicated, rejoicing love.

But gradually, the complications, the failures, the compromises, the shadows, of adult life gather round and penetrate our souls, till many believe that the Christian proclamation of the Resurrection victory is, in one of St. Paul's favorite words, foolishness: foolishness to Gentiles, to the thinking secular world, and worse, offensive to Jews, to serious religious people. So one righteous man died and was justified, the criticism goes. That gets you off the hook? Absurd. Where's the responsibility for the individual to engage in the struggle? Where's the need to build up social structures, to share with others in human solidarity?

An adult Easter needs to take into account the darkness of our lives. In the words of the great hymn which I heard for the first time on Good Friday, 1976, in St. James' Cathedral in Toronto, so beloved of Douglas, "My song is love unknown, my savior's love to me: Love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be." We become lovely by being loved, and in turn loving others into loveliness.

The victory may have been won, but appropriating the fruits of victory is no easy task. Douglas Brown was a man who lived into these questions with deep sincerity, and whose life is a paradigm of the answer to the world's criticisms of the Christian faith. He placed himself in the path of the Resurrection, and that path took him to strange and wonderful places. This Chapel, the worship in it and the community which lives its life around it, became Douglas' life, and the strange and wonderful place where he struggled to appropriate the victory of the Resurrection.

Douglas was profoundly liturgical. He loved the ancient liturgies of the Church, the monastic offices, the chanting, the community's times of simple shared prayer, the psalms and canticles and antiphons, the public reading of scripture, the hymns of Anglican worship in all its glorious variety, the shared physical movement of the community in the daily dance of praise, the Peace at the Eucharist which he would share in a great bearlike embrace, the bread and the wine and the fellowship around the Table of the Lord. He found here his heart's center, and in the stability of the forms of monastic prayer I believe he found the strength to take up his cross and follow Jesus. Because the cross is the answer to the criticism of cheap grace: We are offered the Resurrection victory won by Jesus Christ if - "if" - we follow his life and death and make it ours.

Douglas embraced his cross. He allowed himself to die to parts of his life that could not give him life: shyness, insecurity, drinking. His life was a work in progress on all these fronts. I believe that the great gifts he shared with us were made possible by the Resurrection victories won on the crosses of his struggles.

When our Founder, Father Huntington, wrote about the houses of our Order, his first thought was about the spiritual struggle they make possible: "The ladder of the cross is planted firmly within the walls of a religious house and angels pass up and down that stairway. Our house is a house of God; let us strive to make it for ourselves the gate of heaven." Jacob's ladder is the ancient Jewish and Christian symbol of mystical contemplation, and at a deep level, the union with God symbolized by that ladder is the goal of every monk. I think the genius of the image is not so much in the ladder, however, as in the picture of the angels ascending and descending. Up and down, up and down, an interplay of the interior life, which is never simple, always dynamic.

This ladder has an ancient pedigree in monastic tradition. St. Benedict gives it 12 steps, and each one of them is an act of humility. The fear of God; leaving behind your own desires; submission to a human superior; obedience under difficult circumstances; the vulnerability to share your inner life with those who have power over you; contentment with whatever comes your way, especially abuse and deprivation; willingness to live by the community's norms; keeping silence when what you want to do is chatter; restraining the laughter of hysteria and self-preoccupation; when you do speak, speaking modestly, gently and briefly; and finally, realizing that we speak not only with our words, but in our actions. They too must be characterized by humility.

This is a big order. It is a sixth century 12 step program of formidable challenges. Ascending this dynamic ladder of humility requires more than one act of faith. It requires first of all that we are willing to give ourselves to God unreservedly, not looking to our own strengths and gifts but allowing God to use us as we are. "Just as I am, without one plea" says the old hymn, and that is the monk's daily song as we struggle up a rung or two of the great ladder. This first act of faith requires us to trust that we, our own essential being, and not what we can say or do or produce on our own, is worth God's trouble. A tall order for a shy, insecure alcoholic. But Douglas took it on.

A second act of faith climbing this ladder requires is that the community will be a faithful partner in the struggle. Submission, obedience, vulnerability, joining in the no doubt flawed life of people no better than you are; all this presupposes a community and leadership whose first focus is on the Cross and its victory, and not on its own power and gain. This is a struggle for all of us in monastic community. But what joy when we all honestly share its tasks: "How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity." It is like the fine oil anointing Aaron, running down in seeming waste all the way from head to foot, signifying not the usefulness of the oil but the overflowing abundance of God's Spirit, not the daily tasks of earning a living and running things and being productive, but the hope of a superabundant overflow of generous, mutual love. A tall order for a man who could so easily analyze the realities of personal dynamics in himself and others, and whose call to leadership was complicated by his understanding of the inner dynamics of the exercise of power. But Douglas took it on.


A third act of faith that climbing the ladder of humility requires is that you only reach the top when you have hit the bottom. St. Benedict famously does not recommend humor to his monks, and if there were one thing I would like to change in the Rule, that's it. I think a joyful approach to life is always welcome, but then, we don't live in the sixth century, with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire a living memory, with the collapse of the successor state of the great and wise Theodoric the Ostrogoth on the horizon and chaos drawing closer and closer, surrounding them like the darkness of an enveloping night. But there is a delicious irony in the thought of a ladder of humility. If the Cross is a paradox, so is the ladder. Imagine: climbing higher and higher to become more and more humble. When you reach the top you are really at the bottom, so to speak. I cannot help but think that this is a parable about leadership as well as a profound observation of the course of a truly redeemed life. Perhaps that could be the monastic message to our leadership shortly to assemble in Columbus (editor's note: the triennal General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA). Here is where I think Douglas found his Resurrection victory. He hit bottom. He embraced another 12 step program, one I think not unrelated to Benedict's. He understood that when you reach the top of that program, you're still no better than the day you started. I think he made this his life's work: To see in himself and in others the daily work of grace, grace that picks you up after you've been thrown down, and keeps picking you up, day after day after day. Not an easy way to live your life, but Douglas took it on.
I loved Douglas' ways of being humble. The schlumpfy clothes, the sandals (didn't the man have a single pair of shoes?), the only-occasionally trimmed hair and beard, the muffled voice, which you had to strain to understand sometimes, low like an organ pipe. He didn't much like spending money. I would try to take him out to a nice restaurant near the seminary in Chelsea, and more often than not we would end up in a Chinese place just north of 23rd Street where it was a challenge to bring the bill above $20.00 a person. He loved being a monk, even perhaps playing a little in his ironic way with the outward symbols of humility.

Douglas was a holy person. Not a saint, I think, but holy. He let himself be transformed by grace and the Spirit. When his life hit bottom, he saw it as Christ's cross for himself. He saw the ladder of humility planted firmly in the midst of the monastery and embraced it. He trusted the Lord and he trusted the community, not without struggle, but with an admirable constancy.


And as a result, his life became a blessing. He was a rock of integrity to us in the monastic life. His preaching and retreats were beacons of reason and generosity and insight to thousands. His spiritual direction reached deep into the souls of hundreds and hundreds of earnest Christians. His wide sympathies, born of his own sufferings, opened channels of grace which are still flowing with the waters of life. His love of justice and compassion in public life led him to become a voice in the struggles of our day.

In my church we sing a song after the sermon, a song born in the Black Church:
Thank you Lord, for saving my soul.
Thank you Lord, for making me whole.
Thank you Lord, for giving to me
Thy great salvation so rich and free.
.
Thank you, Lord, for saving Douglas. Thank you for making him whole. Thank you for giving to him your great salvation so rich and free. Thank you, Lord, for giving Douglas to us all, for the great gifts his salvation has brought us. Thank you for the Easter life, for the free gifts of childhood, for the Ladder of the humility of the Cross, for the humility which lifts us up, and brings us, finally, to You.

Amen.