well done

Funeral Homily for Lindsay Warren
January 22, 2009
(Numbers 6: 22-27; Ps 37: 1-8, 17-18; Revelations 21: 1-7; Luke 19: 11-17)


To Fred and Linda who grieve their dad, to Mary who could not be here today, to all of us who gather in this holy place to pray and mourn and yet smile, I say welcome.

Most of us have our own vivid memories of Lindsay Warren. One of mine is how he loved to walk up to me whenever I had just finished some exhausting church thing—a huge liturgy, a challenging funeral, an arduous Annual Meeting. He’d take my hand and intone, “Well done, good and faithful servant…” Before I knew better, I would thank him, which gave him his next best straight line, “Now take charge of TEN cities!”

Thanks a ton, Lindsay—just when I wanted a beer and a soft chair, nothing more. One exhausting Sunday I snarled, “Take charge of your own ruddy cities!” He grinned.

But today I’ll take some gentle payback from the Gospel, and say, “Now, Lindsay, take charge of ten cities!”

We all know he’d love the joke, and we all know he’d love a well-timed Biblical turn of phrase. Most if not all of us who spent time with Lindsay had some moment unique to ourselves where the smile, the look, serious sometimes but always with a sparkle, and the phrase, the poem, and yes the absolutely awful pun would follow. Some high church official apparently offered Lindsay to pay out of pocket if he’d get a “pun-ectomy.” Fortunately there’s no such thing, not with a co-pay we could afford.

But that quality that Lindsay had—what was it? I described it to someone recently as “absolute personalism”, the gift of being in complete I-Thou relationship with a person in a way that would put Martin Buber to shame. When you were with him, you were completely with him and he with you. Since Lindsay’s death, I have been besieged with so many people on the phone, face-to-face, or on e-mail, who each feel that they shared something unique and special with Lindsay.

Well, we did. We all did. That was part of the outrageous, utterly human and warm gift of this man, wending his way ever more slowly around town in that outlandish Cadillac, walking in at Lindsay-pace wearing that re-sale shop plaid vest, and slowing you down in the midst of what seemed so important. For what? Things that were so much simpler, but now seem so much more important—a joke, some philosophy, his latest wonder at the grand glory of the cosmos, a prayer.

Now I wish I had slowed down even more, but that is the way of things.

Steve Hiscoe read the Numbers text, the Aaronic blessing that was loved by Saint Francis and who copied it out in his own hand as a gift for a friend. “The Lord bless you and keep you…show his face to you…give you peace.”

Steve was Lindsay’s confrere in the local Franciscan fellowship and knows, as do I, how Lindsay loved Francis and Francis’ way of seeing the world as shot through with wonder and glory and whimsy and Christ’s Presence, divine presence. Lindsay to me showed more of Francis’ spirit than some whom I have known who walk through life literally wearing brown robes and sandals—humor, joy, and above all humility and a refusal to take himself too seriously. We’ll end our Mass today by singing Francis’ Canticle of the Creatures, and as we do I’ll see Lindsay’s face as he would look off and wonder at the majesty of the ages, the intricate wonder of evolution, the vast distances between the stars.

And Lindsay the priest loved Francis’ knocked-flat astonishment at the love and healing power of God.

Lindsay was a man who understood grace and forgiveness and I think bet his life on it. I will always think of Lindsay as a holy man, but it was no holiness sprung of a life without flaw or an impossible goody two-shoes kind of morality. I respect and love Lindsay the wounded healer, the saved sinner, because he knew and spoke candidly about his failings and his struggles. It’s a matter of public knowledge that he passed through a time as an adult and a priest of personal brokenness, when he and Mary separated. Mary wrote about this quite openly in her book Let The Earth Bring Forth, for which she still gets fan letters from people who found hope in hers and Lindsay’s story. The healing of their marriage and Lindsay’s recovery of his priesthood was dearly-bought every step of the way. I think that Lindsay’s insistence on the unconditional love of God was not a pleasant religion, but for him was a matter of life and death. His favorite quote on the matter was taken from a homily of Desmond Tutu’s: “God loves you. Full stop.” Full stop—no commas, no “buts”, no conditions, nothing to earn.

This is not simply a sweet piety. It is a witheringly honest and naked kind of way to live, and to re-assert and re-live each day. Lindsay walked that talk, and I will always be grateful for what it says to me.

Lindsay the priest freely gave that blessing of Aaron, that priestly blessing of unconditional divine love, as freely as he received it. As I wrote this one of the orphans of the street came and knocked on the door, asking for…well, the usual. I once saw Lindsay put his hand round the back of this unlovely man’s head and pray. He and Mary labored for years in “Vital Signs”, their own healing ministry. And he would always assist in administering healing here. After anointing others he would never fail to gesture to me, hold out the oil, and bow his own head for healing. From his wounds came healing, just as did from his Master.

I’ll gladly match story-for-story with anyone else concerning special moments with Lindsay. My family has their share—the birthday he shared with my older daughter and how they would call each other that day; how he and Mary helped us get orthodontia for one of the kids; the two years he helped a brand-new rector with a financially-challenged parish in a changing culture by serving as non-paid associate; all the talks about changing church, changing culture, and his changing body in what he called in his last sermon, “The end of the third stage of my life.” “I was born on another planet called the 1930’s, you know,” he’d assure you. Later you will hear a solo from a young woman whose talent Lindsay delighted in and from whose grandmother Lindsay took piano lessons. In the pews here you will notice that most of the red Prayer Books have a plate in front designating them as memorials to one Eunice Mullen, Lindsay’s mom. He’s pretty much everywhere today.

These last months have been hard. As Mary moved more deeply into dementia and finally was placed in residential care, something seemed to leave Lindsay just as memory and speech left Mary. His walk was slower, his smile was slower and less frequent, something was quenched. Living life alone did not agree with Lindsay. I had an odd sense at the time that his sermon last December 17 was his last, but I did not know how true that was to be.

Lindsay once wondered aloud at the process whereby a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. “Did you know that when the cocoon is spun and the caterpillar becomes a pupa, somatically it dies and for awhile it’s really nothing?” he marveled. “When I was a boy, I’d crack open the chrysalis and what would pour out was just kind of, well goo.” Lindsay said prophetically that this was the stage in which the church was at present—seeming death, indeterminate, mushy. But the process does lead to new life.

I think this is a personal process too, especially for a person baptized into the death of Jesus and eating and drinking at his table weekly. In these last months Lindsay let go of much that was dear to him as his strength waned, much that gave his life shape. But death and the promise of new life go hand in hand. Lindsay struggled to be faithful to this hard truth of his life even to the end. So, Lindsay, priest, husband, father, artist, lover of science and of the spoken and written word, lover of the Word made flesh, saved sinner, wounded healer, you live now in the promise that death does not have the last word, that new life springs forth from the most forgotten of places. And the old and weary will go, as the Prayer Book says, from strength to strength in the “larger life” of perfect service. Just when we are tempted to think we are done, Lindsay would have us know there’s more. There’s always more.

So, dear dear friend, well done, well done good and faithful servant…

Wait for it…

Now take charge of ten cities!