At the request of Kenneth Young’s wife Irene, I offered these thoughts at a memorial celebration. The sun, an hour or two shy of a midsummer setting, shone in the big tent on a very large assembly looking out over the Hudson River in Columbia County. My words were these:
Somewhere in this county sit the stones which were meant to be the steps into St. Peter’s Church in Spencertown, where I once served as pastor. Somewhere, those stones lie. This was all some twenty-five years ago.
Irene had come to the church a few times. She and I had had some conversation. At the house, I met Kenneth. It came up that a plan was afoot at the church to re-design its front steps and access. Kenneth offered a beautiful argument that the work should be done in local stone. I liked the idea. Soon, Kenneth got me a drawing and prepared a bid. He even told me where he would find the stones. I was ready to bring his plan to the church council.
In the next days, however, men came up in trucks from Westchester Co. and in one day, they built the steps and the access ramp from paving stones, just as you see them today. There was no contract; no questions were asked. This work was done by the father of a young man named Michael who had just died of AIDS here, and whom we knew well and loved and honored at the church. The father in his sorrow could hardly speak, but he was a contractor and also Italian, and so he communicated his gratitude by getting this thing done fast, and for no charge.
Before I could explain the suddenness of it all to Kenneth, he had seen the work, all finished. Naturally he was dismayed with me, confused. I went to see him. He liked that. Of course, he got the picture right away. He let it go. Our friendship began.
The stones of his plan are still really out there. Perhaps they are in a wall he built for another, or a wall built by another. Or are they in a floor, or at the quarry still? Somewhere, they are. The snows of all the years between are gone, so the flowers and the sounds and smells of our lives and the little children of the house, but the stones are out there, and Kenneth is not.
It may seem trivial to give much attention to the concreteness of things which can no more be found for the simple fact that the plan of gathering and assembling them was let go. After all, this happens all the time. A woman handles a skein of yarn, thinks of a sweater for a certain someone, but drops it. The yarn is out there somewhere. Someone marries, then drops it. Out there somewhere, the unknown life goes on.
But being common does not make trivial. Ideas, formed and unformed, were really all we ever had—a conception of what would be good: good to eat, good to build, good to do for our loved ones or our community, good to stop doing, good to be remembered for. It was never a matter of how well we did with our intentions, rather, it was that all together, they composed us. Ideas, plans, conceptions—these were our building stones: the honorable, the delightful, the just, the kind, the difficult, the holy. All we were came from what we conceived. It was no mere coincidence of words that we ourselves were conceived—by our parents. And that, in the gift of it, we ourselves conceive a new generation.
So, somewhere in the county still are the stones Kenneth conceived for the steps of St. Peter’s. Except for the story of it, that idea is gone—but countless others of Kenneth’s conceptions serve as building stones somewhere out there, beyond any accounting for them. Is this what is meant by life after death?
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I have no idea what death is. Moreover, I do not see that the doctrines of religion and philosophies afford anyone any knowledge of what death is. I think knowledge of death is not even in their purpose. But anyone can see that though we do not know what death is, we live our life up against the wall of it. Its fact shapes all our thought and action.
I have never been moved by the tidy phrase that death is natural, just a part of life. Certainly death looks to be in the nature of living things, but we . . . are not a thing. Not primarily a thing, not at all. We are an openness, an infinity. With no more effort than to stop obsessing with whatever frets us, we can cast our thought on the endless flow of the mountains and the river waters. We can send thought into the sea deeps of no thought, and come up in unending sonnets and songs and seasons. Why, we can conceive that there exists a number corresponding to the tally of every sun-spread leaf and blade of grass in every wood and meadow across the whole earth. In the starry night, we can accept that our small body takes its part in an untold vastness of space and stuff. We conceive of infinity. We are an infinity in an eternity. We are not a thing.
Death is not in the nature of infinity; therefore death is not simply part of our nature. Death is an assault. an error from the infinite —a DIV error; it does not compute.
Here, up against the wall of death as we are this evening, putting our hand on it as we must now, conceiving of Kenneth, there may come an intimation of the infinite and the eternal surrounding us, breathing us, breathing all. There may come an intimation that nothing just “is what it is,” but that everything is also, can be, a parable; everything, everything: an option, an invitation to conceive it, or her or him, as a touch from the eternal, directing our mind beyond, beyond itself, beyond.
Nothing was just literally so, not even stones that sit somewhere in the county bereft of Kenneth’s brief intention. Everything we touched, everyone who touched us, was from the unending, the infinite, the eternal. To feel so sharply this end, this sudden cease of the touch from the one we loved — this shock, this awful rupture — signifies all that we are saying here tonight. We feel it so sharply because the eternal is in us, and death, speaking nothing back, opens a cleft in our nature that lets the echo echo unending. In this mind, the prayer of Teilhard de Chardin may open: “I suffer. God has touched me.”
Just before I moved away from this county many years ago, the last gathering I shared with Kenneth and Irene and the children as a neighbor was up at the house, singing. From songbooks! Do you remember? The other day, I was put in mind of that night by a song of Eric Bogle.
Like Kenneth, Bogle emigrated from the British Isles as a young man to a big land starting with the letter “A.” Australia in his case. His songs of lament for war and death touch the spirit of all we have heard here tonight. One in particular, in which war has no part, I commend to you. It is called, “The sound of singing.” Its refrain is thus:
“Sorrow, care, or fear / Tonight have no place here
They shall all soon disappear / In the sound of singing.”
June 16, 2018
Rev. Stephen H. Phelps
New York City
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