As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones,
in whom is all my delight.
This morning I am thinking of two former parishioners of mine up in Vermont, Doug and Thelma Wright.
Doug and Thelma grew up "going to meeting" together in the same little New England Congregational-style church and stayed there all their lives -- except the brief time Doug served as a shipbuilder and then later as a Staff Sergeant in the Army Air Corps in England during WWII. After the war Doug came back home and married in that same little church where they had played as children out on the front lawn. A few years later they bought land just a stone's throw from his parents' place on East Road in Colchester. They raised four children, three girls and boy, on that farm and brought them to church and filled up the same wooden pew every week. They both taught Sunday School to many generations of children. When it finally got too hard to make ends meet on the farm Doug went to work in a steel factory in Burlington. He cried when he sold his cows and draught horses. Doug passed at age 91. His funeral took place in that same little church where he was baptized married, and spent his whole life in. I had never seen the Church so full. Thelma followed a few years later.
Doug and Thelma had a special marriage. In some ways it was more 19th century than it was 21st. When Doug died the family had to teach Thelma how to pump her own gas. Doug had always done that. And the family joked that if Thelma had passed first they would have had to teach Doug how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The old farmhouse smelled of burning wood; and I can still remember the smell on my clothes as I would drive away after visiting.
They were such humble people -- never letting the left hand know what the right was doing. Once by chance I discovered that our church had been a part of a 1940s effort to bring negro children from Harlem up to Vermont for an "intentional experiment in race relations" during the summer months. I asked Thelma if she had known any families that had participated. She rose to the full measure of her stature -- all 4 feet 10 inches. "Well, we did," she said matter of factly. I would have never known, but I wasn't surprised.
The old Wright farm house I am told has been torn down now. The wood stove no longer burns. The house and the stove and the Wright's have all gone the way of the whole earth.
But this morning's Lesson evokes a memory and a feeling and a connection that transcends time and geography, life and death:
"As for the saints in the land,
they are the excellent ones,
in whom is all my delight."
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