The funeral for one of the members of our centering prayer group was yesterday. Anna and I were privileged to deliver parts of her eulogy. I'm pasting in my part of the eulogy below; four of us spoke. Clara, who died of lung cancer, had asked that Anna write and then read a poem as her part of the eulogy. Anna will post her poem in a few days--Rickey
Clara
Chapman: My Part of Her Eulogy
For me, Clara was a spiritual teacher, one of the most
important in my life. The reason is because she modelled for me “grace in
dying.” This phrase “grace in dying” is circulating now in some of the
spiritual circles I move in. Because of Clara, I know what it actually looks
like. It’s not just words for me.
Clara and I became spiritual friends after she got the
news that her lung cancer was terminal, that she had just a year or so to live.
Being the woman of God she was, she prayed hard about how to respond to her
diagnosis and how to live the last days remaining to her. For many, many years,
everything in her life had been dedicated to God, and this last year would be
no different. In fact, it would be more so.
I am blessed that one of things God led Clara to do in
her last year was to join the All Saints’ contemplative prayer group, which I
facilitate. That’s how I came to know her.
Although contemplative prayer was new to her, she took
to it, as the cliché says, like a duck to water.
One of the statements in her obituary that means a lot
to me is that among her many activities of service and worship, she “especially
looked forward to the Centering Prayer group on Monday evenings.”
A time of silent prayer is one of the major components
of those evenings. As most of you know, Clara was always thinking of others,
and she almost quit coming to Centering Prayer in her last few months because
she didn’t want to be a distraction to us, she said. Those last few months she
couldn’t go out without her portable oxygen machine, which was a bit noisy. She
needed it to breathe, and she was afraid its noise would take away from our silent
prayer time.
But it was just the opposite. Having Clara in our
midst, with her courage and her wholesale commitment to God, took us along with
her deeper into the presence of the Lord. It was clear to us that she was
growing closer and closer to him, surrendering more and more completely to him,
and her presence with us on Monday evenings and the noise of that portable
oxygen machine had a sacramental effect on us. It brought us along with her
into a closer and deeper relationship with God.
As a woman of God, Clara had many dimensions: faithful
worship, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, volunteering at the thrift
store, Sidewalk Sunday School, and many others. But for me, none was more
important than her example of friendship with God. Clara was a woman who truly
knew the Lord.
