As many of you know, my mother, Catherine Poole Sartain, died Sept. 7 at the age of 84. We five children had the privilege of being with her at the moment of her death. I thought I would share with you this week the homily I gave at her funeral at St. Paul Church in Memphis. My family and I send our deep thanks to you for your prayers and support during these days.
Barely two weeks ago, we closed on mom’s house on Graceland Drive. Now a nice young family calls home a place we knew as home for 47 years.
I hear they plan to paint and lay new carpet. I have a hunch when they pull up the old carpet they’ll wonder what caused those ridges in the wood floor underneath. Not to worry, it wasn’t moisture. It was roller skates.
When they paint my old room, they might have to use a little spackle to fill one small hole in the wall, just a few inches below the light switch. You see, I had this new Cub Scout knife that needed breaking in, and I discovered that one of the blades was great for drilling. It wasn’t so great for filling in holes.
As they’re cleaning the kitchen cabinets they may notice tiny pin holes in the front side of the shelves above the washing machine. We kids were innocent of that one. The pin holes were made by thumb tacks which once held in place small typed messages from mom: “No snacks without permission.” Somehow rules seemed more solemn and more foreboding when typed.
If the walls of our house on Graceland and our house on Fountain Court could talk, they would speak of song and laughter, of giggles and groans, of lessons taught and lessons learned (sometimes by the hardest), of prayers offered and answered, of sleepless nights and tender nursing, of arguments helpful and unhelpful, of board games and card games, of opera and baseball, of baking bread and steaming chili, of tears of joy and tears of worry and tears of sorrow, of welcomes and farewells, of housework and homework … the stuff that makes a family a family.
If the walls could do more than talk — if they could offer testimony — they would testify to two things in our mother’s life that fueled the engine that kept our family going: faith and fidelity.
For years I’ve been under strict orders from mom not to say lots of nice things about her at her funeral. Like all kids, I can twist any parental order to suit my purpose, so I’ll speak instead of what made our mother possess the many qualities that would make us want to say lots of great things about her if we were allowed to say them — which we’re not, so I won’t, because she told me not to.
Faith and fidelity. The two are closely joined. The biblical heroes and heroines of faith extolled by the letter to the Hebrews still speak to us by their ageless testimony. We tend to think of them as heroes in their own right, heroes whose innate perfection caught God’s attention and persuaded him to give them a mission, which made them even greater and spread their fame.
But that way of thinking is backwards. They were like you and me, like mom, ordinary folks who were gifted with faith in the eternal God. It was their faith — in other words, it was the God who gave them faith — that enabled them to persevere because in some way they “saw” what they hoped for. It was faith that led them to intuit the origin and order of the universe established by God’s word. It was faith that perked their ears to hear things heard only by those who revere God, faith that caused them to do things that made some folks shake their heads in disbelief — like crazy Noah building an ark to save his people. It was faith that helped them go forth, and keep going forth, on the basis of God’s imprecise promise; faith that sharpened their vision to see beyond the struggles of the day all the way to the land of promise. It was faith that emboldened then to believe that the impossible is possible with God.
Abraham knew that the One who had made promises to him was trustworthy. And so he was faithful, a man of fidelity. Again, we have to put things in their proper order. Was it because Abraham and the others were people of fidelity that God chose them? Or was it because God is full of fidelity (and they knew it) that they had courage to be faithful in return? I think it was the latter. As Hebrews says, Abraham knew God was trustworthy.
Those who trust in God’s fidelity and have become faithful in return persevere in hardship, jump back on their feet when they have stumbled and (most importantly of all) never go back on a promise. This is the beautiful, the mysterious, and curiously, at times even a baffling aspect of fidelity.
God is always “yes.” God does not equivocate. God does not maneuver or back away from his promises. God is love, and his love is so faithful that it endures to the end, even to the end that was the cross. There were those like Peter who disagreed with Jesus about the need for him to suffer. Oddly, when Peter said to Jesus “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you,” he was trying to convince him not to be that faithful. There must be an easier way, a more benign interpretation of the promise, perhaps a way of fulfilling my hope that would be a little less demanding … of me. There we go again, getting it backwards.
Our faithful God, worthy of trust, has given us faith. Those who receive the gift with an open heart and respond in kind with steadfast faithfulness give others a vision of God’s kingdom. They do so not because they are perfect but because they long to be made perfect in the homeland they hope for. They struggle with the crosses life gives them as much as anyone, but in the struggle they let God win even when baffled by his dogged fidelity and his willingness to bear the Cross. They will not let go of his hand in the dark valley. They will be his faithful friends even if the evidence gives them pause about the way he seems to treat his friends. They will never go back on a promise because they know he never will.
In the past few days many of you have shared stories with me and my sisters about mom and her impact on your life. I think she wouldn’t mind my saying that what you saw in her was faith and fidelity, that is, God shining through her desire, her hope, her love, her struggle, her crosses, her frailty, and her motherly embrace. Gifted with faith, she was doggedly faithful to God, to our father, to us, to the pastors and principals and kids of St. Paul, and to her friends. God’s faithfulness is all about love, and so was mom’s.
Folks never forgot how Jesus raised the daughter of Jairus from the dead, how as he rushed to her side (hounded along the way by others who needed him just as much), reports reached him that she was already dead, that there was no reason for him to come after all. But he had said he would go see her, and not even death would prevent him, for he would never go back on a promise. People had already begun grieving as he arrived and called him foolish for bothering to come, but Jesus took her by the hand and said, “Little girl, I say to you, arise!” And she did.
Catherine was the wife of Pete Sartain and the mother of Marie, Cathey, Sally, Jennie, Peter, and thousands more at St. Paul School; she was also the daughter of Jim and Camille Poole and big sister to Camille, Ed, Rose, Pat, Adele, Jean, Paul, Maggie, and Merle; and she is the daughter of God for all eternity.
On Wednesday afternoon, we quietly watched her draw her last breath. In that tearful, mysterious moment we also witnessed the faithfulness of God, who came to greet her and lift her up. “Little girl, I promised I would come. I say to you, arise!” And so she did. And so will we.
Do you have an intention for Bishop Sartain’s prayer? If so, send it to him at Bishop Sartain’s Prayer List, Diocese of Little Rock, 2500 North Tyler St., P.O. Box 7239, Little Rock, AR 72217.
