My friend and classmate from seminary, Will Carter, died last night. He was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer just ten days ago. The Doctors said he could possibly make it four weeks, but Will told his wife it wouldn’t be that long. He was in his late sixties or early seventies; young in this day and age. Will was quite a character. He dabbled in Mormonism when he was young. Before seminary he was president of the local Toastmaster chapter. I never really knew what the toastmasters did…there was a chapter in my hometown. Knowing some of the members I gathered that they basically were people who liked to get together and hear themselves talk. Will certainly fit that profile. For his age he was decidedly naive, but he was, to say the least, persistently earnest. In class he was always the first person to raise his hand to ask a question. He would work his way into it until he got himself lost in what he was trying to ask…he would pause, and then say, “Am I making any sense here?” Of course he wasn’t, but our professors graciously indulged him and would try to answer the parts of the question they could understand…. Will was always the first person to volunteer for… anything, and he quite often made a fool of himself, but above all else he was delightfully and persistently earnest, and we loved him for it.
Will in his earlier years was an engineer. He could manage numbers, but he never mastered the art of writing, and in seminary that’s about all you do: write. He asked me to tutor him during our first year in which he probably had more papers returned to him to rewrite than any of the other students. But he earnestly persisted. I wasn’t much help. His mind just lacked the gift of expressing oneself via the written word. But Will made up for this shortcoming in other ways. He was compassionate to a fault. In Clinical Pastoral Education at St. Davids Hospital he visited at least three times the patients the rest of us did. As the rest of us would begin winding down during the afternoons, having a soda in the cafe, we would see Will out of the window pushing a patient along the sidewalk in a wheel chair so that his patient could get some fresh air. We practically had to drag him away, as spent as he was, from the hospital at quitting time.
I suspect Will was a fine priest. His sermons were probably not all that coherent, but through his naively earnest self disclosure, I believe one could see and feel the love so brimful in his heart. I’m sure his congregation will miss him, as will I. Thinking of Will reminds me of some words from our hymnal from #9 Morning Song: “to give and give and give again what God hath given thee; to spend thyself nor count the cost; to serve right gloriously the God who gave all worlds that are, and all that are to be.”
Some years ago my mother was visiting our house and we were listening to John Rutter’s Requiem….one of the lines, very familiar to us from the Burial Rite is, “blessed are the dead who die in the Lord for they rest from their labors.” I’ve heard it many many times. My mother gasped slightly and said , “I now know what that means…. “our labor is not life’s burdens” she said…. “our labor is the gift of bearing God’s life.” Those words have shaped my theology in no small way. We live and we give God’s life, which is Love, for and to our world, until it is time to rest. Let us spend ourselves nor count the cost and give and give for the great good of the world. Rest, dear Will…Rest.
