The Soul Selects                                                 Funeral of Don Knop

Terrance Klein                                   22.IX.2022 St Joseph Church

 

Job 19: 1, 23-27a   Revelation 21: 1-51, 6b-7   John 6: 27-40

 

A line from Emily Dickinson came to mind as I pondered Don’s life. 

The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —

Life is about choosing.  Try to have everything, and you end with nothing.  You must choose what you really want, whom you truly love.  If you’ve chosen well, then the soul shuts her door, as Dickinson says, because nothing more is needed.

Don married his high school sweetheart.   She was a freshman, and he was a junior. Janice’s mom had to question if such an early decision was wise, but they married the same year she graduated.  That was sixty years ago this month.  The soul selects her own society, then shuts the door.

Knowing what you want doesn’t mean that life, or marriage, comes easy.   There are still going to be the struggles, life’s broken plates, if you will.  But those who know what they truly want are much more blessed in life than those who can’t decide.

It was the same way with the sand pit.  Don thought that it would be a good investment, a way to provide for his growing family, give them what they needed.  Of course, that meant borrowing a lot of money and disappointing those who disagreed.  But within a year, Don had worked so hard and long that he had paid off the loan.   

Again, that didn’t make life easy.  Don would continue to work long hours at the pit and in the fields.  He wanted to provide for the family he had chosen, but he never forgot that his wife and family were his first choice, not work.  If the kids were doing something in school or on the field, Don was there. 

Dementia is such a terrible trial.   Who can say for whom it’s worse, the person who suffers from it or those who love him?  All sickness is a burden, but an illness in the mind is so much harder to comprehend, to accept, than one in the flesh.  Loved ones must keep telling themselves that they are struggling with the illness, not the person they love.  The one who suffers the sickness loses knowledge of himself and the illness. 

How hard that must have been for Don, someone who had always known what he wanted, what mattered to him.  Of course, Jan and the kids were there for him.  That’s a consolation they’ll never lose.  Like Don, they saw the choice and made the decision to stand by Don and to care for him.

Today we gather for Eucharist, the Church’s great act of thanksgiving.  Of course, even in sorrow, we give thanks to the Lord for the gift of Don.  Especially when we remember that we ourselves, our own lives, are nothing more than a gift from God.  Everything came to us from God.  We and all whom we’ve loved, will return to stand before God.

But we have another reason to be grateful, another source of comfort.  The soul selects her own society.  Long ago Don chose his Lord and savior.  And that’s the choice that matters most of all because it allowed Jesus to claim Don’s soul as his own.  So even in the years of struggle, even in the gathering gloom of illness, when Don seemed distant to us, the Lord was there for him. 

When the time came for Don to pass from this life to the next, something each of us must do alone, the words of Job became his own:

 

I know that my Vindicator lives,

And that he will at last stand forth upon the dust;

Whom I myself shall see;

My own eyes, not another’s, shall behold him.

 

The Lord Jesus is also here for us.  Of course, like Don, we must make a choice.  What do we want from life and whom do we love?  The soul selects her own society then shuts the door.

In a way, dementia is a parable of life itself.  The world yet to come is more real than this one. What matters most isn’t always apparent.  Sometimes on earth heaven seems such a faint hope.  We’re so often deceived.  We deceive ourselves.  One could call sin itself a type of dementia, a lamentable forgetting of what matters.

That’s why we must again hear what the Lord says to us, trust him, and give ourselves over to him.

 

The one who sat on the throne said

“Behold, I make all things new. 

I am the Alpha and the Omega,

the beginning and the end.”

 

That’s why we must rely on the love of others to stay by our side, to carry us through.  It’s why we need a savior.  And that’s what we have in Christ Jesus.  He is the one who chose Don and who chooses us.  When we gave ourselves to him, he took us as his own.

 

And this is the will of the one who sent,

That I should not lose anything of what he gave me,

But that I should raise it on the last day.

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