31 MAY 2023
A Mass of Christian Burial was celebrated for Marjorie Thomas at Saint Joseph Church in Ellinwood by her pastor, Father Terrance Klein.
Link to the obituary
Link to homily audio
As Though Everything Depended |
Marjorie Thomas |
Fr Terrance Klein |
St Joseph Church 31.V.2023 |
Wisdom 3: 1-6, 9 2nd Timothy 2: 8-13 John 11: 21-27
There’s some debate as to whom this popular Christian maxim should be attributed, to Saint Ignatius of Loyola, to John Wesley, or even to Saint Augustine.
Pray as though everything depended on God;
act as though everything depended on you.
Of course, it doesn’t matter who said it. Margie lived it, and that does matter. It matters a great deal.
Margie was a girl when she started working on her family’s farm, outside of Olmitz, and she never stopped. She was one of four siblings, three girls and a boy. But Arthur, her little brother, was too young to work when Margie first started helping her father, so it was Margie who drove the tractor and pulled the weeds. She also learned calving, and she helped her mother with egg collecting and with making lye soap.
In that regard, marrying Bob meant a new farm—this time east of Ellinwood—but little change in her work description. Even after their wedding at Saint Ann’s in Olmitz, back in January of 1959, Margie still drove tractors and trucks. She didn’t complain that she did all the work normally assigned to women and then much of the work that men did.
When she wasn’t in the fields, Margie was making meals for those who were, delivering them to far flung fields, several times a day. Desserts were her specialties: cakes and pies, such as chocolate sheet cake and lemon meringue pie, always from scratch. Same way with her chicken and noodles. If you were hungry, Margie was there to feed you. Even her dog Smokey knew that. He’d nudge Margie’s elbow, and she would lower her own spoon and feed him.
Her children remember a good mom, one who raised them well and was still around to help them raise their own kids. Yes, there’s no question that Margie acted as though everything depended on her.
But Margie prayed as though everything depended upon God. She never missed a Sunday Mass, and she was here for plenty of those on weekdays. Week after week, Margie and family arrived at the same time and sat in the same place. Saint Joseph Parish knew that it could depend upon Margie and Bob. Our altar society knew Margie would do her part.
Pray as though everything depended on God;
act as though everything depended on you.
There’s an image her children shared that captures this part of Margie’s life. It’s that of their mom, on her knees by the side of the bed, praying the rosary for rain. Margie knew that hard work was one thing. It was her thing. But everything else depended upon her Lord.
Saint Paul assured Timothy:
If we have died with him
We shall also live with him
If we persevere
We shall also reign with him.
But if we deny him
He will deny us.
If we are unfaithful
He remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.
We are no longer a work-oriented culture. Certainly not in comparison to previous generations. So, while overall numbers of hard-working people may be going down, there will always be some who never stop laboring. Many do it for the advancement it brings.
But it’s only those who have learned to pray as though everything depended upon God who are ready for the challenges and sorrows that inevitably come our way in life. Consider Margie, helping her children to bury her grandchildren Alex and Ashley. Their loss affected her greatly, but she was a woman who knew where to find her Lord. Like Saint Martha, Margie could say
Yes, Lord.
I have come to believe that you are the Messiah,
The Son of God,
The one who is coming into the world.
Today, we come to Eucharist. It’s the Church’s great act of both petition and thanksgiving. In petition we ask God to forgive whatever sins Margie committed through human weakness, to purify her of them and draw her to himself and all his saints, her loved ones among them.
But we also give thanks to God for the gift of this woman, our mother, grandmother, and friend. God created her, redeemed her, and gave her to us. Even in the pain of loss, we must give thanks for the gift Margie was.
There’s something else we need to take care of today, and that is to learn from Margie, to imitate her virtues of hard work and intense prayer.
As gold in the furnace, he proved them,
And as sacrificial offerings he took them to himself.
Those who trust in him shall understand truth,
And the faithful shall abide with him in love:
Because grace and mercy are with his holy ones
And his care is with his elect.
If others can someday say of us that we worked as though everything depended upon ourselves and prayed as though everything depended upon God, then we will know that we have lived life well, that we have imitated this great worker and, even greater, woman of faith.
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