|
Friends United Meeting |
 |
October 1997
Commitments
Goodbye to Three Dear Friends
by Johan Maurer
- Precious in the sight of the LORD
- is the death of his faithful ones.
- O LORD, I am your servant;
- I am your servant, the child of
- your serving girl.
- You have loosed my bonds.
- (Psalm 116:15-16 NRSV)
- is the death of his faithful ones.
As I write this, my wife Judy is in Maine to attend the memorial meeting of her mother at Portland Friends Meeting. Since the first time I met her twenty years ago, Betty Van Wyck seemed a larger-than-life person to me. That first meeting was at the day care center in Biddeford, Maine, where she put into practice many innovative ideas about caring for kids with special needs. Seeming to be everywhere at once in her day care center- office, kitchen, classrooms-she was simultaneously a visionary, a friend to children, a fund-raiser, a politician and a storyteller.
I was around her in both of her adopted home states, Arizona and Maine. She seemed completely at home in both places. One of the most vivid examples of her visionary side comes from Arizona: As president of the school board in Cave Creek, she convinced people to pay cash to buy 185 acres for education. With a total population of 600 for the village, it wasn't an easy sell. Today the student body alone is 6000, but thanks to Betty, the school board owns the real estate it needs now and for the future.
After many years as an Episcopal priest's wife, she became more and more active with Friends, eventually starting a worship group on Peaks Island in the Portland harbor. She formally joined the Portland Meeting in November 1992, only months before neurological degeneration began to rob her of her clarity and vitality, leading to her death this August 14.
We knew for months that Betty was weakening, but another recent death came unexpectedly. On August 17, Kenneth Josephs, clerk of Jamaica Yearly Meeting, was preparing to return to Kingston from Yearly Meeting at Hectors River, when he was hit by a bicyclist. Three days later, he died of internal injuries in a Kingston hospital. Kenneth was my oldest friend in Jamaica, the one who shepherded me around the island and taught me most of what I know about Jamaica. He gave the yearly meeting countless hours of volunteer labor; for years he stopped every day at the Yearly Meeting office on his way home from his government office.
At FUM's 1996 Triennial sessions, Kenneth became aware of how deeply we were concerned about conditions at the Friends children's homes in Highgate. As the new Yearly Meeting clerk, he decided to find out for himself what the situation was and reported finding that it was even worse than he had heard. In the 1997 YM sessions, just days and hours before his death, he served the cause of truth by raising the standard of accountability for the Highgate institutions. Some Jamaican Friends are saying that a corner was turned and new hope is in the air.
I never met Bulat Okudzhava, the Georgian/Russian poet, novelist and "bard" who died on June 12 in Paris, but my heart ached terribly when I heard about his death. His wonderful songs-full of strength, whimsy, understatement, lyrical charm and stubborn integrity-were part of the conscience of the Soviet people during decades of lies and repression. So many Russians know his songs by heart. His kind, unpretentious voice and melodic guitar-playing are equally familiar.
After he declared his public career at an end, he still gave occasional
interviews to the press; in one of them, he was asked how long the current
social chaos in Russia would last. He replied with a reminder that the
Israelites spent forty years in the desert. It took that long for them
to unlearn the mentality of slavery, he said, suggesting that the same
would now be true of the Russians. In his many years as a gentle prophet,
he did his best to get the process started.
Copyright (c) 1997 Friends United Meeting
Return to October 1997 Contents page