For Heather Joy Wilson, May 24, 1970 – December 11, 2003. In Memoriam.

 Atop my shoulders as I carried him to a swing-set near Sconset Beach on Nantucket Island, my son Gabriel was three when he asked me, “Daddy, What are you thinking about?” I told him that I was thinking that when God makes a day as beautiful as this one you owe it to Him to have a good time. He plied me with another question, “Daddy, how do you get to heaven?”

What do you do when a little child asks you a big question like that?

I told him that I imagined you got to heaven the way you got to other places by catching a train; that you got there not on your own steam but by being taken, except I didn’t think it was a train that took you to heaven but an angel. The angel, I added, was just possibly the same one who spoke to blessed Mary telling her not to be afraid: the archangel Gabriel.

That is what I told him, craning my neck to look up at him looking down at me. He was up there, smiling, and shaking his head. “No Daddy; that’s not how. A swing!” he said, his voice rising, “A swing can take you there!”

How do you get to heaven? You get there, I heard my three-year-old saying, not in the by and by but in the here and now. You get there not by intellectualizing but by having a great time.

Jesus spoke at length of heaven once. This is what he said: The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field. As a seed, mustard is smaller than any other; but when it has grown it is bigger than any garden-plant; it becomes a tree, big enough for the birds to come and roost among its branches. . . .The kingdom of heaven is like yeast which a woman took and mixed with fifty pounds of flour till it was all leavened. . . . The kingdom of heaven is like treasure buried in a field. The man who found it, buried it again; and for sheer joy went and sold everything he had, and bought that field. . . . The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant who looking for fine pearls found one of very special value; so he went and sold everything he had and bought it.

Jesus speaks of heaven, and the images he uses are common and everyday things that people can relate to. Seed, tree, and birds playing in the trees; yeast, flour, and a woman baking bread; a treasure in a field, and a man going to some trouble to make that field his own; a merchant finding the pearl he’s lived his life dreaming about. If it’s the kingdom of heaven you’re looking for, Jesus appears to be saying, then pay attention to your ordinary life; because it’s there that you’re apt to find it.

Heather Joy Wilson—she of the cool car, the nails manicured just so, the inveterate good cheer, the big heart, and, of course, the pearls—paid attention to her life. She listened to her life, and what she most loved were voices, and those voices were yours. Her life was as rich as it was, as vital as it was, to hear her tell it, because it was full of you.

She did what is not easy to do, and what you so admired her for doing: she loved the way God loves; not generally, but particularly. She loved each of you in particular, and you loved her for it. That is why she didn’t let go of her life easily. She was the kind of person who got notes like the one from her student Max at Rock Creek Forest Elementary School. In some of the best lines in any literature, Max wrote: “Dear Ms. Wilson: You’re the best English teacher in the world. I want to flunk second grade in a good way, so you can be my English teacher again. [Max’s emphasis]”

Heather’s life, the way she lived it as a coach and a teacher, made you disbelieve. She made you disbelieve the lie that you couldn’t swim, or couldn’t spell, or couldn’t write. And doing so, she made you disbelieve that favorite lie we tell ourselves: that life is neither good nor bad except as we make it so by the way that we live it. We may make a full life for ourselves or an empty life, but no matter what we make of it, the common view is that life itself does not care one way or another whether we sink or swim any more than the ocean cares, or any more than the water in the River Falls pool cares. In all honesty, one has to admit that a great deal of evidence supports such a view.

But this church, and other places like it, exists—and you come to it today—because you don’t believe that life doesn’t care. To say that God is Spirit is to say that life does care, that the life-giving power that life itself comes from is not indifferent to whether we sink or swim. It wants us to swim.

That is why Heather’s life was well lived, and that is how her life gave glory to God. She was spirited that way, and inspiring, and she reminded you—even if you didn’t think so out loud at the time—of the One who wants us all not to sink but to swim.

Her life was a lot to say goodbye to, and she didn’t give it up easily, God knows, any more than Jesus, at 33, gave his up easily. And just so, though her body be destroyed, yet shall Heather see God; whom she shall see for herself and her eyes behold, and not as a stranger. Amen.

Sermon Preached by Rev. Phillip C. Ellsworth
For Heather's Memorial Service on  December 20, 2003
St. Francis Episcopal Church, 
Potomac, MD.