When Dr. Richard Cornelius announced his retirement, I was the one privileged to find myself with a position in the English Department at Bryan College. I did not take his place: no one possibly could have. He had been the Department chair for 30 years; he was a treasure, an icon.
My seniors that first semester did not want me as their teacher. A fierce love of and loyalty to Dr. Cornelius kept them from allowing themselves, for awhile, to warm to a stranger; they had wanted him to teach their final classes in the major. Over the last 15 years, I've heard from so many graduates before my time who loved him, as a teacher, a mentor, a friend.
I know him as a gracious and witty Southern gentleman who gave me all his course handouts and syllabi, and who, with good will, wished us success even when we changed some age-old academic traditions of the department. I too have watched things that I established and directed change under new leadership, and it can be hard to let go. If it was for Dr. Cornelius, he never let on to us.
I will let others tell the stories of his teaching and his attention to detail and his unique ways of challenging his students. I've heard so many of them, but I never experienced them. I can only say that he was a brilliant, humble, and kind man who made me feel that I had found a home and was welcome in it, even as he was moving toward its edges. While I did not have a great deal of interaction with him, I always felt his friendship and lovingkindness; I always knew I had only to ask and he would offer advice and wisdom.
His legacy permeates our department even now. His name comes up regularly within the department and from our alumni. We may do some things differently on the surface (no more MEG test!), but we do all things with the heart and vision of Richard Cornelius: love for our students, love for our Lord, and the instilling of a desire for excellence at every level.
I am grateful for his influence, much greater than it seems on the surface. I am sad for his loss and glad that I will see him again someday and know him better than I had the opportunity to in this world. May the Lord comfort his family and friends with many lovely memories and with eternal hope, and may we never forget to live his vision.
Showing posts with label eulogy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eulogy. Show all posts
23 August 2014
04 August 2008
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, RIP
One of the greatest men -- perhaps the greatest man -- of the twentieth century has died.
If you aren't ready to tackle Gulag Archipelago or Cancer Ward, try One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to begin to understand the horror that was Stalinist Russia.
But Solzhenitsyn saw the wrong directions of the West, as well. Here are two of his addresses which serve as reminders of who we have become and why, and what we must do to rectify our errors:
The Templeton Address
The Harvard Commencement Address
These ideas made him unpopular after the initial warm reception which followed his exile from Russia. But he was not concerned with the praise of men; he was concerned to speak the truth as he saw and understood it, and hope that men of good will would be able to hear and embrace it, however hard it may be.
May he rest in peace with the God he served.
If you aren't ready to tackle Gulag Archipelago or Cancer Ward, try One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to begin to understand the horror that was Stalinist Russia.
But Solzhenitsyn saw the wrong directions of the West, as well. Here are two of his addresses which serve as reminders of who we have become and why, and what we must do to rectify our errors:
The Templeton Address
The Harvard Commencement Address
These ideas made him unpopular after the initial warm reception which followed his exile from Russia. But he was not concerned with the praise of men; he was concerned to speak the truth as he saw and understood it, and hope that men of good will would be able to hear and embrace it, however hard it may be.
May he rest in peace with the God he served.
28 January 2008
"Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light"
For June, my mother-in-law, whom I loved
28 November 1930 - 27 January 2008
Our students often wonder why so much literature is "dark and depressing." Among other reasons is that Death is the one universal, the one mystery that will happen to us all. Philip Larkin was right to fear Death, if for the wrong reason: Death does not bring annihilation, as he believed, but a more fearful prospect yet -- judgment. Emily Dickinson likened Death to a gentleman suitor, and, while I love the poem, I find it too kindly. The Christian has hope, it's true, and need not fear Death, but Death is not natural or kindly; it is a result of sin having been introduced into the world. I'm far more sympathetic to Dylan Thomas's urging: "Do not go gentle into that good night; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
She didn't rage, but she didn't go gentle, either: she lived in the face of the inevitable, inexorable, and agonizing Death pursuing her. Less than a month ago we sat on her back porch sorting through pictures and listening to stories of her younger days. She emailed us a few times after that, and called her younger son one last time to say the final good-bye early last week. I received a letter from her last week, too, a letter I had no chance to answer, in which she asked about syntax that she questioned in an article she'd read. Loving, learning, living.
She lived every moment of her life, and she gave us love and laughter and beauty and wisdom until the very last. And so I rage for her against the dying of the light, the sin that gives Death power over us all, the devastating brokenness of this world. I know the promises and I believe them. But we were not created to be torn away from each other through Death -- who, yes, will die, and the sooner the better.
Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus.
28 November 1930 - 27 January 2008
Our students often wonder why so much literature is "dark and depressing." Among other reasons is that Death is the one universal, the one mystery that will happen to us all. Philip Larkin was right to fear Death, if for the wrong reason: Death does not bring annihilation, as he believed, but a more fearful prospect yet -- judgment. Emily Dickinson likened Death to a gentleman suitor, and, while I love the poem, I find it too kindly. The Christian has hope, it's true, and need not fear Death, but Death is not natural or kindly; it is a result of sin having been introduced into the world. I'm far more sympathetic to Dylan Thomas's urging: "Do not go gentle into that good night; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
She didn't rage, but she didn't go gentle, either: she lived in the face of the inevitable, inexorable, and agonizing Death pursuing her. Less than a month ago we sat on her back porch sorting through pictures and listening to stories of her younger days. She emailed us a few times after that, and called her younger son one last time to say the final good-bye early last week. I received a letter from her last week, too, a letter I had no chance to answer, in which she asked about syntax that she questioned in an article she'd read. Loving, learning, living.
She lived every moment of her life, and she gave us love and laughter and beauty and wisdom until the very last. And so I rage for her against the dying of the light, the sin that gives Death power over us all, the devastating brokenness of this world. I know the promises and I believe them. But we were not created to be torn away from each other through Death -- who, yes, will die, and the sooner the better.
Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus.
13 November 2007
The Generosity of Centered Love
for June, who has loved me
Some 34 years ago, I happened to work in the curriculum library at The University of Kansas, reshelving and rearranging and doing whatever projects the director needed me to do. A strikingly beautiful woman with a soft Southern accent happened to be a doctoral student under the director, with a desk in the library’s office area. Her inevitable kindness, her ready smile and laugh won me instantly – and one day she invited her younger son to take us out to lunch at Pizza Hut, thereby (not quite unknowingly) selecting her daughter-in-law.
From the first, June considered me a daughter, loving me neither less nor differently than she loved her own children. And I have always called her “mom,” because she immediately became a second mother to me, as precious as my own.
Sometimes I envied her energy and her talents. She could make anything on a sewing machine from a simple skirt to complex valanced drapes. She could cook anything from scratch and taught me to love simple beans and cornbread as well as exotic tabuli. She canned and froze and dried the produce of the family farm and in her children’s youth had driven the tractor, planted trees, and helped put out the fire that younger son inadvertently started in the outhouse. Her eye for beauty ensures that nothing in her various homes has been accidental or happenstance, and each one has inevitably been both elegant and comfortable, truly home to all who step across the threshold. She taught economics and home economics at Texas Women’s University and she is an artist and a landscaper and a homemaker par excellence.
But I understood immediately that she didn’t expect me to be like her, that she realized that my upbringing, my talents, my preferences and abilities, even my lesser store of energy are uniquely mine and to be valued as such. Never have I felt a moment’s slightest disappointment from her, but only encouragement to follow my own paths, to excel in being the woman I was created to be. And while I’ve not, sad to say, learned to sew or cook or decorate my home in the complex ways she does, I have learned from her anew the most important lesson my own mother has always impressed on me, not by speech but by example.
For Mom generously, fiercely loves people, with a deep loyalty and a vulnerability that draw and enfold. All that she does arises from this love. When she bakes bread and prepares a lovely pot roast and a sumptuous dessert, it is an offering of time and love to those who will share it, as is the time given to teach her grandchildren to sew and draw and paint, showering love along the way. Her home opens vistas of quiet beauty where guests feel free to relax, from the cushioned window seat and afghans in the den and deep leather couches in the living room to scented soaps on the bathroom sinks and lush down pillows on the beds. Her paintings – like the two I see each time I glance up from this writing – greet the viewer with a profusion of soft colors that draw the eye into a centered depth of beauty that is like the depth of her own centered love, the theme of all her interior decoration, even to simple trinkets hanging in a window.
One year, we arrived at Mom’s the Monday morning before Christmas, racing ahead of sleet and snow, the day sagging about us, grey and drizzly. Bringing dishes to the sink after lunch, I noted the several multi-colored, multi-shaped, flat pieces of glass hanging in the kitchen window that had been there since I could remember. Pretty, I thought, and didn't notice them again. Wednesday dawned bright, the ordinary sun dazzling after nearly a week's hiding behind the wintry grey. Around mid-morning, I started from the den toward the laundry room -- and was arrested by vivid rainbows reflected on the white walls, a brilliance that abruptly stilled my teeming mind. After catching my breath, I approached the window to find their origin, and, for the first time ever, I saw among the colored baubles two small, clear glass pieces: a ball and a teardrop, each with dozens of facets cut into the surface, joyfully refracting the sunlight into radiant beauty.
Simple elegance – yet with depth, richness, brilliance like the love of the woman who, with her instinct for beauty, hung the glass in that perfect place to provide moments of sudden delight. This is her way – not extravagance but quiet gestures that never waver, never halt, but need only the light of our gratefulness to break into beauty enough to delight the universe.
Some 34 years ago, I happened to work in the curriculum library at The University of Kansas, reshelving and rearranging and doing whatever projects the director needed me to do. A strikingly beautiful woman with a soft Southern accent happened to be a doctoral student under the director, with a desk in the library’s office area. Her inevitable kindness, her ready smile and laugh won me instantly – and one day she invited her younger son to take us out to lunch at Pizza Hut, thereby (not quite unknowingly) selecting her daughter-in-law.
From the first, June considered me a daughter, loving me neither less nor differently than she loved her own children. And I have always called her “mom,” because she immediately became a second mother to me, as precious as my own.
Sometimes I envied her energy and her talents. She could make anything on a sewing machine from a simple skirt to complex valanced drapes. She could cook anything from scratch and taught me to love simple beans and cornbread as well as exotic tabuli. She canned and froze and dried the produce of the family farm and in her children’s youth had driven the tractor, planted trees, and helped put out the fire that younger son inadvertently started in the outhouse. Her eye for beauty ensures that nothing in her various homes has been accidental or happenstance, and each one has inevitably been both elegant and comfortable, truly home to all who step across the threshold. She taught economics and home economics at Texas Women’s University and she is an artist and a landscaper and a homemaker par excellence.
But I understood immediately that she didn’t expect me to be like her, that she realized that my upbringing, my talents, my preferences and abilities, even my lesser store of energy are uniquely mine and to be valued as such. Never have I felt a moment’s slightest disappointment from her, but only encouragement to follow my own paths, to excel in being the woman I was created to be. And while I’ve not, sad to say, learned to sew or cook or decorate my home in the complex ways she does, I have learned from her anew the most important lesson my own mother has always impressed on me, not by speech but by example.
For Mom generously, fiercely loves people, with a deep loyalty and a vulnerability that draw and enfold. All that she does arises from this love. When she bakes bread and prepares a lovely pot roast and a sumptuous dessert, it is an offering of time and love to those who will share it, as is the time given to teach her grandchildren to sew and draw and paint, showering love along the way. Her home opens vistas of quiet beauty where guests feel free to relax, from the cushioned window seat and afghans in the den and deep leather couches in the living room to scented soaps on the bathroom sinks and lush down pillows on the beds. Her paintings – like the two I see each time I glance up from this writing – greet the viewer with a profusion of soft colors that draw the eye into a centered depth of beauty that is like the depth of her own centered love, the theme of all her interior decoration, even to simple trinkets hanging in a window.
One year, we arrived at Mom’s the Monday morning before Christmas, racing ahead of sleet and snow, the day sagging about us, grey and drizzly. Bringing dishes to the sink after lunch, I noted the several multi-colored, multi-shaped, flat pieces of glass hanging in the kitchen window that had been there since I could remember. Pretty, I thought, and didn't notice them again. Wednesday dawned bright, the ordinary sun dazzling after nearly a week's hiding behind the wintry grey. Around mid-morning, I started from the den toward the laundry room -- and was arrested by vivid rainbows reflected on the white walls, a brilliance that abruptly stilled my teeming mind. After catching my breath, I approached the window to find their origin, and, for the first time ever, I saw among the colored baubles two small, clear glass pieces: a ball and a teardrop, each with dozens of facets cut into the surface, joyfully refracting the sunlight into radiant beauty.
Simple elegance – yet with depth, richness, brilliance like the love of the woman who, with her instinct for beauty, hung the glass in that perfect place to provide moments of sudden delight. This is her way – not extravagance but quiet gestures that never waver, never halt, but need only the light of our gratefulness to break into beauty enough to delight the universe.
04 December 2006
Nancy L. Walker, RIP
(written Saturday, 2 December 2006)
Nancy died day before yesterday. I sat numbed in front of the computer screen for a quarter of an hour, thinking again and again, "I never made the cross-stitch I'd planned for her."
How arrogant and foolish to put off kindnesses, thinking there will be time. We have no idea how much time there will be, and I never told her how much a part of me she is.
Nancy Walker was my colleague, director of the writing program and writing teacher, at Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State). It was my first full-time position out of graduate school, half-time teaching and half-time directing the new writing center. She was kind to this nervous 30-something who'd never intended to work outside the home; she made me feel not only welcome but competent, belonging in this alien place.
A short, petite woman, she dressed "professionally feminine" -- well-tailored dresses and heels that raised her above the lectern (if she ever used one). I sat in on one of her graduate-level writing classes; a dynamo with cropped greying hair and reading glasses perched on her nose, her heels tapping constantly about the room, she challenged, delighted, and encouraged, drawing from us our best. She didn't have to look at my work, as I wasn't a student, but she did -- many written comments and then the concentrated attention to help me make a piece publishable, my first.
It was during those four years at SMSU that I finally accepted the identity of "writer" that had been a reality since I learned to scratch my name on kindergarten lined paper. And it was Nancy who helped me see that the reflective essay is my genre. That in itself might have been a career-killer, we both knew, but she never discouraged me from following the gift given.
I left SMS for many reasons, one among them being my absolute inability to justify sacrificing my time, energy, and identity for academic writing. One of the greatest gains from those years was the courage to embrace a gift -- and in that courage Nancy will remain with me, leaving the world not quite as empty as it felt when I first read the message of her death.
May it please God that she rest in peace.
Nancy died day before yesterday. I sat numbed in front of the computer screen for a quarter of an hour, thinking again and again, "I never made the cross-stitch I'd planned for her."
How arrogant and foolish to put off kindnesses, thinking there will be time. We have no idea how much time there will be, and I never told her how much a part of me she is.
Nancy Walker was my colleague, director of the writing program and writing teacher, at Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State). It was my first full-time position out of graduate school, half-time teaching and half-time directing the new writing center. She was kind to this nervous 30-something who'd never intended to work outside the home; she made me feel not only welcome but competent, belonging in this alien place.
A short, petite woman, she dressed "professionally feminine" -- well-tailored dresses and heels that raised her above the lectern (if she ever used one). I sat in on one of her graduate-level writing classes; a dynamo with cropped greying hair and reading glasses perched on her nose, her heels tapping constantly about the room, she challenged, delighted, and encouraged, drawing from us our best. She didn't have to look at my work, as I wasn't a student, but she did -- many written comments and then the concentrated attention to help me make a piece publishable, my first.
It was during those four years at SMSU that I finally accepted the identity of "writer" that had been a reality since I learned to scratch my name on kindergarten lined paper. And it was Nancy who helped me see that the reflective essay is my genre. That in itself might have been a career-killer, we both knew, but she never discouraged me from following the gift given.
I left SMS for many reasons, one among them being my absolute inability to justify sacrificing my time, energy, and identity for academic writing. One of the greatest gains from those years was the courage to embrace a gift -- and in that courage Nancy will remain with me, leaving the world not quite as empty as it felt when I first read the message of her death.
May it please God that she rest in peace.
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