Yesterday we had a funeral for our brilliant mother, who passed away on January 16 from complications due to Alzheimer’s disease. My brother and sister (Kevin and Kelly) and I were all sort of bemoaning the fact that it took us so long to get this particular act together, and we’re not at all uncertain it didn’t have to do with sheer exhaustion following from our Dad’s (their father, my step-father) passing last July. Whatever the case, it was a beautiful day, 
and an intimate gathering. It took place at St. Martin’s church in Davis, 
where my brother and his wife (Cindy) are members; Fr. Mark Allen presided. Cindy and Rylan (Cindy’s nephew) read the lessons, Joseph Farrow (Kelly’s ex-husband) gave a moving tribute, Kelly brought two lovely photos of Mother–one from her youth and the other from my first mass,
I preached, and at the end read the Mourner’s Kaddish, to honor Mother’s near-conversion to reform Judaism.
This is Stephanie (Cindy’s sister), Cindy, Kelly and Joey (Joseph). 
That’s me preaching. Here is the text of my sermon. I will return to regular posts in line with the Revised Common Lectionary next week. Thanks for bearing with us through this difficult year.
Who’d a thunk it … who’d a thunk it … that’s what I kept mumbling to myself walking through the Philadelphia airport Thursday. Who would ever have thought I would preach at my own mother’s funeral? But then again, it seems sort of like the right thing to happen, one last time for little Ricky to put on a show for Mother. Marcia Jane Hinds was a child of God who was close to God, who did not live a life of conventional churchgoing faith, but who knew God in her heart and lived as God called her to do, and furthermore she knew that was what she was doing.
Marcia Jane Hinds Smiraglia was the vibraphone player in Billy Hill’s TwinTones in Peoria in the late 1940s … and soon found herself playing in jazz clubs in lower Manhattan and in Harlem … she played a mean vibes, and if you ever knew that little happy noise she made,
kind of an inhalation over the lower teeth with a big smile, that was her ecstatic musical noise learned when she played jazz with the big boys, Tal Farlow, and Sal Salvador (my father), and even in the circles of Lerner and Lowe and Rodgers and Hammerstein, My Mommy, used to play jazz all night in Harlem!
In 1986 I went to teach at Columbia University and later at Long Island University. My friend Mac lived in the building where I probably was conceived, when I described it to her on the phone she said “oh yes, that’s were we lived then, you could see Grant’s Tomb.” I was born at Queens County Hospital in Jamaica, it has a different name today, but you still go past it on the Long Island Rail Road …. she would laugh when I told her about that. She didn’t like Queens but after she quit playing, which she had to do after she got too pregnant not even the bank jobs she was so good at were enough to afford an apartment in Manhattan.
Our mother lived a long and pretty much happy life. In the end Alzheimers’ took her memory but never her smileor her charm. I have been as torn about this homily as I was about writing the blogpost I wrote after she died. Everybody here knows our Dad died last summer, on the 4th of July. I wrote his blogpost complete with photos, that night. I knew right away what to say. Mother was different. When I told my priest friend Bill about this he said simply enough “mothers are different.” He was right. It was harder, because she was my cause, and she was my raison-d’etre and she was my … Mommy. It’s that simple. How does a grown man, old himself, deal with the loss of his Mommy?
As I wrote in that blogpost, I was born premature, I couldn’t suckle and I couldn’t breathe. I had to be kept in an incubator for six weeks. Aunt Margo, Mother’s older sister, was there and they took turns lifting me out of the incubator and making me eat. Funny isn’t it, now, to think there was ever a time when I couldn’t eat? Mother put her heart and soul into it.
I never knew much about her life with Sal. She never talked about it much. But when it was too late, and I started looking through the photos of her marriage and those big family dinners in Massachusetts and especially that Christmas card she wrote home about the state of the world in 1950, then I had to cry again, just to think how someone in that kind of a time, isolated from her mother and her sisters, dealt with having a baby in New York City. Thank goodness Aunt Margo was there for her.
Mother felt like a part of the world, always, and she taught me that. I have never been a citizen of my neighborhood more than a citizen of the world. Her pain at the death of her high school classmates on the beaches at Normandy was palpable even thirty, forty years later.
She taught me that all of us are here together. She did it by sitting with me on the sofa, feet entwined, 1960s television was our hearth, babies in the other room sleeping or needing attention. That would be Kevin and Kelly.
She became Marcia Jane Hinds Hanks when she married our Dad in 1968. She and I took the Santa Fe Super Chief from Chilicothe Illinois to Los Angeles and then somehow got to San Diego where I was the ring bearer and they were married. Dad was like a knight in shining armor. Along with Dad came a whole new family, Kevin and Kelly, even additional grandparents. We had a pretty conventional life for a navy family I guess.
A decade later I went off to college, to Germany, to graduate school, to my own life.
During this time we talked once or twice a week by phone. I remember trying to talk to her from the post office in Berlin in 1973, and I remember trying that subterfuge where you make a collect call and hang up. She couldn’t do it! The operator would say: “Collect call from Rick” and she was supposed to say “I don’t accept it” but she couldn’t … she’d always say “Are you okay?” The operators always let her get away with it though.
She was a woman who knew great love, and therefore a woman who loved greatly. And all of us know that. She never lost her joy in our relationship until the very end. Even at the end when I called she would get excited. In the early days of my work in Amsterdam she loved when I would call her at night and she could hear the trams, and the sirens ….. and we would talk about how romantic it all was. When I went to Paris to work for the first time she told me all about how to go to Gard-du-Nord. When I went to the Jack Ford bridge at Nijmegen I called her. When I went to Arnhem and walked to the Rijn and looked at the forest I called her. And I knew she was reliving those days of the end of World War II. I’m just sorry I never got to call her from Madrid or Granada to talk about Hemingway and Spain after Franco.
The scripture we have heard is all about the eternity of God and the eternity of God’s people. Mother was always right in the thick of that. “As the deer longs for the water brooks, so longs my soul for you O God.” From the Lamentations: “God is good to those who seek God;” From the Revelation, “Who are these?” They are those who have come out of the great tribulation. Well, that’s life isn’t it? And she not only has come out of that tribulation now, but she has shown us how to do it to. Jesus said: “In my house, there are many dwelling places.” That’s pretty much a description of our mother’s heart. She had many dwelling places in her heart, enough for each of those whom she loved.
I guess you all know that our mother was the grand-daughter of a Methodist circuit-riding pastor, The Rev. Erasmus Capp. So I expect that as a little girl she heard rather a lot of stories from the Bible. And our mother was a twin, second-born, identical twins they were,
Marilyn and Marcia. Some time after her divorce from our Dad, our mother decided to become Jewish. She got so serious about it that she once told me I needed to be tested for Tay-Sachs. She had us all figured out according to the twelve tribes, so of course, it was no surprise to her when I heard the call to become a priest–she said “you are of the tribe of Levi.” She moved to Israel for awhile, painting in a garret (or a hostel, what do I know?) until she got picked up for photographing sexy soldiers. Later we all learned she had changed her name to Jacob. We didn’t know why, and when we asked she just smiled and changed the subject.
And then, one day, in about the second week of seminary, I went to my Old Testament class, and … well, let me tell you a story, using words from Genesis:
Genesis 25:19-28
These are the descendants of Isaac, Abraham’s son: Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac was forty years old when he married Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Paddan-aram, sister of Laban the Aramean. Isaac prayed to the LORD for his wife, because she was barren; and the LORD granted his prayer, and his wife Rebekah conceived. The children struggled together within her; and she said, “If it is to be this way, why do I live?” So she went to inquire of the LORD. And the LORD said to her, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.” When her time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb. The first came out red, all his body like a hairy mantle; so they named him Esau. Afterward his brother came out, with his hand gripping Esau’s heel; so he was named Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them. When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents. Isaac loved Esau, because he was fond of game; but Rebekah loved Jacob.
I was so excited I could hardly stand it! I ran to my apartment and called her. I said “I know, I know” and she said “umm, what?” and I said I know where you got your name. And she said “oh you do, do you” and then I read, “afterward his brother came out with his hand gripping Esau’s heel, so he was named Jacob” and she laughed.” So then we talked about how she had felt all her life being the second twin. Funny how life works out that way.
So, I’ve taken enough time here. Mommy, Mother, I loved you from the moment you gave me life. I know Kevin and Kelly did too. Go with God mommy, Go with God.
Dimensions of Reality: glbt Christian spirituality 