Good afternoon friends
Today we’re celebrating the life and cherishing our memories of Maria Silverback.
Last week, on Anzac Day – it was also Dave and Maria’s wedding anniversary – she passed away. A young wife and mum – she was only 35!
Occasionally, just occasionally, someone comes into your life – it might be very brief, like the light of a flashing meteor across the night sky – someone who has the gift of altruism: that is, they genuinely want to know who you are, and how you are.
ALTRUISM
The unanimous feedback I get from family and friends of Maria Silverback is that she was one of those very rare people: she had a genuine interest in you.
On Maundy Thursday, the day before Easter, just ten days ago, I had the privilege of talking with Maria – and with David and her mum Selena and her sister Priscilla – for six hours: six very honest, lucid, beautiful hours. And she tossed into that conversation a few details of my life and family. How did she remember those things?
Well, that’s the kind of person she was.
My professional work involves counseling with clergy/pastors and other people-helpers and leaders – and their spouses. I ask them: ‘You spend your life listening to people’s stories: but who is there for you?’ The vast majority of them say: ‘No one really, except perhaps my partner, or occasionally, a special friend or colleague.’ They tell me: ‘I can have a serious conversation in a social setting with someone I’d love to share a reciprocal friendship with, and at the end of our visit how much have they really learned about me? Nothing.’
Now we pastors and counsellors are paid to ask questions, to be interested in people and their issues.
But Maria did it for love of others – and that’s very rare. If you’d let her, she’d keep prompting you to tell your story. Please nod if you’ve had that experience with her! (Nods everywhere…). Her husband Dave said ‘She’d have been a wonderful counsellor; she made everyone she met feel special; she didn’t have an agenda, but a genuine concern for whoever she was talking to.’
That’s what I mean by ‘altruism’. As one of Maria’s friends wrote on her Facebook page: The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is to love, and be loved in return.
I’ve had one or two ‘deep and meaningful’ conversations with Dave and Maria, and a couple with Maria on her own. Now she would have preferred to revert to her regular habit of turning the conversation back to me, but I gently deflected those attempts, because I sensed there was some deep pain buried within her. Every well-put-together human-being will open like a flower to the sun when they are truly known, and accepted unconditionally.
I can’t reveal what we discussed – that’s confidential – except to say that all her life she’d really been wanting to talk about all that stuff.
Now where did she learn to love people like that? For her, she told me Jesus was her model – not religious authorities who always seem to have an agenda for you. Jesus was someone who lived for others… So she wanted to be more like Jesus than the judgmental religious leaders who did him in.
But Jesus was also a man of sorrows who felt others’ pain, and Maria too was a very special wife and mum whose greatest sadness at the end was leaving her two little girls and her wonderful husband Dave behind…
COURAGE
We admire Maria for her love, but also for her courage – courage in facing those terrible medical procedures in the last few years Courage as she confronted the inevitability of dying. And – you’ll have to take my word for this – incredible courage in dealing with the demons of her past.
AND US?
Now let’s talk about us – Maria would want us to do that. There’s a tombstone in Ireland somewhere which says Death leaves a heartache no one can heal; but love leaves a memory no one can steal.
So we have mixed feelings. And I want to give you permission to feel whatever you’re feeling. Feelings are neither right nor wrong, they just are.
If I were to ask you to complete the sentence ‘Today I feel…’ what would you say?
Gratitude? Yes, people like Maria aren’t ‘thick on the ground’.
Sad? Of course: that’s a natural part of grief. But time will soften the sadness.
Happy for Maria? That’s part of my response. She’s got a new body: and I can visualize her as she’s welcomed into her heavenly Father’s home-of-eternal-love – and she looks at her new body, and screams with happiness ‘Yoohoo!‘
Perhaps you’re feeling fearful: one in one dies, and my and your time will come, sooner or later. When that great man C S Lewis lost his wife of a just a few years to cancer, he wrote in A Grief Observed No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
But also there’s a legimitate rage – against God. Why did God let this happen? My four children are still alive – and they’re all older than Maria was when she left us. You’re allowed to be angry, and ask ‘Why, God, why?’. Don’t trust anyone with a simple response to that one: but the best answer we’ve just celebrated, last Easter-weekend. God shared his life with us in Jesus, and shared our pain in Jesus’ crucifixion. The cross-and-resurrection of Jesus tells us that pain and suffering and death are not the last word.
In fact the three great existential questions we all have – about guilt, death and love – were all dealt with in that great cosmic event. There we meet a God who forgives, who removes the fear of death, and who ‘loves us to death’ (and beyond).
So my last word to you – and Maria’s message to you today – might go like this:
God does not share his love between all of his creatures: he gives all of his love to each of his creatures.
To Dave: all our love and prayerful thoughts are with you, especially as next Sunday – Mothers’ Day – you’ll be both dad and mum to those special little girls. Scarlett and Ruby: you were very lucky to have such a beautiful mum, and now you’ll have lots of others – many of them here – who’ll be your special friends. To Maria’s family: Selina and Nigel, Nick, Reuben, Priscilla: our love and prayers are with you: may this experience enrich your lives in special ways. And that is our prayer too for the Silverback family, and the school mums who were special friends of Maria’s, and her hair-dressing clients, and the Salt Community, and the Christian Revival Crusade Church family… and to all of you.
May the love of God exhibited so beautifully in the life of Maria enrich all of our lives too…
Rowland Croucher
Discussion
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