July 5, 2014
You are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers;…”
Elizabeth
Jane Palmberg was a teacher. I
know. I was her student. You might have been too. It was not in a classroom in California, nor
at Cornell, nor even in a class here at St. Stephen’s. She taught me—us—something of great
importance. She taught us how to
die. I hope, Zab, that you are listening
in today, forasmuch as you are here among us, as are all the saints and angels
and archangels in the heaven where you are, which is closer to us than the air
we breathe. I hope you are listening
because I think that by now you know what and how you taught us, but you might
not yet know that we caught on to your teaching.
She taught
us more. One could start with the rather
mundane things at which she was extraordinarily gifted: writing, editing, reading, for example. Hers was a world populated by gifted authors,
many of them too much underrated women, like Elizabeth Gaskell. She admired and perhaps emulated women of
strong intellect and acute imagination like Ursula LeGuin. She more than likely never in her life turned
in a piece of shoddy work, so much care for detail did she exercise in every
visible part of her life.
We could
move on to her determined commitment to social justice. Zab told me one day towards the end of her
life that she had heard me say many times that life’s only real challenge was
letting go. She said that she had
finally come to a place where she agreed with me, but that she had often
disagreed when she heard that because her own great learning was that life
demanded commitment and identification—the things which had driven her to stand
with the poor and the oppressed and the causes of alleviating suffering. I saw her point and she saw mine. She modeled thoughtful reflection, restraint,
the careful measurement of words, honesty of expression.
Ah! There is one worthy of more than passing
reference. Honesty of expression. Yes.
Zab’s teaching often came couched in humor, a wry sense of the poetry of
laughing at oneself. She taught me one
Lent several years ago that one could actually give up something to which one’s
psyche was velcroed, like anxiety. “I’m
giving up worrying for Lent,” she said.
In a flash I saw and heard truth:
the truth she was speaking to and about herself, the truth that she was
offering me, the permission she was giving me to glimpse my own shadow, all
encased in a self-deprecating humor. She
learned her own lessons well, so much so that in her last Lent she vowed to
give up “abject terror,” when she was staring death in the face, frozen betimes
by the possibility that circumstances would call her to do things she doubted
she could do.
Elizabeth
Jane Palmberg, teacher. She not only was
a friend; she taught friendship by modeling it.
She not only was a Christian; she taught Christian faith by living
it. She was not only a professor of responsibility;
she took seriously that she needed to live what she professed by her
faith. It can be said without doubt that
no good teacher has ever been a good teacher without first being a good
student, a learner. And Zab learned some
things along the way, and kept on learning till the very end. She learned that she could not do everything
she wanted to do, and that that was perfectly fine. She learned to make peace with the fact that some of her dreams she would not live to see fulfilled. She learned that she could manage physical
challenges that seemed daunting in the abstract but were just more obstacles to
conquer by grace. She learned to accept
help when in other days she might have been enthralled to a persona of
self-sufficiency. She learned that many
of the things she cared most deeply about were gifts that would outlast her
reach and control. And in dying as she
died, she learned that most of the things that provoke abject terror in us are
things that never happen and thus things we never had to worry about anyway.
Zab’s
greatest gift, perhaps we would all agree, was the way she let us share her
walk, as troubled and difficult as it sometimes was. She opened her heart in supplication and
thanksgiving, teaching us that vulnerability is no badge of weakness, but of
strength. She invited us to know and
feel her pain, to share her suffering, guided by a deep belief that “suffering produces endurance, endurance
produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint
us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit
that has been given to us.” [Romans 5:3-5]
I doubt, frankly, that she would have made that statement at any point
along the way, or that she would in fact make it today. But what I do not doubt is that she has now
found it to be true.
Nor do I
doubt that Elizabeth Palmberg the brilliant teacher now sees herself in a light
that from her torturous path on earth shone too dimly for her completely to
embrace herself. I refer to the part of
her that was in dynamic tension between profound faith and honest doubt. Doubt, by the way, is never the enemy of
faith, but an important ingredient in it. The opposite of faith is sin, and the essence of sin is
estrangement and alienation, the insubordinate position that the human being is
ultimately alone and therefore its own god and savior.
Zab and I shared a love for Ursula
LeGuin. One day in the last month or so
when I was visiting her, I noted that I could not locate a very short story of
LeGuin’s. I described in some detail the
tale of this girl who had an obsession with finding words in odd places. She would walk the beach and see the
wind-blown foam left on the strand by waves, and find that it formed words that
she would read aloud. One day she found
herself in a secondhand shop that sold lace, where she saw a handmade collar in
which she could make out the words tightly woven into it. Zab and I searched
some of her books but couldn’t locate it.
On my next
visit she handed me a book with a story dog-eared. “Texts,” it was called. I turned to it, exclaiming, “Zab! You found it!” I read,
It was
handmade, handwritten. The script was
small and very even. Like the Spencerian hand she had been taught fifty years
ago in the first grade, it was ornate but surprisingly easy to read. “My soul must go,” was the border repeated
many times, “my soul must go, my soul must go,” and the fragile webs leading
inward read, “sister, sister, sister, light the light.” And she did not know what she was to do, or
how she was to do it.[1]
Zab looked at me.
I looked at her. “You like that
esoteric crap, don’t you?” she said.
In my mind, behind my laughter, I saw the teacher, Zab,
dart behind her very own words. I
imagined that I was holding a story not because it was hers, but because it was
mine, lost and now found. I was not
there to teach her anything, only to learn.
And that day’s lesson was that I did not need to know how to light the
light for Zab or anybody else, only to be present. She let me into her world and taught me,
wittingly or unwittingly, how to be there.
And I think she did that for us all.
Apostles, prophets, teachers, doers of deeds of power,
workers of miracles, healers, leaders, speakers in various kinds of tongues: all of them are body-parts of Christ, each
one manifesting the Spirit for the common good.
Most of the good we do is in spite of ourselves, and certainly in spite
of our limitations and shortcomings.
Elizabeth Palmberg was an exceptional person, but no exception to that
truth. That she gave us much beyond her
own understanding of what she was giving and how she was giving it is a sure
sign of grace. And for the graceful life
of an exquisite teacher of grace beyond all bounds of reason, how could we not
be thankful and full of praise? How,
indeed, to use the words of one of her favorite songs, could we possibly keep
from singing?
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2014
