All Saints’, Dorval
May 7, 2023
Putney High School (the right hand picture was probably taken around the time my mother was there). Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any pictures of Aunty Gwen herself.
For some reason, I’ve found myself thinking and talking a lot recently about my godmother.
Her name was Miss Gwendolyn Date, and she was what was known in her day as a “lifelong spinster”. She was my mother’s teacher for the equivalent of grade 5 at Putney High School, a Church of England school for girls in London in 1961. My mother’s family was not religious, and it was the influence of Miss Date and the other teachers there – and the daily round of prayers and religious instruction that were part of the curriculum – that first sparked her interest in faith. When my mother returned to London in 1975 with my father for them both to spend the summer doing the research for their doctoral dissertations, they looked Miss Date up where she had retired in Dorsetshire, and had a joyful reunion. And when I was born three years later, she wrote and asked Miss Date to be my godmother.
I did not actually meet “Aunty Gwen” – as I was instructed to call her – until I was eight years old and visited England with my grandparents. At my baptism, my grandmother stood proxy for her, since there was no Zoom in 1979. We only had two actual in-person visits: the one in 1987, and then one in 1999, when I was studying in Oxford, and when Aunty Gwen was already severely debilitated by the illness from which she died two years later.
In between, we wrote letters. Mine on pages torn from school notebooks, usually, and hers on those thin blue “aerogrammes” that you could send by air mail for less postage than a regular envelope. I have few clear memories of what we actually said, but I do recall her abiding, kind, patient interest in the thoughts and experiences of a child she had never even met when the correspondence began, and I can see now how remarkable it was that she kept it up for two decades, when my sister’s godmother, who didn’t have the excuse of an ocean in between us, had disappeared from our lives before I made any clear memories of her.
The week after Easter, when Bob preached and I took the children downstairs without having prepared anything beforehand, I found myself talking about Aunty Gwen. The reading (as it always is the week after Easter) was the story of “Doubting Thomas” and as we wondered what it means that “blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe,” I talked to the kids about how even though I only spent a few hours of my life in the same physical space with my godmother, she was still an essential part of my learning about Jesus, having transmitted the faith both directly, and through my mother, to me.
The Tuesday after that, at the regular monthly service at the Bayview Centre, I couldn’t use my usual approach of adapting the sermon I had preached the previous Sunday, since I hadn’t preached one. So instead I turned once again to Aunty Gwen, and I suspect my congregation of folks, many of them in advancing age, many of them living with significant limitations, found the story of someone whom I knew in her frail old age to be more easily relatable than many of the things I say in my sermons there. (Though to be clear, it took a lot to bring Aunty Gwen down – on my first visit at age eight, she was still maintaining her habit of swimming daily in the English Channel off Swanage, year round!)
And then this week, I was once again reminded of her when I opened the lectionary to discover that the reading from Acts was the story of the stoning of Stephen.
My mother has a vivid memory of discussing this passage in class, with Miss Date sitting (as was her habit) on a desk in the front row, with her feet on the attached chair. They zeroed in, particularly, on the fact that as Stephen gazed into heaven and saw the vision of Christ at God’s right hand, he was not described as sitting there, as is standard, but rather as standing at God’s right hand: not passively enthroned, but active.
My mother doesn’t remember Miss Date having a particular answer for why Jesus was standing rather than sitting. But she does remember herself and the rest of the class of eleven-year-old girls being asked, seriously and genuinely, what they thought – not necessarily the most common pedagogical approach in 1962. Aunty Gwen was just one of a series of books and mentors that my mother was blessed enough to encounter at just the right times in her life, all of which invited her into faith as something that was not about rules to be followed, or singular correct answers to be regurgitated, but rather was an ongoing conversation, an ever-evolving, living tradition, where creativity was central, paradox was celebrated, and there was always more than one way to look at things.
Our Gospel today, the passage from the 14th chapter of John, is frequently read at funerals. I didn’t get to attend Aunty Gwen’s funeral, but I do find it profoundly comforting to know that when (God willing) I attain one of those many dwelling places, she will be there too, and we can have all the conversations that we only had in life on thin blue airmail paper.
Aunty Gwen was a saint. She was one of the living stones whom God builds up into a house, as described in today’s reading from the first letter of Peter. She lived a life of love and service. She welcomed the little children as Jesus commanded. And even when she was dying and nearly destitute, living in her sister’s spare room, there were jars on the windowsill in which she collected coins for charities that fed children and rescued seafarers. And without her lively and generous teaching and her lifelong, matter-of-fact faith, it’s very possible I wouldn’t exist at all, let alone be here preaching to you.
We can never know the impact we have on those whose lives we touch. All we can do is live as faithfully as we can into the gifts that God has given us: giving of our substance; respecting and honouring people of all ages and walks of life; faithfully keeping the vows we make; wondering together about God’s story and exploring it as related in Scripture; and looking forward, someday, to being built as a living stone, abiding in one of those many dwelling places, where Jesus stands at the right hand of God, ready and waiting for what will happen next.
Amen.
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