Catheryn was one of the most famous residents of The Hermitage, a
retirement community in Richmond, VA for members of the United Methodist Church. In the summer of 1994, when Randy met her
while doing an internship, she was a very spry 104 years old. Catheryn spent her days going downstairs to
the Hermitage’s craft room and making little clay animals. She called this daily trek “going to work”. Her magnum opus was an entire orchestra of
well over 50 finely dressed little critters holding musical instruments.
Every year the Hermitage had a Bazaar and by means of family members
visiting residents and denominational publications the word of Catheryn’s
artistic ability spread. For some odd
reason people could not resist purchasing Catheryn’s little clay figurines. You
just wouldn’t believe it. Randy
remembers being there one day chatting in the craft room and a woman was
visiting Richmond from North Carolina came in and said she just had come to the
Hermitage to buy a set of Catheryn’s pieces.
She had driven about 3 hours. For
some reason Catheryn’s work resonating with people.
Amazingly, Catheryn had never done anything with clay until she was
in her 90’s and not until she had lived a few months at The Hermitage. She was by no means a master of the medium. Her artistic ability was…well…if you saw one
of her pieces you would think it was made by a talented grade schooler. But, there was just something about it. Her work had a voice of its own. It struck a cord with people, a cord of
hope. People would not have been buying
Catheryn’s work if it didn’t mean something to them personally.
Catheryn’s work and her story spoke to people, particularly those
going through life’s changes…especially the changes that aging brings on. Her figurines reminded people that we must be
willing to adapt to life’s changes and find something new to do when we can no
longer do the things we used to do. We
must let go, move one, and continue to be creative. When we experience a loss we must look for
something else, create something new in our lives.
Catheryn had all the problems that go along with old age - the aches
and pains, failing eyesight, failing memory.
She couldn’t think and talk as fast as she used to. She was widowed. She’d outlived her friends and family. In her 90’s she had to sort through a life’s
worth of stuff and leave her home to go to the Hermitage. She’d literally lost everything except for a
few pictures and a couple pieces of furniture, small reminders of the life she
once had. But still, in the wake of all
that loss, Catheryn kept moving on and moving forward. At The Hermitage she created something new
for herself. Found a new purpose, found
something new to do, something that was distinctively Catheryn. Indeed, she grieved her losses, but she did
not give into them. She didn’t give into
loneliness. She didn’t grow bitter. She didn’t complain. She didn’t go looking for pity. Instead, she got out of bed and went to the
craft room to work each day, doing something she had never tried until she was
in her late 90’s.
Catheryn’s figurines were for her kind of like what Isaac was for
Sarah and Abraham. If you would have
told Catheryn when she was in her 80’s that when she was 104 people would be
coming from all over to buy little clay animals that she had made, she would
have laughed and said, “I’ll probably and hopefully be dead by then.” She never expected the joy she would find nor
the joy others would find simply because she took the risk of letting go and doing
something new.
In Hebrew the name Isaac means “Laughter”. As you recall from our reading today Sarah
laughed at the impossibility of her ever bearing a child with Abraham due to
her old age, a child of the promise. God
had promised Abraham that his descendants would be many and that they would be
a great nation. But Sarah, her womb
wasn’t cooperating. As she grew older
she tried to make the promise come true by letting her servant Hagar be
Abraham’s concubine. Hagar conceived and
gave birth to Ishmael, but Ishmael was not the child of the promise. The child of the promise was to be born of
Sarah. Then, when these three strangers
came Sarah was no longer able to bear children.
She was probably 90 years old. After
a lifetime of an unfulfilled promise, she laughed at what the strangers said.
This laughter was a bitter kind of laughter. It’s a laughter that comes from pain and is
meant to hide the pain in a sarcastic kind of way. Sarah had longed to bear children. Childless women in that culture were
stigmatized. Sarah suffered that. Being childless was seen as a curse. For years she believed God’s promise to
Abraham that she would bear him a son, but years, lots of years, came and went
and it just never happened. The God of
Abraham seemed to have let her down. He
hadn’t lived up to Sarah’s hopes and expectations. He hadn’t kept his word. He left her barren. Sarah’s laughter masked a lot of pain and
bitterness. Yet, God turned the laughter
of bitterness into the laughter of joy when Isaac was born and so they named him
“Laughter.” Moreover, those three
visitors were actually God in disguise.
God came personally to deliver this seemingly impossible message to
Sarah. God didn’t forget or abandon
Sarah.
That’s the way God works. We
often find it impossible to believe that God seeks out each one of us as a
friend as he did Abraham, that God cares for and will always be with us, that
God has a purpose for our lives that will fill us with joyful laughter. So often, the contrariness of “Reality” makes
these things hard to believe. But when
we see these promises being fulfilled it fills us with the laughter of joy. God does indeed turn our mourning into
joy. As the Psalmist said, “Those who sow
in tears will reap with songs of joy.”
Between the time of sewing and the time of reaping, there is the time of
waiting in ambiguity, the time of wondering what God is up to, the time of
wondering “Why”, the time to lose faith or to find it. But then the harvest of hope and joy comes.
The lesson this morning is simply that we should spend a little time
looking for Isaac, that God-given source of laugh-worthy joy that God has
placed and will place in our lives even in the midst of grief and shattered
hopes. Sometimes it is a good thing to
do to take a moment and look back on the past year or so of your life and see
how God’s promise to always be with you, to care for you, and to be on your
side has come true. Now I know that some
of us have not had the best of years this year.
But its times like those that God can be the most real to us, times like
these that we truly do see God working things to the good even in the worst of circumstances. I can think of no greater comfort than simply
finding that God has really been there for me.
Take some time to look for Isaac, look for what God has done in your
life in the past year or so or longer and note the things that God has done to
give you joy. Think especially of how in
those most difficult of times that God himself has come to you and restored
your hope and given you joy. Amen.
