May 9 2025, Jymie Anderson Memorial

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

Breaking Open

 

Homily by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn given May 9, 2025

for the funeral of Jymie Anderson

 

 

I have had the sacred honor of doing many funerals, walking with many people toward death and with many families seeking to honor their loved ones. And in all that time I can say I have never met anyone quite like Jymie. When I began working here at St. John’s in 2018, Jymie was one of the first to come visit me. She assured me she had worked for many years for the Rectors of St. John’s and St. Stephen’s and that she was a good listener, that she was here to support me. Eighteen months after I became the Rector of St. John’s the pandemic hit, and when we finally came back together, it was clear that dementia had been cruel to Jymie. But every week, through her dementia, she came to church and came up to receive Holy Communion, and every week, long after she had forgotten my name and the name of St. John’s, when I would give her the bread of Christ she would say to me, “you are doing such a good job. It was really good today.” That is who she was. A light of love and affirmation for people. A person who wanted to help others. I think that’s who she still is, in the mystery we call death that is not only an end, but also a beginning, also a gateway into the Light and the presence of the God we know as pure Love.

 

As I said, Jymie worked for St. John’s for four and a half years, and then she left to work for St. Stephen’s for two reasons. She needed full time employment and health insurance for her family; and she wanted to be able to join St. John’s as a member, which she couldn’t do as the church secretary in those days. She became a member here in 1986. At St. John’s and at St. Stephen’s it was part of her job to create funeral programs with families, to do everything except preside at them. In fact I wonder if she might not have had a vocation to the priesthood, except her free spirit probably did better just ministering to people without the title and the collar. Because she had created so many funeral programs, Jymie knew exactly what she wanted for her own funeral, and she left a large file full of suggestions about hymns, scriptures, readings, and the liturgy itself. Every part of the liturgy you hear today, including the Jesus Prayer during Holy Communion which is John Philip Newell of Iona’s interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer, including the Affirmation of Faith written by Susan Barnes, was selected by Jymie. The reading by Steven Charleston was written many years ago and selected by Jymie, and who knew how prescient it would be for our times.

 

In this same file Jymie created to express her wishes about her funeral is a beautiful memoir she wrote about her life called “Becoming Me: A Memoir,” which she wrote in December 2008. In fourteen pages she vividly describes her life, beginning with the sad day she was seven years old and in the hospital with a burst appendix, alone and missing her school Christmas party and her family’s Christmas dinner, and ending with her description of discovering her own inner life that she was unaware of for years. Jymie had been an agnostic at best for much of her life, but in her work as secretary of St. John’s, she said this:

 

When I went to work at St. John’s, I was an outsider. I was not a Christian and wasn’t looking to become one. I didn’t know anyone there and they did not know me. I was a stranger whom they welcomed and loved. They didn’t ask me what I believed or if I believed. They didn’t test my faith to see if I belonged with them. (I knew I did not). They loved me anyway….

 

And then one day she was driving. She said in her memoir she could never remember anything about the day itself – not about the weather or the time of day or anything. But she had this experience, that I quote:

 

Suddenly I am aware that God exists, that the God I had questioned all of my adult life, the God that my friends knew as real, the God I have come to know, that God is. All my doubts about the reality of God fall away. I do not sense a presence. I do not hear a voice. I just know. I no longer feel alone and empty and fear-filled. I know God and God is deep within me. Revelation brings relief; relief brings rest; this rest is real. Deep within me I know I am loved, that Love dwells within me and always has.

 

She describes this experience as breaking open. Several pages later she concludes her memoir describing the day she could finally bring her family to the late Christmas Eve service, finally taking Communion, and she said this:

 

Joy and peace were in me. Singing and silence, darkness lit by the Light, hope not for things to come but in me… I was beginning to break open, to feel love—to be me.

 

As the gospel reading Jymie selected for today says, no one has ever seen God, but Jesus, who was close to God’s heart, has made God known. I believe Jymie too was and is close to God’s heart, and that just as she experienced many layers of breaking open in her life, her death was a kind of breaking open as well, and her light has merged with God and is streaming around us pointing toward the reality of God as Love that dwells deep within each one of us, a Love we cannot lose because it is who we are and it is what unites us.

 

As we gather today to honor Jymie, I know we have profound grief, of course we do. But even in the midst of grief, there can be wonder. It seems to me that Jymie would want this for us. It seems to me she would be offering it as a gift, with her shining beautiful smile.

 

In some ways grief is a great purifier. It washes away everything that is unimportant. It takes hold of us and turns us inside out. Sometimes we don’t feel anything, we are numb. And sometimes it comes like a great tsunami, like a wave, that tumbles us around in it. Let this grief, which is intimately connected with love, clear out all that is unimportant in your life so that you can see what is beautiful and real, so that you can see with the eyes of your heart. Then, I pray that you will see and know the love of God as you understand God, who dwells within you and within all things, in your own way, just as Jymie had this experience in her way in the car all those years ago.

 

What never ends is the presence of the Spirit, of Christ, whose compassion is without limit and who will never leave you. For those of you who are grieving Jymie, or perhaps for those of you who are here supporting Jymie’s husband Ken and children Tyler and Jennifer and her many beloved friends, I invite you to let your hearts be tender and open. Know that Jymie would want for you to feel loved, to know that you are sacred. Before time, in time, and out of time, the love of God in Christ has caught us all up in an embrace that does not let go, that still holds Jymie, and that carries us through the storms until we come to the other shore, the dawn, the light, and we can laugh with a joy that is unshakable, reunited with Jymie and all those who have gone before. Until then, may the love of God hold and comfort you, heal and keep you. Amen.

10am Service