Hilton Head Island, SC – February 28, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 23; Proverbs 31:10-14,20,26-31; Romans 8:28-39
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. – Romans 8:38-39 (RSV)
In Praise of Trudy Yates
In 1981 David and Trudy Yates moved to Hilton Head Island in retirement from Circleville, Ohio. David had owned a car dealership there for years. He and Trudy became very active in our community and also at First Presbyterian Church, where I was the pastor. David became heavily involved in the Sea Pines Property Owners Association. Trudy had been a journalism reporter prior to coming here, and she became a writer for The Island Packet and was the editor of two local magazines.
Because the Yates were so faithful in their church membership, both in worship attendance and other activities, I came to know them quite well. I was sorry when they moved to England in 1987 to be closer to their daughter and her family. However, it was because of that move that I became especially close to them, and particularly to Trudy. Every time I went to Britain after they moved there, both in my previous life and in my current life, my wife and I went to visit Trudy and David. David later became confronted by kidney problems and was on dialysis for a couple of years before he died a few years ago.
Trudy Yates was a loving, loyal, and supportive wife to David Yates for as long as they were married, which was close to sixty years. She was like “the good wife” described in the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs. She took wonderful care of David when he could no longer take complete care of himself. In the last days of his illness, she was a true godsend to her husband. Because of her, he died as peacefully as possible.
The Yates bought a condominium apartment on the third floor of a very large English country house called Shipton Court in Shipton-under-Wychwood in the Cotswolds, thirty or forty miles from Oxford. This grand home was built perhaps three or four centuries ago by someone in the very-well-landed gentry. Twenty or thirty residents live in the main house and in the various smaller dwellings scattered around the manor house. The Yates and everyone else there typified the kind of folks who gravitate to English villages if they haven’t always lived there: fascinating, interested, interesting, vital, dynamic, and perhaps also a bit eccentric, people. They’re like the folks who are neighbors of Doc Martin or who might be found either upstairs or downstairs at Downton Abbey.
Trudy and David became pillars of St. Mary’s Church, the Anglican congregation in Shipton-under-Wychwood. Trudy sang in the choir, and both she and David were lay readers in Sunday worship. The Yates’ daughter Ann and her family live in Surrey, south of London, and it was because of Ann that the Yates left America for the Mother Country. Though they retained a strong commitment to their native land, they also became confirmed Britons, ultimately becoming naturalized British subjects while also keeping dual citizenship in the USA.
Twenty-five years ago, when we first visited Trudy and David in the Cotswolds, I noticed that they subscribed to The Times of London. When I lived in Scotland over fifty years ago, occasionally I read The Times. Seeing it again, I was intrigued by the wide variety of stories it carried from all over the world, and especially from America. I told Trudy the journalist that I thought The Times was a world-class newspaper. I might add that it continued to be so even after it was bought by Rupert Murdoch, one of the most conservative of media men anywhere in the world, of whose views on almost everything neither Trudy nor I approved. But good marks to Rupert for not messing with the outstanding format of the London Times.
Because Trudy knew I was interested in Times news articles about all kinds of things, but particularly about American politics, perhaps twenty years ago she started sending me a fortnightly (which is to say ever two weeks) collection of what I came to call “Dispatches from the Mother Country.” As I wrote for the cover of today’s bulletin, “Through the years Trudy Yates sent me thousands of clippings from The Times of London. You have heard hundreds of quotes from those clippings over the past twelve years. We have all benefitted from her never-ceasing thoughtfulness.” In gratitude to her, each year I sent a subscription to The New Yorker.
Her clippings often have her own editorial comments inscribed on them. For instance, in her last mailing there was a story entitled “Russia warns of world war if Gulf tates take on Isis,” she wrote, “And we may just have one if HE” (Vladimir Putin) “doesn’t get out of Syria and Ukraine!” On an article about the Vatican covering up nude statues prior to a visit from President Rouhani of Iran (she became skeptical of Islamic intentions in the UK and elsewhere), she said, “Give me strength!” A story featured the second-class treatment of women in Saudi Arabia, and she observed, “If we all stopped kow-towing to this ridiculous country, I think I could die happy!!!” Then there was the short article about an amateur scientist from Wisconsin who has allowed himself to be bitten by 160 poisonous snakes, taking various costly medications to test their validity. So far he is still alive, although his wife divorced him, saying that she and their two children no longer wanted to live in a house with hordes of venomous vipers. Beneath the headline she had written, “You have to watch these Wisc. boys. They overdo it sometimes.” In recent months her caustic comments regarding some of the candidates for the presidential nomination were always “spot on,” as well as pointedly humorous.
Trudy became such a valued friend that I have telephoned her every two or three weeks for at least the past fifteen years. Together we would solve all the world problems which came to light in The Times and The New Yorker. Because we agreed on most political matters on both sides of the Atlantic, it was easy for us to find solutions for nearly everything. Unfortunately, nobody ever asked us how we could transform the global situation greatly for the better in two weeks of less. Had our opinions been solicited, however, it would quickly become evident we certainly had them in readiness on every issue large or small in the UK and the USA.
Trudy was a woman who valued and cultivated friendships. She and David made many friends on the island during the six years they lived here, and they became close to many of the people in Shipton, Shipton Court, and St. Mary’s Church. Trudy became a lifeline to several elderly ladies she knew who depended on her for this and that, until such time as she herself needed to depend on others for this and that.
As frequently happens, taking care of an ill spouse took its toll on Trudy. After David died, she began to experience health issues she perhaps had simply set aside during his decline. Her digestive tract turned into a painful and unpredictable system at best. If she ate anything after lunchtime, she paid a price for it in increasing discomfort in the evening and at night, so she got to the point where, in order to promote calm innards, she ate very little. She was a tall woman, maybe five-eight or five-nine, but she eventually dropped down to 98 pounds.
In recent years there were many stories in The Times and The New Yorker about physician-assisted death in the US, Europe, and the UK. A while back Parliament narrowly defeated a bill to allow it in the UK, which grieved Trudy. She had come to the place where she did not think she would be able to endure her rapidly declining health much longer.
Because she received e-mail copies of my sermons for many years, she knew my thoughts on this matter, and therefore she felt she could share her thinking with me without fear of being attacked for any unorthodox views. (And anyway, who am I to attack anyone for unorthodoxy?) Trudy had no fear of death; quite the contrary, she said many times she would welcome it. Never for a fleeting moment did she hold God responsible for her troubles; she accepted her litany of deficiencies as being natural inevitabilities at her age and stage in life.
Trudy Yates carefully stored up a supply of potent pain pills over the course of a year or so. We had talked about whether this method would be sufficiently lethal. At the end of several phone conversations, I always wondered if that would be the last time I talked to her. Then one time early on in a call about three months ago, she told me she had taken the pills --- and they didn’t work. Maybe they were too old. There were no ill-effects from them; there was just … nothing. Needless to say, she was extremely disappointed her attempt at a final exit had failed.
Trudy had talked to her doctor about her situation. Knowing her as well as he did, he was sympathetic to her plight, but of course there was nothing he could do legally or ethically to help her to end her life. Therefore since late December my conversations with her took on a darker tone. I will not go into any detail of what we talked about, but you perhaps can imagine.
On many weekends Trudy’s daughter Ann and her husband Stephen would drive the three hours from Surrey to the Cotswolds to see Trudy. On Saturday, February 20, they were there, and they went back home that evening. Trudy was not well, because she had not been well for several years, but she was as well as could be expected. The next day, last Sunday, Ann called Trudy, and for the first time she was incoherent. Ann got in the car and drove immediately to Shipton Court. When she got there, Trudy was barely conscious. Ann held her mother in her arms until she died last Monday morning.
What caused her to die? I believe that death, whose visit she had so strongly desired for so long, finally made its lethal, natural, terminal call on her. Her passage from this life to the next went fairly quickly and painlessly. Thomas Hardy was a very somber, sober, serious English novelist. In the last line of his classic story Tess of the D’Ubervilles, after Tess had died at the conclusion of her sorrow-filled, tragic life, Hardy wrote, “’Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.”
I presume that both Hardy and Aeschylus would identify “the President of the Immortals” as either God or Fate or Death. It was neither God nor Fate that caused Trudy Yates such agony in her last years. Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a cantata called Komm, Suss Tod (Come, Sweet Death.) Bach was more fortunate than Trudy; death came more sweetly and gently to him than to her. Never did Trudy attribute her agonies to God, but she most definitely had an ongoing dispute with death for being so absurdly slow in making its appointed round to her third-storey door in Shipton Court.
Last Sunday, when Ann Bourne arrived at Trudy’s home, she saw clippings from the Saturday and Sunday Times on the dining room table. Even as Trudy was getting ready to leave this life, she was doing what she had done for years: preparing dispatches to send to the Colonies. That is a high tribute to all of us, dear hearts: ultimately she did it for me and for us.
There are Christians who happily affirm whatever they are told by persons in ecclesiastical authority. Trudy Yates was not one of them. There are Christians who choose to pass through their earthly pilgrimage without delving deeply into whatever it might be all about. That wasn’t Trudy. She was a pensive Christian, a pondering Christian, a questioning Christian.
She took nothing at face value. In the depths of her being, she was an investigative reporter. She had many opinions, and they were strong, irrepressible, and unhesitatingly voiced. We loved to bounce our thoughts and prejudices off one another - - - about Prime Minister David Cameron and the British Conservative Party, about the new daft leader of the Labor Party, about President Obama, about the nearly incomprehensible and finally inexplicable 2016 American presidential primaries, about the Scottish Nationalist Party. We also talked about God with regularity, and what we thought He was up to in our lives.
We didn’t agree on everything, but we agreed on most things, and one of the things we agreed on was that although there would be no Church of Jesus Christ without Saul of Tarsus, still, for us Paul left much to be desired in so important a personage. For example, we had no doubt that Paul’s attitude toward women, while it might have been advanced for his time (as many scholars have averred but from whom we demurred), was and still is quite defective. We also felt he was too Jesus-centered and was insufficiently God-centered. Nevertheless, we both respectfully if also reluctantly admitted that it was providentially necessary that the Tarsus tentmaker should be included in the canon of holy writ.
Paul’s letter to the Romans is the most densely packed, closely argued theological treatise among all his writings. After having gone on for eight chapters to explain what he believed and why he believed it, he said that in everything God was working for the good of everyone who loves Him. (Trudy and I would insist God works for the good of everyone, whether or not they love Him.) In some of the most high-soaring, soul-stirring words ever written, Paul said, “For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).
Trudy Yates was not a conventional Christian, but she was among the most committed of Christians whom I have ever known. She thought through every facet of her faith. Surely it is not necessary or even possible that every Christian should be steeped in deep thought for a lifetime, but she was one for whom deep thought about everything was her life’s passion. She was a woman who lived in two worlds --- for three-quarters of her life in the New World, and then for the last quarter in the Old World. Because she was Trudy, she fit in wherever she was, making many friends who respected, admired, and loved her for the rich depth of her personality, even if they might not always agree with her.
The Church of Jesus Christ, for all of its wonderful, woeful, and willful history, represents the communion of saints. It is not the sole representative of that entity, but it is perhaps the primary representative. When I think of Trudy Yates, I associate her with the First Presbyterian Church of Hilton Head Island, but especially with St. Mary’s Anglican Church of Shipton-under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire, England. Her ashes will be buried there besides those of her husband in the St. Mary’s churchyard on March 18. At long last, from the difficult labors of her final years, she now rests. Requiescat in pace, St. Trudy.