Rest in Peace

The funeral was pure Windsor Park: the cellist was slightly deaf, the crowd was fairly small, the body was absent and the Spirit was present.

Mr. Yeagle had died. When I joined Windsor Park Baptist Church about a year ago I just assumed that the dignified, elderly man on the back row each Sunday was part of the old guard - took him for one of those staunch old members carved from the same oak as the pews they occupy and with memories that date back to the congregation’s genesis. But no, Mr. Yeagle was a recent recruit, reclaimed by a dying wife’s wish and a pastor’s persistence.

Mrs. Yeagle’s deathbed request was that her husband get back into church, a connection he’d lost in the long years of caring for his beloved invalid. So he creaked into the sanctuary one Sunday morning not knowing a soul in the place, a gaunt spectre who seemed so frail that the rustling of hymnal pages for the opening anthem would whip him into particles of mortality. Our pastor Grover Pinson, himself new to the place, asked about the faithful fellow way in the back and discovered that nobody knew anything about him. Friday afternoon visits ensued. Bertha and Juanita, Windsor’s own version of Lucy and Ethel with a gene splice from Thelma and Louise, accompanied Grover on these weekly quests.

Mr. Yeagle opened up, started staying for the Sunday fellowship lunches. We discovered that he mowed five yards on a regular basis. We found he owned a fund of spiritual wisdom and an almost jaunty witness for Christ. “Do you know him?” he’d ask random strangers, his thumb stabbing skyward in a quick jerk. Beats handing someone a Four Spiritual Laws tract if you ask me.

He took a fall, did time in rehab, recovered. His kidneys failed, hospitalized again, fought back. The last time around my pastor’s eye, practiced in repeated trips with elderly saints, could discern the signs of one who has begun his final slide - not a downward slip over the edge of a precipice, but the graceful dip of a wily base-runner who accelerates the pace as he curvets toward home plate. On a Monday night he beat the tag and slid safe into the arms of his Savior. One of the last things anyone heard him say was, “Jesus, remember me,” and then, with a smile, “Jesus, I know you. You won’t forget me!” Let’s see all of Richard Dawkins’ logic knock that one down.

So we gathered for the funeral. The family had cremated the body so no coffin graced the altar. The cellist, whose lawn Mr. Yeagle had mowed since she was a girl, spun out two Bach sonatas like an arthritic angel restored to youth. Our pastor’s wife printed a beautiful program which sported a photo of Mr. Yeagle hoisting his little dog Brownie on his shoulder and smiling like a man holding a winning lottery ticket. One of our theology students remembered Mr. Yeagle advising him, “If the devil has you under his thumb, if you wiggle around by praising God you can get away.” The MARTY Team (the name combines the titles of the two sisters of Bethany in a reminder that Christ has flanked the imaginary Maginot Line between contemplation and service) threw a reception that achieved elegant comfort, a rare combination.

And a small church on an obscure corner of a minor city remembered an old man whose name was less than a cipher to the cable news shows and the lurid tabloids. Not a celebrity, Mr. Yeagle was celebrated by those who made sure the last year or so of his life mattered because they insisted that he touch them. In a day when reality television teaches that it is better to have a lot of people watch you do nothing than to do something unseen, we can say of Mr. Yeagle what George Eliot says of her heroine Dorothea Casaubon, “Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

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