From her hospital bed, where Linda had just shared the diagnosis that would eight weeks later end her life, and never being one to talk long about herself, Linda abruptly changed the subject. She began talking pickles. Pickles? I asked. Pickles. Evidently, she had said something the weekend before that she was concerned might have hurt her grandson, Rylan, and she was determined to make it right. Aside: it is impossible to overstate Linda’s love for Rylan and her whole family. Thus the need to make it right. “But it can be awkward,” she said, “to just dive into a difficult thing like that, without context or some kind of safe container, but it’s important that you do find some way to circle back,” she explained. She went on, “Having an occasion can make it easier!” And the occasion, she explained with the biggest of smiles, was to be an invitation to share some fabulous, recently discovered pickles with her grandson. “Because who says no to pickles?” she asked, as if no objection were imaginable. After a pause to consider her plan, she nodded her head, deeply satisfied that she had found a way to make a bruised thing right. To risk love that might heal; Linda believed, after all, that every love takes patient tending, that love is proven in the mending. So many times in this life we let our loves settle for unwanted distance because the risk required to make love true asks more than we fear we have. Sometimes love requires both our courage and careful attention. Daunting for must of us. But good news for Linda. Careful attention was what she did best.
I’m sure you could choose other words, maybe better words, to describe Linda Balzersen, but the two I keep returning to are meticulously wholehearted. Wholehearted. Love communicated oftentimes without a word - through sparkling, frequently mischievous, eyes. Radiant.
And meticulous. Detailed. Thoughtful. Painstaking. Aware that the prayer shawl laid on the shoulders of the dying, the grieving, of the priest could only become a comfort to a soul though the invisible labor of ten thousand stitches counted. Endless knits and pearls completed. Row on row made accountable to the integrity of the whole, so that, together, they might be privileged to convey the love of prayers that human hands could touch.
Meticulously wholehearted. Gentle. Patient, at peace with tedium, even. Which surely served Linda well through decades of work in church offices.
Linda’s life is a remarkable reminder that patience in prayer, contemplative prayer, holy silence, can birth patience with the everyday world, too. And with people. In other words, meticulous wholeheartedness makes so much more than kneelers. Linda loved the Episcopal renewal movement, Cursillo, with its motto “make a friend, be a friend, bring a friend to Christ.” And in those words you can almost see Linda imagining that as handiwork, too, as mending, as making whole the fabric of things the way they were meant to be. Knit together in and by God’s ocean deep love for Linda and each one of us. Every last one of God’s own.
So, dear Linda, today, consider. When, in John’s gospel, Jesus promises to prepare a place for you, you know by now he wasn’t just washing sheets. The Love that knit you in your mother’s womb, who delights in every detail of your being who, in every trial and joy of earth, was with you, prepared for you a place. A thousand thousand pearls and knits stitched in love with the whole of you in mind.
Dear friend, in the letter of Revelation, too, you know how the promise goes: how, the saints from every corner gathered ‘round the throne, God wipes away the tears from their eyes. Where the promise is not like the old shampoo tagline - no more tears - is not that life’s griefs or difficult parts are erased from eternal memory, lest a single stitch of love be dropped, but the promise is exactly that love’s every grief is seen and touched, healed. Every last tear tended. Patiently. Meticulously. Wholeheartedly.
That’s when you and I discover that all this time Linda was actually putting those theatre degrees to work! Performing, not inauthentically, but from the truest parts of her, performing the love she knew in Jesus, attempting to point us all, love us all, to the One whose love makes us one. In whom nothing is ever wasted and everything belongs.
Angelic is a word you sometimes hear used to describe Linda. It feels both silly and true at the same time, to say it. Linda wasn’t perfect. But of course that’s not what angelic means. Angelic means a messenger. I remember walking through the hospital door, that last time we spoke. After unpacking the diagnosis with me, Linda looked up at my face. “Jonathan,” she said, “Don’t be afraid.” And suddenly she is the angel announcing resurrection from the vertigo of the grave, through the tears of our grief. Later that day, she shared with me her own surprise that she was not afraid. She didn’t know exactly how to account for this. She could see, looking back, how in every moment, every encounter, with her family, so many of you, by every love and opportunity, God had stitched together a fabric of faith such that she was not afraid. In turns out, Linda Balzersen doesn’t have a monopoly on meticulous attention and seemingly endless compassion. At best she was an understudy. No, the attention and compassion that finally matter most belong to God, to her Lord, whose steadfast love never ceases, whose mercies never come in an end. Not in life, not in death. Whose perfect love casts away every fear.
So today, with Linda and the great communion of saints to which with her help we know we’ve been knit, we sing the love of our Lord Christ Jesus, crucified and risen, our Savior and brother, who loses not one of his own.
Amen.
