Resting in the Grace of the World

October 3, 2026 - Thanksgiving for the Life of Rosemary "Rosie" Thurber

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you to all of you for being here today to celebrate and remember Rosie. I’m going to start today’s homily with a poem, one by Wendell Berry, who also passed this summer, just a few weeks ago. I hope you’ll see why I chose it by the end of the homily, probably even sooner. It’s called “The Peace of Wild Things.”

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry has long been one of my favorite writers, I know many in our community here at Epiphany appreciate him too. And while I never had a chance to talk to Rosie about Wendell, nor about his beloved small-town characters Jayber or Hannah, I think she might have appreciated him, she probably would have appreciated all of them.

Rosie, to me, was a delight. She always had a smile for me, always a quick story, a joke to tell, a twinkle in her eye when she’d come up for communion, or when I brought it to her. I only got to know her over the last two years, but those were years and times with her that I will treasure. As we recognized her health was failing, I kicked myself for not having some audio recorded of her voice to hang on to, maybe a read-through of the Wednesday healing service to which she was so loyal. But that’s not how this life works, and thankfully so: this life is not infinite. We need to let go; we need others to let us go. Now, we need to grieve. I am left simply thankful for the time I did get to spend with her.

But not everyone always had the peaceful, joyful experience that I had with Rosie. Since June, every time I’ve asked for a story about Rosie Thurber around here, I was met with stories of abundant love and also equally abundant, often amused, frustration. Rosie was passionate, and Rosie was fierce, and Rosie could be stubborn. As Father Michael Ryan put it in a note to me this week, “Rosie Thurber was a force.”  I hope those who knew her well can hear that in the manner it’s intended today. When Rosie knew what she wanted, what was right, well, it had to happen, and she would fight for it. Her obituary reads: “You wanted her on your side.” Ha.

I’ve heard stories about her care for this building and our gardens, conflicts over flowers, over art. I know deeply about her fierce love of animals too, and I am personally indebted to her, as we all are, for her love for the Church of the Epiphany, especially after the split over LGBTQ rights 20 years ago. She, and a handful of others she called “the remnant,” they would not let this place close. She stubbornly fought for the things that mattered, not just for her, but for all of us. Thanks be to God.

Sara and the family left me two of her handwritten notes they found in her papers this summer. One of them was a funeral plan, selecting the songs we sang to open the service today. “I like hymns about creatures and the good stuff,” she wrote, “also, Now the Day is Over, and Lift High the Cross.” That note also lists out people and ideas that were important to her: theater, poetry, and gallery days; Mary Oliver; the East Coast; the Hallelujahs in our hymns.

She listed her dad’s dedication to her too, in his book, The Last Flower. Though it’s certainly common knowledge to many here, some will still be surprised to hear that Rosie was the only daughter of James Thurber, the famous author and cartoonist of the 20th century. Rosie rarely talked about that connection here, and never with me. Our pasts are often delicate, and Rosie wasn’t one to talk about herself anyway. But James wrote this dedication in The Last Flower to his daughter, Rosemary: “in the wistful hope that her world will be better than mine.” What a wistful hope that is.

The second handwritten note of Rosie’s that Sara left for me was written two days after Father Michael Ryan announced he’d be leaving Epiphany “after 10 and 1/2 successful years” for a church in Washington state, back in 2019. She wrote, “A beginning, yes. Not exactly new - I’ve been at this kind of beginning (a priest search) four other times in my 39 years at Epiphany… there’s a good chance I won’t come to the end of this one. Stay tuned.” Rosie had more time than many of us do to grapple with her own death; she was thinking about it years before I was called here as her last priest, but she did make it to the end of that search, and she greeted me and treated me as she did all of us over these last few years: warmly, with a wry smile, and with a quiet sense of wisdom and peace.

I won’t speak on Rosie’s behalf this afternoon at her funeral, only her life and the memories you have of her can speak for her now. But my read of Rosie over her last few years is of a child of God coming to terms with the inevitability and finality of her death, one who knew what was truly important, what was worth fighting for when and where she could. She also wistfully hoped for a world that was better than her dad’s. And, she deeply hoped my world and your world would be better than hers.

We spent our last hours together, over the course of several visits this spring, staring out the window at the birds and squirrels that fed off her feeder. She peppered our bulletin boards with pictures of animals, with poetry, with cartoons that touched on the important things. She pointed me towards rest, towards stillness, toward grace, toward prayer, toward beauty. She loved flowers too, we talked about them on every visit, along with animals of all kinds. Rosie regularly, consistently pointed me toward the wild things.

Because we know that the wild things, all those things created by God, those are the things of everlasting, eternal value. The prophet Isaiah talks of our God making a feast for all peoples, a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines. He talks of God wiping away the tears from all faces, swallowing up death forever. We know that Rosie has passed from this life, but we also believe in this church that she is now in the company of all the saints, the animal-loving St. Francis included… that we share the table with those saints and with her every time we come up for communion. We believe in a heavenly banquet, in a kingdom where there is fullness of joy, where death has been wiped away. And we believe Rosie is there today, surrounded by flowers and with all her animals, reunited with her own mother and father, her stepfather and her stepmother, with her son Mark. And we know that someday, we will all join with her again; death will be no more.

Friends, this afternoon, I encourage you to grieve, truly grieve our loss, together. We cannot visit with her and talk about dogs and squirrels and flowers anymore, we cannot see that eye twinkle or knowing smile, we cannot lean on our mom, our grandma, our great-grandma, our aunt, our sister, our stubborn and passionate force, our dear friend. Grieving is what we do today, and it’s best that we do it together, not alone. And also, I encourage you to believe, in hope, as I do, that we will see Rosie again, that the promises of our faith, of her faith, will ring true, that God has led back home this child of God, this wild thing herself, this passionate, fierce, stubborn, opinionated, peaceful, wise, and joyful woman whom we all loved in our own ways.

When despair grows in us, as Wendell Berry wrote, when despair and sadness and grief grows in us, may we ourselves come into the peace of the wild things, may we come into the presence of still water and light and beauty, and may we rest in the grace of this created world, and like Rosie, be free.

Amen.