Eulogy For Artlisa Rouse

Artlisa Rouse Eulogy

Wow, Great-Grandma huh? What an adventure, what a life! We are here to celebrate that life. Both the life she lived in the body, and the life she lives forever unto the Lord. But you know there’s another life, that she lives, here, now….in all of you, in me, in every life that she touched. When we remember someone, we are not just looking back to who they were, we are finding out who we are. The self, the soul, is not like a marble that bounces off of other marbles: it’s more like a narrative, a story, and it’s a story within a story.


When Abraham went out to Canaan he was not looking to be remembered by nations, he was looking to BECOME a nation. He wanted his story to live on in as many people as possible, and that’s exactly what happened. Nobody is more alive today than Abraham is. How did he accomplish that? He didn’t stay home, where it was safe. He went off on the road, into radical insecurity and uncertainty, not knowing where it would lead, but just trusting that something important was going on out there. I think great-grandma Rouse was like that.


How many people did she raise? How many people did she help raise? I had as good a relationship with her as most people do with their regular grandparents. And how did that happen? It happened because she didn’t stay home, because she went out on the road, even when we didn’t want her to any more (joke). She pushed life as far as it would go. And what was the result? There were wonders…a life that spanned two states, as I said before the raising up of entire people, a new century come to pass…and there were horrors: the death of some of her children. But she didn’t let those horrors deter her from the road, she had to be a part of whatever was going on, because she felt like it was something important.


I remember spending a weekend with her when I was a little kid. And she played with me, she played like a little kid herself when she was 80 years old, because she could still see life in wonder and amazement.


And so my message to you today is to make that story, your story: to go out on the road and live the adventure of life, as she did. To push life as far as it can go.


I also want to give you a warning: we do great-grandma Rouse no good by idealizing her. CS Lewis, after his wife died, said he could feel her slipping away, not because he was forgetting her, but because the parts he was remembering were only the good parts. So what he wound up with was the memory of an image of her, rather than his wife as she really was…but his wife was not an image, she was a person.


When someone passes, especially someone so wonderful as great-grandma, someone who did so much for so many, it is so easy to idealize them, to remember only the parts of the story we like. But great-grandma was a human being, flaws and all. It is important that we remember the whole story of who she was. This point was driven home to me when I visited her a couple of days before her 100th birthday. Her favorite topic of discussion was her neighbor Manuel and all these people who came by and helped her. And she said it made her realize she had been wrong about some things in her life, about certain types of people. Now reflect on that for a moment. At 100 years old, great-grandma was still growing as a person. If there is anything to learn from her story, it’s that. But you can’t do that if you don’t face her for what she was: an imperfect person, wonderful, helping so many, but a sinner like all God’s children.


And I think, man, if she helped us so much when she was imperfect, how much more now, now that she no longer sees through a glass darkly, now that she is made complete, now that the imperfect has been made perfect. How much more now is she helping all of us all the time and people all over the world and maybe all over the universe is ways we can’t even imagine? But don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can understand and have a relationship with what she is now by holding onto the ideal I talked about earlier… Uh-uh, what she is now is beyond our imagining. And you can only be a part of it if you learn to love the person she is for you, the person she was when you knew her directly. Because God had to love the imperfect before it could be made perfect, and because her story is one you can learn so much from. You can learn to go out on the road, to push life as far as it can go, knowing that there will be wonders, and horrors, but not letting those horrors deter you from the road, seeing them not as defeats but as challenges to be overcome. And realizing that you will make mistakes, but fighting against those mistakes to your dying breath, while trusting in the love of God. If you can make do that, if you can make that a part of you, then like great-grandma, your story will not end where someone else’s begins. It’ll never end. Amen.