RON EDWARD BRAZIER
November 17, 2007 

I have learned over time, that when we gather together as community to honor at their dying someone we have shared a bit of life with, our best selves show up!  In celebrating a life that has ended, we begin again to rediscover both what was precious in the life of the one we honor and what is best and most precious in our own lives as well.  Each of us arrives in this world a unique creature, called into being by God, known and loved by God by name.   Yet experience teaches us that over time our authentic selves can become obscured. Each moment finds us showing sometimes more and sometimes less of what we were created and intended to be.  The question of what our ‘best selves' really look like, and how our lives were created to look in the eyes of our loving Creator, is a question that each of us will continue to ask when we go our separate ways today.

One of the greatest gifts that Ron shared with those who knew him - whether our relationship with him was as family or friend, as partner or co-worker, or as a member of St. Thomas' Parish - was that he gave us long glimpses of himself as his best self.  No matter where we shared life with Ron, each of us were blessed to have known something of the authentic, unique person that God loved into being.

Ron's genteel spirit led his way though life.   You yourselves have described Ron to me in words that each are glimpses of Ron's ‘best self' -- unassuming, gentle and kind, a quiet disposition. Ron led life with a dignified cadence and emotional posture.  To be quite candid about it, Ron's temperament had a spiritually generous soul-quality to it.  Today we celebrate the fact that this generous disposition in life was one of the ways in which God blessed the world through the gift of Ron's authentic self.

Ron moved to Washington, DC, after having grown up in Connecticut.  St. Thomas' has been blessed by Ron's faithful membership for several decades.  The Episcopal Church was one of the ways Ron framed his life...as a member of the altar guild, crucifer, chalicist, and the first African American to serve on St. Thomas' vestry during the tenure of former rector, Henry Breul.  One of Ron's longings, which tell us much about his soul, was a calling to the monastic life.  Ron did fulfill a vocation in a similar servant ministry as an elementary school teacher and faithful employee of The Tiny Jewel Box here in Washington.  His family remembers Ron as ‘his mother's favorite'.  This is not always easy to admit as the brother or sister of ‘the favorite child', so I can appreciate these sorts of stories when they are revealed.  One of the stories his brother Gene told me about growing up with Ron revealed so much. In a home where each of ‘the sons' worked and gave back a part of their earnings to their mother, two of the sons gave back a part of their pay-check, "skimmed a bit off the top" is how the story was told.  Ron gave his mother his entire check, every time. 

This one story is an icon of Ron's life - a picture that opens up for us a chance to see Ron's ‘real & authentic self'.   The whole person, the entire paycheck of blessings that God had given to him, Ron gave back to the world.  Remembering this about Ron makes each of us ask what our own lives would look like if we discovered our authentic identities as persons created in the image of God and then reflected this image out into the world, undistorted, as gift and blessing to the world?  Speaking just for myself, I know that each of us here was not blessed with the genteel disposition that we saw in Ron. We each, however, have been blessed with one particular spark of the divine that God needs this world to have, if we are to learn fully and faithfully how to love one another.

Ron's living, not just his dying, were a testimony to the fact that there are not "six degrees of separation" between the community of St. Thomas' and The Tiny Jewel Box, or between us and Martin and JeanNate' and Gene.  In knowing something of the best of Ron all of us are bound together in a mysterious way and are now part of one another's community.  And in this way the blessing of Ron's life does not end with his dying, but continues to call us all to be ourselves with the same authenticity that we knew in Ron.  This time to honor Ron can be an opportunity to reclaim our vocations of loving the world, and in that way what we do here today gives life to the legacy of Ron's rich and genteel life, his legacy of bearing a spiritual generosity with each of us.

In closing I invite you to recall your last encounter with Ron, and claim that as one of your blessings.  Ron's vulnerability with us had the capacity to draw out the authenticity of our best selves.  In sharing with each of us the gentility of an undefended heart extended in extravagant generosity, Ron also saw in us our ‘best selves' whom he could trust to receive the precious gift of his kindness towards us.  In gathering here to celebrate the life of Ron, may each of us claim Ron's gifts as our own, and discover our unique way to contribute to the healing of relationships, one gesture of kindness at a time.  In doing this, we do not mark Ron's life ending - we celebrate the ways his life lives on as a gift to each of us, in part our legacy to bear forward, a resurrected life.