My Comments at the Memorial

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BOXING DAY: FOR GABRIEL RICE
By Marcus Trammell

LETTER
A Personal Message

Gabe,
I got the news a few days late. The news of your death on December 21st didn’t reach me until Christmas Eve. It is the most terrible gift I have ever been given. We were the closest of friends and your death leaves a void that can never be filled. This is a new adventure for you and for me. A challenge to continue to dream the dreams we dreamed together. This is your final and greatest adventure, a journey of self-entrustment into the mysterious and gracious reality of God. This adventure is a blessing for you, but the feelings of loss and separation are a bitter companion for those of us you leave behind.

Even in your death you displayed the enigmatic qualities of your life. Keeping track of you has always been a challenge. It was just this past year that you were put in jail for illegal hitchhiking. I didn’t hear from you for a couple days and when you finally called me back you told me the whole story on how you spent the weekend in jail while your parents searched to find out where you were. Your movements were unexpected and so throughout your life there were times when you would just disappear. That was the nature of our friendship. It was marked by periods of separation and I always enjoyed the stories those periods of separation returned.

Like usual, I waited for this last story—it arrived Christmas Eve. This time I didn’t laugh, I cried. I knew it was the final chapter of a book that I hoped would never end.

I spent Christmas with my family up on the side of a mountain that you would have loved and next to a glut of suburban sprawl that would have humored you. My dad delivered the news of your death and despite his thirty plus years preaching funerals and facing death, he was visibly shaken. My family loved you and your memory hung heavy in the air this Christmas. It wasn’t until December 26th, Boxing Day, that I could find the clarity to write these words of tribute to you—my best friend.

Boxing Day is an elusive holiday one that usually passes without much notice. But as I began to try and piece together my words for your memorial, I wanted to mark the day and from this heightened sensitivity, I stumbled upon the tradition of Boxing Day. You liked random facts and we talked for hours about little things we learned along the way. So I wanted to tell you about something I learned today.

Boxing Day is a day for the giving of offerings. In England's feudal past, it was the day the lord of the estate would give a mandatory offering of goods to the serfs whose lives were the substance of his equity. It was also the day that churches would open the offering boxes and give their contents to the poor and dispossessed. In our time, it continues as a day of gift giving to honor those who serve the public. You were a giving person, a servant, and I was often a recipient of your generosity and service. This year it has become my occasion to serve you in giving to posterity the story that only our unique experience together will allow.

Strangely, I feel like I know what to say. We talked so honestly that I can still hear the details of your voice in my head. Thank you for calling me back Sunday night. That conversation will now repeat itself for the rest of my life—thanks for making it a good one. This eulogy is self-revealing it requires me to offer those personal-private understandings of you, as a human being and as a friend. I hope that my words will rest with you in what is to come. I love you, may God be with you.

EULOGY
A Writing of Tribute

Gabriel was a giving person whose charity was not self-important, but the result of a humility given to him by his parents and by his spiritual depth—to know what needed to be known. He had the gift of being able to see more than a person wanted to show. His spiritual perception was acute and he seemed to have the ability to see what lies beneath. I found it hard to hide my feelings from Gabe, but our friendship didn't require much restraint. We were honest with each other and his confidence and counsel will be my greatest loss.

We meet at Christian Life College in the fall of 1997 and from the first moments of our meeting, we both knew we had found a life long friend. That year we traveled all over the West Coast of California, sleeping on the beach or in my small car. We both had a passion to ramble and we did, both in words and movement.

The next summer at eighteen we backpacked across Europe. We visited seventeen countries in six weeks. It was one of our many contests of endurance, which he always won. Gabe was one of those rare persons whose stamina could match his courage and with his strength of both mind and body he lived a life worthy of being immortalized in literature. Those hard days on the road: missing the train, sleeping in the station, trudging through the rain, gave me an intimate window into the character of his being and I remain impressed. He had a heart of gold and a genius of mind that hide itself behind a simple and unassuming manner.

His concern for others was apparent in his words and behavior. My friendship with Gabe gave me a beautiful example of what it meant to love. He loved his family—his parents, his sister Hanna and brother Isaac—and he loved life and this love was rooted in a faith that rested in a present yet transcendent God.

Gabe was an accomplished pilot, a student of science and culture, he had a deep faith and a solid grasp of the scriptures, but his most winning quality was a smile that was as infectious as it was broad. His love of life was displayed across his face for all to encounter. He acknowledged the humanity of all he met with a smile and a deep gaze through his perceptive blue eyes. He carried his goodness lightly and openly, offering it to everyone.

To me, he was as close as a friend could be. He was a brother, who by living his own story taught me how to better live mine. He was almost one year older and although we were equals, he on many occasions was a leader that showed me a better way to live the future.

In his tragic death, he has again provided me guidance. His rapid exit leaves behind a challenge to make good on his faith in me. He was always quick with encouragement and he believed I was going to change the world. But it is he who changed the world—my world—and those changes will live at least as long as I do.

Gabe lived without fear. He faced each new day as opportunity to discover, to find out what was both new and old. His courage to face life was shaped in the bush of Alaska and in his adventures to remote parts of the world. He knew what it meant to take the narrow road and because he knew of its rewards he never sought the easy path.

On one of our last days together this past spring, we hiked to the top of a mountain in Tennessee. The sky was clear blue and the air carried a fading winter chill. I took him up the easy route winding around the edge. After we reached the top, sat and stared across the valley, he proposed a new way down. He wanted to run straight down the side. We did. We ran down the side, pulled forward by gravity, and within minutes I had learned something new about a place I visited many times before. Gabe was at home in the wilderness and he was always more able then I to draw out of it the fullness of what it offered.

His death has proved to be just as peculiar as his life. His body already rests in the soil of Long Island, even before we could gather to honor his passing on the opposite side of the country. He has disappeared from my life just as quickly as he entered it. But I don’t blame him for this. He couldn’t help it. Every step he took was a step towards adventure whether he wanted it or not. He, to me, was a man of Alaska, a happy traveler of some hard-bitten terrain, but it seems fitting that he be laid to rest in New York. I think he would have loved it. His death is it self, a curious event, which in its exception speaks volumes about his life.

HOMILY
A Spiritual Edification

Grief is the flaw in human love. For love to matter it must be coupled with those dreadful feelings of loss. Our love is finite like our bodies and we must struggle with the pain that comes with limitation. This is the human condition and we today are the subjects of one of its many realities.

We are now in winter, the season of death. But in this dying out, new life is begotten. The natural cycle teaches us that this withering away brings with it new possibilities for growth. Gabe’s passing brings with it new possibilities for how we can live our lives. In the wake of his death, in the process of grief, there is also the possibility to grow angry with God. Questioning God is as old as human consciousness. But if we are silent and reflective we will see that death is just as much a blessing as life. Because it is in learning how to die that we learn how to live. Gabe knew how to die. He had died out to himself and Jesus was his ever-present teacher.

As Christians we find in the death of Christ the ultimate courage of the Cross. Jesus’ death has become a symbol of the transformative power of the almighty God. You can grow angry and ask why must we die, but Gabe knew the answer. We must all die to truly live.


Theologian Joseph Sittler in his book Gravity and Grace writes,

St Augustine, at the beginning of his Confessions makes a great and beautiful statement. “Thou hast made us for thy self O Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” In back of that statement lays a proposition, which says the human is created for transcendence that we are by nature created to envision more than we can accomplish, to long for that which is beyond our possibilities. We are formed for God, faith is a longing, human kind is created to grasp more than we can grab, to probe for more than we can ever handle...

You can either be creatively restless as before the unknowable or you can collapse in futility...

One of the goals of the Christian message is to join together the people of the way, the way of an eternally given restlessness and to win from that restlessness the participation in God, which is all that our mortality can deliver.

It is this leap of faith from the known to the unknowable that asks so much of us. We are asked to place our words, thoughts, deeds, the broken pieces of our shattered dreams, the pain of our failures. We are demanded to die out to our own desires and place them into the hands of God and from God’s hands we are given back a newness of life.

In this life we will never truly understand the mystery of death and Gabe’s death is particularly sobering because of his love for life. Paul the Apostle in First Corinthians chapter 13 and verse 12 writes “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” This verse points me to a reflection written by my favorite theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who said

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing, which is true or beautiful or good, makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

It is my prayer that these words form meaning in the hearts of those who hear them. Let them turn from language into melody and sing a song of life. Let it be a song of joy and let us remember that this song was sung in the eyes and smile of Gabriel Ray Alan Rice.