A Believer's Journal

We have been grieving Mom for a long time. Much of who she was has been gone for a long time. But the most essential part of her, her ability to give love and receive love was there to the very end, and for that I am grateful.

Mom was conscientious, an eldest child, two years older than her only sibling, a brother. She was committed to doing the right thing, always doing the right thing. She set high expectations for herself, not merely for the sake of success or wealth or recognition, but to do something meaningful with her life, to make a difference, to serve people, to serve God.

She was driven to do well, and she did do well. She was smart, talented, an accomplished violinist and choral conductor and voracious reader. She was a most capable administrator, able to type ninety words a minute in the days before personal computers, without mistakes. She proofread and typed our father’s entire doctoral thesis, while at the same time working an office job to put him through graduate school.

For many years, she drove the hour long commute from her home on Massachusetts’ North Shore into Boston where she worked as a medical transcriptionist. When she and Dad moved to Blue Hill twenty-some years ago, she did the same work at Blue Hill Memorial Hospital.

It was during one of those Boston commutes that she heard a radio disc jockey announce that “Kathi Ensworth” had won a trip to Alaska for two. Oh, my, was she excited! “I never win anything,” she liked to say when she told the story. She and Dad made lifetime memories on that Alaska adventure, just as they made lifetime memories on trips they shared to Israel and Jordan, to Italy and Greece, to Africa and Australia and the Far East.

Mom was shy, not withdrawn, but not naturally outgoing. She was warm and kind and gracious, but preferred the company of a few close friends, friends like Margaret Barker and the Saylors and Butlers and Hartis’s. And Alice.

How she loved Alice Hauser and her regular Thursday visits to see Alice in her apartment at Parker Ridge. And how Alice loved my Mom. They stayed in touch after we moved Mom to Iowa. Alice sent letters and cards and they would talk from time to time on the telephone. And I would be sure to report to Mom on the visits Lynne and I would have with Alice each summer during our time in Blue Hill.

Mom was passionate, passionate about the earth, about wolves and bears and birds, passionate about her family, passionate about football and the Patriots, passionate about Maine, passionate about music. Her music-making was about passion, about feeling, about the meaning music can convey by stirring human emotions.

When she led choirs, she was not so much focussed on technique and style. She did have good command of music history and vocal technique and had good taste in music — at least in my opinion and I am a musician! She conducted Handel and Stainer, Randall Thompson and Kurt Kaiser. She focussed on connecting musicians to the music, on helping us embody the music and its meaning so we could fully communicate its emotional — and spiritual — power. “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing!”

She led adult chancel choirs, but youth choirs, too. Heather and Gary and Lynne and I spent time singing with the Dawntreaders, named after Prince Caspian’s boat in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia chronicles. We would prepare fully-staged musicals with choreography and lighting, accompanied by piano and guitars and drums. We would perform at our own church in West Peabody, Massachusetts, and then take the production on the road to other churches and schools. My Dad served as stagehand and often built the sets himself.

The kids and young adults loved her, because she loved them and affirmed them, because she gave them something important and meaningful and challenging to do, because she praised them for their hard work and affirmed the value of their ministry.

One of my most profound and formative experiences as a young man was being part of the troupe of adult choir members that performed “Celebrate Life!” under Mom’s direction. “Celebrate Life!” is a musical retelling of the story of Jesus, written by Buryl Red & Ragan Courtney to a soft rock soundtrack, full of humor and pathos and joy. Mom inspired us and empowered us to be bearers of the gospel through our words and songs, witnesses to the good news of Jesus: “He is alive, he is alive, he is alive!”

Mom was courageous. Her life took her far from her roots, far from home, literally and figuratively. She was a southern California girl who married a midwesterner, a boy from Detroit, seven years her senior. When they married in Pasadena, California, she was twenty-two and he was twenty-nine. She followed him to the opposite corner of the country, to Philadelphia and then to Massachusetts and finally to Blue Hill, Maine.

But he changed her life. She changed her life. He changed her name from “Faith” to “Kathi” and she has been “Kathi” ever since. She did not leave behind who she was, but she grew. She grew up and she grew broader and wider and deeper, personally and spiritually, which are really the same thing!

Her roots were in the Christian and Missionary Alliance church and she was a believer from childhood. My father’s faith was birthed and formed through Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship while he was an undergraduate at Michigan State University. They were members of a variety of churches during their lifetimes: Presbyterian churches, Baptist churches, non-denominational churches, Congregational churches, finally finding a home in the Episcopal Church.

They moved from what would be commonly labeled an “evangelical” expression of faith to a “mainline” or “progressive” expression of faith, but I hate labels! Their faith did not change; it grew. They never abandoned the fire of their first love, the evangelical fire of love for God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength. They simply came to understand in new ways the implications of that love and of God’s call to love their neighbors as God loves their neighbors, all of them.

Their hearts grew wide as they came to better know God’s heart. Faith for them was always about righteousness and justice and love, but as they grew in faith, it became more and more and more about grace.

Mom was raised as a Nixon/Goldwater Republican, and when we children were born into the family, that’s still who she was. But, oh my, how far she has come! What changed her? Her faith changed her. Her commitment not to preserve some fixed tradition handed down to her, but to listen to the God who is still speaking to us changed her. And what she saw changed her: prejudice and discrimination and white privilege, abuse of power and disregard for the “other,” disregard for the earth, for the earth God blessed and made good.

She followed politics closely, as long as her mind allowed it, and even after the dementia had advanced, she would still yell back at the TV when certain politicians who will go unnamed would speak. But it wasn’t about the politics, not about being Democrat or Republican. It was about what she had been about from the beginning: about doing the right thing.

Because Mom was loyal. As much as she changed over the course of her lifetime — in her church affiliation, in her political views, in elements of her lifestyle — her primary loyalties never changed.

She was loyal to Jesus, from beginning to end. Her faith in Jesus, her commitment to be a follower of Jesus, was the thread that held together all the rest of her life. I know what that means, because my commitment to be a follower of Jesus is the thread that holds together all the disparate and ever-changing, ever-growing, ever-evolving elements of my life.

And she was loyal to family. Family, being family, doing things, almost everything, “as a family” was a central focus of my parents’ lives, especially Mom’s. They made a point of us sitting down together “as a family” for dinner every evening, saying grace, perhaps reading a devotion before or after the meal, sharing our food and our lives.

For many years, we kept a regular “family night” one night a week — I think it used to be Fridays. We would all be home together, not watching TV, but playing board games: Monopoly or Life or Scrabble or Risk or Clue. And for many years, before we began attending churches with a Christmas Eve service, we would hold our own Christmas Eve services in our living room. We would turn down the lights and light the Christmas tree. Dad would read the story of Jesus’ birth from the gospel of Luke and “The Night Before Christmas.” Heather would play her violin or I my trumpet and Dad would accompany us on his harmonica as we sang “Silent Night.” Playing the harmonica was his only musical talent and “Silent Night’ was the only song I ever heard him play.

And then to bed, and Mom would come to each of us and rub our backs to help us fall asleep and hum as she did. As I spent her last hours with her on a Monday night two months ago, I rubbed her head and hummed to her.

And Mom read to us. She read aloud each one of the Narnia tales to us — The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Prince Caspian; The Voyage of the Dawntreader; The Silver Chair; and the rest, all seven of the books, chapter by chapter, one chapter a night. When she reached the end of a chapter, we would beg her to read more, and sometimes, she relented and did.

We took family trips, sometimes vacation trips, but sometimes for Dad’s work, which would be work for him but vacation for us. We made many cross country trips from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, five-day trips by car, the three of us kids all stuffed in the back seat. Mom would prepare large bags for each of us which she kept up by her feet in the front seat. Each day from the bag, she would pull comic books for us to read, often “Classics Illustrated” comics, and once a day, a game or toy for each of us.

We grew up together, as a family. I remember Mom and Dad at all my concerts, soccer games, track meets. And I loved it. I loved our family. I loved hiking with Dad. I loved listening to Mom read or beating her (or losing to her!) in Clue. I remembered believing I had the best family in the world.

No family is idyllic. Every family has its flaws and its struggles and its heartaches and ours did, too. Eventually, I understood that, though it probably took me longer than most. And yet …

And yet, it was good! I would not trade my family, my Dad and my Mom, for anyone. I am so grateful, so grateful to God, for my mother and my father.

They had times of struggle in their marriage, like all couples do, though I was not aware of it until later. But their marriage was at its best at the end. Dad dearly loved Mom and she him. Just weeks before he died, we celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary at the Jordan Pond House with many friends, many friends from this church, in attendance. I will treasure the memory of that day always.

We always knew we were loved, all three of us, always. We were told and we were shown. Dad and Mom gave so much for us, so much of themselves, to make our lives full, to make our lives good.

And now we have neither of them with us. We will scatter her ashes where we scattered Dad’s ashes, where they will rest until the day when God makes all things new.

But they are with us. They are with us because they are so much a part of who we are. My Dad is a part of me and my Mom is a part of me, some of the best parts of me. I will remember her and carry her with me always in my body and in my spirit, as I carry my father in me. As will my sister and my brother and her grandchildren and even her great-grandchildren. As will you, because she touched you, too.