ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

FUNERAL MASS FOR SISTER ELIZABETH MAY

Fr Alan Moses

20th October, 2006
All Saints Convent, Oxford

This sermon is something of a joint effort between Fr. Gerald Reddington and myself. It is sad that Gerald cannot be here to preach it. He had known Lizzie longer and better than I had.

It is not going to be a detailed narrative of Elizabeth May’s life in the Community; that life which began not long after she left the orphanage she grew up in. Although she had family in Manchester whom she valued and holidayed with, (and it’s good that some of them are here today), there is a sense in which the Community was her family.

It was a life which encompassed places and works which were part of the history of community and Church _ Tonge Moor which she often reminisced about and where, as a north country lass, she was perhaps happiest. There was London Colney and Eastbourne and Margaret Street and then here. The greater part of her life was before I knew her; before even some of her sisters did. She loved being in London for those last active years of her active life. She enjoyed the freedom, having her list of people she looked after, and enjoying the variety of people who came to No. 82 and the church. I hope someone will write that up before it is forgotten. It should be part of the communal memory.

The religious life can seem to the outsider quite eccentric, even mad; and yet mysterious and fascinating. It attracts myths which must be a source of amusement or frustration, in equal measure, to those who live in it. One of these is that all those who follow Christ in this way are serene, angelic, naturally devout figures who glide through life as if on castors. Another is that life in a religious community insulates them from the pressures of the real world.

Those who live that life, or are in some way associated with it, know full well that all these myths are far from the truth. A religious community has at least the same variety of characters and personalities, - and clashes of personality - as any family, with less chance of escape. Vocation is often a struggle; a worthwhile and rewarding one, but still hard work. Commitment to living with a group of people under vows is a serious and demanding business and not for the faint-hearted. Problems which can be avoided and ignored in other walks of life are much less easy to escape within the walls of a convent - even one of an active community like this. There is no hiding place. And that is just as well, otherwise the religious life would be something for angels and not for human beings.

Elizabeth May was very much a human being. She would certainly not have claimed to be an angel - nor did she always come across as one! She could be peppery, even vinegary at times - but what is food without some savour!

Gerald speaks of her as a sparrow - intense, active, busy, in a hurry. I would see her from my study window - setting off on some errand - purposeful, knowing where she was going. I imagine her more as a wee terrier - a Jack Russell.

She was not pious in any demonstrative, emotional or sentimental way. That does not mean that she did not love God; that she did not pray. The bird-like activity was always set within the purpose of God. Prayer for her was I suspect work rather than play. It was something she was committed to as part of the life to which she had dedicated herself. It was a serious but matter-of-fact business. Unless it was down-to-earth it would never reach up to heaven. She had a simple approach to life. She lived for “the sacrament of the present moment”. She was perhaps more Martha than Mary.

I would often see her purposefully heading for her place in the south aisle as I prepared for the lunchtime mass. In those days, Jean Margaret and Barbara Mary were early birds, larks - 8 o’clockers during the week - but Lizzie, rather surprisingly, got going later.

Although the could tell stories of the past, she was not one to take refuge in nostalgia. I can remember sitting out in the garden here during the summer with a her and some other residents of St. John’s Home. Someone looked back with rather rose tinted spectacles to the “good old days” when things were done properly, and nuns wore proper habits. Lizzie intervened quietly but firmly to say that much about those days was not good; that there was a great deal of sheer drudgery which we could be thankful to be free of. Even of her memory was going, she had not lost her marbles.

What she did bring from the past was the experience of hardship in her childhood. This gave her a sympathy and understanding for the difficulties of others which perhaps some of us born and raised in happier circumstances did not have.

She may not have had the educational opportunities of many, but she had a sharp brain. She could often get the point quicker than others and she would worry that this made her critical of what she considered their slowness. She could sometimes have a short fuse; she did not suffer fools gladly - even Vicars of All Saints. But having said what was on her mind, she was always contrite and she never nursed grudges.

Life had taught her everyday, homespun wisdom, a sort of sanctified common sense, often encapsulated in those many sayings she loved to quote. One of her favourites was, “You can’t have the penny and the bun”. In other words, “you cannot have your cake and eat it”, which is what most of us spend our time trying to do.

Lizzie had known tribulation in her childhood. She had lived through more than 60 years of enormous changes in the world, in the Church, in the religious life to which God had called her. In her life she experienced what it means to have here “no abiding city”. Yet we can see that not only places but stages of life are all “dwelling places”, in God’s house, caravanserais on our pilgrimage.


In her last years she had to cope with illness and restriction - no longer able to march off briskly down the street to wherever she wanted to go. Her memory began to go, but with it some of the fear of death which she would, with straightforward honesty, admit. Whenever I came to see her she would always break into a smile and she would always tell me how grateful she was for the kindness of her sisters and the staff of St. John’s for all that they did for her.

Lizzie remained faithful, she persevered in her calling. Now her pilgrimage in this life is over and we, her beloved sisters and her friends, commend her into the loving care of the Lord she served faithfully all those years. Heaven in scriptural imagination may be populated by angels, but it is also a place for us, for Lizzie.

If we may forsake the prosaic of modern translations for the grandeur of the old, there is surely in heaven a “mansion” for a poor Lancashire orphan lass who became an All Saints Sister of the Poor.