Homily for the funeral of Helen Grant 1933-2009

 In the Christmas 1978 issue of our magazine Pluscarden Benedictines, there is a fine photograph of Helen’s father, Donald. He had died that September. And in the obituary, Fr Maurus tells a moving story. Donald was in bed, in the Lodge. He was dying. Suddenly he sat up straight, stretched out his arms and cried, “Lord, have mercy on me. Lord, have mercy on me.” Then he turned to his one surviving daughter, Helen, and said, “Lassie, bide here, bide here.”

 “Lassie, bide here.”

 When her father gave her that command, she had already bided in this valley for 35 years and in Pluscarden Lodge for 28. And she would do so, until two Sundays ago, for another 31.
 Helen Grant, the eldest daughter of Donald Grant and Mildred, née Craigen, was born in Huntly on the 24 January 1933. The family came to the Vale of St. Andrew around 1943, when she was 10. At first, they lived in Westerton Lodge. They were the only Catholic family in the valley. And when Abbot Wilfrid Upson of Prinknash would come up here to reconnoitre the new, still uninhabited, property of Pluscarden Priory, it was with them that he stayed. And so a relationship began. The first monks came here on 13 April 1948. The next day they were working, shifting flagstones. Suddenly a postman appeared on a bicycle. It was Donald. He delivered some letters, parked his bicycle, and silently began helping shift flagstones. On the first Sunday he and his family were at Mass in the Priory, Helen too. In 1950, the Grants were offered Pluscarden Lodge by the monks, and they came.

 “Lassie, bide here.”

 And so she did. There was school, in the valley and then at St. Sylvester’s. There was helping her father on his postal rounds. There was employment as a maid to the Mutch family in Elgin, then going “into service” at the old Westerton House, working for the Hepburn-Wrights. Then there was work in a Munro Home in Elgin. In 1954 her sister Elizabeth died, aged 13, and then in 1963 her mother died.  So Helen became her father’s housekeeper. And from then on she bided here all the time. There is something of William Wordsworth or Walter Scott about all this: an old monastery in the shade of a wooded hill, a bridge, a burn, the wee cottage, a father given to keeping bees and clipping hedges, and a daughter Helen, ‘fair Helen’, Helen of the Lodge, ‘Lady Grant of Castle Grant’. Better, there is something biblical about it: Helen biding like a tree beside the flowing waters, not just of the Black Burn but of the quiet grace of God giving her growth from within. “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit” (Jer 17: 7-9).
 
 “Lassie, bide here.”
 
 And what a providence, gift, blessing that she did! I often think of the alternatives, had Helen been other than she was. There was this house at the monastery gate. It could have been a house with shutters, green or otherwise. It could have been a place one slunk past cautiously. It could have been a constant headache or heartache to the community. It was none of these things. Helen simply turned the gift given her into a gift for others. Like the woman in the Book of Proverbs, “she opened her hand to the poor, and reached out her hands to the needy” (Prov 31:20). Like the mustard seed of the Gospel, she put forth the branches of a large heart, and all sorts of birds of the air could make nests in her shade. She made her house a place of welcome, warmth, nourishment - those great meals for her guests! - comfort, sympathy, laughter, wisdom and peace.
 What a woman she was! The scope of her hospitality was extraordinary. It embraced aristocrats and waifs and strays, archbishops and academics, locals and strangers, natives and foreigners, the strong and the weak, young and old, those who shared her faith and those who did not. And today, rightly, she is being remembered, not just here, not just in Scotland and England, but by friends in America, Germany, France, Ghana, the Congo. She was no fool. She was in fact highly intelligent. She was a shrewd judge of character, a talent given expression at times in painfully apposite nicknames. She knew full well when people were exploiting her. But her realism, her honesty, her eye for human foibles never, never hindered her kindness. That simply welled up day in, day out, and overcame everything. Sometimes friends and family of monks came here for the first time, wary of Catholics or suspicious of monasteries. And then they met her. And her radiant humanity disarmed them, turned foes into friends. She was a kind of airport or border post to Pluscarden, but utterly benign. Or to go back to the biblical trees: “Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing,” said the prophet Ezekiel (47:12). So were hers.
 Her secret surely was her humanity. Or, let’s say, her heart. The true ‘Lodge’, the true place of welcome, was her heart. This was the pearl in the oyster. It was the enlarged heart St Benedict speaks of. Helen loved her ‘kind’, humankind, and loved with a generous heart. Isn’t it striking that her great physical weakness, from childhood on, was her heart? She was told that, because of its condition, she would never live beyond 40. St. Paul says that “for those who love God all things work together for good.” Just as Helen turned the Lodge into good, so she turned so much else in her life. She was single; it made her more open-hearted, not less. She had no lack of disabilities and then the mounting pain of recent years, and especially of this last one. “God has put them to the test, said the 1st reading... He has tested them like gold in a furnace” (Wisd 3:5-6). But if physical suffering was her test, how superbly she passed it! She could sometimes be brusque, but never bitter. She was never a moaner. She would be more concerned about her carers than herself. I  remember an American abbot saying, after Helen had had us both to tea, “She is who she is because of the way she has accepted suffering in her life.” The word ‘courage’ comes to all us here. A friend rang from France the other day, and said simply, “She was the most courageous and inspiring woman I have ever known.” And the sign of her victory, the victory of her heart? Her humour, her laugh, her smile. This did not desert her even on her death bed. There was a solemn, silent cluster all around her - Helen propped up on pillows, eyes closed, not really “there”, we thought. And suddenly she opens her eyes and says, “Aye, you’ve never heard me so quiet.”  And laughter filled the room. Abbot Alfred wrote of her father Donald that he went “merrily” to God. Helen at the very end was much sedated, but I think we can imagine the same.
 
 Funeral homilies are not meant to be eulogies. They are not canonisations. They are not meant to pretend that someone was flawless. They don’t abolish the need of prayer for the departed soul. No, but they may be celebrations of God’s work in human lives. So much “news” - public, publicised “news” - is bad or revels in the bad. But there is another story. There is something else going on in the world. There is the work of God. There are “the waters of Shiloah that flow gently” of which Isaiah spoke (Is 8:6). There is “the water that flows from the sanctuary” which the prophet Ezekiel was shown (Ez 47:12). And there are people, many people,  “planted beside the flowing waters” (Ps 1:3), who set down their roots there; people who know that “in returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Is 30:15); people who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord, and whose leaves stay green in the heat and do not cease to bear fruit in the time of drought (cf. Jer 17:7-8). They are the people who carry the world, unbeknown to themselves perhaps. They are the people it’s a privilege to know.
 
 “Lassie, bide here.”

 Helen, we all know, was among such people. Helen was good news. And here was the secret to her secret: the secret to her kindness and courage. Helen sunk her roots into the stream of grace. Helen was a woman of faith and prayer. She was a Christian. Daily Mass and communion - worth the ever-more difficult trek up the drive - daily Rosary, regular confession: she “bided” in these as well, and drew their water into her life. Even as a girl, delivering the mail for her father the ‘Postie’, she measured the distance between the houses by the prayers of the Rosary. If, in later years, she had to be put to bed early, it was a chance to play a CD of the Pope saying the Rosary and join in with him. “I love my Rosary,” she’d say. And she loved to teach it to others too. She was a quiet apostle of her faith.
 Helen, for this and for so much else, for your humanity and dignity, your rootedness and loyalty, we salute you!

 “Lassie, bide here.” 

 We may wish we had the power to call her back, such is the sense of loss. But the best tribute we can pay her is to think, each of us, how we might make our lives such a gift to others as hers was, turning everything to good.
 And now, in her 77th year, after much physical hardship, surrounded by friends and monks, sealed by the sacraments of the Church, in faith and peace, Helen has gone to the house of the Father.
 Let us pray for her.
 “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” says Christ in the Gospel. It was one of the readings we had by her bedside the day she died. “Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”  (Jn 14:1-3). If it’s true that it will be done to us on the day of judgment as we have done to one another, Helen surely will be assured of a place and a welcome and a banquet in the Father’s house. And she will hear that Father too, as well as her own, telling her to bide.
 
 Let the 1st  reading have the last word: “they who trust in him will understand the truth, those who are faithful will live with him in love; for grace and mercy await those he has chosen” (Wis 3:9).
 
       Fr. Hugh, O. S. B., 29 November 2009