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Archive for the ‘Eulogy’ Category

This obituary in the Toronto Globe and Mail caught my eye.

Here’s a few highlights:

• Leonard Butler was born the day the Titanic sank, in 1912.
• The only thing his father was ever quoted as having said to his mother was: “You’re pregnant. I’m gone.”
• There were only 2 books in his home (growing up),  The Swiss Family Robinson and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which he read hungrily.
• He quit school at 14 and took a job as a wagon-repair apprentice.
• A year later, his mother died of pneumonia.
• He left England and went to Canada.
• After working as a farm hand, he went to college and earned a PhD in genetics.
• In 1946, Dr. Butler accepted a position for a year as assistant professor in the genetics department at McGill University.
• Dr. Butler retired (from teaching) in 1977 and became a consultant with the Upjohn pharmaceutical firm, where he bred diabetic Chinese hamsters in Kalamazoo, Mich.
• He died suddenly on June 30, 2008 at 96 years of age.

I would have loved to ask Dr. Butler how reading Pilgrim’s Progress prepared him for his journey.

Journal of Heredity - 1953

Several of Dr. Butler’s scholarly articles are available on the internet, including this interesting article entitled: A New Eye Abnormality in the House Mouse. I might have called it “Three Blind Mice”, but that’s a song for another day.

I never met Dr. Leonard Butler, but I admire his courage, tenacity, skill, and accomplishments.

“I am going to my Father’s, and though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it…. When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the Riverside, into which as he went he said, Death, where is thy sting? And as he went down deeper he said, Grave, where is  thy victory?  So he passed over, and all the Trumpets sounded for him on the other side. ” – from Pilgrim’s Progress

C. S. Lewis was one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers. A man with an incredible mind; he was a scholar of medieval literature, who captivated his Oxford and Cambridge students with wonderful lectures, while also creating a fascinating and imaginative series of children’s books, that are currently being made into a series of movies.

I recently finished reading Alan Jacobs’ biography of C. S. Lewis, The Narnian (which was a gift from my son – Christmas 2005), and decided to sprinkle a few of my observations into the blogosphere.

Let me start at the end, and we’ll talk about the beginning later …

Thirteen year old Roxana Tynan read three sentences from The Weight of Glory (pdf) at the funeral of her father, Kenneth Tynan, in 1980. C. S. Lewis had written these words in 1941 (in the midst of World War II). These are the words Roxana read over her father’s grave :

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things – the beauty, the memory of our past – are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.

Today is my 40th year remembering Dr. King, who was killed when I was a young boy — and I still love to hear the stories about M.L. King and his concern about being a person of character, and raising up people of character, who will stand against all kinds of hate, and bigotry; and stand for what is good, and right.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was one of the pivotal leaders of the American civil rights movement. He became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1957), serving as its first president. His efforts led to the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Here he raised public consciousness of the civil rights movement and established himself as one of the greatest orators in U.S. history. In 1964, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other non-violent means. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

Pause a few moments and review a video tribute to Dr. King.