Obituary & Remembrances ~ Rev. Kerry M. Craig

OBITUARY & REMEMBRANCES ~ The Reverend Kerry Marie Craig, B.A., M. Div., 1956-2004

On June 14, at home, surrounded by family and friends and her beloved dog Murphy, Kerry returned to God from whom she came. Kerry was born on March 23rd, 1956 to Jack and Shirley (nee Force) and grew up in St. Vital. She attended Dakota Collegiate and the University of Winnipeg (B.A. '76) In 1981 Kerry married Dennis Wood and they moved to Saskatoon where Kerry worked on her Masters of Divinity at St. Andrew's College. Joshua was born during her second year at St. Andrew's. Upon ordination she was settled by the United Church of Canada on the LaRiviere Pastoral Charge where she served for five years at LaRiviere, Snowflake and Kingsley. She was called to the Pembina Parish Pastoral Charge in 1990, serving the congregations of St. Paul's, Morden and Zion-Calvin, Darlingford. Daughter Hannah was born in 1991. Kerry served this pastoral charge until she became ill and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2001.

Kerry was known for her quick wit, forthright manner, persistence, determination, and her passion and love for those with whom she lived and served. Never one to back down from a debate, she did not suffer fools gladly, but she did have enormous patience with her family, her parishioners, and those weighed down by the struggles of life. Her warmth, caring, and pastoral skill will be remembered by many. Kerry was generous with her time and brought a keen mind, common sense, love for the gospel and the church to her work in the local church, the presbytery, the conference and the national church. She will be remembered as a capable chairperson, a woman of conviction, and a dependable colleague. Although not formally trained, Kerry loved to sing and took great pleasure exploring the musical heritage of the United and Mennonite churches. Those who were close to her know how hard it was for her to keep from singing.

The cancer diagnosis opened a new world to Kerry. Freed from the demands of a busy parish life, she was able to devote more time to her family and took great pride in the precocious independence and creativity of her children. It gave her great pleasure to watch her children grow and mature developing their God-given talents to share in the world. Kerry also enjoyed learning to quilt, walking with her dogs, discovering the enormous wealth of information on the Internet, contemplating the beauty of her yard and the birds which inhabited it, and learning how to garden. If her body wasn't always able to do the things she wanted, her mind was certainly active, seeking out information, organizing and planning.

Throughout the course of her life and most especially during her illness Kerry was blessed by the support and encouragement of people of faith. These relationships strengthened her and contributed to the courage and humour with which she met her life and her death. We give thanks to God for them. In these last years members of the Pembina Fellowship Church have enriched our lives and the continued care of members of the Pembina Parish has been appreciated. Kerry regularly gave thanks for care and treatment she received from health care professionals. Drs. Dyck, Holmes, Menzies, and Lotocki were sensitive to her desire for both quality and quantity of life. The nursing staff of the Boundary Trails CancerCare Unit routinely went above and beyond the call of duty to provide excellent care through the many ups and downs of cancer treatment. God has a special place for chemo nurses Cheryl Penner, Mary Ann Cram, Carolyn Weibe, and Ken Froese. In the last months of her illness we experienced the benefits of rural health care provided through Boundary Trails Health Centre. Palliative care workers, Barb and Muriel, the nursing staff, healthcare technicians, and the cleaning staff worked together to ensure Kerry's comfort and wellbeing. How blessed we were.

Kerry was predeceased by her parents Jack and Shirley. She is survived by her husband Dennis, son Joshua, daughter Hannah, stepmother Eileen, and many close friends. It was with regret that Kerry gave up her life, for she dearly wanted more time with her children, her husband, her friends, her church, and the activities she had come to enjoy so much. However, as was her practise and in accordance with her wishes we will praise our maker while we have breath. A service of thanksgiving was held at St. Paul's United Church, 353 Thornhill, Morden, on Saturday, June 19 at 11 a.m. Friends may wish to make a contribution in her memory to Doctors without Borders, 402-720 Spadina Ave. Toronto, ON M5S 2T9, Boundary Trails Palliative Care, or to South Central Cancer Resource.

Kerry was interred in St Vital Cemetery, near the river, beside her parents, Jack & Shirley. Here is an image of Kerry's casket, which she asked Dave Penner of Thornhill to build, as well as a few images of her funerary urn, a five-times-fired Raku vessel thrown by Barb Wiebe, whose stoneware creche figures Kerry loved.

Thanks be to God in whom we live and move and have our being.

REMEMBRANCES OF KERRY CRAIG

Given by Reverend Robert Campbell at St. Paul’s United Church, Morden, June 19, 2004.

It is a privilege for me to participate in this service today for a dear friend. Before I speak personally, I wish to bring formal condolences to Dennis, Josh, and Hannah and all of Kerry’s family on behalf of Winnipeg Presbytery, the presbytery in which her membership most recently resided. Many folk are here from our Presbytery this morning and many who could not come have been expressing to me their sorrow and asking me to convey their sympathies.

[The letter of condolence from the United Church of Canada was read here.]

I knew of Kerry Craig before I knew her. At the age of 19, she had been a student minister with Massey Place congregation in Saskatoon, the year before I was the student minister there. By the time I arrived, this diminutive young woman, all four feet eleven inches of her, had assumed larger-than-life proportions and I was regaled with Kerry stories all summer long. In a few short months she had become beloved, particularly by the boys in the youth group who thought of her as the female equivalent of a “cool dude.” To that congregation she had brought energy, challenge, and life; and, if the stories were to be believed, change. She was not a person who saw it as her role to do things as they had always been done. Still in her teens, Kerry was sending signals of what the future would hold for her.

A few years later I met this dynamo at an annual meeting of Conference. Almost involuntarily, the first words out of my mouth were, “So you’re Kerry Craig,” a sentence she has mimicked for me a hundred times since. Little did I imagine that this somewhat inauspicious beginning would lead to a warm and trusting friendship and, one day, to Kerry’s request that I accept the assignment of trying to find suitable words to remember her at her funeral.

Friends, I don’t know if any of you have had this experience, but I found that Kerry was always organizing me to do something. She was generally pretty clear about her wishes, what she wanted me to do. I think that I, and so many of us, geared ourselves up to fulfill her wishes because we sensed that this was not just about Kerry, but about things she had thought through to depths many of us rarely touch, and we wanted to defer to the work she had done to discern the Maker’s plan, and how God intends us to function together in Christian community, and how we could bear each other’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.

So it was that, a while ago, Kerry said that she intended to plan her funeral and that she wanted me to organize and execute it, as well as give the remembrances. Two weeks ago, we met to go over her plan, and we worked on the details, and then, the easy work done, I asked her how she would like to be remembered. And she reeled off a list of nouns and adjectives, each of which of which accorded with my experience of her and is confirmed by the recollections that friends, colleagues, and family have shared with me this week.

The first word Kerry chose was stubborn. An apt word. When I asked Lois Creith what she would say if she were standing here this morning she replied, “Well, Kerry was a feisty, little lady who didn’t back down from anything.” That was certainly one side of her. And you needed a certain amount of stubbornness and feistiness to be a trail-blazer in a rural charge when you were the first female minister and you had a house-husband. A Mr. Mom, to boot. Those were days when that was new and it wasn’t always easy. And you needed a certain amount of stubbornness when you were on some church committee or theological task group and they had talked and skated their way all around an issue and hadn’t got where they needed to get, and you were the one who was going to make sure they got to the heart of the matter.

The second word to describe how she hoped to be remembered was compassionate. And I thought of how, when she would open her arms at the beginning of a church service to say, “The Lord be with you,” it wasn’t a formula, it was a blessing from the heart. Over and over again I have heard appreciation for her pastoral care and presence, appreciation for how she would do a wonderful job at a funeral in celebrating a person’s life and bringing consolation to those who mourned, appreciation for how she would be with people in a giving and supportive way in tough times and circumstances or in palliative situations. It was another parishioner at La Riviere who summed up Kerry’s time there with the words, “She left us much love.”

Kerry also used the word mentor. She knew what is was to have good mentors — Ralph Donnelly being the one she named most often, who recognized just what a fine preacher she was and asked her to preach at his funeral. She had benefited from the wisdom and guidance of mentors, and she hoped she had been able to fill that role for some people. Well, Kerry, you would appreciate these words that one of your colleagues sent to me earlier this week: “Kerry had the gift of recognising other’s gifts, and nurturing / challenging / pushing us to use them. Many of the things I’ve done I’ve done because Kerry obviously believed I could.”

To this I would add that many of her colleagues experienced Kerry as a theological mentor. She always downplayed her excellence as a scholar and theologian, but the fact is she brought considerable intellectual rigour to dealing with things not ultimately of the intellect, namely the soul and spirit. She took the attitude that though our faith might have many mysteries, that didn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about them and explore them. And though her theological talk was sometimes halting and uncertain, she would persist with a question until she broke through the muddle and got to the depths. She was always probing at the heart of the faith and never got so caught up in the latest fad that it took her away from the centre of the gospel. And she had the gift of finding the language that could commend in practical and pastoral terms doctrines that, in many circles, have gone out of fashion, but which are in the end critical to an authentic Christianity. Her recently published paper on the atonement in Touchstone Journal would be a good place for any minister to start in preparing for preaching through Lent and Holy Week.

Also, Kerry hoped to be remembered as a bridge-builder. And she will be so remembered by those who worked with her on countless committees, or who did pastoral relations work and crisis interventions with her, situations where she displayed her gift for knowing what was going on and bringing help to the situation. Many is the time I have seen her bring a group of people paralysed by division together to find a way forward. It is so fitting that one who aspired to be a bridge-builder should have had the opportunity to chair the United Church’s national Inter Church and Interfaith Relations Committee and should do such sterling work on projects such as Mending the World and Bearing Faithful Witness, the latter directed at United Church - Jewish relations today. She always remained proud of that work and accomplishment. What she could not have known is that because of her interfaith commitment and the wide-ranging work she did in that cause, people all over, people whom she may not even have known, are grieving her death.

Kerry hoped to be remembered as a woman of faith. Well, when I spoke with Dennis on Thursday night, he specifically emphasized Kerry’s need to pray. That is how you life live by faith. She showed by example that she knew what prayer is and how to do it. Whether rehearsed or not, her capacity to bring appropriate words of prayer to a setting or situation clearly revealed a woman of faith
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To all these words by which Kerry hoped she would be remembered, I would like to add two things which she did not mention at the time but are so abundantly true of her. The first is her love of life itself. Her aliveness was manifest in so many ways: As a youth doing adventurous things, trying out homelessness under a Winnipeg bridge as part of her Canadian Urban Training, zigzagging across America on the back of a motorcycle, taking a spur of the moment trip to Colombia.

Her love of life was manifest as an adult in the joy she found in her husband and children and her enthusiasm for drawing out their talents and seeing that they had the best experiences. Manifest also in her passion for her dogs, Maggie, and latterly, Murphy. She once articulated the reason for moving to the country this way: “We could get more dogs, Denny.”

Manifest in her passion for her chosen vocation and the zest she brought to her work among the people of La Riviere, Kingsley, Snowflake, and the people of Pembina Parish. Her life’s work was in many was her life.

And when active ministry was no longer possible, her love of life was manifest in the way she threw herself into the struggle with the illness that claimed her. She made herself an authority on ovarian cancer, participated actively in her treatment, at times actually initiating and directing it, all the while grateful to be surrounded by state of the art facilities and state of the art doctors, nurses, and caregivers. Dennis has asked me to say that Kerry was greatly concerned for unity among the agencies that serve people with ovarian cancer and gave her strength to that cause. Also, that Kerry would dearly love women and their caregivers to be vigilant about this insidious disease. She would love all to work for the day of earlier diagnosis and more effective treatment so that this disease might go from being such a deadly one to a chronic and manageable one.

Kerry’s love of life was manifest in her candidness about life’s fragility. Not for her the avoidance of the reality that we live our life in the shadow of death. Not for her the head scarf, or the wig, but rather the bald head that God gave her adorned with the butterflies of transformation.

Joshua says that when he thinks of his mother, it is of a woman who knew that there was a time and a place for everything. She puts him in mind of the verse from Ecclesiastes: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: A time to be born and time to die.” Well, yes, Kerry was well aware of the seasons of life and she lived with their rhythm. Yet while she looked forward to the better world that awaited her, she wanted to stay, and fought to stay, in this world for as long as possible, in part for the sake of her family, but also in part because she simply could not get enough of life, in sickness or in health, in joy or in sorrow.

So tied up with her love of life was her love of the worship which animated it. Worship was to her as breathing. I well remember when she was diagnosed and found herself in hospital in Winnipeg. About the first thing she did when able was to call her friends to come and have a service with her in her room, with scripture and prayer and the laying on of hands. She was low that night. She knew her need of praise.

On the last Sunday of her life she went to church, in her living room, sharing holy space and holy time with the members of the Pembina Mennonite Fellowship who had become so significant for her. To them she bequeathed more worship experiences this week — washing her nobody and enshrouding it in linen, constructing her casket, making her pall, building her urn — all concrete ways of working out before God the mysteries of life and death.

And now today, she offers us this worship service that she has planned, in it bearing witness to the convictions by which she lived: The simple pall on the casket announcing that we brought nothing into this world and take nothing from it but the one thing we truly need, our baptism in Christ. The generous amount of scripture, read and preached, reminding us of a God who has graciously revealed himself to us if only we will listen for and pay attention to his word. The Sacrament of Communion by which we are reminded of what Jesus Christ has done for us on his cross and what he is willing to do for us in the power of the Holy Spirit. And the plenitude hymns and sacred songs, by which we praise our Maker while we’ve breath in the conviction that, when our voice is lost in death, praise shall employ our nobler powers.

By this service, Kerry has once again born witness: to what she believed, to what was fundamental in her life, to the blessings she most wanted to commend to those whom she loved. And it only remains for me to say that in death, as in life, Kerry’s was a faithful witness.