All Saints by the Lake, Dorval
Leonard McArthur
January 10, 2023
Leonard was already over 90 when I got to know him, and like the disciples who had supper with Jesus in our gospel reading this morning, we became known to each other in the breaking of bread. Every few weeks, Gordona would give me a call and I’d stop by and bring them communion, first in the apartment just around the corner from here, and then in the one in Lachine. The table would be carefully set with the embroidered cloth, and with the carved and decorated cross that Leonard had made specifically for these occasions.
That was Leonard: a man of actions, first and foremost. He wasn’t always as quiet as he was by the time he was in his 90s, but it was always his actions that spoke louder than his words. He was the one you called when you needed help with something, whether it was being a churchwarden, stringing the lights on the Christmas tree, or hauling logs out of the woods with draft horses.
Leonard could easily have been a hard and bitter man. Life did not deal him an easy hand: growing up during the Depression, leaving school after the third grade, facing the punishing weather and grueling physical labour of the farming and logging life in the northern Ontario backwoods. But in the face of all this, he chose to be the sweetest person imaginable, humble, patient, generous, faithful, a devoted husband to Gordona for 63 years and a beloved uncle to many, whether born into the family or on an honorary basis.
As our scripture reading today reminded us, “Those who trust in God will understand truth, and the faithful will abide with him in love, because grace and mercy are upon his holy ones.”
Leonard knew this in his bones. He knew God was with him. He heard God’s word, yes, but most particularly, he knew God in the flesh, through sharing in the breaking of the bread.
In his faithfulness, his humility, his loving care for those around him, Leonard showed us something of God. We believe in a God who made all of nature, who became human among us, who becomes known to us in the breaking of bread, and so enables us, in our human lives, to show forth a little bit of what God is like.
In Leonard’s case, the parallel is unusually close, because of course he, like Jesus, was a carpenter. But also much more: he grew food, he raised and worked with animals, he was close to and in harmony with the good land that God created, and the rhythms that brought forth from it good things for the use of God’s people. And in his quiet willingness to pitch in and help out, he also imitated the one who came not to be served but to serve.
So, as we rightly mourn the end of Leonard’s long and well-lived life, we also give thanks – that nothing that he was, or that he did, or that he gave, is lost, but rather lives on in us, who loved him, and in his impact on the world; and also that he now sees God face to face, the God he learned to recognize while he was here on earth in the beauties of nature, the faces of his loved ones, and in the bread broken and shared.
The day before Leonard died, Gordona prayed with him, over and over, St. Patrick’s Breastplate, the prayer that was set to music as our first hymn this morning. Harking back to the Celtic spiritual tradition that sees God in nature, it invokes the widest cosmos: sun and moon, wind and lightning, earth and sea; and at the same time calls on Christ to be present within and beside us, before and behind us, above and below us, in quiet and in danger, in every moment of our lives.
Leonard knew God in the starlit heavens and the fruitful earth, and he knew God in those moments of private, heartfelt prayer. He knew God in hard work well done, and in the faithful love of his wife and family. And above all, he knew God in the breaking of the bread, which we will share this morning in memory of Leonard and in joyful thanksgiving for his life.
Amen.
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