Thea Berryman's funeral

Too many days have gone without posting what is going on here at the Foundation...and there is a lot going on! I will try and catch you up in the coming days. I just got the homily below from Thea Berryman's funeral. I wish I could bring you the drumming of the African drum choir, the singing of the Houston Boy's choir, the classical guitar, the hymns we sang.... oh, and the lemon meringue pie!

Jerome and Thea Berryman, founders of Godly Play

Please remember Jerome and his family in your prayers during the coming days and months.


Celebrating Thea (1941 - 2009)
When Thea and I began to talk about her funeral she told me that there had to be lots of music and there is. Then she said that she wanted me to do the homily. I was not sure that was a good idea, but she said that I was her priest and I would do a good job. I don’t’ know about that, but I told her I would do my best.

Thea loved us in many ways and we loved her as “Thea,” as “Mom,” as “Grammy,” and as “Mrs. Berryman.” I first saw her in 1960, walking down Nassau Street in Princeton. She was dancing along in her black tights and short kilt, with her long braid swinging back and forth. My life suddenly went from shades of brown to intense colors, which blended into the pastels she began to wear, as the decades passed. I have been falling in love with her ever since that day and we have walked together through much sadness and happiness since then.

Once we even walked over the great divide together, a hike of some 24 miles, much of it above timber line, over the high mountains from Bear Lake to Grand Lake in Colorado, but we also climbed up and down the stairs in our own house one last time together, a challenge that was much tougher. Still, being together, as always, was enough to bring great joy. Do you know what you get when you mix lots of happiness with lots of sadness? You get joy and we had much of that together.

Thea was a wonderful wife, full of life and fun and yet as down to earth as her love of shoes. One of the many things we created together, as a labor of love, was something called Godly Play, an approach to religious education, which is now used all over the world and has been translated into Spanish, Finnish, German and Swahili. Teaching together was always wonderful. That was the part of this we liked best.

Last year, when we realized that we would not be able to go to our mountain house much longer we had a beautiful garden planted in our backyard. The people from Garden Gate and Sabrina came to place the arbor for the climbing roses. Thea came home from school that day at noon to rest before her afternoon classes and to make the final decision. She walked wearily but erectly and gracefully through the grass to the very spot and then suddenly did an astonishing plie, bending at the knees with her back straight as her expressive arms and lovely hands showed the place. The arbor with the climbing roses is still there.

How did we ever meet, a boy from Kansas and a girl from New Jersey? I will never know but I will always be grateful. God laughs and plays.

When our girls, Alyda and Coleen, were born Thea created a safe place for them in her heart and in our home, which they could explore from and retreat to when they needed to. She rocked them in the chair her grandmother Schoonyoung had been rocked in and made our home a place of adventure, attunement and consistent warmth.

One of the great times for us as a family was the year we lived in our tiny appartamento in Bergamo, Italy, while we studied the Montessori approach to education. That is where we discovered the wonderful Christmas bread from Milano called panettone, which was one of the last things Thea was able to eat with pleasure. We warmed it in the oven so she could smell it and gave her tiny pieces to savor. That is why you will find panettone on the table during the reception. You will also find lemon meringue pies there because three generations, including Thea’s mother, collaborated to make this treat for her. The pies at the reception were baked with love by the parents of School of the Woods.

Thea was a magical mother who loved her daughters deeply and she cared for them as they were growing up with wise delight. The exuberance and excitement of our home was especially alive during the many holidays that Thea loved to decorate for and celebrate with her family. She gave her girls the qualities of intelligence, creativity, sweetness and toughness as well as a love of life --- all of which she had in abundance to share. They have loved decorating for this celebration, especially all the photographs!

Thea is also loved as “Grammy,” by her beloved granddaughters --- Lexi, Maddi and Tori. There was a spring to her step and a broad smile on her face that was reserved just for them. Their telephone calls to her from their home in Colorado, when she could no longer get out of bed, were a wonderful treat for Thea. Her face was content though her voice had trouble making the words when they talked.

Thea loved being “Grammy” and passed on to her granddaughters the qualities she gave her girls. She loved looking for just the right gifts to surprise and astound them. Just being near them gave her immeasurable happiness and gave meaning to her life that can be understood only by those who have devoted much of their lives to the children of other people.

The School of the Woods children loved Thea as “Mrs. Berryman.” I heard that after she could no longer teach, some of the children cut out a big, paper “Mrs. Berryman,” which they carried around the music room, so she could be there with them. I like that idea very much and I have done much the same, but my “Mrs. Berryman” is deep inside so she can go with me forever, wherever I may go. It is good to have someone like her always near just in case you need help to do something that seems impossible at first, you know like a guardian angel.

The doctors, nurses and caregivers also loved Thea as “Mrs. Berryman.” She was a gracious and inspiring patient, who loved them for their wonderful work, especially Dr. Michael Bevers, her oncologist, and his staff. They were magnificent. I had to look twice to be sure what I saw the first time Dr. Bevers operated on Thea. He was walking alongside the gurney holding her hand, as she was wheeled toward surgery. His great knowledge and skill converged with respect and love to make him a true healer, despite the existential limits to life.

Among those who loved Thea was our dog, Monte, a Great Pyrenees of large dimensions. He loved Thea as “Alpha Dog” and he misses her too. He is grieving for her by chewing on various parts of his body, which is something I don’t recommend.

Yes. There was something lovable about her, but there was also something else. It is harder to define, but it is also why we ache and smile today with such depth. Thea was a person of substance who seemed to weave together within herself two great themes in Western Civilization, as easily as she braided that long braid, which went all the way down her back and danced as she walked.

Thea embodied the qualities of faith, hope and love, which run deep and true in the Christian Tradition like a warm current in the ocean. She was a safe place of faithfulness to return to and rest in when you were weary and a place to venture out from in hope. She was a wonderful companion to share hope with. Her eyes would sparkle and her sly smile would light up to say, “Let’s do it. It’ll be fun!” Love may be the greatest of these three --- faith, hope and love --- but without all three there is no love and this lovely creature of God lived all three theological virtues to the brim.

Thea also embodied goodness, beauty, and truth, which the ancient Greeks thought were connected and I can testify to the fact that they are, because I was married to such lovely symmetry for almost fifty years. Thea was beautiful and yet her beauty was full of goodness and both her goodness and beauty were deeply true, as true and natural as the sun coming up in the morning and going down in the evening. When she was so ill she could hardly walk she stopped in the grocery store to help a lady who had fallen to the floor and was disoriented, as everyone else passed by. She stayed with her and talked to her until several people arrived to help her get back on her feet. Then Thea needed help to get up herself. Goodness, beauty and truth. That’s who she was.

It was music that drew all of this love and virtue together and expressed it in a way that was completely Thea. She loved all of us but she also loved music and the music in us. As a performer, she studied dance and voice --- as well as the piano and other instruments, including the nose flute and the digeridoo. When she was in high school one of her student dance recitals was in Carnegie Hall in New York, which included her own choreography. At Westminster Choir College in Princeton she was a soloist with the Westminster Choir, which performed and recorded with the New York Philharmonic. In the town where Alyda was born, Hutchinson, Kansas, she performed the lead in Cosi Fan Tutti, a rollicking Mozart opera, that she and some other young people put on to the astonishment of many, including myself, just for the fun of it. She continued her ballet as a young mother and also studied the dances of India with Rang Vitthal in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

As a music teacher, “Mrs. Berryman” taught at School of the Woods from 1974-2009, where she shared her tremendous talent and love of music in creative ways with the children she taught. As she often said, “I get to sing and dance all day.” Among her many remarkable accomplishments as a teacher, all done with quiet dignity and a seemingly effortless grace, was taking hundreds of children each year to the opera and then afterwards to celebrate with a proper Italian meal. I loved going on these expeditions and visiting her classroom just to watch her in action.

She also loved supporting young musicians in any way she could, especially through Houston Young Artists with Sho Hao Pao, The Houston Boychoir with Carole Nelson and through her own after-school music program. You heard some of the students from the after-school program she started at School of the Woods during the prelude and the boys of the Boychoir have donated their voices and love of music to her today as they join us to say good-by.

Thea was a real teacher, always thinking about teaching music and the children she taught. The trunk of her car is still full of works in progress for her teaching. For Thea music was everywhere and in everyone, as the series of lessons she created called “Music from the Beginning of Time” eloquently showed. Music makes the qualities of goodness, beauty, and truth as well as faith, hope and love possible, especially if you were taught music by Mrs. Berryman.

Do you children from School of the Woods remember the only rule in Mrs. Berryman’s music room? Sometimes teachers have long lists of rules, but in the music room there was only one. It was to be kind. When you were kind the problems got solved and that is worth remembering as you grow older. Being kind is a kind of strength that is very powerful, even if many people are afraid to try it. Mrs. Berryman was not afraid to try it in her classroom or in her life. Music is good for your soul, at least the kind of music that Mrs. Berryman taught you, and the quality of your soul is what really mattered to her, because that is where being kind comes from.

So we say good-by to --- “Thea,” “Mom,” “Grammy,” “Mrs. Berryman,” and “Alfa Dog” --- with the drummers drumming, the guitars playing, the Boychoir singing and all of us joining in to give thanks for the gift that God has given us. This place, which Thea loved, is a house of stories so it is fitting that her story comes to an end here in the midst of your love and amid the beauty, truth and goodness of God expressed in the stone, glass, wood, words, people and music around us. And when we have finished saying good-by we will go out and on our way, singing of joy. Thea would like that, wouldn’t she!

AMEN.

With love by her husband,
The Reverend Dr. Jerome W. Berryman

Homily
The Burial of the Dead, Rite One
St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Houston
February 6, 2009