Dale King studied the scriptures every morning of his life since his college days. He also loved reading the seventeenth-century English Puritans. A favorite, Richard Baxter said about death:

“If a man that is desperately sick today, did believe he should arise sound the next morning; or a man today in desperate poverty, had he assurance that he should tomorrow arise a prince: would they be afraid to go to bed?”

He loved reading Spurgeon, the magnificent Victorian pastor, who admonished:

“Never fear dying, beloved. Dying is the last, but the least, matter that a Christian has to be anxious about. Fear living… that is a hard battle to fight, a stern discipline to endure, a rough voyage to undergo.”

“A good character is the best tombstone. Those who loved you and helped you will be remembered when forget-me-nots have withered. Carve your name on hearts, not on marble.”

He loved the seventeenth- century British poets. His favorite, George Herbert, said:

“Only a sweet and virtuous soul,/ Like seasoned timber never gives./ But though the whole world turn to coal,/Then chiefly lives.”

John Donne, another seventeenth-century poet thundered:

“Death be not proud, though some have called thee/ Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so…./ Death shall be no more ; death, thou shalt die.”

So. Why all the quotations? My heart is so broken that I cannot do this. Words….Words….Words!So inappropriate a medium for measuring immeasurable grief and loss. Forgive me. I must borrow language. I must borrow from the Apostle John who, under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, resorted to outrageous understatement in rehearsing the untimely loss of a beloved and respected colleague:

“There was a man sent from God whose name was John [the Baptist]. He was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that light.”

In my life, and in the life of thousands of other students spanning the globe for over six decades: “There was a man sent from God whose name was Dale….” He, too, in the sovereignty of God, from before the foundations of the world, was sent to bear witness of Christ, the Light.

One of the best days of my life was an early fall morning in 1975 when I sheepishly stepped into Dale King’s Victorian literature class. A man with sparkling, dancing eyes; a robust beard; a winsome smile; a zest for life and literature. And—for the first time in my life—I thought I must have encountered a saint with the gift of glossolalia! He spoke in another tongue—the tongue of angels?— and with the voice of God. I was at the burning bush: I spent my first hour as a liberal arts undergraduate desperately trying to write in a notebook—phonetically—each polysyllabic nugget that dropped from his lips.

He kept me after-class that day. I was terrified that he was going to tell me that liberal arts education was reserved for scholars, not back-woods, ignorant hicks such as I. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and thanked me—with grace, charm, and elàn—for transferring to Malone from a nondescript, non-accredited Bible institute, and for picking up on the biblical allusions from his selection of Victorian essays for that first day. While wooing me in that sonorous Dale-King tone, he tipped too far in his chair, fell backward into a deft backward roll that any accomplished gymnast would have had to respect, picked himself up, returned to his chair, and, all the while, kept right on talking—didn’t miss a beat.

I fell in love. Hopelessly. Irrevocably. Soul-mates. Forever. My years at Malone, both as a student and, later, as a professor, were rich times, indeed: a few moments to rub shoulders with remarkable mentors in the Kingdom of Christ: Bob and Zovinar Lair, Burley Smith, John Bricker, Coach Bob Starcher, Carlene King.  Never, however, had I met another man like Dale.

The poet, J. Frederick Nims, in “Love Poem” attempts to capture the essence of such a beloved one. Nims admits that his wife is “his clumsiest dear,” one who is “a wrench in clocks and the solar system;” that is to say, she is someone who is clearly not a candidate to host a home-repair show.

Neither was Dale. He was not the one to set the timing on your carburetor or to trim back the giant oak tree towering over your house.  In the words of Nims, he had “no cunning” in fix-it situations, EXCEPT:

“Except all ill-at-ease figiting people.

The refugee uncertain at the door,/You make at home.

Deftly you steady the [broken, the reeling] on his undulant floor….

….Only/with words and people and love you move at ease

In traffic of wit expertly Maneuver/and keep us/all devotion at your knees….”

When I met Dale, I was hopeless. Raised in the shadows of the soot- belching smokestacks of Plant two of the Firestone factory in Akron, imagination was the only resource I had. It was the only escape one had from a world that seemed to have little opportunity, when all one ever saw was what was outside the front door. By high-school graduation, hope had been beaten out of me. I was broke, and I was broken. Ill-at-ease. Suicidal. God used Dale and Carlene to save my life, and to give me one. Dale tried his best to teach me literature but—far more than that—he gave me hope. (The apostle Paul insists in the conclusion of his letter to the Romans that we are saved by hope.) In the wonderful film Saving Mr. Banks, Walt Disney echoes the primacy of hope in a remonstrance to Pamela Travers, the author of Mary Poppins:

“That’s what we story-tellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again, and again, and again.”

What Dale did for me is redolent of a scene in Wendell Berry’s magnificent tale “Nearly to Fair,” in his book That Distant Land. In this story, a kind, gentle man comes across a small boy who has just been verbally abused (a staple in this child’s life) and left sobbing and cowering on the sidewalk. Dale, like the man in the story, looked at me in all my cowering, shivering, craven fear—looked into my bankrupt heart and announced to the whole world: “If you don’t mind, I’m going to borrow this boy for a while.” He picked me up, nestled me into his capacious heart—and he loved me.

More than my teacher, more than my dear friend, more than my most-loved colleague – he was my dad. To Dale, and the love of Christ that emanated from him, I owe everything. I would not have survived without him. Scores of his students surely must echo that same sentiment.

His crowning achievement, however, is that of winning the heart of his dear wife Carlene: She was my best teacher. Smartest person I know. The very definition of savoir-faire. An avatar of grace and charm.Her extension of friendship and love, one of the best things that ever happened to my wife.The final arbiter in all matters sartorial or gustatorial. I am ashamed in expressing my grief in front of her; I am faced with my selfishness. Forgive me, Carlene. Your grief must seem inconsolable.

Yet a little while, Carlene, and all of us who have tasted of the grace of Christ will re-unite with Dale in a place unencumbered by time or grief or doctor appointments, or medication. And Dale will have the Jordan Pond bars. And the party will begin.

As many of you know, my father was not a man given to linguistic excess: he had sufficient respect for the power of words that he would not use them lightly. For example, if he were eating a particularly delectable serving of prime rib, he would never have declared it “the best prime rib ever,” because he would have readily recognized the possibility that there might be still better prime rib out there somewhere.

I have inherited this penchant for linguistic precision, and showed signs of it even at an early age. Apparently, at some point during my younger years, I told my father something to the effect of “Daddy, of all the fathers I know, you’re definitely in the top five.” Far from being insulted, he was both delighted and touched, because he recognized that this was no mere outpouring of well-meaning but childish hyperbole; it was a carefully considered declaration of my affection.

I have also inherited my father’s — and mother’s — love of literature, and my husband claims that I can’t get through a day without quoting some of it (my response to this assertion was “Why would I want to?”). I turn to literature for entertainment, but also for edification and encouragement, which is why I chose to include excerpts from certain poems in today’s program.

In the first poem, “Death, Be Not Proud,” John Donne is essentially challenging Death, telling Death, “You may think you’re all strong and tough, but you’re really not that impressive — or permanent — after all.” In Anne Bradstreet’s “As Weary Pilgrim,” Bradstreet builds on the idea of the transience of life and death through the Biblical metaphor of Christians as pilgrims traveling on a journey to heaven. Like my father, Bradstreet lived long enough to grow weary of the physical as well as spiritual challenges of this world, and eagerly anticipated moving on to the next world. Bob Lair, one of my father’s closest friends, who passed away a few years ago, offers a more recent perspective on this concept. I especially love the image of being “catapulted into the arms of Jesus.”

I know that not everyone shares my family’s fondness for poetry, but I do hope that over the next few days, you’ll take some time to read over these excerpts on your own, and let the wisdom and beauty of these poets’ words minister to you. However, whether you do or not, I’d feel remiss if, at a service for my father, we didn’t read at least one full poem aloud, so let’s take an extra minute or two now for the final poem mentioned in the program, by my father’s favorite poet, George Herbert:

 

Death

By George Herbert

Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,
Nothing but bones,
The sad effect of sadder groans:
Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.

For we considered thee as at some six
Or ten years hence,
After the loss of life and sense,
Flesh being turned to dust, and bones to sticks.

We looked on this side of thee, shooting short;
Where we did find
The shells of fledge souls left behind,
Dry dust, which sheds no tears, but may extort.

But since our Savior’s death did put some blood
Into thy face,
Thou art grown fair and full of grace,
Much in request, much sought for as a good.

For we do now behold thee gay and glad,
As at Doomsday;
When souls shall wear their new array,
And all thy bones with beauty shall be clad.

Therefore we can go die as sleep, and trust
Half that we have
Unto an honest faithful grave;
Making our pillows either down, or dust.

Herbert beautifully understands a point that C. S. Lewis makes in his novel The Screwtape Letters. The premise of this novel is that the character Screwtape is a senior demon with a long and successful history of tempting humans and keeping or leading them away from God, and now Screwtape is writing letters to his nephew, Wormwood, an inexperienced junior tempter who needs his assistance. Since the novel is set in wartime, young Wormwood is excited about the death and destruction, but Screwtape warns him that death is only to their demonic benefit if those who die are not Christians. He notes of humans that “They, of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good. But that is because we have taught them to do so. Do not let us be infected by our own propaganda.” As Herbert attests, death may indeed be the “prime evil” if we “look on this side of” it. And as Screwtape recognizes, death is also the “prime evil” for anyone who hopes to be saved by his own merits, or for any reason other than Christ’s sacrifice.

However, my father did not believe hell’s propaganda, did not think of death as the “prime evil.” He knew that, as a flawed human being, he would see heaven only by trusting in Christ’s blood, shed for our sins and validated by Christ’s resurrection. Yet because he did have this faith, he was not afraid to die; he saw death as “fair and full of grace … much sought for as a good.”

My father would have said his sins were many — and I think we could each say the same of ourselves, seeing our own hearts more clearly than even the people closest to us can. But most of what I saw in my father was worthy of praise, admiration, and emulation. I’ll close with these two examples my mother shared with me just the other day….

“Soon after I married your father,” she told me, “we were at a picnic for the children of our church, and someone got into a bee’s nest. I just grabbed the nearest kid and ran, and others were doing the same — but when I looked back, there was your father. He was standing over the nest, letting himself get stung multiple times, until everyone else could get a safe distance away. This showed me the character of the man I had married.”

My mother then noted that even after forty-five years of marriage, his character had stayed much the same. “In recent months,” she said to me, “I’ve often had physical issues that required me to ask for his help, and if he was sleeping, I’d have to wake him up. Whenever I did, he’d always turn to me with a kind smile, as if to say, ‘I’m so glad to see you.'”

When my mother shared these examples with me, I cried, and am crying now as I type them up, and may cry again when I hear them read. My father often said, “The best gift a father can give his children is to love their mother.” I don’t think he was the origin of this insight, but he certainly lived it on a daily basis.

Out of respect for his and my aforementioned linguistic precision, I’m still not positive I could say he was the absolute best father in the world … however, it’s very hard for me to imagine a better one.