Celebrating the life of Marianne Mallory
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Celebrating the Life and Ministry of Marianne Brooks Mallory
January 30, 2013
Fr. Don Hamer
I want to begin by welcoming on behalf of the congregation Marianne’s niece, Susan Guinn, and her husband, Eddie, who drove up from South Carolina on Sunday morning to represent the rest of Marianne’s extended family who are unable to be with us in Hartford today. Susan has shared with me several times the family’s understanding of how important this congregation was to Marianne and how central its ministry was in her life.
And yet, as involved in the life and ministry of Trinity as Marianne was, she was such a private person – I’m told that runs in the family – that even those who knew her best didn’t know a whole lot about her. For almost all of us, knowing the story of Marianne’s life is much like what we know about the life of Jesus: We know he was born, and we know some of what he did at the end of his life, but we don’t know a whole lot about those mystery years in between.
What I have learned in the past week helps me to understand the woman whom I have only known for about 9 years.
- She was born on June 30, 1933 in Idaho.
- As a high school student she attended the Westminster School for Girls in Atlanta.
- Marianne earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Georgia State University in 1955. Her niece, Susan, quite a few year’s Marianne’s junior, remembers “aunt” Marianne as being a beautiful young woman who always engaged the younger children with games and neat toys – she was a fun aunt.
- Following college, Marianne went to work at an orphanage, somewhere out west of the Hudson.
- Sometime in 1962, I learned this morning, she moved to Connecticut and in 1969 she moved to Hartford and joined Trinity Church. Within the space of a few years, she fell in love with and married the much beloved sexton of Trinity, Jesse Mallory on Sunday, April 29 1972 during a Sunday service. They lived happily together until Jesse died of cancer in October 1984; one week later, she had to travel to South Carolina to bury her beloved mother who died suddenly and unexpectedly. A lot of pain and loss in a one week period.
- Marianne worked in the early days of electronic data entry as a key punch operator for the Aetna, at which I am told she excelled, and when those skills were no longer needed in the business world, she joined the business office for Williams Chevrolet in West Hartford.
- Marianne’s ministries at Trinity have been many and varied. She has served as Directress of the Altar Guild, and she continued to serve Altar Guild at the 8 a.m. service right up to the time of her death. She was the Directress of the Guild of the Christ Child and an active member of the newly-created Trinity Chapter of the Daughters of the King. She was a minister of communion and a worship leader, and served at the morning weekday Eucharists before that service was discontinued several years ago. She has served as the Monday office volunteer for as long as anyone can remember, and she stuffed 200 bulletin inserts into 200 service leaflets each and every week.
- She was also an active member of the Parkville Senior Center and the 33’er club – the latter of which was a club consisting of people born in 1933 which Marianne found out about by responding to an advertisement in Yankee magazine. Perhaps more than any other activity, Marianne so looked forward to those bi-annual trips to various destinations with the members of that group – the most recent trip being only months ago. Her hobbies included being a pen pal – which was the primary mode of communication for the 33’er club – collecting souvenir spoons, travelling to places she had never seen before and gathering picture postcards at those places, and attending plays at the Hartford Stage Company.
- But nothing defined Marianne’s passion for ministry more than her love for children – perhaps pre-visioned by her work at an orphanage right out of college. One of her first ministries at Trinity was as the nursery attendant – another position she held for more than 40 years until the time of her death. And on weekdays she devoted herself to nurturing young people as a tutor for children on Asylum Hill both at West Middle School and as a part of the Connectikids after school program. Each year, she sponsored a child through the Christian Children’s Fund.
I rehearse what may sound like a laundry list of the things that Marianne has done because they serve as a window through which we can begin to more fully appreciate who she was. Like an attorney who doesn’t have a lot of direct eyewitness evidence, we can develop a case for an appreciation of who Marianne Mallory was by the circumstantial evidence of what she did. And the word that keeps coming to the top of my list is, “faithful.”
Marianne Mallory was a faithful person. She was a faithful wife, a faithful parishioner, a faithful minister of God’s mission in the world. She believed to her core what the writer of 1 John writes in the passage we just heard: See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God and that is what we are. . . Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him. Marianne didn’t just believe that – she lived it.
This church was her second family. She virtually never missed a Trinity event, be it a worship service, an adult forum, an Adult education program, a Lenten soup supper, a Brotherhood of St. Andrew breakfast. She knew the importance of Christian community and lived it fully. To a generation of children, Marianne was the first face of Trinity Church that they remember. Even though she never had biological children of her own Marianne’s love and nurture of God’s children in the neighborhood and in the parish was reflective of her wider understanding of each and every person as being a brother or sister in Jesus Christ, a beloved, valued and unique child of God.
Through whatever pain or loss she suffered in her life—a life somewhat ironically lived both in the midst of community and at the same time in considerable solitude – Marianne was faithful to her God and to her fellow human beings. Like Job, she had the faith to live life to the full even to the very end, owning as her own the words of Job when he said, “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth, and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side. . . Marianne was not afraid of death – she understood it as part of life, and she was comfortable in the knowledge that she would one day join her creator. In the meantime, right to the very end of her life, she understood her ministry to keep on keeping on, doing what she could when she could do it, to further God’s mission through the church that she loved with the people she loved.
And so as we celebrate Marianne’s life this morning, her gift to us is her example of faithfulness to appointed service, serving as a reflection of God’s love for each and every one of God’s children. May her memory live on as we strive to follow her faithful example. Amen.