She wrote about it herself, three years before she left.
She was singing a hymn in her living room during the pandemic — alone with me, separated from her church, the way everyone was separated that year — and something happened that she felt she had to write about. She sensed, in the middle of the singing, that she was not alone. That she was part of a choir that stretched back eight hundred years to St. Francis of Assisi, and forward through time to voices she could not yet see. We, who are so very time-conscious, she wrote, forget God has no such limits.
She understood the communion of saints not as a doctrine but as an experience. She had felt it in song.
And she had spent her life building it, one relationship at a time. The women in Chad who opened their Bibles in the heat with no electricity and no comfort but the presence of God and the company of a woman from Pennsylvania who loved them without condescension. The women in Ecuador and South Africa who heard the same message she carried everywhere she went — that God’s love is real and sufficient and the only safe place in a suffering world. The hundreds of young women who moved through her care over thirty years at two colleges, and who stayed in her life afterward because she would not let go of them, and because they could not let go of her.
Nouwen, writing to his father six months after his mother’s death, places her death inside the Eucharist — inside the great ongoing proclamation of Christ’s dying and rising. He says that every time the Eucharist is celebrated, her death is remembered alongside Christ’s death, because she was so intimately united with him in life. Her dying has been gathered into the worship that does not end.
I have been thinking about what Carol would make of that claim. And I think she would not find it surprising at all. She would say she always knew the choir was bigger than the room. She would say she wrote about it from her living room in 2020, watching the birds and the butterflies and chopping the vegetables for dinner, and it seemed perfectly natural and perfectly true that the praise of St. Francis had not gone anywhere.
She has simply taken her place in what she always believed was there.
And the hymn she loved so well — let all things their Creator bless, and worship him in humbleness — is still being sung. By a choir larger now than it was on December 21. By a voice I can no longer hear with my ears, but which I am learning to hear in other ways.
O praise him. Alleluia.