Ok, which forum to put this?? well, Jesus gets honourable mention so why not here?
My dad’s mother’s half-brother’s son’s daughter was Barbara LeWars (grandmother was nee Peat) who was Miss Jamaica in the sixties, I think (no, perhaps it was her sister that was Miss Jamaica - anyways...), and later became Jamaica’s First Lady upon her marriage to Jamaica’s Prime Minister of the day, Michael Manley. So dad had this address transcript in his possession from his mother’s effects which he kept after her death.
And I need some typing practice, so…
On behalf of Bishop Clark and myself, on behalf of all who have gathered here today, and the many others who cannot be with us, I express our deepest sympathy to Michael, to Barbara’s parents and sisters, and to all the other members of the two families.
On their behalf, I publicly say thanks to all the dedicated doctors, nurses, maids, and friends of the family who served Barbara through her illness as one would a sister and beloved friend.
Barbara Manley created intense loyalties among an ever-growing circle of friends, who counted it a joy and privilege to know her and to be of use to her. In contributing to her well-being, these friends found their own selves enriched. In helping, they were helped.
I have often wondered what her secret was, in this respect. Part of the explanation, no doubt, was in something she herself told me about. A time in her life when she was lonely, desperately needing to be recognised, admired, wanted. For despite the background of a happy home of great love and security, for which she was always grateful, she long wrestled with the problem of finding her own true independent self; of being, rather than just shining. When one is very intelligent, and very lovely, as she was, the question often forms in the secret places of the heart, “Do people like me for my looks and admire me for my wit, or do they like me for myself?”
Out of her wrestling with this problem, she gained those insights, and that maturity, which made her a sort of healing stream, where others found enrichment, and this is the ultimate explanation of her hold on that privileged circle of friends. She was, as Michael said, “a great human being”. And that is the best tribute that I can find to pay to her memory.
Such a humanity cast a wide-spreading interest and light on life around her. It was a delight to watch her catch a new idea, like a ball, and turn it over, and toss it up. Michael shared his knowledge and love of cricket with her, and she became an ardent and fascinated fan, like one who had stumbled into a new world. I introduced her to Zen Buddhism, and there was the same delight: “Oh I do like these Zen masters!” she exclaimed. She had a feeling for words. She was very fond of a quotation from Einstein that I share with her. (“God, “ said Einstein, “is subtle, but He is not malicious.”) She used words well herself and could in a few choice phrases reconstruct a scene or a mood. She once spoke of emerging from a “cocoon of gloom” to do one of her most moving paintings. And once long ago, she transformed for Marguerite the disappointment of a rainy Christmas Eve by a flash of her powerful imagination: “Let’s pretend it’s snowing,” she said – and everything seemed different from that moment.
Those of us who shared the last steps of the long agonising journey that ended last Friday, will not forget the triumphant flashes of humour that she brought to bear on her situation, even when speaking had become an effort of major proportions.
I wish I could linger and expand on these things, but there is too much to be compressed into these few moments, and I must move on to something that was central and vital to her involvement in life, without which no tribute to her would be complete. This is her concern for her country.
The Town Clerk’s daughter, who lingered near her father’s chair while politicians came and went, grew up with an ideal of public service that a nation can never safely do without. She believed in party politics, to be sure; she believed in her husband’s party, and she believed in her husband’s leadership. She went with him in spirit on every trip to Alpart, not just as a wife concerned for a husband’s safety, but as a crusader in a cause.
But she saw the party and the politics and the Union as means to an end, as the instruments to create a better Jamaica for all Jamaicans.
Like the Biblical Rachel, weeping for her children, so she bore the needs and the pain of her fellow countrymen on her heart. I was amazed at the range and depth of her passion in this respect. She had begun, under Michael’s tutelage, to become acquainted with the political economics needed to give expression to her concern. She had entered upon the study, for example, of Galbraith’s “New Industrial Society”, and she was puzzled by those wives who were content with nothing more mentally and socially involving than social gossip. Michael’s speech in the Budget Debate had been born in dialogue with her, and was, as he put it, an offering to her.
Above all, she sought and she called for courage. I was speaking with a German of great insight recently, who said that one of the reasons why Hitler’s tyranny took such a hold on the people was that the Germans knew better the courage required on the battlefield than “civic courage” – the ability to check a superior official in public life and say, “This is wrong; we must not do it.”
Barbara wanted to see the growth of a courageous public opinion that would never allow the spread here in Jamaica of things that had happened elsewhere, in other countries. She itemised them for me: things like housing being allocated, not according to human need, but according to party political allegiance; like Work Permits granted not on merit, but for favours rendered, when the night is dark and the curtains drawn; like men, or firms, being swayed in political conviction because they feared to lose a contract, or promotion in a job; like politicians taking graft from little people or big people before doing them service.
Barbara hoped these things would never rear their ugly heads in Jamaica; and she knew that the country’s protection lay, as always, in the ideal of public service that she had learnt from her father, and in the courageous integrity that she saw exemplified in her husband.
Barbara learnt courage in the hard school of her own personal suffering. She looked back on a path strewn with certain failures and a great deal of unhappiness and marked by a few wrong turnings, partly due to a nature that was at that time too timid and too gentle.
Yet she did not pity herself, and I know that when she had cause, in Michael’s company, to revisit the past and to re-examine old wounds, she found them healed and the scars clean of infection. There was no lingering animosity.
You see, friends, I am not drawing the picture of a cardboard or a stained-glass saint. I am telling the story of one who knew in experience that virtues have to be achieved; that courage must be won in the teeth of fear; Faith must wrestle with doubt; love with resentment.
She took with her to New York, and into the cobalt treatment room, and kept by her bedside, a little white prayer book that my wife gave her. She found in it a prayer for daily fortitude, and sustained herself on it, at times when (as she said) “courage was just knowing that the next step would be bearable.”
Her faith in God had had a new start, when just over a year ago God spoke to her in the Nuttall Hospital, following an operation. “I don’t mind who thinks I’m a fanatic,” she said, “but I must speak of this: I am sure God spoke to me – in an experience so intense that I prayed that it may not happen again.”
In April last, she received her first Communion after eight years, and spoke of herself as being brought back “like a bucking bronco” to this expression of her faith: She broke down and cried much on that occasion of special spiritual homecoming. She was willing to die, she said, but wanted to live. Then with characteristic humour, she said, “Forgive me crying like this; it runs in the family; when we weep, we weep like Dunn’s River Falls.”
That faith of hers had to wrestle with doubts right up to the last week of her life, for she was going through an experience that seemed to deny all the beauty of existence. But in my last exchange of conversation with her, I asked her if she remembered how God spoke to her at the Nuttall a year ago, and she said a clear and definite, Yes – the last word I was to hear from her.
I fully understood the reasons for the struggle. In Michael, and in Sarah, her daughter, Barbara had at last found her best dreams come true. One cannot go into this here, of course, in detail. But those of us who were privileged to be their friends over this past year saw a mutual love of unfathomable depth and meaningfulness. They identified with one another and complemented one another, like two instruments in a duo performance. It rang true when she once said that an hour with him was more than a day with anyone else, and a day with him was like a million years without. He brought out the latent possibilities in her, and she enhanced his own courage and freedom to be himself.
Those who know the inside story of his contribution to the Budget Debate knew the inner agony against which it was done, as he reluctantly left Barbara’s bedside during one of the critical hours of her sickness to give a speech forged and wrought out on an anvil of sharp suffering.
To this love of theirs, Sarah was born, and Barbara re-echoed in her experience something her mother had felt when Barbara was born. As the nurse, Hilda Spence, brought Sarah to her, “the whole room seemed to contract (Barbara said) and Sarah became the whole world of her vision.” But Sarah’s story, in the pleasure of God, belongs to another chapter. Suffice it to say, that this love, found with Michael, shared with Sarah, gave Barbara her clue to the meaning of life.
And is this not the Gospel? That God, that Ultimate Reality, is personal love?
One evening at their home, I had been talking with various members of the two families, pressed and plied with questions, and answering as best I could. Next evening, Mrs. Edna Manley said to me, “I’m sorry we pressed you so hard yesterday. As Rachel said, you were like God’s ambassador and we were outside the Embassy staging a protest demonstration.”
I said then: “But, you see, that isn’t quite the right picture. I wasn’t in the Embassy defending. I was out there in the street too – protesting – for I too feel the burden and pain of the mystery.”
“What is more,” I added, “I don’t think God is in the Embassy either. He’s out here with us too, in the street, afflicted in all our afflictions. He is with us in our search for meaning, instigating it, prodding us on.”
And to that I now add one last comment: I believe God wants us all, out there in the street, to be His ambassadors too – not looking for some revelation to drop into our laps from heaven, but being ourselves the agents of meaningfulness, of faith and hope and love, however terrible the situation. Not looking up to heaven with complaints, but looking out upon the earth with dedication.
Mary Magdalene stoops on Easter Morn to look into the empty tomb, and the whole world comes to a stop.
We are in that moment now. But the moment after, Jesus says, “Mary”; and Mary cries out, “Rabboni”.
The flash of revelation is in that leap of personal love. Let us each pray for that succeeding moment to come to us. Jesus has said, “Barbara”; and I believe, with abiding faith and joy, that she whose greetings were always marked by that personal touch, has answered, “My Master”.
Let us then go out to build personal tributes in our own lives to one who was “a great human being”. Let us seek to make a Jamaica worthy of her spirit and her vision, a New Jerusalem, golden with righteousness.
And let us pray, as she did in their Christmas Card of last December, for
* The reference is to Edna Manley’s statue of Mary before the tomb, and the quotation is from Rachel’s poem, “For Mary and My Barbara”.
My dad’s mother’s half-brother’s son’s daughter was Barbara LeWars (grandmother was nee Peat) who was Miss Jamaica in the sixties, I think (no, perhaps it was her sister that was Miss Jamaica - anyways...), and later became Jamaica’s First Lady upon her marriage to Jamaica’s Prime Minister of the day, Michael Manley. So dad had this address transcript in his possession from his mother’s effects which he kept after her death.
And I need some typing practice, so…
BARBARA MANLEY
Memorial Address
9th June 1968
By
Rev. John Hoad
On behalf of Bishop Clark and myself, on behalf of all who have gathered here today, and the many others who cannot be with us, I express our deepest sympathy to Michael, to Barbara’s parents and sisters, and to all the other members of the two families.
On their behalf, I publicly say thanks to all the dedicated doctors, nurses, maids, and friends of the family who served Barbara through her illness as one would a sister and beloved friend.
Barbara Manley created intense loyalties among an ever-growing circle of friends, who counted it a joy and privilege to know her and to be of use to her. In contributing to her well-being, these friends found their own selves enriched. In helping, they were helped.
I have often wondered what her secret was, in this respect. Part of the explanation, no doubt, was in something she herself told me about. A time in her life when she was lonely, desperately needing to be recognised, admired, wanted. For despite the background of a happy home of great love and security, for which she was always grateful, she long wrestled with the problem of finding her own true independent self; of being, rather than just shining. When one is very intelligent, and very lovely, as she was, the question often forms in the secret places of the heart, “Do people like me for my looks and admire me for my wit, or do they like me for myself?”
Out of her wrestling with this problem, she gained those insights, and that maturity, which made her a sort of healing stream, where others found enrichment, and this is the ultimate explanation of her hold on that privileged circle of friends. She was, as Michael said, “a great human being”. And that is the best tribute that I can find to pay to her memory.
Such a humanity cast a wide-spreading interest and light on life around her. It was a delight to watch her catch a new idea, like a ball, and turn it over, and toss it up. Michael shared his knowledge and love of cricket with her, and she became an ardent and fascinated fan, like one who had stumbled into a new world. I introduced her to Zen Buddhism, and there was the same delight: “Oh I do like these Zen masters!” she exclaimed. She had a feeling for words. She was very fond of a quotation from Einstein that I share with her. (“God, “ said Einstein, “is subtle, but He is not malicious.”) She used words well herself and could in a few choice phrases reconstruct a scene or a mood. She once spoke of emerging from a “cocoon of gloom” to do one of her most moving paintings. And once long ago, she transformed for Marguerite the disappointment of a rainy Christmas Eve by a flash of her powerful imagination: “Let’s pretend it’s snowing,” she said – and everything seemed different from that moment.
Those of us who shared the last steps of the long agonising journey that ended last Friday, will not forget the triumphant flashes of humour that she brought to bear on her situation, even when speaking had become an effort of major proportions.
I wish I could linger and expand on these things, but there is too much to be compressed into these few moments, and I must move on to something that was central and vital to her involvement in life, without which no tribute to her would be complete. This is her concern for her country.
The Town Clerk’s daughter, who lingered near her father’s chair while politicians came and went, grew up with an ideal of public service that a nation can never safely do without. She believed in party politics, to be sure; she believed in her husband’s party, and she believed in her husband’s leadership. She went with him in spirit on every trip to Alpart, not just as a wife concerned for a husband’s safety, but as a crusader in a cause.
But she saw the party and the politics and the Union as means to an end, as the instruments to create a better Jamaica for all Jamaicans.
Like the Biblical Rachel, weeping for her children, so she bore the needs and the pain of her fellow countrymen on her heart. I was amazed at the range and depth of her passion in this respect. She had begun, under Michael’s tutelage, to become acquainted with the political economics needed to give expression to her concern. She had entered upon the study, for example, of Galbraith’s “New Industrial Society”, and she was puzzled by those wives who were content with nothing more mentally and socially involving than social gossip. Michael’s speech in the Budget Debate had been born in dialogue with her, and was, as he put it, an offering to her.
Above all, she sought and she called for courage. I was speaking with a German of great insight recently, who said that one of the reasons why Hitler’s tyranny took such a hold on the people was that the Germans knew better the courage required on the battlefield than “civic courage” – the ability to check a superior official in public life and say, “This is wrong; we must not do it.”
Barbara wanted to see the growth of a courageous public opinion that would never allow the spread here in Jamaica of things that had happened elsewhere, in other countries. She itemised them for me: things like housing being allocated, not according to human need, but according to party political allegiance; like Work Permits granted not on merit, but for favours rendered, when the night is dark and the curtains drawn; like men, or firms, being swayed in political conviction because they feared to lose a contract, or promotion in a job; like politicians taking graft from little people or big people before doing them service.
Barbara hoped these things would never rear their ugly heads in Jamaica; and she knew that the country’s protection lay, as always, in the ideal of public service that she had learnt from her father, and in the courageous integrity that she saw exemplified in her husband.
Barbara learnt courage in the hard school of her own personal suffering. She looked back on a path strewn with certain failures and a great deal of unhappiness and marked by a few wrong turnings, partly due to a nature that was at that time too timid and too gentle.
Yet she did not pity herself, and I know that when she had cause, in Michael’s company, to revisit the past and to re-examine old wounds, she found them healed and the scars clean of infection. There was no lingering animosity.
You see, friends, I am not drawing the picture of a cardboard or a stained-glass saint. I am telling the story of one who knew in experience that virtues have to be achieved; that courage must be won in the teeth of fear; Faith must wrestle with doubt; love with resentment.
She took with her to New York, and into the cobalt treatment room, and kept by her bedside, a little white prayer book that my wife gave her. She found in it a prayer for daily fortitude, and sustained herself on it, at times when (as she said) “courage was just knowing that the next step would be bearable.”
Her faith in God had had a new start, when just over a year ago God spoke to her in the Nuttall Hospital, following an operation. “I don’t mind who thinks I’m a fanatic,” she said, “but I must speak of this: I am sure God spoke to me – in an experience so intense that I prayed that it may not happen again.”
In April last, she received her first Communion after eight years, and spoke of herself as being brought back “like a bucking bronco” to this expression of her faith: She broke down and cried much on that occasion of special spiritual homecoming. She was willing to die, she said, but wanted to live. Then with characteristic humour, she said, “Forgive me crying like this; it runs in the family; when we weep, we weep like Dunn’s River Falls.”
That faith of hers had to wrestle with doubts right up to the last week of her life, for she was going through an experience that seemed to deny all the beauty of existence. But in my last exchange of conversation with her, I asked her if she remembered how God spoke to her at the Nuttall a year ago, and she said a clear and definite, Yes – the last word I was to hear from her.
I fully understood the reasons for the struggle. In Michael, and in Sarah, her daughter, Barbara had at last found her best dreams come true. One cannot go into this here, of course, in detail. But those of us who were privileged to be their friends over this past year saw a mutual love of unfathomable depth and meaningfulness. They identified with one another and complemented one another, like two instruments in a duo performance. It rang true when she once said that an hour with him was more than a day with anyone else, and a day with him was like a million years without. He brought out the latent possibilities in her, and she enhanced his own courage and freedom to be himself.
Those who know the inside story of his contribution to the Budget Debate knew the inner agony against which it was done, as he reluctantly left Barbara’s bedside during one of the critical hours of her sickness to give a speech forged and wrought out on an anvil of sharp suffering.
To this love of theirs, Sarah was born, and Barbara re-echoed in her experience something her mother had felt when Barbara was born. As the nurse, Hilda Spence, brought Sarah to her, “the whole room seemed to contract (Barbara said) and Sarah became the whole world of her vision.” But Sarah’s story, in the pleasure of God, belongs to another chapter. Suffice it to say, that this love, found with Michael, shared with Sarah, gave Barbara her clue to the meaning of life.
And is this not the Gospel? That God, that Ultimate Reality, is personal love?
One evening at their home, I had been talking with various members of the two families, pressed and plied with questions, and answering as best I could. Next evening, Mrs. Edna Manley said to me, “I’m sorry we pressed you so hard yesterday. As Rachel said, you were like God’s ambassador and we were outside the Embassy staging a protest demonstration.”
I said then: “But, you see, that isn’t quite the right picture. I wasn’t in the Embassy defending. I was out there in the street too – protesting – for I too feel the burden and pain of the mystery.”
“What is more,” I added, “I don’t think God is in the Embassy either. He’s out here with us too, in the street, afflicted in all our afflictions. He is with us in our search for meaning, instigating it, prodding us on.”
And to that I now add one last comment: I believe God wants us all, out there in the street, to be His ambassadors too – not looking for some revelation to drop into our laps from heaven, but being ourselves the agents of meaningfulness, of faith and hope and love, however terrible the situation. Not looking up to heaven with complaints, but looking out upon the earth with dedication.
Mary Magdalene stoops on Easter Morn to look into the empty tomb, and the whole world comes to a stop.
“There is no motion left
In all the universe….” *
We are in that moment now. But the moment after, Jesus says, “Mary”; and Mary cries out, “Rabboni”.
The flash of revelation is in that leap of personal love. Let us each pray for that succeeding moment to come to us. Jesus has said, “Barbara”; and I believe, with abiding faith and joy, that she whose greetings were always marked by that personal touch, has answered, “My Master”.
Let us then go out to build personal tributes in our own lives to one who was “a great human being”. Let us seek to make a Jamaica worthy of her spirit and her vision, a New Jerusalem, golden with righteousness.
And let us pray, as she did in their Christmas Card of last December, for
“Courage to face truth,
Time to know peace,
and
God’s Richest Blessings.”
* The reference is to Edna Manley’s statue of Mary before the tomb, and the quotation is from Rachel’s poem, “For Mary and My Barbara”.
