Remembering a Good Man

John Harold Ward Requiem

December 5, 2015

  We gather today to give thanks for the life of John Harold Ward, a true native son of Morgan Hill.  I have come to know John in his days of retirement since moving back to his family home.  John was a fixture at our early services on Thursday and Sunday mornings.  And if John was in town, he was in church.

  From his quiet and gentle and understated manners, one would not immediately guess that John had such a wide and varied life experience.  John was not one for self-promotion.  But just reading about John’s travel, work, and his hobbies one realizes that he had a wonderful sense of adventure.

  As far away as he got from home, his home always had a pull for him.  He did, after all, live in Paradise, Paradise Valley, that is, and who would not want to return there.  The imprint of his native home brought him back to finish his life here.

  If you lived in Paradise Valley then you had the Machado School experience.  John could not have an excuse for being late to school since he lived so closed.  It is amazing how the Machado School identity has remained with so many of its graduates.  There is something special about Machado as a sort of end of an era little red school house.  There is no official sociological study on the phenomena of being a Morgan Hill “townie” or a rural Machadoite, but it could be observed.  Machado was a place where there were so few student that you could not get lost.  Machado School and Morgan Hill schools were influenced by the farming in the valley.  The way John explained the start date of school in the fall was something like a movable feast.  With Bill Britton and John’s father on the school board, school began when the farmers were done with their “child laborers” for the harvest.

  John’s friend from second grade at Machado said that John was always diligent about being good and not getting in trouble.  My own experience of John and his gentle character and his perpetual kindness was that he was just “naturally good.”    I often thought that John was one of the few person I have known who was not affected by original sin.  He just seemed that good without even trying.

  Although, John’s perfection was recently seen in a different light.  His friend John Atkins said that once when they were in high school and they were playing tennis on the courts near Monterrey Road, old 101, John Ward instructed his friend John Atkins to hit the tennis ball over the fence.  This gave John permission to retrieve the ball but while retrieving the ball, John would sneak over to the Orange Freeze and get a candy bar or a snack and then come back to the tennis court.  But his friend said that John did share his snack.

  I guess if this is the worst skeleton in John’s closet, then his good reputation is still intact. 

  There is a saying in rabbinical tradition that when a person dies, an entire universe dies.  When I think of John, I think of the beatitude in the Sermon on the Mount which reads, “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”  I believe that John’s meekness sums up my experience of him.  John did inherit the earth; he inherited the only version of the earth which he had from his own experience.  And the sad thing for you and me is that we enjoyed having a place in John’s universe, in John’s version of the earth.  We enjoyed John’s version of us; we enjoyed John’s irony on us.  I believe that John had a better view of us than we often had of ourselves and it is comfort to know that there are people who do not seem jaded by politics, skepticism and cynicism.  John saw the world and us in a childlike and innocent way without being childish.  The way John saw the world and us is something that I will deeply missed.  I don’t know about you, but I loved being in John’s version of the world.

  And if we thought that John might be a bit too naïve or simple, we were wrong.   We were wrong and the way in which we can know this is to ponder his visions of the world in color.  John was a colorist.  He had to paint.  He had to experiment with color.  He had to experience Pollack, Gaugin, the Impressionists, and Pointillists and be inspired to express and experiment with his own vision of colors.  Within the soft spoken man was a soul of fire full of colors.  He expressed his complexity through his painting.  He did because he had to do it.  He had to release his vision.

  Several years back we discovered that John’s living spaces were just full of his wonderful expressions of color.  There were hundreds of canvases in his garage alone waiting to be in future need of “restoration” if not moved to other places or given other showings.  It was a magnificent event to see the walls Machado School covered from top to bottom with his wonderful work.  You can see a pictorial catalogue in the narthex of John’s paintings that was prepared for this event.  It is wonderful that many people can now share in John’s vision of his world.  We have some of his paintings in our home; they are not just special because we enjoy John’s vision of color.  They are extra special because we had the privilege of knowing John.

  Each day of my life I have a living dialogue with John’s paintings around me.  I see new things; I project onto them; the paintings for me continue to keep me in an active and lively dialogue with John.  And so John will continue to be in our lives with his brilliant color iconography.

  I was told that John received encouragement in art from his Aunt Edith Grace Ward, a professor at College of the Pacific in Stockton, who was a Stanford graduate and quite a prolific artist herself.  It was wonderful that John could combine his passion for art with his career as an educator.  He combined art, teaching, administration and traveling into quite a charmed life.  He lived and taught and served as an administrator in Venezuela.  He traveled and painted in Spain, Italy, Greece and England.  And John had a special group of friends in San Miguel Allende in Mexico.  He would frequent this wonderful place for painting and fellowship often.  I once spoke to John about an experience which we shared, that of living abroad as an expatriate.  Sometimes within our own homes, families and hometowns, we only have a limited number of ways to come to know ourselves.  What the expatriate circumstances did for John was give him freedom to come to know and accept himself as he truly was.  And I believe John was a person who became very comfortable and honest about who he really was.

  In being an expatriate and a traveler, John became something of an Anglophile.  And the curios and Britannia Memorabilia shops were thrilled about his obsession.  He had a vast collection tea cups, teas spoons and thimbles and he loved to share it with those who had similar interests.  John grew up in the best and most famous wayward child of Anglicanism, the Methodist Church.  Certainly the Ward family was a fixture in the Morgan Hill Methodist Church but with John we received back into the Anglican Episcopal fold, this son of Methodism.  And it probably had to do with Anglican liturgy and John’s Anglophilia.  He loved the Rite One liturgy, which we are using today even though it can be difficult to keep saying liveth and reigneth hundreds of time without developing a lisp.  As John’s eyesight got worse, he knew the Rite One liturgy by heart and so he did not even need the Prayer Book.  John served here at the altar as a Eucharistic minister at our 8 a.m. Rite One, Eucharist for many years and his partner Ken played the piano for this service.  The 8 o’clockers as we called them were a very close group.  John was a devoted in attendance at our Thursday morning Rite One Eucharist and he always stayed to listen to the rest of us pontificate about religion, politics and culture, and John’s silence was his way of saying, “When everything is said and done, it’s mostly said.”   John also served on our Preschool Board and he was a very generous person.  John gave because if you enjoyed something it really pleased him.

  It is sometime said that “you can never go home.”  John proved this to be wrong.  He returned to the house of his upbringing and he got involved in many organizations including the Morgan Hill History Society. He spent many hours there organizing the archives there and he was involved in the move of the Hiram Morgan Hill House to its current location on Monterrey Road.  He remained connected with Machado community and supported his brother Paul and Henk Marselis in their efforts at Machado.  His retirement gave him the opportunity to paint, paint, paint and that he did.  And he had various shows for his paintings in the area.

  As a patriot John served in the Army during the Korean war.  He was stationed at Fort Ord in Monterrey.  The majority of John’s teaching career was in Menlo Park and he was active in the Episcopal Church there.

  In our lives we come to be known not as just an individual but as a team, especially with our spouses.  For me, knowing John was to know him as John and Ken.  For me the two were inseparable and we have enjoyed many grand hours of conversation with them.  Some of you, including my wife know that John was a great dancer.  This sometimes understated person loved the dance floor and since I am one who is dancing impaired, my wife Karen was happy to have John as a dance partner.  Jean Pinard, and others can attest to this zest which John had for dancing.

  We cannot end this remembrance of John without acknowledging his affliction and suffering.  John did live a charmed life but he also has on his life resume the fact that he was not exempt from affliction and suffering.  Alzheimer’s is a terrible creeping affliction and it is communal because it affects the community of people who care for a person who often feel helpless to intervene or understand how the affliction is affecting their loved one.  If it was painful for us to watch John in his last days, we cannot truly know how he experienced his affliction.  We who believe in a loving God, also believe that God’s love includes an incredible freedom for lots of things to happen.  We who believe in the Christ believe that Christ is evidence of God suffering in and with us in the freedom of all that can possibly happen in our lives.  In faith, we look for words of meaning for affliction and suffering, if only as coping mechanisms to continue to bear up.  In the words of Donne, “No man is an island,” and we believe that there is a solidarity and connection among us and so we would like to believe that John did his part in filling up what was lacking in the afflictions of Christ.  And so we honor John’s suffering and affliction and we hope that it has brought us deeper training in empathy and compassion.  Most of all, we honor the devotion of Ken to John during his last years; it was truly lived out vows of “till death do us part.”  So we salute you Ken for your care and devotion to the end.

  John loved life; he loved his life; he loved our lives.  John and we, do everything we can do to preserve our lives.  We know that time and the effects of time upon our minds and bodies eventually bring us to the limits of our ability to preserve life.  We can see death as the sword of Damacles hanging over our heads and live with the despair of knowing that we dreamed and hoped for more than we will ever achieve.  But we can also, believe that ultimately this universe is a friendly place, as least as friendly as John was.  And in believing the universe is a friendly place, we can hope that a Great Friend will remember us with a mind and memory to give more than the proverbial “fifteen minutes” of earthly fame. 

  And in believing in a Great Friend with a great memory, we can in faith commend John to God as the Great Friend with a great memory to preserve him forever and reconstitute him in an afterlife worthy of a resurrection act of God.  John was a member of a resurrection community; and to the resurrection from the dead we now commend him in the great train of Jesus Christ.

  John, we thank God for you.  We are thankful that we lived in your world and that you had good versions of each of us who knew you.  Because of you we believe in friendship, meekness, gentleness, kindness and in abundant vibrant Color.

  We bless you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.