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.
