This week America mourns the loss of a dear British friend of ours. While there are a number of impatient folks who heard the news much earlier than the rest of us, for many, Sunday night brought the final moments of Sybil Grantham’s young life into our living room.
If you are part of the small minority of people in our world today that have not been living for the past three years on the grounds of an estate known as Downton Abbey, this blog will mean very little to you. For the rest of the world, it will serve as a much-needed opportunity to move together through the next stage of our communal grief.
If there was any identifiable Christ figure in the Downton Abbey series, indeed it was Sybil. Throwing off the shackles of aristocracy, and refusing the silver spoon dangled before her mouth daily, we watched Sybil fight for the rights of women, wear pants in an age of dinner dresses, and volunteer as a nurse during the war. Of the entire Grantham clan, she was the most comfortable among the staff that waited on them hand-and-foot, treating them as equals, as fellow humans. In the end, she made the ultimate commitment to associate with the “common folk” by marrying the families’ chauffeur and sacrificing her very life in the process of giving birth to their daughter.
In one of her final conversations, the produces of Downton offered us a rare glimpse into the spiritual life of Sybil as she shared with her older sister Mary,
“I do believe in God, but all the rest of it, Vicars, feast days, and deadly sins I don’t care about all of that. I don’t know if a vicar knows anything more about God than I do.”
Those that have come to know Sybil would have expected nothing less. Her words, indeed her very life, speak to a desire for authentic faith and an authentic life. A faith that recognizes that we have not just been saved, but we have been saved for something. Her words reminded me of the famous Priest, counselor, author and educator Henri Nouwen who once wrote,
“The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows them to enter into a deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success, and to bring the light of Jesus there.“
Nouwen, who walked away from a lucrative career in the halls of the Ivy League to spend his final days caring for a mentally and physically disabled young man, reminds us what we loved most about Sybil. Her position of power and influence was a post from which she recognized her ability to give, rather than to take, to serve, rather than be served, free rather than oppress. Sybil, while we will miss you dearly, thank you for helping to put flesh on the reality that we are called to be people of incarnational ministry. Thanks for helping us all understand what it means for us to be a peculiar kind of people who follow a God who put on flesh and “dwelled among us.” I speak for many when I confess that you helped me to understand the gospel with greater clarity, and what it means for the world that the Lord upstairs not only knows our name, but was willing to come down and dine with those of us working in the kitchen. And that he came not only to share a meal, but to share with us the infinitely amazing news that he has prepared a room for us in the estate, declaring to us with the same warmth and generosity we caught so often in your eyes, “I no longer call you servants, but friends.” (John 15:15)
Farewell Sybil. Thank you.
