Scoppe: Goodbye to an amazing woman who changed thousands of lives — including mine
I MET AGNES Clawson the week after my confirmation. She called me over to the table where she was holding forth in the parish hall, and presented me with a copy of the book she had written to coincide with our parish’s 100-year anniversary. So perhaps it was fitting that I would be able to participate when she spent the final two years of her life working with her youngest son, Robert, to produce a second edition.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Most people reading this never met Agnes, never even heard of her. But she touched my life, enriched it profoundly. And she touched the lives of thousands of others in nearly a century on this earth.
My mother passed away nearly 15 years ago; she was too young to die, and I was too young to become an orphan. Mama Agnes welcomed me into her church, her life and her family, not as a substitute mother but, in some ways, as much more.
All of us have people like Agnes in our lives — or we ought to. People who are full of passion and generosity and Christian love, who teach us about our past and connect us to it, who influence the world around them in ways large and small. It is our job to slow down, to look outside of ourselves for long enough to recognize them. To allow them into our lives to encourage us and instruct us and to bless us. To treasure them, while we still can.
Agnes Pringle Lee Clawson was an amazing and inspirational woman, a model of living a life of faith and being an integral part of a community of faith. She was a walking, talking, living and breathing history book. She had lived most of the history of the Church of the Good Shepherd, and the parts she hadn’t lived, she had researched extensively.
She had been a teacher by vocation and remained one by avocation, conducting the adult lectionary class for the past quarter-century. Every Sunday, she led her class through that day’s scripture readings, blending documented history with her imagined version, as she urged us to imagine for ourselves how we would have reacted to whatever situation confronted the apostles or the prophets or the poets.
She taught the liturgical seasons and feasts and the history of the Episcopal Church and the larger Church Catholic, and how our 21st century traditions traced directly back to the scriptures — from the election of bishops in the apostles’ selection of Matthias to replace Judas Iscariot to priests’ authority to pronounce absolution in the words of Jesus, near the end of St. John’s gospel.
She taught the Book of Common Prayer, stopping every time we read a verse of scripture that she recognized and announcing with a devilish grin that the author “took it straight out of the prayer book,” and then instructing someone in the class where to find that verse incorporated into the liturgy. She talked about the apostles Luke and Peter as if they were old friends and relished teaching her beloved Psalms, always bemoaning the translators’ substitution of “happy” for King James’ “blessed.” I can still see her beaming with delight that morning she asked me to read a passage that included “happy,” and I substituted “blessed.”
She was long retired from her work on the Altar Guild and Episcopal Church Women and vestry and as a lay reader and diocesan delegate by the time I met her. But in the simple act of living her life, she taught us, taught me, what it meant to be deeply invested in her faith and her faith community. When a physician once asked her goals, she replied without hesitation that she wanted to be able to walk up the chancel steps every Sunday and receive the sacrament at the altar. But for a handful of Sundays when she was hospitalized or in rehab, she succeeded.
Even as the Episcopal Church moved in directions she did not condone, she reminded us that the one holy catholic and apostolic church has had far larger disagreements than any we are experiencing today, and that it had survived through two millennia because it had remained focused on its larger mission: Christ’s Great Commission. Schism begets schism, she explained, and she had lived through one in 1977, when the priest and assistant priest and two-thirds of the congregation left to form what eventually would become a Roman Catholic parish. She was part of the faithful who slowly rebuilt our parish, and she would not be a party to putting anyone else through that ordeal.
Agnes devoted her life to family and church, outlived her husband by decades and raised three fine sons, Tommy, States and Robert, all of whom inherited parts of her and all of whom I am privileged to call my friends.
She loved her Wednesday bridge games and her evening toddies and her monthly meetings of the Daughters of the King and the weekly visit from each son, which would become twice- or thrice-weekly sleepovers as her health deteriorated.
For the last several months, Robert’s visits always included a detailed update on the progress we were making on the manuscript she had turned over to us. In the fall, he gave her my edited copy, along with a red pen and instructions to mark anything she wasn’t perfectly happy with. (And no, guest columnists don’t get that privilege.) Just before Christmas, she went through scores of photographs Robert had taken, and picked out the ones she wanted to include in the book. Just after Christmas, Robert read her the introduction I had just written, and she filled in the details I had left blank. The week before she passed away, she signed off on the foreword.
When I visited Agnes a day and a half before her death, I promised we would have her new history published before summer; she was on medication that made it difficult to communicate, but she clearly recognized what I was saying; I like to think it brought her some joy. I have no doubt that her new work will bring joy to all who read it — a final of countless wonderful gifts she has given to our parish, to our diocese and to all of her many students.
Every church has its matriarch and its teachers and its toilers in the vineyards; many have an expert on the history of that church and even of the larger church. The fortunate ones have all of those people. Blessed were those of us who had Agnes.
Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571. Follow her on Twitter @CindiScoppe.
This story was originally published February 9, 2015 at 9:00 PM with the headline "Scoppe: Goodbye to an amazing woman who changed thousands of lives — including mine."