The Reverend James R. Squire, Hon.
July 16, 2024
The Class of 1944 Chapel
The Episcopal Academy
There is a poem that captures Rush T. Haines’ life and death. Like all poetry it expresses a depth of understanding of who we are as children of God in life and in death. Many of us have read or heard Dylan Thomas’ poem about night and light. Dylan died at age 39. He wrote this poem to his father.
“Do not go gently into that good night
Old Age should burn and rage at the close of day
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
There are a few interpretations of this poem. The one that I choose that reflects the life and death of Rush T. Haines is the poem cries out for us to live our lives with intensity and fullness. “Do not go gently” in the poem means to give life everything that you have in your cycle of existence by good deeds, justice, and joy.
Our lives reflect how we view death. Old age becomes an extension of the way we have lived life until we leave our contributions here to provide joy, meaning, and purpose to those who are left behind.
“Do not go gently into that good night” is a line that describes Rush in life and death. Leave nothing on the so-called field of play.
He was a force of nature in all that he did and to all whom he loved as friend and family. That is an understatement that hangs in the air over our service today. He was tough and tender and found that balance of those attributes in his relationships with others. While running with my labrador retriever down at the river, with the lease wrapped around my upper arm, my lab did something that she had never done in her years of running with me. She bolted to the left probably to catch a squirrel. I went airborne and came down on my head. I looked like Rocky after the fifteenth round. Rush called me and began the conversation with, “I heard you are starting a dog running school.” Tough! He quickly followed with, “What can I do for you? How can I help?” Tender.
What are the components of his soul? When I first learned about Rush’s final days which came very suddenly, I asked the family what they thought was at his heart. I had already written down my answer to the question. They said, “family, friends, loyalty, and honor.” I smiled to myself when they responded, for they were the same words that I had written down as well on my yellow legal pad.
Rush did not go gently into those aspects of his life. I found those four attributes bundled in his dedication to build this campus with everything that he had. He looked after the building of the new campus as if it was his own home because that is what it turned out to be, his second home. How appropriate that we have his memorial service here in the place that seemed to me to receive so much of his energy and attention. He was one of the key people who made this campus rise from a grassy knoll. Some say that he was the key person in this challenging venture. This chapel is stamped with, what it needed to be like to house, in his opinion, faith, family, friends, loyalty, and honor and he initiated frequent conversations to make sure that he shared the same vision with others for this place.
Do not go gently into that good night. It is the work of the Holy Spirit that the Chair of the Board, when so much of the work here was done, would be a highly esteemed real estate lawyer in Philly. He seemed to be on this campus and our Merion Campus 24/7 so I got to see a lot of him. It was a gift so freely given by him for his work although he did say to me on occasion, “Jim, I got to get to my office. I need to earn a living.”
His loyalty and honor were made manifest when he saw what a person did, not what they said they would do. Suzie told me of an incident that describes his honor. A person met with Rush with a request for a particular use of part of the property which seemed to make sense to Rush. Rush shook hands, no written contract, when another person wanted the same deal and commented that Rush had not signed anything. You can do what you want. Rush said back to him, “I shook hands with him!” That’s as good to me as any written contract.
Rush often talked about the MacMullan Brothers, Hugh, Jack, and Dan who came from the same working-class neighborhood, Lansdowne, as he did and with whom he had so many shared experiences including going to kindergarten with Jack. Rush thought Jay Crawford, was the very definition of what a leader and friend should be, and one of my blessings in life was to share loyalty and friendship with them both.
“Do not go gently into that good night.” Those who had a shared purpose in building this campus, too many to mention, shared in his love for our school.
Faith. The cross that hangs above us today is from the Merion campus. Rush wanted that moved here and it was important that it occur. Suffice it to say that desire on his part would be an understatement. I watched the cross lowered at Merion and put on the driveway to be brought to this campus. I was taken back by how large it is when it is at our eye level. It reflected Rush’ s faith, bring your faith down into you…down to earth…salt of the earth…eye level when you meet people along life’s troublous way and make it a large part of your life.
“Do not go gently into that good night”…live your life to its fullest…tough and tender. Where Rush’s tenderness can be seen is in his devotion and love for his family, in the Latin the Larva Dei, translated family as…the mask of God… where sacred conversations occur…redeeming those precious moments.
Look no further than Suzie, Jen, Christopher, Monty, Anabelle, and Madeline. If I think back to some of my exchanges with Rush, he becomes centered and at peace when talking about his family because, whether you know it or not, you just entered holy ground. I was Jen’s adviser at EA, and yes, she is as special as you and I have heard and experienced over the years as Rush gave voice to his praise, admiration, and love for her. Many of my conversations with Rush began with, “Let me tell you what Jen, Christopher, and the kids are doing. He would launch into a story for he was a person who valued the importance of storytelling.
The same goes for Suzie. Gosh to have lived life with their commitment and love for one another is special. One day he asked me a question, “Do you know that Suzie is a potterer? So proud of everything that she did! When Suzie was stricken by cancer, Rush shaved his head as a gesture of support. One of my great memories is being on Nantucket for several days to bless the marriage of Jen and Christopher. It was a love fest including family, Jen and Christopher’s friends, Suzie and Rush’s friends including some players on Princeton’s football team among others.
Rush could have strong feelings about what he felt was important. Everybody knows that. On the first day on the island, he and I had a disagreement about the wedding when I told him that he would have a more enjoyable time if he realized that Jen, Christopher, and I would make the decisions and we would run them by him and Suzie. He didn’t like that one bit, but I think that he had a terrific experience when he finally realized that was the way that I did things. I knew his motivation was that he wanted it to be so special for Christopher and Jen. I can still see Jen and her maid of honor, Kara Mansfeld Morehouse, another advisee, skipping arm in arm coming up the road by the hotel on the island in shorts arm in arm with unbridled laughter loving life to the fullest. That is what he wanted. That is what the bride and groom gave to him and Suzie.
“Do not go gently into that good night
Old age should burn and rage at the close of day
Rage, rage against the dying light.”
He lived life... to not go gently into life filling each minute with seconds of love, family, friends, loyalty, and honor…combining tough with tender. He was still the rascal when struggling with pain and suffering at the end. When I asked him what he wanted me to pray for in that difficult moment, he simply said, The Eagles. I was looking for something else like peace which passes all understanding which was my prayer for him and his family when I responded.
But there is an irony here. Remember that cross that he had brought from Merion to Newtown Square, the one that when it was brought down was a symbol of someone who did not also go gently into that good night. It was that cross that hangs over us today, that was the center of his life and our school. Before issues of diversity and inclusion were even on anyone’s mind filled with controversy, he welcomed that perspective and embraced all persons the way that the man on the cross did. You heard it in the Gospel reading today, “Love God! Love your neighbor.” We see that as well in the story of the Good Samaritan who were hated because they were Israelites who intermarried with the Assyrians, the Jewish peoples’ sworn enemy from the north. Yet Jesus chooses one of that group of outcasts to be the hero in the story.
Jen picked up that mantle of the importance of welcoming the other, those different from others in any way, in her work in schools. People thought that cross taken from Merion and now hung here was just Rush being stubborn and wanting his way and not what the architect wanted. Nothing could have been further from the truth. That was not it at all. For Rush it was about faith and the tradition of the school. It showed the importance of two aspects of his life and the heart of EA, the central nature of faith in our lives and the continuation of the values, tradition and motto of our school to be seamlessly transferred to our school from one location to another with the kind of faith that was like the man on the cross, sought to embrace all so that our school experience would be making our individual faith deepened by experiencing the faith, maybe different, from another embracing not excluding. Rush never went gently into that good night, and we all individually and institutionally are richer for it.
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