A beautiful garden for final rest: 1-20-15
January 20, 2015
Since the 1980s, one of the beautiful Kansas City area gems has been Powell Gardens, less than an hour east of the city on Highway 50. It has become a world class botanical garden as well as the location of a magnificent chapel designed by famed architect E. Fay Jones.
The Marjorie Powell Allen Chapel (seen in the photo on the left) is used for weddings, funerals and other events.
So Powell Gardens is a place that celebrates both the cycles of nature as well as the cyles of life. And now, near the chapel, it has added a Memorial Garden (seen in top photo) as a place for the scattering or placement of cremated remains of people. It's a lovely spot that I visited recently at the request of my friend Wendy Powell, a member of my church and a member of the family that donated the land for the center.
The Memorial Garden is a semi-secluded spot that allows for the installation of memorial plaques on a stone wall, which in turn helps to define the space. (You can see the chapel from the Memorial Garden but when you're in the chapel it's almost impossible to notice the Memorial Garden off to one side. So they're close but nicely separated.)
Indeed, one of the plaques (photo at right) in place there now commemorates the lives of twin brothers, Bob and Dick Firestone, who grew up just down the street from me in Woodstock, Ill. Their sister, Sally Firestone, lives in Kansas City and has been a great supporter of Powell Gardens.
One of the things I especially like about the new Memorial Garden is that President and CEO Eric Tschantz and his Powell Gardens staff are trying to make sure it is appropriately welcoming to people of all faiths as well as people of no faith tradition.
This fits with the chapel itself, which can be used by people of any religious tradition and, thus, welcomes the entire spectrum of the American religious landscape, which is increasingly diverse.
The seasonality of Powell Gardens (if you haven't seen it in the dead of winter, go; it's a wonderfully different experience from the peak of summer) speaks metaphorically of the seasonality of life itself, and now the botanical center has closed the circle by offering a place where people can arrange to have cremains scattered or placed.
My guess is that some day the Memorial Garden will hold the cremains of more than one couple who began their married life in the adjacent chapel. There will be something profoundly satisfying about that.
(In the top photo, what look like two square stones in the top center of the wall is a small fountain through which water bubbles when the season is warmer.)
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A QUESTION WITH NO GOOD ANSWERS
On his trip to the Philippines, Pope Francis was asked by a young girl why God permits children and others to suffer. It's the old theodicy question of evil, and the pontiff gave exactly the right answer: "She is the only one who has put a question for which there is no answer and she wasn't even able to express it in words but in tears." Well, there are answers, but none of them ultimately satisfies.
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