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PERCIVAL ALAN REX McFARLANE, Priest (1928–2001)

Preached in St. Mary’s Church, Paddington, London 2 February 2001

I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. (John 10:11)

Almost exactly forty years ago, I found myself in the role of president of what we used to call the YPF—the Young People’s Fellowship—in St. Philip’s Church, Brooklyn, New York, where I had grown up. Between masses, the youth of the parish served breakfast to the faithful and charged the princely sum of a dollar and twenty-five cents. Now the only people who didn’t pay for breakfast were the reverend clergy of the parish, an awesome threesome, who arrived, at the stroke of ten, in cassocks and birettas. It was on such a Sunday breakfast that one of those priests approached me and, out of the blue, asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I told him I wanted to become an interpreter at the United Nations. Without batting an eyelash, he asked me if I had ever considered the priesthood. I laughed so loud that people stopped eating their breakfast. When I regained some of my composure, I said, “Oh no, Father, I am not cut out for for that sort of thing.” The priest’s retort—he was deadly serious—made me stop laughing. “Harold,” he said, “God does not choose the worthy, he makes worthy those whom he chooses.” “Not a bad line,” I thought to myself, and I promised the priest that I would, like Mary, ponder these things in my heart. That priest was, of course, Percival Alan Rex McFarlane, beloved curate at St. Philip’s and known to young and old alike as “Father Mac.”

Father Mac took charge of my life. He told me to apply to McGill University, and, when I was admitted, he arranged for me to stay at the Diocesan Theological College and to worship at his boyhood parish, the Church of St. John the Evangelist. When, a year or two later, he returned to Montreal, ostensibly to work as chaplain at Her Majesty’s Prison (but really, I suspect, to keep an eye on me) he informed me that, for my soul’s health, I should come to to prison to play the organ for the Sunday services—for free, of course. He was always giving me life lessons. Once, he visited me at college and brought with him a young man who had been formerly an inmate. Alan spent fifteen minutes on the telephone explaining that it would be unethical to let on that I had met this man when he was behind bars while I was the prison chapel organist. He had, after all, paid his debt to society. I assured Alan that I understood. Over sherry, one of my classmates asked Alan’s guest how he came to know Father McFarlane The former prisoner, doubtless also schooled by Alan, replied, “I met him on the outside.”

Today, as we gather to commend Alan to Jesus Christ, the Bishop and Shepherd of our souls, in whose priesthood Alan was pleased to share, we take no small comfort in Jesus’ words in the tenth chapter of Saint John’s Gospel: “I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is an hireling and not a shepherd sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches them and scatters them . . . I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me, as the Father, and I lay down my life for the sheep” (John 10:11–14).

I think this passage is especially appropriate for two reasons. First, Alan was a man who could mouth these words with conviction. Fully aware of his humanness, he could and did put himself in God’s hands, in the embrace of a loving shepherd. He tried to tell me this in our last conversation on the telephone. “Your old Uncle Alan is dying,” he said, in that knowing tone of voice that only the dying possess. And, in a brief moment, all my pastoral training went out the window, and I assumed the role of one who loved him and couldn’t bear to let him go. Instead of helping Alan to prepare for a holy death (not that he needed my help, mind you!), I took the coward’s way out; I was in denial. I knew I would be returning to London on February 19th and I assured him that we would see each other then. Alan was comforted by Jesus’ assuring words, and could, therefore, commend his own soul to God: “I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me.”

But there is another reason that this passage is appropriate. And that is that Alan, as priest and pastor, emulated the Good Shepherd. When all was said and done, Alan would do anything for his friends. It was contrary to his nature to be like the hireling, the paid help who is indifferent to the plight of the sheep, who would run away and leave them to the wolves. Alan had that rare gift of being able to know many people intimately. And he knew us, our “downsittings and our uprisings,” our foibles and our idiosyncrasies, and loved us for them, as we loved him.

We all have our Alan stories. We have been his friends, his confidants, his protégés, his companions, his nurses. At times, we have found him irascible and overbearing, even cantankerous and demanding. Yet through it all, his rapier wit kept us on our toes, his infectious laugh and his radiant smile bespoke his gentleness. When all is said and done, Alan was a loving, caring, human being who touched all of us. He was usually almost all too willing to push the envelope. Bishop Herbert Thompson of Southern Ohio wishes he could have been here today, and he sends he assurance of his prayers to Alan’s family and friends. He, too, is indebted to Alan for having nudged him into the priesthood. One of Alan’s favorite stories about Herb is that before Herb embraced Anglicanism, he was a Methodist. And while still a Methodist, Alan dressed him up in alb, tunicle, maniple, and biretta and put him through the paces of being subdeacon at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Alan took pride in pointing out that the same dyed-in-the-wool Anglicans who were aghast that a mere Methodist would be allowed to be so gloriously arrayed are now dying for the privilege of touching the hem of now Bishop Thompson’s episcopal garments!

So we gather today not so much to mourn Alan’s loss, but to give thanks to Almighty God for his life and the lives of those who he has touched. We give thanks that Alan’s life and witness have made a difference and that many of us are richer for having known him. We are tempted—although the span of Alan’s life managed to equal that of the Psalmist’s threescore years and ten—to say that he was snatched from us prematurely. But that’s our personal agenda. Less selfish reflection enables us to say to Alan, as the Good Shepherd has said to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of the Lord.”

Let us pray:

O what their joy and their glory must be,

Those endless Sabbaths the blessed ones see:

Crown for the valiant, to weary ones rest:

God shall be all, and in all ever blest. AMEN.