May Our Lord Recieve Her Soul

On Tuesday, 10 November, at 5.15pm, our dear parishioner and friend, Penny, was killed tragically in a car accident just past the Ashley River Bridge, north of Rangiora, New Zealand. Please may we recommend her soul to your prayers. She would have been so grateful to know that she was being prayed for.

Penny was an extraordinary woman. She received the Faith and Holy Baptism in our little Oratory less than a decade ago now. There she found life and friendship amongst the many faithful families. An expression recalls giving the shirt off a persons back, but Penny would have gone and bought you a few too and then ordered more online. A faithful friend and wife, one of those extraordinary women who was never heard to criticise her husband, but only to praise and thank him from the heart. Likewise her dear daughters. That alone was remarkable.

Deeply a philosopher, she had no meaningless conversations, deeply Catholic, she was the hammer of modernism; courageous, empathetic, after the Mosque shooting in Christchurch she spent hours outside it praying the Holy Rosary alone and in silence.

Penny was a struggler and a sufferer, perhaps few people knew the depths of darkness that sometimes surrounded her. Yet even then she could make the best Barista coffee with extraordinary science and care, for us who sat upon Job's heap together in her kitchen.

In her house were to be found many beautiful and old Holy things, most especially of Mary Immaculate. They spoke of a child of Mary.

There is an old poem, more pretty than theological, which says:

    The kiss of the sun for pardon,
            The song of the birds for mirth,
        One is nearer God's Heart in a garden
            Than anywhere else on earth.
        For He broke it for us in a garden
            Under the olive-trees
        Where the angel of strength was the warden
            And the soul of the world found ease.

The writer of this text's last memory of Penny was of her sitting quietly in her garden, at the same time in Eden and in Olivet. May we all be as faithful as was she. If the question that Our Lord will ask us in that awful day will be: "Did you love me", she could truly answer "Yes, with all my heart".

Eternal Rest grant unto her O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace.