Burial: William O. Ducworth Jr.

Jack Hardaway

“Father Jack”, as he is affectionately known, has served the parishioners of Grace Episcopal Church as their rector since 2004.

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Burial William O. Ducworth Jr.
21 August 1961-16 February 2018
19 February
Jack Hardaway

To know Bill Ducworth is to be simultaneously in love and infuriated pretty much all the time.
He had this manic vitality that was catching, always on the verge of tipping over the edge into neurotic distraction, well maybe a little over that edge, especially sometimes.

Bill was always recruiting people for the cause, inviting, encouraging, training.
The cause was much bigger than the adult or children’s choir, or how to decorate and design, or make music.
Those were all outward and visible signs of an inner and spiritual calling.
The cause was the glory of God, the beauty of God, to attend to that singular Beauty, to praise that beauty that brings vitality to all living things and to in turn make beauty ourselves.
The cause of the beauty of God shaped and moved his life.

It was a sort of a spiritual obsessive-compulsive disorder for him, and for the rest of us it was a lot fun and frustration to be caught up in his wake.
That kind of vitality, it’s so easy to fool ourselves into thinking it can’t end, it can’t run out, it can’t die. It is always a shock when such liveliness ends.
Death, that thief in the night, it really caught us all off guard this time.

There was so much more to do, and say, and talk about, to give and forgive, to finish and begin. And that time is past. It is now time to let go.

So as Southerners, we tend to elevate our dead to the point of worship, to cling to them. It is a habit that we have that is hard to break.
The challenge of Christian faith is to step that adoration down to veneration, to letting go and finding in this particular, unique human image the image of God.
Our faith requires us to do more than remember, more than grieve, more than celebrate and give thanks. We do all those things, but we also find God and how God was made known to us in this person.
The Gospel according to Bill.
The beauty of God, it just dances, for the sake of being. There is no utility about it. It just is.
In beholding the beauty of God we are all made more alive.
Bill reminded us of that cause that brings life, that is vivacious.
The vitality of God, it is shown through Bill.
The beauty of God- it dances us all into life- it wakes us from our sleep
Bill is dancing into that life, the dance of resurrection that is the fullness of the Beauty of God, that Beauty that is Jesus the Risen Lord.
Join the cause.