Remembering Dale Walker - by Belle Boggs & Beatrice Allen
Yesterday Bea and I went to a memorial service for Elizabeth Dale Walker, a minister and friend we met on our bus trip from Burlington, NC to Montgomery, AL almost exactly one year ago. The celebration of Dale’s life was held at Sedgefield Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, where she was interim pastor, beginning in 2005, and which was her home church until her death in March of this year.
Dale was born at Camp Lejeune in 1944. She grew up in New Bern, the daughter of Binford Lafayette Walker and Mary Elizabeth Henderson Walker, and moved to Greensboro in 1976. She graduated from Salem College and in 1992 received a Master of Divinity degree from Duke University—she would have been forty-eight years old when she completed that degree, and forty-nine when she accepted a call as associate pastor at Church of the Cross in Greensboro and was ordained. As interim pastor for Sedgefield, she accepted the role of leading the church through what Reverend Kim Priddy described as a challenging time. Rev. Priddy described the talks Dale hosted back then around challenging conversations around belonging and social justice; never one to turn away from necessary conflict, Dale called them “Welcome Conversations.”
The service was presided over by seven women pastors who knew Dale throughout her long and significant career as a minister, and as close friends who loved her. They each wore hand-embroidered clerical stoles of Dale’s and spoke of being encouraged to pursue the ministry in mid-life, of late nights studying and drinking wine together, of looking around and seeing that there were now more of them—enough to form a group of women ministers and pastors in the area. One pastor, Deborah Suess, told us that she and Dale shared a love of colorful leggings, and held up a pair of Christmas leggings Dale gave her, which she said were “proudly bought at CVS.” Everyone spoke of Dale’s great sense of humor, her generosity, her strengths as a leader and writer and friend.
I’m glad that Bea had the experience of watching this group of women testify to the way that they lifted one another up, in good times and bad, and in a field that, when Dale was born, was not even open to women. We knew Dale for a brief but intense time of bonding, during a bus trip to some of the most important historical places in the American South—Dr. Martin Luther King’s childhood home in Atlanta, 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, the Legacy Museum in Montgomery. Bea was the youngest person on the trip by decades, and I at first worried that the stories we were hearing, about some of our country’s worst crimes against its people, would be too much for her.
Dale, at the time, was mostly using a wheelchair and a walker to get around, and she kindly allowed Bea to wheel her in several of the large museums and spaces we visited. The care and responsibility Bea felt in navigating Dale’s chair through difficult spaces (in both the physical and emotional sense) helped Bea feel both connected to a wise and gentle person, and also like she had a purpose. Which, of course, we all do—sometimes as friends, sometimes as leaders, sometimes as participants in “welcome conversations.”
I’m grateful that we had a chance to know Dale, even briefly.
I was especially moved by the last pastor and friend of Dale’s to speak, Reverend Leslie Klingensmith. She read from one of Dale’s beautiful prayers, and recited the last stanza of “Let Evening Come” by Jane Kenyon, which she’d read with Dale on her last day:
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
Rev. Klingensmith fought back tears nearly the whole time she spoke. Even as she recited these words of comfort and faith, she shared that she felt regret when she thought of the time she had missed with Dale. She had just passed through a busy time in life—her kids grown, her career established—and assumed that she would have more time to reconnect with the close friend she’d studied, laughed, and read with all those years ago. “Pick up the phone,” she told us, when we think of an old friend or loved one we are missing. “Make the call.”
So, Carolyn and Harry and Karen and Tony and Mary Jane and Loy and everyone on the bus—we miss you and think of you a lot.
And to all of you, Frog Troublers (especially those I owe a call or a text or an email): Happy Sunday and more soon.
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