Charlotte’s Poem

Charlotte, my niece,  wrote and delivered this very great poem at my father’s memorial service!

Poem for my Grandfather’s Memorial Service

http://ashlockcharlotte.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/poem-for-my-grandfathers-memorial-service/

Memories of my father

I just came back home from my trip to Kansas for my father’s memorial service. All of my father’s 8 grandchildren were able to come (Samuel, Joshua, Hannah, and Benjamin Cole; Charlotte, Peter, and Richard Ashlock, and Walter Magellan Musser), my father’s twin brother Arthur, and other dear friends who packed out Danforth Chapel at the University of Kansas. Many people shared their memories about my father and this is what I said:

Richard Cole April 2nd 2013- October 29, 1929.

My father was an excellent father and was a very wise and virtuous man. He honored truth and wisdom so much that he made it his full time vocation and actually got paid for it. Somebody once told me that someday I would become wiser than my father, but I am not sure if that day will ever come. We spent a lot of time discussing history and technology and religion together late into the night on many occasions. He was an outstanding father and friend and mentor about life from the beginning of my life to the end of his. I remember asking him about him recently about if knowledge and wisdom has been passed down from the ancient Greek philosophers to modern philosophers, what if one or a couple generations would drop the ball? He said that would never happen because ideas are captured in books, as long as there are books, people can read those books and rediscover those truths again and again. My first memory of my father is giving us baths and telling us Mark and Wendy stories about our invisible, intangible rabbit ears and about the ogre who lived in the basement and the old ghost lady who lived in the attic. At the end of each of those stories he would always say: Good Night, Sleep Tight, Wake Up bright, To do what’s right with All your might. And that is what I have learned from my father. The answer to the question “Why Am I Here?” is to do what’s right with all my might.

7 sprinkles

…he shall sprinkle some of it with his finger seven times before the atonement cover.

-Moses (Leviticus 16:14)

The Sunday morning after my father died I visited this statue of Holy Moses.

 

Sprinkle 1

The blood from my forehead that I sweated in the garden the night before. I was praying hard and my disciples were sleeping. I was concerned about tomorrow.

Sprinkle 2

The blood from my face where the Roman Soldiers wacked me. I just turned the other cheek. They wacked me there too, with a rod.

Sprinkle 3

The blood from my back when they flogged me hard with a Roman whip 39 times.

Sprinkle 4

When they pulled out my beard. They didn’t even put little pieces of Kleenexes to stop it from bleeding extra.

Sprinkle 5

When they shoved a crown of Thorns deeply into my scalp. Father forgive them please!

Sprinkle 6

My hands and feet bled when they hammered them to the cross so they would stick. They wanted to make sure I wouldn’t walk away.

Sprinkle 7

When they pierced my side. I didn’t feel that one, but it still counts as a sprinkle. I was in a temporary state of being dead.