[Oe List ...] Remembering and celebrating Vance

[Marilyn R Crocker]

Dear Colleagues,

It has taken me a week to come to terms with the fact of Vance's
completed life.  During a long telephone conversation a month ago he
communicated his usual passion for life, tempered only by labored
breathing that betrayed his weakened condition.  But somehow I believed
that we would have time for other conversations.

As a new intern in the Order in 1968, I was struck by many of the
qualities mentioned in earlier reflections, but especially by Vance's
radical intentionality.  The broom collection Bob Refos mentioned was one
example of such intentionality.  Even then Vance had an eye-popping
collection of "the brooms of the common people of planet earth" which he
brought forth and displayed from time to time with great panache and
engaging commentary.  When Joe and I were assigned to a teaching trek to
SEAPAC later that year, I came across an unusually shaped broom in Japan
and carried it in my luggage for 3 years until we finally returned to the
US and could give it to Vance.  By then his collection had grown so large
that he was considering donating it to a museum.

Vance was passionately intentional about living and sharing the
intellectual, social and spirit methods of the OE:ICA.  He was an early
member of the Changemasters' Guild, a precursor to the IAF, and through
his own writing efforts, anticipated by nearly a decade our later
corporate efforts to write and publish books on OE:ICA solitary and
participative processes.  In the mid-1980s I had the adventure of working
with Vance to develop and offer an intensive six-day facilitator training
lab for public school teachers and administrators. His lovely wife, Beth,
showed up at the first session and commented, "For years I've heard from
Vance about how wonderful 'OUR METHODS' are -- so I've come to attend
this lab to see what in the world he means!"  Beth soon became a regular
part of our team in offering the program thereafter.

What I especially loved about Vance in all his phases -- from brooms, to
holiday works of art and poetry, to elephants and ashrams -- was his
unwavering decision to live RSI.  He proclaimed life as GOOD; he wrestled
faithfully to embrace the Word of forgiveness, that pronounces the broken
life RECEIVED and the past APPROVED. And he beheld the future as OPEN and
filled with possibility, even in his last conversations.

As Joe says, "I surely will miss Vance just being there."

We both continue to offer thanks for the amazing company of colleagues
who have blessed and continue to inspire our lives.


Marilyn R. Crocker, Ed. D.
123 Sanborn Road
West Newfield, ME 05095
Tel. & FAX: (207) 793-3711
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