At your funeral, the little things you did will be what people remember. Your obituary will name the big things, the accomplishments and beneficence. But at your funeral it is the little kindnesses that will be most remembered.
The Gospels, in some sense obituaries of Jesus Christ, lay out His great accomplishment for us on the cross and also tell of His resurrection, the feeding of the five thousand, and the sermon on the mount.
But, the Gospels devote far more words to describing the little things Jesus did, His hand extended to heal, His heart reaching out with forgiving words, His welcome to little children.
You may never have heard of Henry Liddell (pronounced “Little”), but a little thing he did has touched you. Born in 1811, dying in 1898, he was Dean of Christ Church, Oxford for nearly forty years. That was a very great thing, but it is not what most touched you from his life.
The Oxford English Dictionary, the greatest dictionary ever published for any language, now in twenty ponderous volumes and three supplemental volumes, might never have happened if it were not for Dean Liddell. Or, at best, it might have been called the Cambridge English Dictionary.
Dean Liddell was the head of a group called the Delegates of Oxford University and the Oxford University Press. James Murray, the first Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, who was ready to give up on Oxford and go to Cambridge University for support, would never have gotten the go ahead with Oxford were it not for the support of Dean Liddell among the Delegates. Liddell’s was a great contribution to this greatest of works in English. But that is not what touched you from his life.
Dean Liddell also edited another dictionary, this one in Greek. His Greek-English Lexicon has been used by all students of Classical Greek for almost one hundred forty years. It contains and carefully defines every word from every ancient Greek document, from the works of Homer and Hesiod, to all the Classical Greek authors, to the complete Old Testament Septuagint and the full New Testament. It is absolutely invaluable in the study of Greek. But, even if you read and study Greek, his Lexicon is not what has most touched you from Liddell’s life.
Y0u will have heard of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. That was really just the preface to Henry Liddell’s complete History of Ancient Rome. But, that, too, was not the thing about him that has most touched you.
But neither this great Greek Lexicon, nor his Roman history, nor his place in starting the even greater Oxford English Dictionary, nor even his long years of service as Dean of Christ Church, Oxford is why you should remember him.
He is remembered today primarily for a little thing, a simple kindness. And that little thing was talked about at his funeral more than anything else he did.
Mourners remembered that on a Sunday afternoon Dean Liddell took his children to row up the river out of Oxford for a picnic. His little kindness was to invite along to their picnic a poor, struggling mathematics tutor who lived alone at Oxford. “It is going to be a lovely day today, don’t you think?” Liddell said to the math tutor as he motioned form him to join them in the boat.
After the picnic they all laid back on the grassy bank and read books, all but one, Liddell’s youngest daughter who could not yet read. She was getting very tired of sitting by her sister on that grassy bank and having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, and what is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?
So she was considering, in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a chain of daisies would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking all the necessary daisies, when, suddenly, a white rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her through the grass.
And the little girl, named Alice Liddell, turned to the mathematics tutor, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who later took the pen name Lewis Carroll, and asked him to tell her a story. And he did. He started it with little Alice on the grassy bank on a hot summer’s day and a white rabbit, although, in Dodgson’s version the White Rabbit was seen to take out of its waistcoat pocket a watch and to mutter, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!”
Later that same year, as a Christmas present to little Alice, and to return Dean Liddell’s kindness, Dodgson wrote out the whole tale and sent it to them, with thirty-seven of his own drawings, under the title Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The book has never been out of print and is now available in 150 languages.
Dean Liddell is remembered by few as the progenitor of the Oxford English Dictionary and by some as the author of the Greek-English Lexicon, and he is memorialized at Christ Church, Oxford, and there are two streets in Ascot now with the names Liddell Way and Carroll Crescent, but every English-speaking child, young or old, probably including you, is thankful that he did that one little thing, that simple kindness, of asking a lonely colleague to join them on a Sunday afternoon.
Little things, little kindnesses: in the end they weigh greatly.
It’s going to be a lovely day today, don’t you think?