Elsa Rylands

Elsa Rylands was born in Bogotá, Colombia on 18 December 1953, the second of six siblings in a family that would shape her lifelong love of music, performance, and community. When she was six, the family moved to Guadalajara, a country village nearby, where her mother Sarah worked as a teacher. The household carried the rhythm of a working mother and a houseful of children, and Elsa grew up steeped in its warmth before tragedy arrived in her twelfth year.

Around the age of twelve, Elsa lost her father, Carlos Para, a talented jazz musician whom she would always describe as her hero. His absence did not silence the music in her life; if anything, it deepened it. She and her five siblings travelled to Bogotá on weekends for plays, concerts, dance, and the kind of cultural air that a country village could not supply. Out of that grief, Elsa built a life that reached toward beauty.

She was, by every account, a girl of unusual range. She played basketball and loved sport in general. She sang in chorus, played the trumpet, and directed theatre and drama productions for her fellow students. In 1971 she graduated from high school alongside her two sisters, Stella and Sarah Patricia, and stepped into the wider world her father had glimpsed for her, working first with her grandfather in Bogotá and then spending time with her Tío Jorge in Puerto Rico.

In May 1974 Elsa came to the United States. She worked as a governess for well-to-do families until late November 1977, when she joined the Unification Movement full-time in Tarrytown, New York. From there she gave herself to missionary work in the Bronx, serving the poor and the unfamiliar with the same energy she had once spent on stage. She remained in that mission until 1986, the year her family began.

Elsa was introduced to Alan W. Rylands of Chicago on 30 December 1980, and they became engaged at once. On 1 July 1982 they were blessed in marriage at Madison Square Garden, among 2,075 couples in a Unification mass wedding. Five years after they first met, their twins Arthur and Albert arrived in 1986. Adele, Alfred, and Edward followed in close succession: five children in six years, and, as the family fondly recalls, an unlimited supply of diapers.

The Rylands family lived three years in a Manhattan apartment before moving to a rental house in Forest Hills, Queens. There were long walks through city parks, long driving vacations with their dad, and the small daily liturgies of a large family. Elsa became a naturalised U.S. citizen, and from 1997 to 1999 she attended an academy in Philadelphia, still learning, still reaching.

Those who gathered to send her on did not call it a funeral. They called it a commencement — a graduation into an exclusively spiritual life. As one minister put it, within a hundred years all who loved her will join her; for now, the separation is only a little while. Elsa heard the call, and she responded. She did very well. Very well.