And So Fulfill

 Without going into too much detail, I can report that our younger child, who is transgender, has been living in a suburb of Saint Paul for the last year and a half. Per mutual agreement, I am allowed to refer to this young adult, almost 22 years old, as our fabulous queer dragonlet.

So the dragonlet's cell phone died - not "I need to charge my phone" dead, but "I'm going to begin to show the loading screen and then go black again" dead. For eight heart-stopping days, we were not hearing from the dragonlet and getting no response to our attempts to call, text, and email. 

Everything, as it turns out, is fine, and the dragonlet will shortly be equipped with a new, working phone. It's one of those things. 

It was a long eight days.

Somewhere in there - maybe four days in - it occurred to me to activate the bat signal, so to speak. I am blessed with a number of clerical colleagues who live in and around the Twin Cities of Saint Paul-Minneapolis, largely because Minnesota is sort of the domestic holy land for Lutherans. I reached out to a couple of local colleagues privately. Then it finally dawned on me to look up the Lutheran congregation closest to the dragonlet and explain the situation.

Well.

There are one hundred and eight ELCA congregations within a 15-mile radius. As I said - the domestic holy land. I sent an email to the pastor at the one that was closest.

I got a text message: "May I call you?" It wasn't long before we had a wonderful phone call. She was kind enough to identify as a parent of two children about the age of ours (a little younger) - and she was also kind enough to name another connection: she served her internship year at the church where the senior pastor is North Carolina's current bishop. 

Just knowing that I had this pastor-mom carrying my cares in her heart somehow made things better even before we heard from the dragonlet. As the actual Saint Paul, the author of a number of letters in the Bible, writes: "Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep" (Romans 12:15).

And even though the hubs and I knew that we were never alone in this concern, talking with this pastor reminded me forcefully of one of my very favorite instructions from Scripture: "Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2).

At a time when the hubs and I were praying that everything was all right, my colleagues, and one colleague in particular, bore my burdens with me. She wept with those who wept, and rejoiced with those who rejoiced.

I might never meet her in person. But she was my sister in Christ when I needed one, badly. 

What happens to me, and to you, when we bear one another's burdens? Even for those of us who help bear burdens for a living, sometimes we are the ones who need help with our own burdens, and it helps to remember that.

Beloved of God

 The late John Lewis, for many years a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the state of Georgia, has been my hero since I was about 13, which is when I first started paying attention to civil rights (as opposed to being vaguely aware).

And Jon Meacham is a historian I like and admire, having already read American Lion, his biography of Andrew Jackson. So it was what one might call a no-brainer that I would preorder the book when His Truth is Marching On was advertised: a biography of John Lewis by Jon Meacham, with the subtitle John Lewis and the Power of Hope. Preorders being what they are, when I bought the book, six or eight months before its publication, John Lewis was still alive, still showing up at nonviolent gatherings, still telling us never to quit hoping, always to keep marching on.

The book, in due course, got published, and I selected it as an unabridged audiobook. And so I've been listening. But only in measured sections, because it's so hard to hear what is being recounted sometimes. 

And when the narrative took me to the city of Birmingham, Ala., in 1961, with the Freedom Riders on the bus, another character entered the scene and was introduced by his entire name. I've known him for years as "Bull" Connor, the police commissioner of Birmingham. I might even have known that his actual name was Eugene. 

 It turns out that Eugene Connor went by his middle name, as I have for more than 30 years. His first name? Theophilus. 

Born in 1897, Connor received a first name from the New Testament, a common practice in those days. And there's no way of knowing whether it was his choice or his family's to have him go by Eugene instead. But it serves as a powerful reminder, one that made me stop the book and sit and ponder that new information.

Theophilus. It means "beloved of God." It's not even a name, exactly, when it shows up in the Bible. The author of the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts addresses those books to "Theophilus," who might have been a real person, but who would have had a different name, because "Theophilus" is clearly a title. 

Confirmation students, one year early in my ministry, all received T-shirts printed with a "Hello, my name is" stickers, with Theophilus printed on the line. It was a reminder that whatever other names they bore, or nicknames, Theophilus was also who they were.

Bull Connor behaved in ways that were unsurprising for his place and time and probably expected by many of the white citizens of Birmingham. His use of fire hoses, German shepherds, and other vicious techniques were unspeakably horrible - yet visual confirmation of these acts helped capture the nation's attention and force significant and long-overdue change.

And Bull Connor was beloved of God. From his birth in 1897 to his death in 1973, Theophilus Eugene Connor was beloved of God. My brother in Christ. That makes it difficult (impossible, really) for me to think of him only with dismissive contempt. I can grieve, and do, at his techniques, his words, his public life. But it does well for me to remember that he was, as are all of us, Theophilus.

We Never Met

 Every year, as death claims people who are public figures, tension seems to arise between the many people who publicly mourn their passing and those who profess to be baffled. "Y'all never even met ____________," the criticism will say. "How can you be sad about the death of someone you never knew?"

But 2020 increasingly feels like a weird rerun of 1968, complete, it seems, with the death of people whose lives have had particular significance to people who are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color). In 1968, of course, we saw the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. just weeks apart.

This year, the death of John Thompson at 78 comes as just one more blow. Less than a week ago, cancer claimed Chadwick Boseman at 43. Boseman, an actor and a graduate of Howard University, brought to life Jack Roosevelt Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and T'Challa of Wakanda (part of the Marvel Comics universe), among others.

Earlier this year, both Rep. Elijah Cummings and Rep. John Robert Lewis died. Often mistaken for one another, each had brought his own unholy struggle to the House of Representatives, where they advocated for the ideal of what America purports to promise all who live here.

Allen Iverson, retired professional basketball player, has said that John Thompson, then coach of Georgetown University, saved his life. A number of colleges were courting Iverson, assiduously, in both football and basketball. Then, as Iverson puts it, an incident happened, and the recruiting tap was turned off. Iverson's mother interceded, begging Thompson to give Allen another chance. "He saved my life," Iverson said.

Why do I care? Why am I sad because someone I never met has died - whether it was Thompson or Boseman, Cummings or Lewis?

Partly because, as John Donne wrote, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." [1]

But, more eloquently, Carmen Florez, writing in 2017, said: "When we're reminded of their humanity, we’re reminded of the effect they had on so many people, and that’s why we care so much. Not because they’re more important than anyone else, but because their deaths mean something different. They remind us that there are few certainties in life, one of which being that there will come a day where we, and everyone else we know, will no longer be here." [2]

I mourn for the families and loved ones of these men. Not only because of the sharp reminders of mortality in a year filled with such reminders for many people who will die "unwept, unhonored, and unsung"[3] except by those who loved them. I mourn because the country, and the world, are a little smaller and dimmer without them. 

[1] John Donne, Meditation XVII

[2] Carmen Florez, "Why We Care So Much When Celebrities Die," at Odyssey Online.

[3] Sir Walter Scott, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel."