They say time heals all wounds, but that’s not exactly true, my grandmother Gladys said. Some days the pain of missing her parents was as intense as it had been soon after they died. But what time did was lessen the frequency of those moments.
I remembered my grandmother’s words after my father died on April 20 in hospice care at home. My last conversation with him was on Easter evening. The night before was rough, and he had been sleeping. But he awakened shortly before my mother handed him the phone to talk with me:
“Christ is risen.”
“Christ is risen indeed, alleluia.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
He died three days later. Since then, this grief I’ve been living with is deeper than any I’ve known.
The word that came to mind was singular. I’ve lost aunts and uncles before, grandparents, mentors, church members, coworkers, and friends. But I had only one father.
He was also singular in the sense of being an exceptionally good father. He asked me recently, as he thought about his life and legacy, what I thought were the foremost values he imparted to me. I responded with these two:
The inherent dignity of all people, which is the center of a wheel with many spokes. To the best of his ability, my father fought against the many ways we humans have to tear each other down (which ultimately harms the souls of those doing the tearing down). He was especially committed to working against racism and economic injustice. He had known the sting of poverty himself.
And long before people were talking about girl dads, my father raised me with an unshakable belief in my equal giftedness and worth. He modeled respect for people of all genders and sexualities in his relationships with colleagues and other lay leaders in our church.
The belief that I can do something about injustice in the world. My father grew up with the plain Anabaptist notion of being “the quiet in the land.” After my grandfather spent a year studying at the Tuskegee Institute in the early 1960s (a story for another time, and a good one), and especially after the events of 1968, my father had a political awakening. It led to his resisting the draft and spending nearly 50 years as an organizer in movements for justice and peace. With all that is wrong with the world, it would be understandable to become apathetic or overwhelmed. My father taught me to keep fighting against any apparent odds.
He loved this quote from Bertolt Brecht’s poem “To Posterity”:
There was little I could do. But without me
The rulers would have been more secure.
This was my hope.
The spiritual director my father saw, Ron Guengerich, is also a retired Mennonite pastor and professor of the Old Testament. He spoke at my father’s burial about how they read Walter Brueggemann together and talked about chesed. Ron’s favored translation of the Hebrew, from Brueggemann, is “tenacious solidarity.” It’s a word that summarizes my father’s life work. Brueggemann’s book by that name connects biblical texts with current topics such as “economic disparities, racial injustice and white supremacy, climate and care for creation, and the power of memory and mentoring.”
It’s appropriate that the list above ends with mentoring. My father cherished the opportunities he had to mentor younger people in movements for justice and peace in all their forms. My father’s parenting style and mentoring style were similar, especially in my teens and twenties. Now I am beginning to shape my own mentoring style. It flows from those same two values my father taught me: advocating for fair treatment for all people (including yourself) and building bonds of tenacious solidarity to continue pursuing justice and peace.
Gathered and Scattered book update
In April, I visited La Casa, the Community of Christ’s former building in Mount Pleasant, D.C., which has been home since 2016 to La Clínica del Pueblo for health education and action. Unlike any reporting trip I’ve taken before, I have 30 years of background with that building and its role in the neighborhood. Past and present were interwoven as I learned about the healthy cooking classes in the kitchen where we finished preparing dishes for Community meals, and the Sunday school space that is now a computer and conversation lounge for the Empodérate program for LGBTQ people, especially Trans-Latinas. The tenacious solidarity embodied by my father and other lay leaders of the Community of Christ lives on in the current work.
Reading and listening
Anabaptist World had a lovely pair of articles about the question of identifying a church’s denomination in its name or not:
“By any other name” by Brad Roth
“So you’re Mennonite, huh?” by Ron Adams
“Mario, Not So Super at Forty,” by Simon Rich. The New Yorker, April 25 & May 2, 2022 issue.
I have long loved Simon Rich’s humor writing, including references to our generation (he’s a year younger than me), and a wonderful way of building up to what I’d call spiritual lessons. This essay is a perfect example. “What are the points for?” is now my household’s way of inviting each other to laugh at ourselves and to focus on the parts of life that can’t be quantified.
Wow, Celeste! I am just a bit more amazed every time I encounter you!
A fitting tribute to an amazing man. Thanks Celeste for sharing it (and your father) with us.