THE COST OF BEING AN ANGEL [M, 5-11-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

THE COST OF BEING AN ANGEL   [M, 5-11-20]

[I apologize. This CIW is twice as long as usual, and if you are a long-time reader, you have read part of it before. But the length is necessary to tell the story correctly.]

We just received a letter from Chandler Park Academy, in Detroit, that Tony Shipley, my old seminary classmate, died last month. When we were at Garrett Theological Seminary, at Northwestern U, in the early 1960s, Tony was one of only two black students. The other was James Cone, who became the famous theologian of black liberation.

After seminary, Tony pastored, and then had a distinguished career as a denominational administrator. Eventually, he felt he’d had enough of bureaucracy, and returned to Detroit, where he asked the bishop to appoint him to pastor the church in the worst part of that decaying city. Appropriately, it was named Christ.

At our forty-year class reunion at Garrett, Tony told us about his work in Detroit. If there were a need of any kind, and there were plenty, Christ UMC had started a program to meet it. The one that impressed me most was a dual-need remedy, abandoned houses and single mothers, for they had plenty of both. Christ bought abandoned houses and helped single mothers get a place to live. But they also gave them two years of training on house care and family management. And Tony had started a charter school, Chandler Park Academy. Just a kindergarten class that first year, but hoping to add a new class each year. The area was so poor that 90% of the school children qualified for free lunches.

I had met Tony’s wife, Barbara, only a few times during seminary days. I commuted, and she worked. By the time of our class reunion, she had become one of those elegant women who walks with a cane but glides into a room like an ocean liner. She told how she was working at an insurance company in Evanston, putting Tony through seminary, and felt intimidated by the other wives because she had only a high school education. She decided to take a course at the community college. Her supervisor told her, “Barbara, even if you get a college education, you’ll still be inferior.”

She said, “I decided, if I’m going to be inferior anyway, I’ll be inferior with a college education!” So, she went to college for years, and got lots of degrees, and eventually became the head of language education for the whole city of Detroit.

Fast forward to 2014.

We gave each of our grandkids an 8^th grade graduation present of an experience to prepare them for college. Brigid went to a Science Olympiad at IU. Joe we signed up for a discovery camp at the Henry Ford Museum, with lots of activities like building a Model A Ford. Then we found out it was a day camp. No suppers or overnights. So we rented a motel room and took Joe out to a different place each night for supper, including the Five Guys in E. Lansing and the Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, so he could see what those college towns were like.

We lived in Iron Mountain, MI then. Very few ethnics. I remembered Tony was in Detroit. I wanted Joe to meet him. I called him up and invited him to supper. If GPS existed, we didn’t know about it, and we drove all over the Sherwood Forest part of Detroit looking for Tony, while he was wandering the streets looking for us, while he and Helen talked on the phone, giving directions neither of them could follow. He told us that such events were not uncommon. Sherwood Forest was so convoluted that once after he had moved there, he had to call the police to help him find his own home!

But once in our car, he found the 1912 Bistro very nicely, where Helen and Joe and I were the only white folks, and where a strikingly beautiful, elegant bald Zulu warrior lady waited on us. I was wondering why Tony did not bring Barbara. I thought my invitation was a general one, for both of them.

As we chatted, I told him how I had followed his career after seminary and wanted Joe to meet him. Then he told us how their daughter, their only child, had gotten married the year before, and left after the wedding for South Africa on her honeymoon, and the next morning Barbara had died! We were stunned. A woman like Barbara just didn’t keel over and die.

You do a lot of mumbling at that point, and then try to find normal stuff to talk about. As we talked, at one point, Tony said to Helen and me, politely but firmly, “I want you to be quiet now, because I want to talk to Joe.” He drew Joe out, asking about his interests and plans and told him about all the ways and places where you could get money for college. Ever after, whenever he called me, he would ask about Joe.

As the meal and the talk wound down, Tony Said: “I have been so depressed since Barbara died. I’m retired from pastoring, but Chandler Park Academy still needs me. Each year we added another kindergarten class as the class ahead moved up. This year we graduated our first class. Every one of those kids is going to college this fall on scholarship. I need to be raising money for the school, but I just couldn’t, I was so depressed. But it seems to me that you must be angels sent from heaven. To know that you followed my career, and wanted Joe to meet me, and talking to him, it has just given me new life. I can get back to doing what I’m supposed to do. How would you like to contribute to Chandler Park Academy?”

So that’s how we got the news of Tony’s death, in a thank-you letter for our considerable, monthly contribution to the Chandler Park Academy.

It can be costly to be an angel sent from heaven!

RIP, Tony, old friend, good and faithful servant.

John Robert McFarland