CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Ministry
When Thanksgiving comes around, I remember with thankfulness friends who graced my life. So it is with Jean. When Jean, my friend and colleague, died, after two bouts with cancer, she was only 44. She was already, though, the senior minister at a large and prestigious university church.
Despite our age and gender and experience gaps, Jean and I were close friends, for three primary reasons. 1] We had worked on a number of denominational programs together, including a mission trip to Nicaragua during Ronald Reagan’s Contra war there, and we had learned to respect each other. 2] This was a time when women were still fairly new in the ministry, and not everyone was accepting of female clergy. I had a reputation as being a supporter of women in church ministry. I became a campus minister only eight years after the Methodist church agreed to ordain women, and I immediately started encouraging girls in my campus ministry groups to consider the ministry. Some went to seminary and into the clergy ranks. I treated my women colleagues as equals, and they appreciated it. 3] Most importantly, Jean and I went through cancer and cancer treatments together. That’s a special bonding experience. We pastored each other.
Nobody knew how to deal with her death. Pastors don’t usually die in harness, and if they do, it’s when they are getting close to the end of their career. So nobody, including me, had any experience with helping a church through that. With no one better available, the bishop and cabinet [all the District Superintendents together] asked me to do grief work with Jean’s staff and congregation.
What I found at her church
after Jean’s death was confounding dysfunction. The congregation wasn’t too
bad. The members just had to grieve the death of their pastor. The staff—about
a dozen people-- was a different matter. They were children bickering about the
inheritance when the parent has died. I finally blurted out, “This is the most
dysfunctional staff I have ever seen. Don’t you have any respect for Jean at
all?” That got their attention.
The worst was the associate pastor, an ambitious young man who had transferred from another conference shortly before because he wanted to be in a university church. Despite the bishop’s instructions, he didn’t even want to let me into the pulpit to talk with the congregation. It was his turn to preach, and he was going to do it!
I had some slight sympathy with him. I was a campus minister for a lot of years, and was usually allowed into the campus church pulpit only a couple of times a year. That’s hard on someone who feels “called to preach.” Associates are usually a little better off. If they have an understanding senior pastor, they get to preach once a month or so.
But this was a special circumstance. His senior pastor had just died. But he had prepared a sermon that had nothing to do with that, and, barely mentioning Jean, he went ahead and preached it. The congregation sat there in disbelief. I had ten minutes at the end of that service to try to deal with the only thing that really mattered right then. I don’t know what happened to that young man, but he was not in our conference very long after that.
There’s no point to this column. It’s just that I miss Jean, and I’m thankful that she was my friend, and I’m still a little bit angry at myself, for not being a better friend to her, by being a better grief counselor to her church, so I am taking my lingering grief anger out on her dysfunctional staff, especially her hapless young associate. We all share in the dysfunction and displacement that comes with the death of someone we love or count on.
I miss Jean, so I wanted to tell you about her. She was so talented, so committed. She could have done so much more good had she lived. As we sat in the backs of committee rooms together, making each other laugh when we shouldn’t, it never occurred to me that she, so much younger than I, would go first. Any memory of someone who made you laugh is a gift, and a sign that death, regardless of its seeming finality, does not conquer love. I give thanks for friends.
“In choosing what is
difficult, we are free.” Wendell Berry
What a coincidence that you would turn to remembering a departed beloved on Thanksgiving. Five years ago, I started off Thanksgiving morning at midnight in Scott-White Hospital in Georgetown holding the hand of my dear dying friend and fishing buddy Dwaine Palmer. He passed away as his wife, children and I stood by...them crying and me trying to be a source of pastoral strength. I miss him mostly on Thanksgiving and whenever a bumble bee comes near. One day, while fishing about a quarter mile off shore in the Laguna Madre, a bumble bee landed on the tip of Dwaine's rod. He would shake him off and he would come right back. We could not get rid of him. So, I cranked up the Mercury and went about a mile down the coast to get away from him (and find a better place to fish). In a few minutes, here came the damn bumble bee. Landing on Dwaine's rod tip (not bothering me. Just poor Dwaine). Fortunately, the bee finally gave up and flew away.
ReplyDeleteA couple weeks later, Dwaine called me and told me the bee had obviously followed him home, and landed on his patio table.(200 miles). I doubt that it was the same bee, but it was fun to believe it was. The story goes on. In the last days of his live, Dwaine slipped into that tattered time of passing in and out of reality. In my last visit with him at home a few days before Thanksgiving, Marita his wife said she thought he was seeing things. He complained of seeing a bumble bee, that was not there. Neither Marita nor I saw the bumble bee, but it was there. Now every time I see a bumble bee, I talk to it and ask if he/she has seen Dwaine lately.
I miss you buddy, but give thanks for the happy memories we shared.
What a great story! Blessings on your memories of Dwain.
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