My kind father

I shared this today at my father’s funeral at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, St. Paul, Minnesota. I followed my brother John, who shared delightful thoughts about our father’s love for family history and identity. All seven of us had small roles in the liturgy. We all miss him deeply.

But what should we call him? Many call him Gary. Nothing wrong with that, though we remember he did not seem to like his given name too much. So, often enough he is called “Judge,” even in the family. “What does the Judge say we should do?” “I found the best gift for the Judge.” That sort of thing.

But then “Judge” became an adjective, usually whenever he baked or cooked: Here, have a few judicial sugar cookies, crammed with nutmeg. Yes! He is making judicial caramel corn! Can we have judicial pizza tonight?

And of course we call him “Daddy.” I am sure I have never even once called him “Dad.” Always Daddy, a tender, immediate name for someone who held each of us newborns in one enormous hand. And then came the names Papa, and Pakka, and Grandpa. Daddy was the father of seven, and then two more, and the grandfather of twenty-five, and the great grandfather of five. He played with these numbers, affectionately. Daddy counted his flock. And there were no bad sheeps, by his counting. Zero goats.

Daddy skipped over names, his own and others’, and he tended to glide over transitions, too: he rarely employed a formal greeting, rarely spoke an elaborate goodbye. The conversation flows better that way. “SD!” he would say as I walked in, having flown into town for a visit. “Seattle is here,” he would announce to himself. And on my birthday this year he texted, “So the day goes,” no preamble. And then he wrote: “Remember 1970!” — his terse but cheery way to say “I love you.”

But this is not just a self-effacing personal style, Daddy’s avoidance of names and formalities, hellos and goodbyes. It is more: We grieve the departure of an authentically gentle, genuinely kind, truly humble servant and friend of God. His subtlety is graceful: Gary is a gentleman. His wisdom is tender: the Judge teaches mercy. His modesty is pastoral: Daddy cares for people.

In English we translate the Hebrew noun chesed a bit clumsily: we call it lovingkindness. But that’s it: that’s Gary, that’s the Judge, that’s Daddy, that’s Pakka, that’s Grandpa: chesed, lovingkindness.

We are forever his students.

Some thoughts about Gaza and Israel

I write this new content on November 7, 2023. I have carefully chosen to take down everything I wrote on November 2, not because I don’t think or feel much of what I said, but because my words have caused unnecessary pain, and because what I truly meant to say about an agonizingly divisive crisis did not successfully make its way into the post. I am sorry for the hurt I caused. Like many of us, I am following a steep learning curve as I grapple with all of this.

This much I will say, with confidence:

My heart breaks for thousands (now more than ten thousand) of human beings who have been killed in the many catastrophes in Gaza and Israel over the past month. I do not discriminate in my heartbreak: I grieve all of the innocent dead. And I pray for everyone involved: everyone. I pray for those who are killed, injured, displaced, abducted, or traumatized. But I pray also for all who are guilty of these crimes, no matter who they are. I pray that they will repent from their behaviors and, as the One at the center of my faith said so memorably, “put their sword back into its sheath.” And finally I pray for all who are inspired by these catastrophes to say or do anything that fairly can be called Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, or antisemitism. All three of those sins have all too easily been committed by members of my Christian faith for uncounted generations, and I take seriously my call as an Episcopal priest to examine my own conscience for evidence of these in my thoughts, feelings, words, and actions.

Jesus of Nazareth was an innocent Judean Palestinian. He was a son of Abraham, who is the father of many nations. Jesus was executed by the imperial state, in the Land of the Holy One. I pray to him for mercy, for courage, and for peace — for every human being on this one earth.

She touched people living with HIV & AIDS

This evening I’m leading the reflection at the vestry meeting at Grace Church, Bainbridge Island. Sometimes we commemorate a saint of the day. Today I chose to commemorate someone who is exceedingly unlikely to make it onto anybody’s calendar of saints, yet did something startling and prophetic, something well worth remembering — and emulating. Here is the reflection I prepared.

Diana, Princess of Wales
July 1, 1961 — August 31, 1997

A reading from the Gospel according to Matthew.

When Jesus had come down from the mountain, great crowds followed him, and there was a man with a skin disease who came to him and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.” He stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I am willing. Be made clean!” Immediately his skin disease was cleansed. Then Jesus said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”

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Diana always flowered in the presence of the disabled or the ill. And later, as she came to understand the symbolic potency of gesture, she used her position to break taboos. In April 1987—a time when AIDS was still considered a pariah disease—she attended the opening of the first AIDS ward in the U.K. at the Middlesex Hospital. Her decision to shake hands, without gloves, with 12 male AIDS patients was critical in dispelling prejudice toward the ailment.  –Tina Brown, Princess Diana’s Legacy is More Urgent than Ever, in McLeans, July 31, 2017

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Reflection Questions

Who are you afraid to touch, because they are, in one way or another, “unclean”?

Have you observed the prophetic act of touching the untouchable? What happened? How did it change you?

Who might we be called to touch? Are there any among us even now who long for prophetic touch?