My Mother´s Friends

One year ago this July I took an emergency flight back home to Oklahoma for the unexpected death and funeral of my mother. She was old and frail and blind, and finally one day she gave up and gave in and moved on to her heavenly home with God.

While I was there I took some time to walk up and down her street and say good-bye to her neighbors one the last time. I had known many of these people from my childhood. Across the street lived two old gay men whom I had never met, but always appreciated because my mother told me how kind they had been to her after she had an accident and was no longer able to drive. Then when she eventually became blind they started mowing her lawn, cleaning her gutters, and raking her leaves. One time when a truck pulled up and people started hauling things out of her garage, they ran over to stop what they thought was theft of their friend's household property. As it happened, the truck was from her church, and the goods were for a rummage sale, but she never forgot their attempt to rescue what she called "the old 'widder' in distress."

I knocked on their door, but no one answered so I moved on to the next house where I saw the father of a young girl I had known as a teen. I asked him what had happened to the guys next door and he said "well that's an interesting story." Evidently over the years new families had moved into the neighborhood who didn't know the two men and who were not like the older crowd, and they were upset that the neighborhood had allowed "queers" to live so close by. Young parents, inspired by teachings of a variety of TV preachers, were worried that these old men might be a danger to their children. So they began organizing and talking, and finally the two felt the pressure and moved away. I asked the neighbor if they had ever actually done anything wrong and he said no. Actually, he said, "they were pretty good fellas." But "they were queer and all, and they say that's bad, so I guess it is."

All of this came back to me when, on July 4, Independence Day, I was in Atlanta Georgia, watching thousands of members of my church, the United Church of Christ, vote to affirm "equal marriage rights for all people, regardless of gender." That means, as most of us would have put it, "same sex marriage."

I know, of course, that votes such as this are not binding on local congregations, and that the General Synod "speaks to the churches, not for the churches." On the other hand, it was a pretty inclusive looking crowd, and their opinion probably approximates that of the majority of our members nationwide. I looked around the room during the debate and saw a wide range of faces. Young people, old people, gay and straight, "red and yellow, black and white" (as the hymn puts it), from all across the U.S. They wrestled with the issue for two days, first in committee and then on the floor, with debate, amendments, rephrasing, and then prayer. They were attempting to discern how God might be still speaking to us in an increasingly complex and brutal world. And what the vast majority finally concluded was that no matter what one could say about the differentness of same gender marriage, they couldn't quite be convinced of the wrongness of it. How could God create human beings and then tell them not to love one another?
I confess that I agree with that. At one level I didn't have a horse in that race. I'm happily and heterosexually married and I wasn't even a delegate to the Synod. But on the other hand I kept thinking of those two nice guys who looked out for my mother. The Bible says very little about homosexuality and some of the references are frankly unclear. Jesus is totally silent on it. What he is not silent on is the need to love, accept and care for all people. Bring in the poor, the hungry, the outcast, the sick, the beggars, the alienated, lonely and marginalized. Jesus condemns wealth and war and divorce, but never two old men who love each other and mow the lawns for neighboring widows.

When I left the assembly hall that day, I was frankly nervous. I would have to go back to my church and explain this extremely difficult decision to the good people in my congregation who had not been there and who might only know of it through headlines and sound bites. The delegates took a leap of faith that day, hoping and praying that their actions were discerning the will of a still-speaking God. But we're all mortal and imperfect. We act in faith and pray that we will be forgiven if we are wrong.

But I was encouraged by the words of a pastor friend of mine from Texas who told me that when he dies and stands before the pearly gates and hears a list of all his sins and failings, he expects to hear a very long list. But, all in all, he would rather be judged for being too open minded than too closed. "If I'm going to make a mistake," he said, "I suspect God would rather it be a mistake of letting too many people into the kingdom than too few."

And you know, I think I agree with that too.

And Did You See Him Smile?

I read about my friend Ron Freeman in the paper last week. There he was there smiling out at us on CBS news and looking real fine. Ron always wanted to be famous.

It’s no wonder fame was so important to him. To hear Ron tell it, his father spent half his life telling him how unimportant he was and how he’d never amount to anything. He once told me that the most important thing in his entire life was for him to do something that would make the whole country sit up and take notice. He even admitted that the only reason he ever went to college was to become a lawyer and run for office and eventually become president.

That dream didn’t make, however. When he was in college he and some friends took off up to Gatlinburg to go skiing and on their way home Sunday night they hit another car. Ron was fine, but two of his friends died and the mother and child in the other car died. Ron was driving. He was drunk. It was the third time he’d been stopped while being drunk. The judge gave him six months time in Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary.

That probably would have been the end of the story if he hadn’t run off. But Ron said he couldn’t stand it in a place like that and one day he just snuck off.

When he got away, he got a job, changed his name (to “Freeman” because that’s what he was now), got married and settled down. He even joined the local Presbyterian Church and taught a Sunday School on occasion. That also might have been the end of it except that Ron still needed to be famous. As a free man he ran for the legislature and put his picture all over Knoxville and somebody recognized it. In the thick of the campaign he was arrested again. This time he was given seven years, and this time he was sent to the maximum security prison in Nashville.

When I met him there as a chaplain, he was still doing time and still trying to think of something he could do that would make him famous. He had just gotten married again and was writing a book about his life. If people could just read about him, he said, he could become famous for sure. People from all over the country might read his book and know about the plight of prisoners and he might do some good with it and, of course, he might become a little famous with it in the process.

When I moved back to Oklahoma he was being moved back to Brushy Mountain. That’s a terrible place to be. It ‘s far up in the mountains and his wife couldn’t visit him very often. In the last letter I ever got from him, Ron said he wasn’t sure he could last in such a place much longer. He said being in prison was wasting his life and there were important big things he should be doing out in the free world.

That’s the last thing I ever hear about Ron until last week. He had finally gotten himself famous. He and a bunch of guys tied up a guard and broke out of Brushy Mountain. One turned himself in almost as soon as they got out. Three more got captured within a day or so. The two that were left got cornered in an abandoned house somewhere up in Kentucky and the police shot their way in. After all the shooting was over one of the two was captured, Ron was killed.

I wished, when I heard about it, that I had answered his letter. I wished that I had said something to him that would have made him want to stay. I wished that years ago I could have convinced the judge that Ron wasn’t really a criminal but just a guy that got in trouble. I wished...

Oh well, maybe Ron is happy now, since he finally got himself famous. Maybe he finally got what he wanted, pictured up there in the television set, looking down at the rest of the world, looking at us with a smile.

In My Father’s House

April 16, 2005

Some years ago my father—at a time when we least expected it—had a stroke. He survived, and then with tremendous effort managed to carve out a diminished, but still productive, life for himself. But then he had another. And another. And another. Each one slowly draining him down to a level of being and existence he never imagined would happen to him. And then finally he had the last one. At first it didn’t take his life, but it certainly took his soul.

I remember the night, weeks later, when we finally gathered around his bed in tears and torment for the meeting that every family dreads, and we discussed aloud for the first time whether we should let him go or keep him here, not wanting to admit that it was over. Our grief and fear was like a physical presence around us that we could feel and touch. That night we cried and prayed and hugged and looked deep into his eyes for a sign that there was something still there, still present, still hearing. But there was nothing. We could find only a deep and terrifying absence, an emptiness. The natural arc of his bodily functions was bending toward the end, and our love and memories were holding him back. The doctor, a friend of the family and a man of great faith himself, stood with us, about to lose an old friend, and said that the future was in God’s hands now and that he could do no more to help my father. My brother, an atheist since childhood, held our hands and prayed words he never knew he had, and felt the mystery of the presence of God in a way that can only come when one is overwhelmed with the horror of the pending death of a father he loved and could never conceive of life without.

We prayed for a wisdom that was larger and more pro-found than we in our weakness could envision on our own. We asked God whether and why and how this body should continue when the life in my father’s eyes had grown vacant and cold.

And finally we made the decision, an awful, revulsive decision, to release his body to God and allow him finally to join the company of saints in everlasting peace. It was terrible, it was wrenching, and we’ve prayed continually since that time that we were right.

Today we look back on our decision that grueling, difficult night as a moment of sacred wonder. We stood frail and helpless at the door of death and touched the face of God. And in the process we felt loved, and held, and com-forted. For us at that time and that place it was right to tell the doctor to ‘let him go,’ to let his body take its natural course, and I think, in the deep and everlasting mystery of life and beyond life, that my father somehow knows that, and agrees with us, and is glad.

And I also think how lucky we were. Not blessed, for that would be like God was playing favorites, but just lucky. We were just lucky to live in an age in which only a very few people could conceive that our personal painful decisions might be regulated by federal law. We were lucky that our difficult intimate choices were pushed onto us before we had a Congress that believed it right to tell families how and when to let their loved ones die with dignity.

And I pray that God will forgive us for allowing such madness to be promoted today in God’s name.