Christmastide, 2002

...Nicholas knew that being poor in Lycia was so hard that it was like being locked up in prison. And Saint Nicholas knew about prison. The Roman Emperor, Diocletian, had put Nicholas in prison for following Jesus... We smile to think of the saints of God in all times who have listened in the night and done whatever they could to show us the love of God. We delight in the saints even now who are listening outside our homes or in our hearts. We give thanks for the communion of saints who have died, but continue to care for us. They are listening and reaching to us with all their love, because God intends for all of us and for all things to be cared for and to be alive with the joy of creation. (From the text of a book on Saint Nicholas which Jeanie wrote for the girls a dozen years ago)

Dear Friends:

Forgive the length of what this shall be. The actual news about Jeanie and the girls comes like winterlight at the end, but I have a litany of saints to walk through en route. Bear with me or run ahead. This has been a year of griefs and losses (and attendant joys of memory). Among the ones I can name, it strikes that we’re of the age where not only our parents and mentors, but our companions begin to die out from beside us.

In the spring we lost Jeanie’s brother, Johnny (exactly my age) to a long intensive-care bout of pancreatitis. Right to the end I kept expecting him to turn the corner and come out of it, but he never did. On the last day his mother and sisters, nephew and nieces were there to sing him home with hymns in harmony (and descants no less). Johnny was something of a recluse with a fascination for trains and rail systems. He loved A. A. Milne, James Thurber, and Spike Jones among other quirky tastes. He knew the Chronicles of Narnia in the sort of detail that provided text to life. I picture him on the last day following Aslan "further up and further in."

Next, on August 6, feast of the transfiguration, my Mom suffered a cerebral hemorage while on her knees in the garden. She loved to tend and weed. Apart from a brief moment in the emergency room, she never came out of the coma. We moved her from intensive care to hospice space back at Clark Home where she’d lived so exuberantly the last year. Vigiling around her for several days, my three brothers and I had numinous conversations full of memory and tears and grace. We were all there breathing with her at the last. Coming and going from her nearby apartment, we discovered her prayer journals, a hidden ministry of intercession - including specific and even pointed prayers for ourselves. She was famous for her charism of hospitality, setting the table and appointing the feast. Advent was necessarily a season of (baking) preparation for her. So I should not have been taken by surprise (but was) when making her Christmas sugar cookie recipe with the girls a few days back, I stepped from the room and the moment I was alone, found myself awash in grief, tears and sobs breaking the heart’s dam. I was knit togther in her love, and I pray to make her ministries of hospitality and intercession my own anew.

As she lay dying in August a friend was elsewhere crossing over: Ladon Sheets who’d been in hospice for months at the L.A Catholic Worker, playing out the final throes of pancreatic cancer. Ladon was a mendicant discipler, himself called to life (and out of IBM) by Clarence Jordan of Cotton-Patch fame. He lived a rhythm between the road, the monastery, and the prison - the latter for praying empty-handed in the forbidden places where weapons of mass destruction are made and stashed. Once when I was struggling with ordination he asked me with characteristic, if undue, sharpness, "So, Bill, what’s it going to be, Jesus or the church?" I bear it even now in my flesh as a pointed and useful query, holding me to the margins. And I sing him to the communion.

In October Chuck Mathei died. Formed at the NY Worker and Tivoli under Dorothy Day, he was instrumental in organizing the ClamShell Alliance, the first massive campaign of nonviolence against nuclear power at Seabrook. I met him in the early seventies on a courtroom bench outside the trial of the Camden 28, a draft board action group. The conversation we struck up became life long. His gift was to comprehend economics, with a brilliant and straightforward simplicity. He could make you see the social mortgage on your property - the claims of everyone from your neighbors to the earthworms beneath. And where did that speculative increase come from anyway? He set out to do land reform in the United States for Gods’ sake! The American Vinoba Bhave as it were, he was a Voice in the wilderness. Since Chuck suffered a chronic case of writer’s block (though you couldn’t stop him talking personalist economics once he got wound) it was ironic - bitterly so, that cancer attacked his throat, silencing him - and sweetly, that he thereby took to pad and laptop and spoke unabated to the end. I loved him.

Then in November Eddie Gersh passed. Unrepentant hippie, urban street Jew with flyaway hair, Eddie was famous among his friends for the outrageous. As a prisoner at Danbury in the early seventies (on a drug charge as I recall) he fell in with a circle of draft resisters studying scripture with Dan Berrigan. Friendship became community, and soon action. For a number of years he was part of our Great Lakes Life circle. I’ve a vivid memory of doing a bannering action with him in Grand Rapids at a Reagan speech, early eighties. As we walked home, who should emerge from the Grand Hotel waving royally to the crowd but Henry Kissinger. Gersh, without so much as a second thought, leaps on top of a parked car, points his finger at Mr K and shouts: "Murderer! Murderer!" (For all the tomes since and those which could be written, such remains true and concise). Kissinger ducked for limousine cover and sped off. Today Eddie would have been shot, and may have been closer to it then than we knew. I didn’t get to see him again. He died of colon cancer in Cambridge with Jimmy Hendrix wailing him home.

Come December Phillip Berrigan joined that communion, going quick of liver cancer. I was blessed to be present for the wake and funeral and some aftermath visitations - all reunions and psychic roilings too rich to recount. Since I hadn’t seen him in several years I had hastened to arrange a visit, but not in time. My first glimpse of Phil was from the crowd of greeters when he walked out of Danbury prison in 1972, but my first conversation was a year or two later on the steps of the Capitol during the summerlong Tiger Cage Fast and Vigil. Soon thereafter I found myself handcuffed to him, though the handcuffs were our own and they ran through a Pentagon doorhandle during a Holy Innocents lockout. (It is the anniversary of that as I write). Phillip was a pioneer and perfecter of actions, from the draft board raid to plowshares disarmament. He was an utterly singleminded non-violent voice latching onto your mind’s ear in conscience and divine judgement. If he were a gospel character, he’d have been a disciple, a converted centurion now more tempted to guerilla zealotry. I know he wasn’t easy to live with (hard enough perhaps to make you a saint), but at the wake, testimony after testimony was about his pastoral side. For thirty years he and Liz McAllister have been the anchor and sail for Jonah House, that resistance community which Stringfellow called "really a school." At the funeral their daughters Frida and Katie alternated a eulogy so full of hope you knew you were witnessing a torch being passed.

Amen and Alleluia all. I honestly hope you can’t tell whether this is a litany of death or resurrection. Me? I’m thinking incarnation. Word made flesh and dwelling among us.

Speaking of Word and really a school - I’m still commuting to work at SCUPE in Chicago, which remains life-giving and expansive, though I lost my closest colleague, Kazi Joshua, when he was hired out from under us to a member school faculty. Fortunately, we’re still working together on a number of projects including, Word and World - the floating movement school for faith-based activists. We’ve just completed an truly amazing round in Tucson: Imagine Delores Huerta talking about Caesar Chavez against a backdrop of desert mountains. Or Hebrew Bible scholar Norman Gottwald, in conversation with Native American theologian George Tinker, studying Judges with a class of eight in an open air ramada. Or sabbath walks to petroglyphs in the Sonoran desert, surrounded by two hundred year old saguaro cacti. Picture late night fires with music, poems, jokes and tales. Or public worship in the kiva style sanctuary of Southside Presbyterian church - spiritual home of the Sanctuary movement - with a gospel choir that nobody could shut down. Lord! Now we turn toward Philadelphia in June. If you want to support the effort or apply for the renewal of your mind and heart, drop me line or check out www.wordandworld.org

As to the much awaited news: Jeanie Wylie perseveres remarkably. They led us to believe she would enter that communion long ago, but she’s now become the American poster child for Newcastles Disease Virus. Or prayer. Medically, she’s virtually seizure-free for over a year. We have an MRI scheduled for next month, but the tumor stays so unchanged that we are now a year out from her last. Jeanie was part of the Tucson school (and the inaugural Greensboro go-round before that). This fall she’s taken two "solo" trips - one to visit her family in Princeton and another to the Upper Peninsula high school mate for reuniting with friends. She revels in the snow, loves to be at the cabin (from whence we write), and slows us all down to take in beauty. She never stops singing and now hums quietly in the next room while penning some Christmas notes.

On Lucy’s thirteenth birthday earlier this month, still drowsing betimes in bed, I said to Jeanie, "Well, Lucy’s now a teenager." Replies she half-asleep, "Does that mean she’s going to start yelling at me?" I don’t think so sweetie, but the hormones have clearly started sculpting her psyche and soma. Lucy never stops dancing (and she’s taking three varieties at once to seed her motion). Her losses this year (beyond family above) include another best friend moving off the block and the closing of her school. Fortunately she likes her new one, Our Lady of Guadalupe, with it’s amazing staff, just blocks from the house. And they have her writing constantly, for which, I notice, she has the gift. Lucy’s written the Epiphany play for the Detroit Worker kids next week and she put poems for each of us in our stockings. Another of her presents to the family this year was 24 homemade boxes numbered and strung together as an Advent calendar, each with a piece of a miniature creche inside. She and Lydia did most of their presents handmade - by a quick mental tally, I make that to be roughly 60 or so between them.

Lydia is the carpool maven with new found freedom, driving a gift: her Grandma Bea’s retired vehicle. And this with a steady boyfriend, Bryan, now two years running. A junior, just beginning to think about colleges, she loves history and literature at Mercy High School, but has an unaccountable easy knack for science and math. She never stops thespianing, and in addition to the ongoing saga of youth theater productions, she had a lead this fall at school in Our Town. (Here’s one theatergoer she brought to tears in the scene about noticing reality, a goodness too much to bear). Lydia is a leader in an after school club which has changed its name from "Diakonia" to "Just Peace." Their 7am coffee house with bagels, hot chocolate and conversation about the pending war draws 30 students and faculty. She’s a born organizer and hopes she can to come to Word and World in Philadelphia. Me too.

Oh, the pending war. The cry heard in Rama. I have said nothing of the descending darkness in which the people sit, but trust I have at least hinted at the great light which we have seen and which the darkness has not overcome. You, dear friends, are the litany of living saints who testify to that light.

Thank you for goodness too much to bear.

Summoned to the birth of hope,

Bill

Epiphany PS: News changes as fast as I can write: Jeanie had a seizure last night due directly to a medication error of my own. I could kick myself. A reminder of how fragile our balances are. We walk lines.