August 14, 2006
What if?
How strange it is to see a contemporary on the calendar of saints. Yet, Jonathan Myrick Daniels whom we remember this day was demonstrating in Alabama for civil rights in 1965, more or less at the same time I was starting a new cure as rector of a fat-cat parish in our town. He was a seminary student. I was a know-it-all, deeply sympathetic with his cause, but apparently not enough so to be there with him.
I have no regret that it took only a few years after that to come to a mutual agreement with our vestry that high-steeple churches were not for me [and probably neither for them, but that is another story]. I do regret, however, that I wasn’t instead in Alabama with my colleagues of a common mind and who had better sense than I to know that the height of steeples is irrelevant. What if? — this day recalls.
Life is filled with “what if’s.” I know there’re plenty in mine. What if I’d followed my bliss like Joseph Campbell counseled instead of letting others live rent-free in my vocational mind? Or what if I’d got good enough on trumpet to try for a gig with Count Basie’s Band? Or what if after seminary I’d stayed with the college ministry and a promising Canterbury/Danforth fellowship, instead of lusting after status as a cardinal rector? What if I’d taken those relatively empty summers forty years ago and studied for a PhD? And what if I’d simply taken Yogi Berra’s fork in the road instead of all those turns I’d rather not mention, let alone even remember?
Jonathan Daniels gave his life at the hands of some bozo racist’s shotgun whom God loved ever so much as the lot of us. When a time to recall that comes along like today, those gaps and turns and what-if’s in mine are not only revealed, they are strangely healed by the grace of the God whose light pours through them all.
What if Jesus had said No in the Garden?