One of the great gifts of the year-and-a-half
I spent here at Trinity as interim rector was passing an hour each week in
conversation with Elizabeth Hess. When I arrived in mid-2017, Elizabeth had
just expanded her duties and added youth ministry to her ongoing role directing
Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. Because in my former life I had spent many
years working with teenagers in both churches and schools, Laurel and I thought
my supervisory experience might be helpful to Elizabeth as she made her way
into this new line of work.
I wish I could tell you that my
experience and wisdom transformed Elizabeth from a neophyte into a rock star
youth minister, but I have to be honest and say that she was a rock star from
the word go. In our weekly conversations we talked and thought together about
particular issues and plans, but all I really added to those talks was a
grandfatherly approving nod or some kind of profound remark like, “That sounds
great”. Elizabeth brought all her
natural intelligence, creativity, and passion from years of teaching both young
children and college students into her work with teenagers. She was a natural
from the beginning, and all I could really do was look on and applaud.
There are so many things to say
about Elizabeth. Let me confine my remarks to two of them.
First: anyone who works with teenagers will tell you
that they have a superior sense for sniffing out the bogus and the fake. In the
early days of my working with Elizabeth, I spent a Sunday afternoon with the
youth group as she led them through a process exploring images of God. She had
exhaustively researched the subject, she provided them with hundreds of
pictures to choose from, and then she sent them out on the street to photograph
anything which spoke to them of the divine. She next convened possibly the best
discussion I have ever heard on the subject, allowing the kids to express a
wide range of preferences and ideas.
If you’ve ever run a youth group,
you know that getting teenagers to talk is in itself a signal achievement.
Getting them to talk about something risky and deep is a triumph. Elizabeth
posed questions and made a space for the kids to share perceptions that even
those of us who talk about God for a living find very hard to do. The three
hours I spent watching Elizabeth work with the kids here felt like an
adolescent pedagogy master class.
So my first observation about
Elizabeth: teenagers can tell the bogus from the real, and they only open
themselves up in the presence of those who are genuine. Elizabeth radiated
authenticity, and in everything she did—from running a youth group to training
catechists to teaching composition—her intelligence and compassion shined
through.
My second is a bit more personal. I
have lived and worked in the church for over 40 years, and my own inner
teenager has given me a kind of sixth sense too, enabling me to sniff out the
real believers among us. When you’re around church professionals as much as I
am, you get a feeling for discriminating between those who are just serving
their time and those whose life depends on the reality of their faith. I have
been extremely fortunate to have had a few mentors (George Regas, Harvey
Guthrie, Fred Borsch) who exemplified in their lives what they professed in
their faith. Even though Elizabeth was young enough to be my daughter, I would
count her among my most beloved mentors in the life of Christian faith and
practice. Elizabeth really believed all this stuff, and the quality of her
daily life and work exemplified the deepest truths of the Gospel. Like George
and Harvey and Fred, Elizabeth was my teacher. I will always love and thank her
for the way she showed what an unsentimental, hard-headed, smart but deeply and
authentically pious Christian life looks and acts like.
As English teachers, Elizabeth and I
also shared a love of poetry. Every once in a while, one of us would bring a
poem to our meetings that we thought the other would enjoy. I’ll read this
brief one she shared with me not long before I left Trinity. It’s a
thirteen-line poem (one short of a sonnet) by the late Nobel laureate Czeslaw
Milosz, and though it speaks in heavily gendered language of man and men, to me
it will always reveal the many things of God we all learned from knowing and
loving Elizabeth Hess.
Veni Creator
By Czeslaw Milosz
[Translated by Czeslaw
Milosz and Robert Pinsky]
Come, Holy
Spirit,
bending or not
bending the grasses,
appearing or not
above our heads in a tongue of flame,
at hay harvest or
when they plough in the orchards or when snow
covers crippled firs
in the Sierra Nevada.
I am only a man: I
need visible signs.
I tire easily,
building the stairway of abstraction.
Many a time I asked,
you know it well, that the statue in church
lifts its hand, only
once, just once, for me.
But I understand that
signs must be human,
therefore call one man, anywhere on
earth,
not me—after all I have
some decency—
and allow me, when I
look at him, to marvel at you.
Berkely, 1961
Elizabeth,
looking at you allowed us all to marvel at God.
Elizabeth’s untimely death is an
unspeakable tragedy, and I know that she would regard any blithe or easy
consolations with the skepticism she brought to all sentimental religious
pronouncements. All of us, and especially Liam, Kevin, and Paul and the
families of Trinity Church, have suffered an irreplaceable loss. I trust that
the God who was faithful to Jesus will be faithful to Elizabeth and all of us
who mourn her, and I know that I will carry my gratitude for Elizabeth’s many
gifts to me in my heart till my dying day.
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