Shedding and Shredding – Spending time at home has been a bit unusual for Bella Madonna. She’s the family member I have not mentioned yet in the blog. She is the quietest member of the family but she makes sure that she is noticed, most especially when either Dawn or I want to be busy at the keyboard. Her four paws seem never to work in harmony with one another. But for the one on sabbatical, I now command her attention. But shedding is not just about her fur, it is also the accumulated detritus that accumulates when one is working on a degree, a book, or is out of the country for six months.
The deadly combination of my completing a degree and then six months later heading to South Africa has given my home office the look of a stuffed storage closet. Since returning, I’ve been filling a recycling bin with old magazines and mailings and a waste basket of shredded paper each week. Most of my friends know that I’m a collector, that is, I am not a pack rat, I’m just an untrained archivist. So going through old papers and is like pushing the delete key on personal data on a computer. It is done reluctantly.
In going through the material I found mail from an old friend, “the original poor humble parish priest”, Rev. Dr. James Gunther. Dr. Gunther has a PhD from Harvard in Sociology, and his most recent mailings also note that he is a futurist.
What he does for me is send a package at unscheduled intervals with tidbits of his lived history as an African American Lutheran clergyman. Sometimes the materials are repetitive, but there is usually one nugget that opens up a line of history about which I may have heard, but did not live. Near the end of my sabbatical proposal, I said that I would work on my research in the history of African American Lutherans.
Along with two large packets of materials sent while on sabbatical there was one lone envelope. In it was a tribute to one of his colleagues, one of my colleagues, one of my elders. Just a month ago, some one asked me about Vernon Carter. I had not heard about Vernon for at least four years, but I assumed that he was still living. I was wrong, he had died in 2007. Rev. Vernon Carter was the long time pastor of All Saints Lutheran Church in Boston, MA. He was a pivotal figure in addressing racial inequality in the Boston Schools in the 60’s. [http://www.boston.com/news/globe/obituaries/articles/2007/08/25/rev_vernon_carter_at_88_held_vigil_to_fight_racial_inequality_in_schools/?page=1]
Vernon at five foot was a giant in persuasion. He could easily make this seminarian feel insignificant by his grasp of the way that social ministry was to be done in a society that did not readily embrace change. He was giant enough to make the Boston Globes annual review of notables who had passed away in the previous year. Granted it was on the seventh page, but he was recognized and remembered. [http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2008/01/01/with_grit_or_grace_they_left_their_mark/]
Like his idol, Martin Luther King, Jr. he practiced non violence, but no matter where found inequality needed to be addressed. His advocacy in later years included assisting Ethiopian refugees and those, who like him shared black and Native American ancestry.
It’s not just shedding and shredding, but the rereading that moves one into sharing and much to my wife’s dismay, saving.
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