When I was in elementary school, I was a Girl Scout. And every year, on Valentine’s Day, there was a Girl Scouts Father-Daughter Dance at the local community center. In second grade, I’d attended with my dad — I know this because I still have the photo of us in a big rattan chair with construction paper HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY letters arranged in a half circle above.
The next year, my parents were going to be out of town for the weekend of the dance. I was crushed, of course, because few things feel as important to a third grader than doing a thing they remember really liking again. I don’t know how we figured out this solution, but we did: I’d stay the night with my friend Meghan, and her dad would take both of us.
Meghan’s dad had a big bushy salt and pepper beard, a Santa Claus build, a contagious laugh, and that ineffable thing that makes everyone around him feel welcome. Which makes sense, because he was also the pastor of my Presbyterian church.
I still have the photo of me and Meghan, nestled in that big rattan chair with him with that same Valentine’s Day banner. And I still have the memory of how special I felt, how lucky I was. John wasn’t my Dad. But what a good Dad he was.
I’ve been thinking about that memory a lot this week, as I found out that John had passed away after an arduous and unforgiving fight with cancer. I hadn’t seen him in many years, but I’ve felt blanketed in a new and curious sort of grief. I’ve experienced other deaths in my life, but nothing quite like this: the death of someone who was not family, not a friend, but a significant and parent-aged adult. Someone who made me feel beloved and safe and cared for. Someone who, consciously or not, made me the adult I am today.
Depending on your background, you might not know the various connotations of “Presbyterian minister.” You could be the sort of pearls and hats Presbyterian (a member of the “frozen chosen”) that’s generally associated with the South. You could be one of the more conservative and evangelical-infused sort that infused the domination in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. But John was neither. He attended seminary at Princeton, came to the Northwest, and was “called” (the Protestant word for essentially “matching” with a church) to my childhood church, which, at the time, was a motley mix of UCC (Congregationalists) and Presbyterians who’d come together decades ago to mix their theologies at a modest but beautiful brick church in North Idaho.
Knowing what I know now about the ways of the church, I can’t imagine what a challenge it would be to arrive in a new place and replace a well-liked pastor. But John was even more likable than the pastor who’d been there before — I understood that much, even as a young girl, and not just because he had two young girls which obviously made him superior. He excelled at “Children’s Time,” those five minutes in every service when the pastor calls all the kids to the front of the church and tries to tell some gentle story that’s maybe also a lesson but mostly just an opportunity to usher the kids down to the nursery before the tedium of the sermon.
Kids can tell when an adult actually likes them. And he did. During those five minutes, you could watch toddlers jockey for space on John’s knee. When he performed a baptism and the baby started wailing, he’d chuckle and gently calm them. He was always up for whatever game the older kids were playing in youth group, particularly if it involved water balloons. He was never the “cool pastor” with the guitar. Instead, he loved a good hymn: Holy Holy Holy, which also became my favorite hymn, but also every verse of Joy to the World, which he’d lovingly compel the congregation to sing on Christmas Eve.
I knew what it felt like to hug John in the big, swaying black pastor robe. I knew how he laughed when he’d catch us kids yell-whispering “SECRET PASSAGE” at the end of the service and running the back route to get the best cookies at coffee hour. And because I was friends with his daughter, I also knew what his study looked like, the small television tuned to PBS, the piles of books, the way he drove a car. He was a pastor made human.
There are so many things that made me turn away from Christianity. But he was never, ever one of them. When I read Marilynne Robinson, I often wish for a church that was a manifestation of her vision of what Christianity could be. A church truly defined by love and grace, by deep self-interrogation, by an absence of guile or fear of difference. John was the closest I think I’ve ever come to that experience.
To mourn him is to mourn that vision. But it is also to mourn an apparatus that allowed so many children to have access to that feeling of being beloved — not for how you performed, not for your grades, but simply because you were, as John would put it, a child of God, as all children were.
I am not naive to the ways in which that trust has been abused by adults in the past, particularly but not exclusively within the church. Part of the reason that abuse is so devastating is because the relationship can be so important. I also know there are other pastors and religious figures and teachers who have used their authority to manipulate and make children feel small, or worthless, or wrong. That’s the opposite of the sort of relationship I’m trying to describe here. John was a significant person in my life not because he told me how to be, but because he didn’t. Sure, he told the congregation how God wanted us to be. But I also felt sure that what John wanted most was for us to feel loved.
As children, we often take our parents’ affection for granted. The care and attention of another adult feels precious beyond measure, even if we have no clear vision of it at the time. What can I do with all this sadness? Understand, as so many say, that grief is love — and grief can also be gratitude.
The question then becomes: what do I do with all of this gratitude? I can try, the very best that I can, to be a significant adult in the lives of a handful of kids in my life. Not because they’re good or bad or smart or fast or like me or not — but simply because they are. John loved a good benediction. This is mine. ●
For Friday’s Thread, we talked about moral educators — clearly, I also had John in mind when I selected that prompt. Today I’d love to hear more about One Significant Adult in your life — or how you’re trying to serve that function yourself.
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Related Reading from the Culture Study Archives:
Many years ago I had a high school friend I will call Miriam, and you will soon see why I do not use her real name. I thought Miriam had the perfect family. All the kids (4) were on the honor roll. During sleepovers her mother served us a lavish breakfast with real china. Her father was jolly and welcoming.
The perfect family. It made me cringe at how messy my house was when she came over, which was not often, and frankly, my mother, not a morning person but warm and kind, let us fend for ourselves for breakfast, which I generally made for us.
Years later I found out that Miriam’s father was a monster who abused all the kids physically and sometimes sexually. Her mother ignored it, and their pleas for help. I was stunned. When Miriam told me this, I blurted, foolishly, “But all of you got all As in school! You never even got a B!” To which Miriam replied, “Maura, there are WAYS to make your children study.” When I asked her how she survived to be a rational, giving adult, she said, “I knew your mother loved me.”
Even though she rarely saw my mother, my mom’s kindness and conversations helped Miriam tie a knot and hang on until she could escape that house of horrors.
My mother never knew about any of this. She died when I was in college.
The moral of this story is that one adult can make an ENORMOUS difference in the life of a child - whether they know it or not.
I am so sorry for the loss of this wonderful man, but I am glad he influenced you and others to make a more gentle world.
I am so sorry for your loss, and send warmth to you and everyone who loved John.
My significant adult was my godmother, Joy, who lived up to her name in so many ways. She listened to me. From my earliest memories of her, she was that precious adult who made me feel so very, very worthy of love because she measured everything I said with fond gravity. She filled in little gaps in my upbringing with such deft kindness that at the time I had no idea what was happening, and was a full-grown adult before I grasped the scope the safety net she offered. She never made fun of me or the things I enjoyed (including my musical choices!), and her house was a quiet and beautiful. I loved her so much, with parts of me that I didn't even realize were involved until she died unexpectedly while on a skiing vacation when I was in my thirties. My grief was enormous and shocking and it still brings tears to my eyes to think of all the things I wish I could share with her. But oh, what a gift she was to a child.
I try to be that significant adult in the life of my niblings, whom I love and adore and admire. They are 11 and 17, and I am never less than amazed at their capacity for creativity, joy, and affection,, even when they are rubbing on my last nerve. The 11 year old is deeply into Taylor Swift right now, and tonight I get to give her an actual hoodie from the Eras tour, and she is going to lose her shit. The 17 year old gets a limited-edition, bright yellow vinyl copy of Lemonade, and likewise. And more, I will get to sit with them and hear their stories today, and relish watching them journey into womanhood with a fierce team of loving aunties behind them. I am lucky beyond the telling of it.