L.D. Johnson Lecture Series
By Stacy Sauls '77
November 1, 2007
The challenge of addressing this topic, “What Really Matters,” is to avoid the abstract and the vague, which, by the way, is something I learned really matters in English 11 from Duncan MacArthur. So I think what I want to do is introduce you to three people who, like a cue ball struck by the powerful shot of a highly skilled billiards player, sent my life caroming in trajectories unplanned by me toward, I hope, what indeed may really matter in life. They are not my parents, my grandparents, my kindergarten teacher, or even any professor I had at Furman. All three, in truth, are really strangers to me. I met each only once, and the truth is that I do not know the name of one of them at all and know only the given names of the other two. None of them knows me at all or would have any memory whatsoever of having had any contact with me, to say nothing of having had a life-altering impact on me. It would be inaccurate to describe a relationship with any of them, so quickly did they both enter and leave my life. Yet, each of them changed my life profoundly. The fact that each of them would be so unlikely as messengers of God only heightens my suspicion that it is God who stood behind them. At the risk of sounding like a book bought in the supermarket checkout line, I am aware that messenger is the root meaning of the word angel.
I. The Dancer at the Cheetah III
The first one is the one whose name I do not know at all. She is a woman I met in a bar. It wasn’t just any bar. It was a nude bar. Because this is a school with Baptist roots, I must say a word about what I was doing in a nude bar where, I confess to make matters worse, there was dancing going on. I assure you it was church business.
I was in that bar because I had struggled for a very long with trying to decide whether I wanted to be a lawyer or a priest. In fact, that question might be seen as the underlying theme of my four years at Furman. In fact, it might be seen as the underlying theme of four years at Furman, three years at law school, and five years of practicing law. As I’m now working on a Master of Laws degree in canon law and deeply involved in the legal issues of The Episcopal Church, I’m beginning to think it is the underlying theme of my life. Still, it all came to a head one night in a bar called the Cheetah III, at which I was present as part of my church’s program to help people discern whether or not they had vocations to be priests. I was stuck when I walked into that bar that night in making a decision about what I wanted to do. I was unstuck when I walked out.
One of my parishioners along the way has suggested that maybe a lifetime of being a priest will make up for five years as a lawyer, but, whether I have a vocation to law or priesthood is not the point of this. The actual point has to do with being stuck and what was keeping me stuck, which quite simply, was fear. I feared a number of things. I feared that I might not be a good priest. I feared that I wasn’t worthy to be a priest. I feared that I would disappoint my parents as a priest. Perhaps most of all, and most concretely, I feared that I would not make enough money as a priest to live the way I wanted to live. Perhaps all of those fears, at least the ones about disappointing my parents and not making enough money, were groundless, but they were real nevertheless, and they were keeping me stuck.
So in my last year as a lawyer, and when I was one year away from being offered a partnership in an Atlanta law firm, I went into the Cheetah III, which is the place God chose to speak to me directly through a woman dancing on a table without any clothes on. As God would have it, on the night I walked in the door, a particular woman was dancing on a particular table where this particular very stuck lawyer was sitting drinking the world’s most over-priced beer. In some ways, I feel like I know a lot about this woman inasmuch as she was dancing on top of a table where I was sitting and she didn’t have any clothes on. In truth, of course, I know nothing about her at all. I remember that she reminded me a little bit of a painting by Rubens. (I had learned about Rubens on a foreign study program at Furman.)
It is actually not precisely accurate to say she had no clothes on. She had on high heels and a garter belt. The garter belt, for the uninitiated, is for stuffing tips in. And on that garter belt was a button. And the button said, “Go for it.”
And in that moment, right then, when I read that button, I realized what my real fear about being a priest was. It was that being a priest is a lot like dancing on a table without any clothes on. And if she had the courage to do that, maybe I could find the courage as well. And in that moment, right then and there, I decided to be a priest. I decided to go for it. I went home that night and told Ginger about my experience. She was understanding. She bought a refrigerator magnet that said, as you might have guessed, “Go for it.”
Here’s what really matters. Going for it is always better than not. Adventure is always better than safety. Safety, it seems to me, is at the root of a lot of boredom, a lot of status quo, a lot of disease, and a lot of stuck, but not much at the root of God. That is why it never ceases to amaze me that so much about religion is about playing it safe. Now what I’m about to say, I realize, may be heretical. What is interesting to me is that the word safe is the noun form of the verb to save. Religion may be mostly about being safe. Faith, on the other hand, is not. It is about adventure. In truth it involves no small amount of risk. The risks can be material or spiritual, often both. We now know that Mother Teresa, a woman who took vows as a nun and lived her adult life in voluntary poverty in order to be with people who were poor, risked everything on something that she was not sure of, in fact actively doubted. That is what makes Mother Teresa’s life an adventure, a story of faith. She didn’t play it safe in any way. She risked everything. That’s something that really matters.
Being safe is, of course, one metaphor the Bible uses to describe the experience of God, but it is not the only one, and I don’t even think it is the main one. The main one is much more about risking and adventuring. Abraham and Sarah are called to leave their safety in Ur to seek an adventure in God’s promise of a new life. Moses is called to leave the safety of tending his father-in-law’s flocks into a confrontation with Pharaoh. The Hebrew people were called to leave the safety of their lives in Egypt to seek the more difficult path of freedom. Amos was called to leave the safety of dressing sycamore trees to speak on behalf of justice. Jeremiah was called out of the safety of the womb to speak dangerous truth to power. Andrew, Peter, James, and John were called to leave the safety of what they were used to for the adventure of what they were not. I find myself a lot more interested in the adventuring than in the saving.
All this has something to do, I think, with why the most prevalent angelic message in the Bible is this: Do not be afraid. It is what the angel told Mary when God had an adventure to propose to her. It is what the angels told the shepherds when suggesting they leave their flocks behind to go in search of something else. It is what the angels told the women who found the tomb empty on the first Easter. Like
Mary and the shepherds and the woman at the tomb, it helps to be reminded of this basic message: Do not be afraid, or in other words, “Go for it.” Go for it because what is safe and secure is an illusion, and illusions are never of God. God is in the adventure.
II. Hobie
The second person I want to introduce to you is someone whose first name I do know, although my encounter with him was just as brief as with the dancer at the Cheetah III. He is someone I met one day after church.
The church at issue was my last assignment as a priest before becoming a bishop. It was a fairly large parish in Atlanta called St. Bartholomew’s. St. Bartholomew’s had a reputation for being concerned about outreach and social justice ministries. Part of the parish history is that during the Civil Rights Movement, the members were known to cancel coffee hour in order to board chartered buses and join demonstrations for school integration at the state capitol downtown. St. Bartholomew’s started the first shelter for homeless families in Atlanta by turning its Sunday school classrooms into bedrooms on Sunday afternoon and returning them to use as classrooms early on Sunday morning. Not surprisingly, it had a constant flow of people who were poor coming to seek assistance in one way or another.
And that is why we had a very important rule. Sunday was reserved for worship. And so on Sunday we would not under any circumstances consider requests for help with rent, or transportation, or paying the utility bill, or whatever. We did that every other day of the week, but on Sunday, we worshiped. The reason for the policy was the concern that if word spread that we were open for the business of helping people with such needs on Sunday, we would be absolutely overrun and not be able to attend to the main business of the day. Word gets around among poor people easier than it does among the rest of us, the internet notwithstanding.
One particular Sunday, I was greeting the people at the door as they left church after the service when an usher came up to me and reported that there was a man there asking to see the pastor. When someone unknown shows up in an Episcopal Church where clergy are typically known as Father or Mother or priest or rector, and asks for the pastor, you know what that means. I glanced over my shoulder. Sure enough, the man looked homeless. I told the usher to tell the man I would be with him in a minute. I did not mean “in a minute” literally. I meant “when I get around to it.” I actually meant “when I get around to it and I hope you’ll be gone by then.” I greeted everyone coming out of the door. I greeted everyone else I could think of. I went back to the sacristy to greet the altar guild. I went into the kitchen to greet the breakfast cooks. And when there was no one else, I went to face this person who I knew was going to ask for a handout and whom I knew I was going to turn away empty handed with instructions to come back on Monday. He had waited patiently for me.
When I found the man, I asked, in a tone that I’m sure conveyed my implicit message, “What can I do for you?” I did not ask him to come to my office. I did not even invite him into a more private place than the spot where he was standing in the foyer. I just asked, “What can I do for you?” because I knew he was going to ask for something and I, in turn, was going to say no.
What he asked instead, however, was, “Pray for Hobie.” I stood convicted without being judged. When I recovered, I invited him to come into the church with me. And then I asked, “Who is Hobie?” He patted his own chest. And mine was cracked open. And we stood there in the church, with everyone else mostly gone, with my arm around this stranger, and we prayed for Hobie. I think I did most of the talking because I knew I had a number of things I needed to say to God. Hobie just listened, or maybe Hobie was praying on his own. I hope Hobie might have been praying for me.
And at that point, another usher came up to me to ask one of those all important questions clergy get asked on a Sunday morning like “where are the bank deposit slips,” or “to whom should the altar flowers be delivered,” or “what should I do about the toilet overflowing in the bathroom.” I excused myself from Hobie to deal with whatever it was, which now seemed more an annoyance distracting me from Hobie than an excuse for ignoring him, but I promised I would be right back.
When I returned, however, Hobie was gone. Vanished. Disappeared. It was if he had never been there at all. I looked around the church for him. Nowhere. I went out into the churchyard. Nowhere. I went and looked up and down the street. Nowhere. Just gone.
It was not so much a lesson, I suppose, as it was a reminder—and perhaps a warning. The lesson, in truth, I had already learned at Furman through Service Corps. This is the lesson. As strange as this is going to sound, one of the things that really matters in life is being in relationship with people who are poor. They are important because they have everything to do with God in the flesh, concretely, tangibly.
Sacraments are about encountering something that is holy and beyond this world in the ordinary things that are common and very much of this world. And by that, I don’t mean that the common things are symbols of what is holy. I mean that they are ways we actually encounter the holy—mysteriously, but nevertheless really. For example, as an Episcopalian, I believe that when we gather to share bread and wine and pray, we encounter Jesus in the flesh, that somehow the bread is in reality his body and the wine, his blood, and that in the bread and wine and community, Jesus himself can be touched and tasted and experienced.
That has something to do with why I think Hobie really matters. You see, I believe there is another way besides Holy Communion that God is made available in the flesh to be touched and tasted and experienced, and not just by religious people, God forbid, but by all people. And that way is by being in relationship with, being in solidarity with, taking our place, making a stand with people who are poor.
There is an important difference between the bread and the wine and living in solidarity with the poor. They are both spiritual, but one is religious and one is not. The first, the bread and the wine, as important as it is to me, is religious, which just means it is regulated, in this case by those who believe, the Church. Not so, I think, with the poor, with whom solidarity is not religious or regulated at all. It is too relational to be unregulated by an institution, and it is also universally available, which means I daresay, that it is also more catholic. What I’m saying is this. Just as God is available to Christians through the bread and wine of the Eucharist, God is available to all people through relationship with the people who are poor, whatever name they may call God or even if they call God by no name at all. It is equally as mysterious as the mystery of the Eucharist, and it is no less real, tangible, and concrete, but it is not religious and it is not exclusive. To identify with the poor is to meet God in the flesh, whether you believe or not, or for that matter, whether you want to or not.
I am a Christian—although I hear contrary opinions about that from time to time. It is my unavoidable perspective, so I ask that you bear with me while I share with you why what I have just inartfully tried to say is a very important and radical teaching of Jesus.
Most of you, I suspect, Christian or not, are likely to have some familiarity with the parable Jesus told about the sheep and the goats in the 25th chapter of Matthew. Although I neither want to turn this into a sermon or a Bible study, I do want to ask you to take a little bit of a closer look at this passage, because I think it really matters and because it usually gets read, much like Jesus, as far tamer than the actuality.
The parable of the sheep and the goats is the one, you’ll remember, where people are separated at the Judgment based on how they have behaved toward people who are in need. The sheep are blessed by God because, God says, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me” (Mt. 25:35-36). Those who are blessed are surprised and ask when it is that they did these things. God replies, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these…, you did it to me” (v. 40). So far, so good.
Then the passage gets not so sweet. The others, the goats, are condemned “into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me” (vv. 41-43). The condemned are just as surprised as the blessed, and receive a parallel response, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me” (v. 45).
There are two important things to note, one easier to see than the other. The one that is easy to see is the sacramental part. The point is not to do good deeds by helping the poor. It is to meet God, really and concretely, in relationship with the poor, which is a much more awe-inspiring thing to do. One point of Hobie’s message, I think, has to do with meeting God, having one’s heart broken open, and being made different.
What is harder to see in the passage is that what Jesus himself is distinguishing between the righteous as non-religious and the unrighteous as religious. There is a subtle reality to the parable in Greek that is hard to pick up in English, but it is apparent in the way Matthew uses parallelism as well as in the precise language he chooses to tell the story.
The reasons the blessed are blessed and the condemned, condemned are exactly parallel. They fed or did not feed, they gave something to drink or did not give, they clothed or did not clothe, they welcomed or did not welcome, and they visited or did not visit. There is a lack of parallelism, though, when the blessed and the condemned alike express surprise. The blessed ask, “when was it” that we did these things. The condemned ask a different question. They ask, “when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not take care of you?” (v. 44). Part of their question is about seeing—when did we fail to perceive, when were we blind? That goes to the sacramental issue.
There is also, though, an interesting difference in language between the way the righteous and the unrighteous express their surprise that is a little more difficult to pick up in English than it is in Greek. While the righteous express themselves in everyday language, the language the unrighteous use in their surprise at the judgment is religious language. What it means is when did we see you and fail to do our religious duty to you? It might be translated better into English as “to minister.” The righteous ask when they did these things for God. The unrighteous ask when did they fail to minister to God. It is well worth noting that God’s availability in relationship with the poor has nothing to do with being religious. It is the most universal of God’s availabilities. And it matters a lot more than all the religious duties and “ministering to” in the world. Standing with the poor is something that really matters to living life.
III. Diane
The third person I want to introduce to you is named Diane. I also met her only once. She never said a word to me at all. She never said a word to me because she had a mental disability that kept her from being able to say a word to me. In those days we would have labeled Diane as “severely retarded.” I thought she and I were different when we met. We are not.
I was a sophomore at Furman when I met Diane. She lived at a place called Whitten Village, which was a large state institution for people like Diane. And Diane entered my life because a woman named Ginger Malone, also a Furman student, knew her as a volunteer. Now Ginger is someone I was trying to impress. So when Ginger asked me to help by escorting Diane, who needed one-on-one supervision, on a day outing at Furman, I reluctantly agreed.
During our day together we didn’t discuss any of the great ideas. We didn’t discuss anything at all. Words were not part of the way Diane communicated. What we did do was hold hands and walk around the lake. I remember lunch by the Bell Tower most vividly. I remember it vividly because of Diane and her bologna sandwich. I was grossed out, totally grossed out. At the end of lunch, which seemed to go on forever, I put my hand back in Diane’s now slobbery hand, and off we went, which goes to show you just how much I was trying to impress Ginger.
I don’t know if this was Ginger’s purpose, but Diane had a bigger impact on my life than teaching me some new things to do with a bologna sandwich. Diane called into question everything about my values system at a very fundamental level. If what really mattered in life was being smart, then Diane was necessarily someone who didn’t really matter at all. Something about that didn’t sound right to me. Part of the reason for that is that while that understanding of what matters left me safely more valuable than Diane, it left me uncomfortably less valuable than many others. It is one of the ways Diane and I are actually more alike than different. We are both smarter than some and not as smart as others.
So what I think I learned from Diane is this. Smartness is overrated. There is something much more basic to our common humanity than that. As important as thinking is to me, there are things that matter more. Compassion is one. Maybe bologna is another.
IV. Ginger, Andrew, and Matthew
Although I’ve introduced you to three people who unexpectedly taught me about some things that I believe really matter, I cannot close without introducing you to three other people who taught me everything I know about the only thing, the only thing, that in the end really matters. Everything I learned about love, I learned from Ginger, Andrew, and Matthew. Angels, as important and mysterious and exciting and inspiring as they may be, are for but an instant. They come, deliver their messages, and move on. Unlike angels, Ginger, Andrew, and Matthew have hung in there with me for the long haul, not vanishing into thin air once I’d gotten the message, but if you will, hammering the message home in all my thick—headedness day after day after day.
So I leave you with one final story. It has to do with our adoption process, and it happens to be a story involving Andrew, but there is a like version of it that involves Matthew. I’m telling this one because Andrew had the misfortune of coming first and thereby saving Matthew a lot of the trouble of having to train his own father.
The adoption process for each of our sons involved something called a “home study.” I found the idea of someone studying our home a bit intimidating, which explains why the two times we have had home studies done are also the only two times in our married life that we have cleaned the oven. I envisioned more of a home inspection than a home study.
The last step in the home study process was separate interviews with Ginger and me. On the day of that interview, I went first thing in the morning on the way to work. It went fine. Ginger made me call her on the way home to tell her what I had been asked so she wouldn’t be surprised. I remember telling her that the last question was: “Do you think you’re ready for a baby?” Ginger, who was a teacher, had scheduled her interview for after school. She promised to call me at the office when she was finished, just as I had called her. The time for Ginger’s interview came and went. There was no call. I began to get worried. I watched the clock. 3:00 came and went. 4:00 came and went. Finally, 5:00 came and went. I was getting very worried. My fear was that the social worker had told Ginger that we had been turned down, probably because of something stupid that I’d said.
At last, at almost 6:00, Ginger showed up at my office door. She had obviously been crying. Her eyes were all puffy and red. I thought it confirmed my worst fears.
And then she looked at me and said, “You have a son,” and showed me his picture. And then I too started to cry. And I cried and cried. I was the rational one in this relationship. Ginger was the crier. But in that moment it was I who couldn’t stop crying. I would think I’d gotten myself under control, but just as soon as I did, I started again. I tried to call our parents, but as soon as someone answered the phone, the tears would start to flow again. I had to hand the phone to Ginger.
It turns out that what happened, by the way, is that when Ginger answered the social worker’s last question about being ready for a baby, the social worker had said, “Good, because I have a referral for you, and here is his picture.” Ginger, too, had started crying at that point, and didn’t want to tell me the news over the phone, but with all the crying had a hard time finding her way to my office. That’s what love does to you. If there have been moments in my life that sent me off in unplanned directions, this one was the biggest of all because the direction it sent me was a direction I did not even know was there.
I don’t know what else I can tell you besides that. I can tell you, though, that more than anything else love is what really matters. If anything at all lasts, it does. It really isn’t even love itself so much that really matters as it is the act of loving. Or more realistically, it is the attempt to love. Just trying. And as St. Francis said, what matters is most certainly the loving and not so much the being loved. Loving is perhaps the ultimate adventure, the ultimate challenge. When you get down to it, it may well be the only thing that really matters. Everything else that matters is just about the how of this one.