Grateful for this reflection from Robert Myallis, including his kind words about Mockingbird. In April, he wrote a brilliant pre-reunion reflection on the difficult life-questions that reunions raise–“A Reckoning with the Road Less Taken.” Here, we check back with him on the other side. -Ed.
My Reunion Taught Me: Mockingbird is needed.
I took the road well traveled – I-95 – back to my reunion. Overall, I survived. I enjoyed seeing dear friends, walking by places steeped in memories, and experiencing the joyful surprise of running into people I hadn’t seen in decades. The reunion also provided good fodder for sermon illustrations, always an extra bonus for pastors like me!
On the other hand, the conversations played themselves out a bit like I had anxiously expected. Introductions quickly turned into status games with not-so-subtle flexes. The weekend served to remind me that I attended an institution called a university, but more accurately it could have been called a seminary for the priesthood of achievement.
Yet the more I listened, the more I found people opening up and sharing about what was really going on inside of them. This is where things got interesting, and I realized we had been schooled a bit by life.
Biology 101: All Life Is Mortal
Before me stood the door to Chadwicks. Every college town has a Chadwicks, the kind of bar you wouldn’t go to as an adult, but at 18 you were willing to pay some senior to manufacture you a fake ID so you could indulge in revelry. Truthfully, I had only been to Chadwicks once — ironically, after I had graduated — but one of our classmates had graciously rented out the whole bar for us. So there I stood, pausing because I was unsure if I really did intend to enter what people referred to as a “meat market” back in the ’90s. My contemplation was interrupted by the doors opening from the inside. I did a triple take because the person walking out the door looked familiar yet not. It dawned on me that the last time I had seen that person was 25 years ago. Yet she looked different, of course, because she had aged. The doors seemed to hold a magical power — they functioned like a time machine — for I swear it had been only a moment since I had seen her as a younger person.
To be clear, the people who showed up at the reunion all looked reasonably healthy. My hunch is that those who didn’t chose to stay home. But our hairlines, our skin tones, our figures, and even the timbre of our voices ensured that no one there was passing for a twentysomething! Indeed, if you listened long enough to people, you realized we were all starting to process our mortality. Whispers of surgeries, cancers, medicines, and deaths of family members — and classmates — were soft but detectable, nonetheless. You could also tell the people who were parents — especially the moms — for a certain expression of stress and distraction never left their face.
Truthfully, I doubt many explicitly addressed this while we shouted over the music at Chadwicks, but my conversations afterward made it clear that we all thought about this reality. You couldn’t help but see classmates aged by time and not think about it!
Economics 101: Resources Are Scarce
At first glance, most of the people at Georgetown swim in abundance. Abundance of talent transformed into wealth, power, and skill by decades of hard work. Yet it became strikingly clear: You can’t have it all. As economics 101 taught us, life is a constrained optimization problem.
So the talented people of my class made choices that led to different outcomes: Some secured piles of money. Others, a strong marriage. Others, healthy children. Still others, global influence. Others, impact in their local community. Others, enduring friendships. Others, physical health. Others, peace of mind. But no one had it all.
Before my reunion, I worried that others would judge my decision not to seek wealth and political power but instead enter into parish ministry. Instead, I found myself verging on judgmental, beginning to feel sorry for those who had given their lives in service to the gods of achievement. I met one woman outside of the bathroom — already an awkward place to meet — and she came out rather quickly and said, “I didn’t know what to do, so I became a lawyer. And I still am.” I’ve heard confessions, and it felt like one. I looked down at her hand and noticed no ring. At 22, she was a romantic, full of life and love, and was attractive enough never to be single. I couldn’t assess her heart; I don’t know how it all happened. But I felt my heart break, thinking, wow, this can’t be the future she intended or hoped for.
Like I said, I verged on becoming judgmental. But I didn’t quite get there, because I appreciated the fact that everyone there faced myriad constraints and opportunities, of which I knew almost nothing. I did observe, though, that no one had it all.
Religion Might Be Needed; Mockingbird Is Definitely Needed
Precisely because we are mortal and resources are finite, no one can have it all, and therefore we all have needed to make choices. Which means, we could have made the wrong ones. One text thread, well lubricated by alcohol, included an admission by a classmate that the reunion made him wonder if he should have ended up with a different wife. I doubt he was the only one to think such a thought. The reunion forced all of us to ask one of the most haunting questions of life: Did I make the right “big” choices? For some, this anxiety came out in early morning texts, written from the back of an Uber. For others, this anxiety expressed itself in constant declarations to others about the righteousness of their decisions. Seriously, do you know how many people told me they were glad they didn’t have children?
This all seems like some of the fundamental ingredients for religion: a dawning sense of mortality, the need for time-tested wisdom about life’s decisions, and above all a need for someone to declare us justified and righteous! (Or at the very least, a means to help us process our regrets and the aftermath of the decisions we cannot reverse.)
Indeed, I became aware of people’s hunger for reconciliation and forgiveness. Admittedly, this did not come up during the reunion but in response to my sermon that I shared with some classmates. Because I peppered my sermon with stories from the reunion, I figured they might enjoy it. In response, two of them opened up about their struggles with forgiveness, both receiving and extending it.
In spite of all of these spiritual yearnings, few were telling me about their prayer practices, Bible reading, or church participation — of any religion. A large number of people actually told me how disgusted they were with Christianity, especially the connection between the evangelical movement and MAGA. One person tried to convince me to read a book about the Gospel of Mary Magdalene after I couldn’t answer all of her questions about why the Roman Catholic Church continued to adhere so religiously to ritual. (You know, it is bullet point number two on a Lutheran pastor’s job description: “Defend Rome’s Dogmatic Insistence on Rites.”) She finally blurted out, “I don’t think people are saved because they do good,” to which my thoroughly Roman Catholic friend, also listening, laughed, “You do know he is a Lutheran pastor, right?”
I felt strangely like I was 22 again. I stood in the midst of people who needed Christ and the church but, for all sorts of reasons, were not participating actively in a religious community. This is why I was called and why I still continue to feel called to parish ministry. I still believe God works in the congregation to forgive, guide, and equip people for living (and dying!). But I believe that the congregation alone cannot do the job; Mockingbird et al. is also necessary.
First, Mockingbird is necessary because people cannot have it all. Participating in a religious community takes time, time that most people don’t (think they) have. In addition, when the survey asks “where I seek spiritual development,” the local congregation is unlikely in the top three or four answers. If we wait for the spiritually hungry to come inside our walls, we will wait a long time — in fact, so long that we will all likely be dead. The message of God’s love amid life’s constraints demands a far larger audience than current congregational participation affords.
Furthermore, as a pastor I must make choices about how I allocate my time. While I would love to spend more time engaged outside of the walls of my congregation, the internal dynamics inevitably chew up time. Few pastors have the time for the consistent creation of the creative and reflective content that Mockingbird does; fewer still have the means and skills to distribute this kind of content in a way that reaches beyond the existing flock.
Second, Mockingbird is necessary because people are starved for transcendence. While law and gospel serve as the raison d’être of church, I sense what draws people back to faith communities is an encounter with something greater than themselves: a cause, a work of art, or the miracle of life and death. People need to encounter something that makes them say their previous paradigms and even life patterns no longer work in light of this new data that God is alive. Mockingbird’s dance with culture and art points toward and provides resonance for souls curious and almost confident that a crucified and risen God is on the loose somewhere in this world. That curiosity paves the road back to life together, the road that needn’t be less taken.
