If Only . . .

A recent photo on my Facebook feed captured my attention. In the foreground was a five-year-old girl with a bright smile and wrinkles in her tights, walking towards the photographer. Behind her, talking intently with three other men, was her father, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States. On his shoulders, the weight of the world. In his posture, a hint of the chronic back pain he wrestled with daily. In his hand, his daughter’s baby doll.

The doll-in-hand photo was taken in September 1963; the youthful president would soon lie victim to the assassin’s bullet, dead at age forty-six. David Powers and Kenneth O’Donnell later wrote of his life, quoting the old Irish ballad in their title, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye.” When considering the presidency of JFK, what might have been different for Vietnam, for civil rights, for a little girl with a doll and a wee lad bravely saluting his father’s casket, had he not died so young? 

It’s a question we often struggle with when someone dies at what we consider to be “an early age.” Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley were fourteen years old; Carol McNair was eleven. Just days after the president had been photographed clutching his daughter’s doll, the four girls were donning their choir robes in the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. On that Sunday morning, no anthem would be sung. The planned sermon, “A Love that Forgives,” would be silenced, at least for that day. What might the lives of these four young women have brought to their families, their community, the world if bundles of dynamite had not robbed them of life? We will never know.

This week, two voices that have spoken deeply into my soul were silenced. One, Jean Vanier, lived a full life, dying at age ninety. A philosopher who lived as he taught, he created community for many around the world, especially intent to include those with developmental disabilities. “A community is only being created when its members accept that they are not going to achieve great things, that they are not going to be heroes, but simply live each day with new hope, like children, in wonderment as the sun rises and in thanksgiving as it sets.” For Vanier, the invitation was clear: “We must do what we can to diminish walls, to meet each other.”

The second voice was one of welcome as well. Rachel Held Evans, age thirty-seven, blogger, author, encourager of so many and lover of Jesus, tweeted that she was being admitted to the hospital with complications from the flu. Two weeks later, she was dead, leaving behind a grieving husband and two tiny children. She also leaves a bereft community of Twitter followers, and, as she described, “a bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good, but because they are hungry, because they said yes.” And, in God’s kingdom, she added, “There’s always room for more.”

Fellow conference conveners (and dear friends) Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu told this story about Rachel: “Once, when she was caught onstage during a Q&A with a fussy baby in the wings, she didn’t press on; she stopped, went backstage and brought her daughter out to finish the session – one hand around her baby, one around the microphone. She modeled the integration of faith, family and vocation.”  

Yes, her writing inspired me. Her courage gave me courage. We shared a heart for wonderers and wanderers. But I never met Rachel. Never shared a cup of coffee. Never exchanged a word on Twitter or comforted her babies. But somehow, I knew her, and I will miss her.

A life cut short? Heidi Stevens wrote, “It’s not the ending any of us would have imagined for Evans.” Nor for JFK, or for four girls putting on choir robes. Yet as we grieve, Rachel reminds us of our work: “We are called to enter into one another’s pain, anoint it as holy, and stick around no matter the outcome.” Vanier’s words lead the way: “we must do what we can . . .”