Disconnected, dispossessed, disinherited, disempowered ? March 4, 2006 Jim Boushay eulogy for Mass of the Resurrection Service of Remembrance for Mark Glende Ascension Church, Oak Park, Illinois, USA Celebrant: Fr. Larry McNally, Pastor Lector: Ms. Victoria Tufano Cantor: Mr. Tom Gull Organist & Director of Music: Mr. David Anderson Organ Prelude Lord, you give the Great Commission: Heal the sick and preach the Word Songs Be Not Afraid I Danced in the Morning On Eagles’ Wings ________________________________________ Good morning. My name is Jim Boushay. Thank you to Ascension Church—its pastor and people—for doing this service of remembrance, this Mass of the Resurrection. I'm grateful too for the opportunity to say something. It was last November that I spoke publicly about Mark Glende, by name, at another local place of worship, Galewood Community Church. There I had the privilege and honor of preaching a sermon about him on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Up until that Sunday, I had not seen him for several weeks. I will say more in a little bit about where I saw him that morning and what I said about him in that sermon. Mark and I—sometimes along with my partner Rickey Sain—spent dozens of hours together in our SouthTown neighborhood, over a seven-year period. I’ve lived in the neighborhood for 12 years. It extends out from Oak Park Conservatory on Garfield Street, five blocks north, south, east, and west. That public building is two blocks south of this church. We shared a mutual love for drinking Pepsi together. Mark was 45. Or we'd sit on a bench outside the Oak Park Bakery, enjoying a Danish sweet roll. Or we'd share a cup of coffee inside the Something's Brewing coffee shop, now out of business, shuttered. Either Rickey or I would occasionally have to reassure the shop proprietor, and proprietors of the grocery store and restaurants in the next block, that Mark was okay. Mark was hardly harmful to anyone—even given his bedraggled down-and-out appearance and, worse, the offensive odors emanating from his unwashed body and unlaundered clothes. He tried to stay out of public view. I came to understand that he himself understood that he was a social outcast. Even so, more than several times Mark and I walked together on Garfield Street to mail letters at the post office at Harlem. He came, twice that I recall, to our annual outdoor community potluck feast. One year he gifted a neighborhood block party on Scoville with two fresh Golden apples as his food offering. And there he also introduced me and others to an acquaintance he had brought along with him. Otherwise in our mutual goings about town we would say hello and simply check in with each other. Sometimes he stayed in one of the local church-sponsored shelters for people homeless, sometimes not. Just depended. I typically asked if he needed anything, perhaps a few dollars or food to eat. He'd answer with a decisive and simple yes…or a no. Once, at his request, I gave him my CTA fare card because he wanted to take the Blue Line downtown. It would happen of course that he didn't recognize me. That was personally painful, especially because I had spent precious time on the phone advocating on his behalf with care providers. I was well aware of him as a person. I was stunned, and cried, over his accidental brutal death January 30 by a Metra train in Harvard. Most of the time, however, even when he wasn't taking his prescribed psychotropic medications, he seemed reasonably sure of what he needed right now. Often I listened without knowing what he was talking about, trying hard to pierce through the obvious mental illness, to get through to the Mark who seemed so bedeviling and elusive to neighbors. A few times I asked him to come for supper at my home. Each time he declined and I respected the decision. In a way, I was relieved. Supper with Mark would likely have been unusual, difficult. He told me once he was disappointed in me that I had not gotten him the job he wanted. I don't recall him asking me to help him get a job. In truth Mark was really not employable in any understandable sense of the word employable. I apologized to him for not doing what he said he had asked of me. I also told him I didn't remember him saying anything about a job. Thankfully, in humility Mark accepted my simple apology. To many observers, he was odd at the least, sometimes scary, and usually off-putting. He would often ramble on, sometimes grumbling incoherently. He would tell endlessly of this or that person he had met. He spoke of what seemed, to me, bizarre and imagined incidents. Only God knows the truth of the incidents. So those experiences were some of the sub-texts of Mark Glende Matters in my Sunday-morning-before-Thanksgiving sermon, titled What Is There to Lose? What I didn't expect that quiet fall morning at 9 was to find him sleeping in the Fifth Third Bank cash station enclosure, where I went to withdraw pocket money before going off to preach a sermon about ways we could and couldn't help him and people like him. While not seeing him in the enclosure at first, I did pick up immediately an unmistakably foul-smelling odor. I turned around to leave that unpleasant space. But there he was, lying on the floor in a darkened corner, just waking up. He assured me he was okay and asked for money because, he said, he was hungry. I gave him $10, saying I would be back on the block in a few hours. When I returned that day, I didn't see him again. I regarded that timely morning encounter, actually, as a kind of miracle, speaking of it an hour later from the pulpit. There I also explained that the worst reality about Mark was his substantial disconnection from the world of his neighborhood. He was more than a conventional mess, and then some. He was homeless, yes. Yet he also seemed to make his way in his own unique style. He seemed to know what he needed in the moment. That trait sounds pretty much like lots of people we all know. And yes, I feel that what we have lost is a member of our family, lost a friend who helped remind us about such values as parity and equity in relationships of mutuality. Clearly Mark was not able to keep up his end of the mutuality. Not to worry. We loved him. Many neighbors genuinely cherished being kind to Mark. Thank you. He was lost, forsaken, like poor rubbish. He was abandoned, weak, vulnerable, down and out, dirty, unclean. I'm sure he appreciated any kindness and the many other good things neighbors did for and with him to help him along the way. But for me, a second and even bigger miracle that happened concerning Mark is not an easy story to tell here. I risk being thought crazy and insane, like Mark. It is the story of Mark standing on Garfield Street, in front of my apartment building. As usual I got out of bed about 5. When I lifted the blinds to bring in the morning light, there was Mark below, standing his ground, staring up at me from the concrete walkway. He was simply there, looking up at my window with what I took to be an angry, questioning look on his scrawny, bearded face. Even more mysterious, on three other separate occasions he was staring up at me on the very morning of our annual community potluck feast that was to happen later on in the afternoon. I had invited him of course. I've thought of those inexplicable experiences, countless times. They have helped startle me into a new reality, into a newer way of thinking and seeing the world and my neighborhood metaphysically, a newer way of seeing the banal and beautiful in uneasy tension. He also showed it is possible that there still is a God of power in all the mess, in the poverty of spirit and in the dysfunction around and within us. There was an exquisite and unique local story behind Mark's madness and messiness, his insanity. It was hard for us who knew him to engage that madness in a way that might reduce his kind of isolation or might fix his abject poverty. Mark had nothing except what was around and on his personhood in the moment. He had no baseball game to hurry home to watch on TV. No friend to meet downtown for dinner. No access to internet chat rooms or Yahoo e-groups. No commiserating colleague on the phone to complain to about life's ups and downs. He was dispossessed from things meaningful to us. Like the historical Jesus, he was among the disinherited. Mark had and was nothing—except for the very breath that God had given him. Now that's another 2006-style miracle worth telling about. There are mystical and supernatural lessons in Mark's very real-life story. And because he had the breath of God only, I felt drawn to him rather than being repelled by him. I felt I was in God's awesome presence when I was with Mark in his vulnerability. I sometimes deliberately sought him out. In effect, the weak and poor have Everything. It was God alone that Mark had. I wanted to be close to God, through Mark. God alone. That's it; nothing else. That awesome reality turns the wonder of truth and justice on its head. That truth brings to mind the call to care and wonder, as expressed in the words of the hymn "Our God Is an Awesome God," which words are similar, it seems to me, to the words of yet another traditional and compelling hymn of the church, "How Great Thou Art." I confess: The awesome metaphysical, heavenly truth of Mark's unique and only-too-real earthly existence is hard to understand and explain. It was hellish—that much we know. But among the inexhaustibly rich gifts that Mark leaves behind, one surely is the lesson of how the community is called to see God and God's creation in the poor, in the simple ways poor Mark spoke rich truth to power. What has Mark brought to life by his terrible death? Not a simple question, really, but one we might ask in the days and weeks ahead. I encourage you, in the name of Mark and all that is good and purposeful, to ponder the complex answers to that question. For me in this instant, I'm certain that Mark will continue to be a compelling phantom reminder in town. His memory will help us continue to ask this question: What more do we need to do to be a better caring community than perhaps we are now? Lest we and the church neglect our mission to heal the sick and to live out the moral ethos of radical inclusion, the story of Mark can help us witness to God's purpose of justice and mercy for all. And to witness to that awesome purpose with renewed integrity. Many thanks for the opportunity to say these things about the miracle of Mark Glende. God has taken him into the loving arms of the almighty kingdom of peace beyond us. May we know that, in God, we are never disconnected, dispossessed, disinherited, or disempowered. Never. Our God is an awesome God: You shall see the face of God and live. _______________________________________________________ Back