A Moral Calling

Editor’s Note: Pictured above is Nashville’s beloved Sara Harwell who passed over in late February. Cut and pasted below are the words of remembrance from her nephew, my good friend Preston Shipp. Readers of Dark Matter might recall some of his work published here and his essential testimony, Confessions of a Former Prosecutor. Reading his remembrance reminds me of all the ways I’ve been formed and sustained by people like Sara my whole life long. We are a beginning.

We just keep moving through life, don’t we? I think about all of the events that Sara was here for - babies being born, ballgames and performances, birthdays, graduations, weddings, funerals, more babies being born, who then had their own ballgames and plays and performances and graduations and weddings that she attended, a few more birthdays and funerals, with decades of Thanksgivings and Christmases and Easters and other holidays sprinkled in, and now here we are with one more funeral.

And of course we have so much to look forward to - more birthdays and weddings and babies born and Christmases and ballgames and graduations and weddings and funerals, but Sara won’t be here for them. And eventually neither will we. Time is weird.

When someone we love passes, we experience a little extra clarity. We are reminded that life is so short and precious. Songwriter Rich Mullins said, not long before he passed away in 1997,

“I think we cry at funerals because we realize what a miracle life is. You realize, ‘This will never happen again.’ There will never be this exact combination of genes, there will never again be the things that have created this person to be what [s]he is. God has spoken uniquely here, and it’s gone. It’s over. And I think there’s some regret, because we all realize, boy, we didn’t pay enough attention.”

Hopefully we all tried to pay attention to the gift that Sara was to all of us. Growing up, I thought Sara was pretty cool.

When I was 7 or 8, she gave me a copy of Born in the USA on vinyl, which I think was only the second album I ever personally owned, the first being Thriller and the third being Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet. And about 30 years later, I gave her Bruce’s autobiography Born to Run for Christmas. Sara and I always shared a lot of interests, including Springsteen.

Sara was a great playmate when I was little because in some ways, she was still like a kid herself. I have memories of taking long walks with her way back on the property of Grandmama Harwell in Pulaski, all the way to back to the big sinkhole. Sara was always up for an adventure.

And Sara loved to play board games as much as we kids did. We would play Sorry! or Clue or cards way past bedtime, and no Christmas gathering was complete without playing The Christmas Game, which was a holiday spin on Monopoly.

This continued right up to Sara playing telephone pictionary with my own kids, laughing until we cried at the ridiculous things we had drawn.

As I got a little older, I learned that Sara was a historian who worked as an archivist in the Vanderbilt library. Teenage me wasn’t sure what a university archivist did, but I learned pretty quick that if you were playing Trivial Pursuit, you wanted Sara on your team.

Sara went on to serve as the chief archivist for the Disciples of Christ Historical Society for 14 years. Listen to what the Disciples said about her in its tribute:

“Sara believed history is more than a record of the past - it has a moral calling for us.” A moral calling.

This is what I have come to appreciate most, as I have reflected over the past few weeks on what I know about Sara and my relationship to her: she believed that she, and all of us, have a moral calling. Sara was a morally serious individual.

The Disciples went on to say that Sara’s work “reflects [ ] the importance of historical memory, moral engagement, and the life of faith.” Sara’s life and work show us that historical memory informs moral engagement. Right remembering leads to right action.

This is Bible 101: Here’s what you are called to - for example in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, treat the poor, the vulnerable, the stranger in your land with kindness and dignity and compassion.

Why? Because remember you too were aliens in Egypt.

This is why Sara’s work as a historian and archivist, the work of right remembering, is so terribly important. Listen how she described her vocation in her own words: “[G]ood history should always be a moral undertaking. . . . This approach often involves the study of historically marginalized groups: racial minorities, women, the dispossessed. Our response revolves around issues of right and wrong, fairness and injustice.”

What a word! What a calling! And it is not just for historians and archivists, but for all people of faith and conscience. To do this critical work, Sara said, we must be open to “questioning our own roots and [not being] wedded to assumptions about the obvious rightness of where we presently stand."

"To truly understand the lessons of the past we must have humility in the face of the narrowness of our own contemporary experience and openness before the expanse of human history.”

“An attitude that is not capable of engaging with the past . . . is also likely to be closed off from the changes and challenges of the present.”

Sara’s words continue to ring true.

Back in 2014, I was privileged to see firsthand Sara embrace this calling of engaging the past in order to meet the moral challenges of the present, when she and Thomas Kleinert and I and a few others collaborated on a symposium here at Vine Street called “Stormy Questions: Christian Churches and the Slavery Issue.” Sara walked us through the ways that the church has been complicit first in slavery, then in segregation, and right up to the era of mass incarceration.

Reflecting on that symposium and the related exhibit, here is how she described her charge as an archivist to engage in moral remembering: “to empower the powerless, to give voice to the marginalized, and to speak truth to power.”

Preserving historical records, Sara believed, was crucial to “the cause of human rights and social justice.”

Sara was always discerning ways that her interests, scholarship, and giftedness could be put to use for others. Let me tell you one last story.

Sara knew that I had been teaching college classes at the Riverbend prison here in Nashville and even sat in on a couple of my classes. Over lunch one day, she wondered whether the guys at the prison might be interested in having her lead a workshop. I asked her what she had in mind, and she mentioned all the work she had done around researching genealogies. She thought the guys might be interested to learn more about their ancestry. So we got the workshop approved.

Sara asked the guys to write as much of their family history as they could, then she filled in the gaps and brought each of them a detailed genealogy. What they learned was that many of them, even guys from neighborhoods and gangs that were hostile, had common ancestors. And it’s hard to foster animosity when you know that you’re family. And that knowledge of their shared history brought about healing.

Sara took her expertise to a dark place, shared her gifts, and the ministry of reconciliation was made manifest. Sara knew that what we give away always multiplies.

So did we pay enough attention? Probably not. How could we? Given the infinite value and complexity of each human being, there’s no way we could ever pay close enough attention, regard each other with sufficient wonder and respect and awe. Perhaps the best we can do is try to slow the tape every now and then and contemplate what a gift and privilege it is just to share time with one another, playing a board game, listening to the Boss, or thinking about what we’re doing to cultivate compassion for people on the margins. All the simple moments we spend in relationship with one another which, when strung together over a period of 70 or so years, constitute a life well lived.

Relationships are precious. They are the currency of God’s kingdom, we might say. In the words of the great Catholic priest and theologian Henri Nouwen, “This brief lifetime is [our] opportunity to receive love, deepen love, grow in love, and give love.” All our life, however, brief or long it may be, is a preparation for death as a birth into perfect, eternal love. So we do well to invest ourselves fully in our relationships, to love as well as we are able, and to take our moral calling seriously, as Sara did. We can be assured that if we do, our lives will continue to bear good fruit long after we are no longer here among our loved ones.

Let’s pray together.

God Who is Love and Relationship Itself,

For the gift of your servant Sara, we give you thanks. For the blessing she was to all of us, we are grateful, and our presence here today is a testament that we are better for having known her. We believe that your love for Sara existed before she was born, and into Your perfect, eternal love we commend her. Receive her into the arms of Your mercy, into the peace of Your sabbath rest, and into the glorious company of all the saints, including Joe, Jo Ann, and Marice. May Sara’s heart and soul now ring out in joy to you, as you welcome her gentle, loving presence into Your Own. And be with all who mourn Sara’s passing. Bless and keep them with a sense of Your goodness and love. Lift up Your countenance upon them, and give them peace.

Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy; to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen.