imagine
When the worst that can happen happens, the most feared and dreaded unimaginable, the darkest darkness that life can bring, we come together in the pain because it is too much to bear alone, we need each other in order even to go on. For parents especially, and I saw yesterday in a way that cut through to me personally, for a grandfather, namesake, anguish in eyes and on face, as though today he has lost his dream, his very rai·son d'ê·tre. I cannot imagine, do not want to imagine.
The life of a bright young man with so much promise for bearing lovingkindness in the world. Those years in the classroom when we talked about, and read books about, and watched films about, explored pointedly, discovered and acquired a consciousness of agapē, the New Testament Greek word ἀγάπη that is the essence of Christian faith. My hope as their teacher, their last year or so of elementary school and particularly through their middle school years, to help them see, perceive, realize, understand what the love of Jesus is about in such a way that even if they didn't get it now, perhaps in some future long after me, the light would come on. Of them all, all the students, all the years, I sensed that two of these young people whom I loved so, had it already, and Richard was one.
To stop abruptly in the middle of a scene in a film, or a paragraph in a story, and identify specifically the example of ἀγάπη that was the love of God. To bring in to class and tell about instances they had seen in life, at home, in the family, out with friends, around their neighborhoods, coming and going in life, exemplary, or especially ordinary cases of ἀγάπη so that they knew what it was, know what love is. That they acquire the sense of it was my one goal as their religion and ethics teacher all those years. Or go away with the seed of it in their minds. Like our main focus C S Lewis described of his "The Chronicles of Narnia", subtle not blatant, Lewis called it "preevangelical". I thought that Richard and one other kid got it when most of the others were just enjoying the movies and donuts.
And, noticing the lives of some of them from time to time over the next dozen years, I saw that he really did.
Yesterday my Kristen, who was in the same class, texted me "Richard Youd died this morning in a car crash". My sadness is beyond all my imagining.
Fr Tom
The life of a bright young man with so much promise for bearing lovingkindness in the world. Those years in the classroom when we talked about, and read books about, and watched films about, explored pointedly, discovered and acquired a consciousness of agapē, the New Testament Greek word ἀγάπη that is the essence of Christian faith. My hope as their teacher, their last year or so of elementary school and particularly through their middle school years, to help them see, perceive, realize, understand what the love of Jesus is about in such a way that even if they didn't get it now, perhaps in some future long after me, the light would come on. Of them all, all the students, all the years, I sensed that two of these young people whom I loved so, had it already, and Richard was one.
To stop abruptly in the middle of a scene in a film, or a paragraph in a story, and identify specifically the example of ἀγάπη that was the love of God. To bring in to class and tell about instances they had seen in life, at home, in the family, out with friends, around their neighborhoods, coming and going in life, exemplary, or especially ordinary cases of ἀγάπη so that they knew what it was, know what love is. That they acquire the sense of it was my one goal as their religion and ethics teacher all those years. Or go away with the seed of it in their minds. Like our main focus C S Lewis described of his "The Chronicles of Narnia", subtle not blatant, Lewis called it "preevangelical". I thought that Richard and one other kid got it when most of the others were just enjoying the movies and donuts.
And, noticing the lives of some of them from time to time over the next dozen years, I saw that he really did.
Yesterday my Kristen, who was in the same class, texted me "Richard Youd died this morning in a car crash". My sadness is beyond all my imagining.
Fr Tom