On the Sudden Death of Nancy and Peter Feist

See In Knoxville, "We Are All Crushed"

See In memory of Nancy and Peter Feist

There is very little that I can say about the sudden death of Nancy and the baby she was expecting in September.

I can say I worked with her and her husband at camp, I can say they are wonderful people with wonderful children and I can say they treated me with great friendship and kindness.

I don't have any funny stories to share. They were just wonderful folks to work with at camp – they were like high school sweethearts.

Maybe my mood is not conducive to remembering funny stories right now.

My meditations are more drawn to the religious aspects of this disaster.

Technically, the existential / theological term for this type of event is “boundary situation” but that scarcely seems adequate.

It's a horror. It's every nightmare that horror writers seek to imagine come to life. It's H. P. Lovecraft on a pessimistic day.

It is, less technically, the situation one finds oneself in when the basic trust we all have in reality is forcibly and suddenly removed from us.

It strikes me that this, above all else, is what the Christian faith seeks to address.

It's not about being a good person. It's not about breaking bad or even immoral habits. It is not about making the world a better place. It is not, even, particularly about loving your neighbor. And it certainly isn't about finding relationship or financial success through accepting Christ.

It is about life handing you a body blow like this and you find that somehow you have the grace to pick yourself off the bloody ground and keep going on.

But not just going on: going on in hope. Going on still vulnerable to joy and pain, still open to the needs of others and continuing to offer your chin to the gods to let them take another wack at you rather than hunkering down in some type of self-protective stoicism.

I've always thought the Simon and Garfunkel song gave the stoic alternative to a Christian stance on life the best: “hiding in my room, safe within my womb, I touch no one and no one touches me. I am a rock. I am an island.”

The other great world religions as well as many secularists would share this balance of realism and hope and vulnerability even though they'd use different language to express it.

But, in the end, it is not the language one uses to express it. It is one's encounter with the reality itself.

The central message of the Christian churches in the first and subsequent centuries was that God offered salvation to the world through the nightmare of Jesus' bloody and agonized death on the cross.

Through sanctifying (that is, making holy) suffering and death, God in Christ conquered suffering and death for all of us. Because of God in Christ, there are no godforsaken places in the world.

Whether one can accept certain physicalist ideas of resurrection or not, it would appear at least to Christians that God has chosen to heal us even in the abyss of our darkest, waking nightmares.

To believe in God in Christ is to believe that there is no such thing as a hopeless, meaningless life or a hopeless, meaningless death.

And, yes, being possessed by that reality can lead to forgiveness, love, moral behavior, social concern and even success in relationships and finance.

But what it mostly leads to is a hopeful, vulnerable embrace of life even when life seems to open into the abyss.

David and his grieving family are encountering the abyss and facing all the temptations of hopelessness and despair. But I've known them a long time. They've faced challenges before.

The gospel landed on good soil in this particular family.

Bill Bekkenhuis
Bethlehem, PA

"Would you rather die by a knife or a gun?"

Letter to Editor Express Times 06/12/09

Last Saturday the volunteer escorts at the Allentown Women's Center were repeatedly asked by a protester whether we'd rather die by a knife or a gun.

Paraphrasing, he said abortion is a procedure done with a knife. Dr. Tiller's “procedure” was done with a gun. I don't know which is worse, a bullet or a knife. So, how do you prefer to die – by a knife or by a gun?

We reported this to the Allentown police. Their response? “He's just asking a question.”

Nonetheless, I do not blame the responding officers.

They know what we know – that there is no local political will to enforce laws against intimidation or threats that would be enforced at any business in Allentown that wasn't a clinic providing, amongst other services, abortion services.

In the next 24 hours several escorts were interviewed by one FBI agent and two US Marshals who apparently had more political will behind them to follow up on such incidents.

Death threats are just the tip of the iceberg regarding the harassment patients, volunteers and staff must face while at the clinic.

It is, in my opinion, time for the women of Allentown (and their male allies) to let the City of Allentown (as well as their own families, friends and co-workers) know that death threats are NOT okay and that laws regarding intimidation, harassment and disorderly conduct MUST be enforced and that those who target providers of abortion services have no special immunity in this regard.