Thoughts on Mike Feigley

Mike Feigley

The Man Who Never Met A Stranger

October 3nd, 2014

Wednesday night, Matt Feigley took me out to an all-you-can eat Chinese buffet where we talked about his dad - whom I knew through Scouting since at least 1981 if not earlier - and his dad’s memorial service.

Matt described his dad as someone who “never met a stranger.”

Sadly - despite Mike’s tactful admission before his death that the failure to reference the word “God” at his memorial would not unduly displease him - this expression stuck in my mind and triggered some theological second thoughts. Occupational hazard...

The psychiatrist Erich Fromm once said, “Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.”(1)

And that problem, in my opinion, is the human animal’s glory and curse in that - of all animals - it is the only one whose brain has developed in such a way that it can contemplate death in abstract and think about its implications long before one ends up in a funeral home.

The Christian lawyer, theologian, and political activist William Stringfellow said:

“Death is the contemporaneous power abrasively addressing every person in one’s own existence with the word that one is not only eventually and finally, but even now and already, estranged, separated, alienated, lost in relationships with everybody and everything else, and - what is in a way much worse - one’s very own self. Death means a total loss of identity.

“Death, in this sense - death embodying this awful threat - is the death which is at work not only on the day of the undertaker, but today”(2)

A person’s religion, in my estimation, is the manner of life they develop in response to the ever-present reality of death whatever sectarian symbols - or lack thereof - are involved in their verbal or ritual expression of that response.

Mike confronted death many times, as do we all. Mike experienced precursors of his death in the dissolution of his first marriage, his being laid off from Crayola, the decline of his health in the last year of his life and - most dramatically - in a health crises at age 35 necessitating cardiac bypass surgery.

So I am confident that, on the day of his passing, Mike Feigley learned nothing new about death as he had already “been there, done that, and got the tee shirt” many times before.

And his religion (if he would excuse the expression) - the way he responded to death as verified by my personal experiences with Mike and Matt’s description - was to fully embrace life and, though he was never one to suffer fools gladly, freely befriend the people he encountered despite his knowing that, in so doing, this openness and vulnerability would cause him a lot of pain along the way.

Estranged, separated, alienated, lost in relationships with everybody and everything else up to and including one’s own self: Mike’s religious response to the problem of his own existence  was as far from that as can be conceived.

And that is why Mike Feigley never met a stranger. No matter the changing circumstances of his life and experiences that anticipated his death, he simply refused to be estranged from full participation in life and engaging life’s fellow participants.

Bill Bekkenhuis


References

(1) “Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.”
-Erich Fromm

Read more at BrainyQuote

(2) “Death is the contemporaneous power abrasively addressing every person in one’s own existence with the word that one is not only eventually and finally, but even now and already, estranged, separated, alienated, lost in relationships with everybody and everything else, and - what is in a way much worse - one’s very own self. Death means a total loss of identity.”

“Death, in this sense - death embodying this awful threat - is the death which is at work not only on the day of the undertaker, but today”

-William Stringfellow (“Instead of Death,” Seabury Press, 1976, p. 22)