May Magazine Letter 2023
Easter has long passed by the time you read this, but the church has not done with it so quickly. The chocolate eggs may be just a sweet memory, but there is an endless amount of thinking that will happen before we stop calling the Sundays after Easter ‘Sundays after Easter’. Death and resurrection are all around us, we so often see the former, but we sometimes need to be reminded of the latter.
Twenty-five years ago a student at the University of Wyoming, Mathew Shepard, was cruelly beaten, tortured and left tied up, naked, to a fence in freezing temperatures. He was there for 18 hours in a coma until a passing cyclist came across him. He died six days later from his extensive injuries in hospital. What had he done to merit such treatment? He was gay.
His parents kept his ashes at their home, concerned they would be desecrated if buried locally, until, that is, five years ago when they were laid to rest at Washington Cathedral. The cathedral commissioned a portrait of Matthew to be placed in the crypt, near to his ashes. The following is the prayer used at the service of dedication of the portrait.
May the image of Matthew we dedicate this night be a reminder of the love which surrounded him in life, and the affection which holds his precious memory in the hearts of so many.
May this portrait be a teacher for those who have yet to learn Matthew’s story, and a beacon of hope for those facing oppression. May it be for all of us a symbol of the beloved community for which we strive, the community where all your children are accepted, embraced, and loved.
I share the prayer’s longing that we create a community where people don’t just ‘fit in’ but belong.
Mark Oakley wrote in the Church Times (6/4/23), ‘Bishop Robinson said at the dedication of the portrait. “God takes a terrible thing, like Good Friday, and brings something amazing and miraculous out of it, like Easter. . . In the end, love wins. It may not look like it right now. The odds may be against it. But our confidence as Christians is that, in the end, God gets the last word, and that last word is love.”’
Mark Oakley concludes his article with the following: ‘The police officer who was called out to the scene of Matt’s attack said in her report that, as she approached the fence, she saw something next to his body. It was a deer, lying quietly beside him. It looked as if it had been there all night long. She said the deer saw her, stood up, looked her in the eyes, and then ran away. “That was the good Lord, no doubt, no doubt in my mind,” she wrote, “that was the good Lord.”’
That might have been a somewhat far-fetched notion, but her theology was right. Where else would the good Lord have been?
William