PROVIDENCE & TRANSFORMATION

by THOMAS HUBERT

The longer I live, the less I believe in accidents. The corollary to that is an enhanced belief in the unfolding of life events providentially. From that perspective, the issue then is not so much whether it really happens that way but rather, I think, whether we are paying attention to the unfolding.

A case in point: A newcomer to St. Michael’s, as well as a bibliophile, I wandered into the Walker library one day. In addition to scanning the book shelves, I examined the photographs on the wall and shelves. One in particular caught my attention; it was an image of Jack Durant, who had been a member of this parish and who served as a deacon here from 2000-2004. (The face in that photograph was, not unsurprisingly, quite different from the one I had known as a student of his at Auburn University, more than 50 years ago.) His ministry here and elsewhere is not, of course, news to those who have been at St. Michael’s for several years. According to his obituary, he was highly regarded for his compassion, his wit and his sermons.

Jack Durant and I grew up in the same general neck of the woods; more precisely, he came to young manhood in Birmingham, Ala., and I, 50 miles south in Clanton. My father had grown up in Birmingham also, and after his death, we used to visit my paternal grandmother, who still lived in Eastlake. (We also both have Tennessee connections.)

More importantly, however, the visit in the library was both revelation and reconnection after some 56 years. I had known Dr. Durant, as I called him at the time, when he was a youngish professor of English at Auburn during my sojourn there between 1967-1969 (he was in his late 30s then). I was a green-as-grass graduate student pursuing an M.A. in literature and was enrolled in his 18th-century novel class during that first year. (After finishing at Auburn, I took a teaching job in the English Department at the University of

Georgia and eventually lost touch.) As many at St. Michael’s know, it was at that time — September 6, 1967 to be exact — that his oldest daughter, Mary or “MayMay,” age 8, was murdered, along with two other girls by a young man who was in time convicted and sentenced to prison for life.

We graduate students knew about that tragic event, along with everyone else in the Auburn community, but there seemed to be a great gulf between us and the awful burden we knew our professor was carrying as he soldiered on during that fall term. A poignant irony about that time, as I reflected later, was that the class was reading some of the wittiest, literature ever written in the English language. Representative works include novels such as Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Humphrey Clinker, and so on. I cannot imagine that such fare provided the least bit of solace to a grieving father. How he, his wife, and the rest of the family were able to carry on with their lives was something we knew nothing about.

Tragedy, pain, loss, defeat— all of those life experiences we all may face if we live long enough—can have two outcomes. As the truism has it, they can either destroy us or make us stronger. But for the latter to occur, in order for us to prevail, we must make a choice. We have to make that choice and commit to live it out. But I dare say we cannot do so under our own steam. We need others in community with us, and we need the healing and tempering grace of the Incarnate and Crucified Word. For it is Christ himself who invites us to take up our cross if we would follow him (Matt. 16:24). That cross may take many forms, but some of them seem at the time to be unbearable. The “momentary light affliction” to which Paul refers in I Corinthians 4 hardly seems either light or momentary in real time. passing over. To condense a longer story, I was accosted at gunpoint in a parking garage in downtown St. Louis while approaching my car after work one November evening in 1985. I got into the car, inserted the key into the ignition, and just as I began turning the key, a would-be robber, having approached the driver’s side, fired a .38 caliber bullet into my chest through the driver’s window. As the engine started, the shooter took off, and I drove myself on Highway 40/I-64 to Barnes-Jewish Hospital, where I checked in for an eight-day stay.

How Jack Durant dealt with the death of his daughter, I do not know. But my intuition is that in the crucible of that experience lay the beginning of a spiritual transformation for him that resulted ultimately in his pursuit of the vocational diaconate where he could give himself in service to others. As I understand it, his ministry was directed in particular to those who, through age and the usual ravages of time, have become disconnected to one degree or another from their community and from the Body of Christ.

Why I was spared in this case from death or a debilitating injury, I have no earthly way of knowing. Was Providence at work? I cannot say with empirical certainty of course. What I do know is that, if the bullet had entered one inch this way or that, my wife would have been deprived of her life partner and our daughter of her father. And I would never have experienced two wonderful grandchildren who now have a grandfather who celebrates their lives with immeasurable delight. Indeed, I was spared. And I began almost from that moment asking myself with the author of Psalm 116, “What return can I make to the Lord for all his bounty to me?”

I venture to speculate about Jack Durant’s spiritual path, in part on the basis of certain trials and debilitating losses in my own life and those of others, which have led me down certain transformative paths that I would not otherwise have thought to take.

One such experience was when I came just about as close to death as it is possible to come without

I do not profess to be an expert in the workings of Providence. But I do know that out of evil—out of pain, defeat, loss, tragedy—can come good in small or great measure. We may, some of us, be subjected to evil and if so, we face it, as believers, not as victims but as witnesses to God’s grace working in the world. For in Christ we are conquerors, maybe on a small stage, maybe for some on a larger one. But that action can happen here. In this place and now.

My own experience with evil in this instance was the beginning of a long journey of transformation involving a search for ways to light a candle against the darkness we all find around us and sometimes within us. It continues. One of those ways has been engaging in a ministry of visiting with those who are either homebound or who live in residential communities and who are accordingly disconnected somewhat from old friends, neighbors and fellow parishioners. Part of that ministry includes taking communion to those unable to get to church on their own.

A number of questions have recently emerged in the past two years. What are the chances, I have recently asked myself, that we—our family—would land in the Triangle area in the year 2021? And more, what are the chances that we should find a home at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in 2022-2023, where Jack Durant was a member and a deacon? And still more, what are the odds that I, like Jack Durant, should find a late vocation in ministering to my fellow seasoned citizens? But as I said at the beginning, I don’t really believe in chances and odds. And why should any of us? It makes no sense to “believe” in impersonal forces anyway.

Our God is personal. What we can believe in is a heavenly Father who watches over us through all the chances and changes of this life and who desires in his heart of hearts to bring us safely home. For those who in this place knew Jack Durant, I hardly need to say that his was a life that in God’s plan was to be redirected out of the inexplicable and seemingly unbearable pain of the tragedy that was his. It was a tragedy that neither he nor any of us would choose, but his ultimate response to it bespeaks a redeeming grace that we all have as our birthright as children of the light.

May we always be open to that great gift in whatever ways it may be given. And may we share it as we are able. For it is really only when we give it away that it can redound to us in the first place.