AUF WIEDERSEHEN, DEE

I have a playlist in my iTunes library call the Dee Files. I listened to it when I sat down Thursday night and started collecting my thoughts for this witness. The Dee Files consists of 392 songs sent to me by Dee Edwards, unsolicited, four or five years ago on a thumb drive with a note that said “Brother, I know those hours on the road can get long so here is some music to keep you company.”

Among the songs Dee sent me to keep me rolling are “She Want to Sell My Monkey” by Junior Wells (not Junior Wells and the All Stars – just Junior by himself); “Nobody Loves Me but My Mother and She Could Be Jivin’ Too” by B.B. King; “She Caught the Katy”  (… and left me a mule to ride…) by The Blues Brothers; “Poetry Man” by Phoebe Snow; “Cheap Sunglasses” by Z.Z. Top; “Gimme Shelter” by The Stones; “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” by Tom Waits; and the long live version of “Get Down” by War.

The playlist is a thing to behold – a work of genius. It came unsolicited and unexpected … and it was perfect. Who else would have Jethro Tull, Nat King Cole, Led Zeppelin and Paul Simon on the same playlist?

Spontaneous. Thoughtful. Generous. Creative. Remarkably intuitive. And just right. Sound like anyone you know?

Each of you has a playlist of Dee’s of your own – perhaps not made up of songs but of gestures and words and the thousands of tender mercies that made Dee Edwards singular among us. And I can tell you that my playlist of Dee Edwards memories has a lot more 392 entries.

Yes, Brother Dee, the road is long. Our journey goes back nearly 50 years – all the way back to Shoal Creek Camp and the fertile years of early adolescence, where the big kid from Lakewood and the big kid from First Conway who ordinarily would become rivals but instead became best friends. The road winds through long dark nights laying in the twin beds of his room at Doug and Clara’s on Skyline, staring at the ceiling and talking about God and the meaning of life and girls and the kinds of hopes and dreams particular to teenage boys. Eventually it winded to room 405 of Martin Hall at Hendrix College (Gashouse Park Avenue) and to the classrooms of Francis Christie and Bob Goodloe and Jimmy Upton and Ferris Baker – to Brenske’s Beanery and Goat Roasts -  to Joel Cooper’s little rent house across the street from Galloway Hall. It winded through weddings and divorces and broken hearts and busted dreams, through seminary campuses in North Carolina and Georgia, and through the unfettered excitement of early years in pastoral ministry.

But roads divide. I crossed the river from the North Arkansas Conference to the Little Rock Conference, and in those days they might as well have been like moving from North Dakota and to South Florida. Our friendship went on a 25-year hiatus for a hundred reasons, none of which is worth a damn.

And in that time Dee tried to feed his spiritual hunger at the table and I tried to feed mine through in some far darker places. Both, of course, are one-way streets that take their travelers further and further away from what they seek. His path took him to grave health issues and eventually to his own death last Sunday – mine took me nearly 2.5 million miles, literally.

Yet the roads that divide on occasion come back together. Several months ago through some fortuitous circumstances Dee and I reconnected after our long break, and we kept a regular weekly appointment to catch up on each other’s’ lives and drink a lot of coffee. This re-connection was a great gift to me – it was remarkable to me how little time seemed to have passed. I guess we had one of those relationships that is undamaged by time and absence. I’d like to think that’s right.

I returned to the road in mid-October but we kept in touch. We were able to spend a couple of hours together this last Christmas Eve. As I drove home from our visit I smiled to myself and thought, “How cool is this – to start out as a couple of hot-blooded man-children nearly 5 decades ago and come full circle to a couple of old guys will gray hair and health issues but still talking about God and the meaning of life and girls (except the girls in this case were granddaughters and physical therapists), unafraid of our affections and unashamed of our vulnerabilities.”

I might change my mind later – but for now this is at the top of my playlist. This was a sacred moment, and I had no idea at the time that that was what it was.

I guess that’s the problem with sacred moments – they go largely unrecognized. Yet in these sacred moments we drink the only water that quenches and eat the only bread that fills. In them we dwell, however briefly, in the presence of the Holy.

Like you my emotions are all over the map. I oscillate from disbelief to anger to a state of mind and heart I can only describe as ‘bereft.’ I haven’t had to live for a long time in a world without my brother Dee in it, and like you I am pretty unsteady with that.

But in my better and clearer moments I am grateful – grateful that Providence placed on my road, and on yours, one who, by the gifts that he had and shared, and by the soulfulness with which he shared them, made the sacred moments quite a bit more visible, more – what’s the word? - transparent. Dee could build a sanctuary, a sacred place, out of the simplest material – a word, a hug, a moment of silence, an understanding nod, a smirk, an expression of grace, an outburst of boyish enthusiasm, a big hand on the shoulder. Unselfconsciously Dee mediated the grace of God.

So Auf Wiedersehen Dee – my lifelong friend, my fellow traveler, my priest, my brother.