Dear john...

I was a first year seminary student at Union Theological Seminary in NYC.  My dentist was across the street from the Dakota.  My young family and I were getting ready to spend 6 months in Costa Rica - for language and liberation theology study - when the news broke that dear John had been shot outside his apartment... and then that he was dead.

I left the seminary refectory and threw up - then wept.  I had been brought to new life - my real Pentecost - seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan back in February 1964.  I found purpose and zest playing music - first a lousy acoustic guitar with my buddy, Ross, from confirmation class and later bass in our band Creepin' Jesus - I was always the rogue John Lennon to his emerging Paul McCartney.  I sang the rough, nasty songs to his sweet ballads.  And as so often happens after high school - and college - we went our separate ways.  Sitting in the drizzling darkness of my seminary apartment, however, the phone rang and it was Ross.  We talked and wept some more and found a way to reconnect in our shared sorrow.

I was doing an internship in my old home church - the place where I met Ross and played guitar so often - so that Sunday we all shared a time of silence in memory all across the universe in the place where I had come to faith.  Last summer, in Montreal, another artist who loved dear John shared a new vision of the old songs - and I wept again.  His gifts are timeless so today I give thanks to God for John Lennon.