Now She Knows

Social media can be so mean-spirited, and last night’s news of the death of Phyllis Schlafly offered a fresh opportunity for many people to match vitriol with vitriol. Twitter was especially vicious.

Today is a good day to exemplify what it looks like to try to embody the message of Jesus, even when dealing with people who wound us and express views that we might consider heinous.

Michael Kirby- my colleague and brother in Christ – puts it this way:

Perhaps precisely because she would never fail to say something derogatory about people like me and many people I love, the most appropriate response I can make to the passing of beloved child of God, yet increasingly marginalized political religious figure, Phyllis Schlafly, is to note that it is my fondest wish and prayer that now she knows. In eternity’s embrace, may all of her disdain and, yes, hatred, fall away in a refining conflagration of grace. May that be the peace in which she rests…one in which she joins for all time those whose deaths from HIV/AIDS she proclaimed as divine judgment but who now welcome the eternal part of her with a love and grace born of the very God she purported to understand.

In this life, Phyllis Schlafly was  a practicing Roman Catholic Christian, and a beloved wife, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.  One of her sons is a gay man.

By faith, I believe that Now She Knows:

• That  her son John is beloved by God just the way he is
• That it’s not a woman’s fault if she is sexually harassed at work
• That transgender people are not “nuts”
• That husbands can indeed sexually assault their own wives
• That human beings might do illegal things but we cannot be “illegal” because we were created in God’s image
• That evolution doesn’t preclude the existence of a powerful Creator
• That grace abounds for each of us.

May God bring comfort to her family and friends.