remembering Rachel Held Evans
Monday will be the one year anniversary of when my friend Rachel Held Evans left this world and joined the great cloud of witnesses. These photos are from February of last year when I went to see her and Dan and the kids at their home in Dayton, TN just before I moved from Nashville to OKC; and spent the most magical day there. That whole experience—eating the leftover spaghetti casserole Rachel warmed up for lunch—is such a treasure to me.
Rachel did the same thing for me that she did for so many of us: created space. People who were not a people, became a people. I like to say it is like all these disparate characters written into some southern gothic novel, and she actually did “write us in”—into the gospel story her very life embodied. And that circle is ever widening, ever expanding, even now. We found that we didn’t need to leave The Story, just to reclaim it from the forces who said we had no place in it. Rachel wrestled for that reclaiming…for all of us. She wouldn’t let anybody take Jesus from her, take her Bible from her. She didn’t run away from the angry religious mob, nor from difficult texts. She was wiling to fight for her faith; she was willing to fight for all of us.
And I am so grateful. I literally see her legacy playing out every single day in my own community, in the lives of people who decided to keep the faith—and in some cases decided not to take their lives—because of Rachel Held Evans. She did all of this without institutional support, without some pre-existent platform, using only the tools of impossible curiosity, fierceness, empathy, and a blue collar commitment to the craft of writing we creatives often lack. And with these, she literally created a space that actually did not exist before.
Today I find myself grappling with these things I find equally true: I am grateful for the way other people are prophesying God’s truth because of her…and it doesn’t sound quite the sound the same as when she did it. I am grateful for the way her witness continues in the world…and it’s not same as when she was here. I am grateful for all the people she drew together…and it’s not the same as when she held us together, at the center of the constellation. I am braver now for the way that she fought, but the world feels more scary sometimes now, not to look over and physically see her fighting alongside. This is not a play, she did not have a role. She was not interchangeable. The world will forever be better because of her. And there are real ways things the world continues to feel off in the last year, and gets even more so, without her in it.
And yet…and yet. I believe in the communion of the saints. I believe in the resurrection. I believe in these things that Rachel believed in, in no small part because of the life she lived. In the words of Rowan Williams, belief in God, “starts from a sense that we ‘believe in,’ we trust some kinds of people. We have confidence in the way they live, the way they live is the way I want to live, perhaps can imagine myself living in my better or more mature moments. The world they inhabit is one I’d like to live in. Faith has a lot to do with the simple fact that there are trustworthy lives to be seen, that we can see in some believing people a world we’d like to live in.” For all the ways things that are not the same, I saw in Rachel a world I’d like to live in...& that keeps me walking.