The Rev’d Ethan Magness
Praying for a Dying Lion.
The Rev’d Ethan Magness
The symbol for the SAE fraternity is a lion whose head is being touched by the gentle hand of Minerva – the goddess of art and strategy. This memorable image sends a clear message: the wild king of the jungle can be infused with a superior nature which derives from a transcendent source. Let that image linger as we consider the lion-like Peter Moore.
Peter was a cut above most men – a leader of leaders, a rector of rectors, a founder and president of life-changing institutions. He was an entrepreneurial pioneer, an intuitive pastor, and a gifted author. But his greatest asset was deeper than a well-crafted set of talents or an innate disposition - Peter was cultivated over many years by the intersplicing of pain and Spirit. These dual and dueling ingredients formed out of Peter something better than a ‘great’ man – he became a good man (‘an Israelite in whom there is no guile’). Peter’s scalp was touched by unseen forces. He was bold and humble, stable and stabilizing. My own fortuitus friendship with Peter occurred because he intentionally invested his hours and energies into young leaders. I (for a yet-to-be-understood-reason) was one of those chosen leaders.
Peter gathered with a few young priests once a year in varied Southern locations. Our annual excursion always has the same liturgy: six of us would huddle with Peter to drink, talk, sleep, drink, hike, pray, and drink. At each gathering, Peter took up the mantle of the quiet servant. Peter made the pancakes, Peter warmed the dishes so the pancakes stayed hot, Peter did the dishes, and Peter advised but only after he was asked for advice. But mostly, Peter served us with his ears. He listened. He heard our sour jokes, our cynical attitudes, our needless jabs, our rancid regrets, our glittering hopes – all of it. Peter was receptive and open rather than defensive and mouthy. He was a lion who never had to show his fangs or chomp-down the younglings to prove his superior status. He was princely without the royal garb; a lion without ever having to roar.
But our 2020 gathering was different and greyer. This year we decided that Charleston was the needful location for our February collective, as Peter was ailing with cancer and we wanted to be near him. So there we were: Peter’s one-time-grad-students, now fully-fledged priests. We are in the throes of our calling, each of us bearing the unseemly scars of this cruciform and debilitating vocation. Balding but bright-eyed, hobbled but resilient, cynical but enthused, we encircled a weakening lion who shut his eyes and lowered his head as we touched him with trembling hands and prayed with intense feeling. We offered Peter’s fragile life to Heaven’s unseen ends and sobbed like soon-to-be-orphans. We knew this was a final moment with the man who was a father to those who felt fatherless.
I remember the final words that passed between Peter and me that day. I stood at the doorway of his home at sunset, ready to plod-off into a purring Suburban. When we were alone, Peter said, ‘Ethan, I’m amazed by what you’ve accomplished. It means something – you need to know that – what you’ve done really matters. I can’t tell you how proud I am of you, son.’ My eyes were immediately baptized in warm tears while my mouth, tongue, and throat dried up like a desert. I mumbled something benign and incoherent, hugged him, and turned away, overcome with a cluttery grief. His words caught me off-guard. They battered through my well-buttressed fortifications of inner-antagonism and caused me to feel something new - something like this: when all is said and done, I do mean something because a man as wonderful as Peter Moore believed that I meant something. He leadened my feet, steeled my spine, lightened my shoulders, and lifted my chin. In Peter’s final, exalting words to me, he mirrored the disarming face of the grinning, Fathering-God whose arms remain outstretched at the welcoming-gate of a refurbished Eden.
I was dumbstruck during the sunset of that reverent day, but I’m not anymore. I can speak again, Peter, and I finally found the words that I needed at the doorposts and lintel of your Charlestonian home. I hope you can hear me through the membrane that separates the shadowlands from the Age to Come. Here goes: ‘You meant something to me, too, Peter. More than something. You called me son. You gave fatherhood a smooth voice and a strong face. You helped make sense of the words that George MacDonald penned regarding his own father: ‘Thou hast been faithful to my highest need; And I, thy debtor, ever, evermore, shall never feel the grateful burden sore. Yet most I thank thee, not for any deed, but for the sense thy living self did breed, that fatherhood is at the great world's core.’
The head we touched that day was the head of our dying, paternal lion – a noble prince of whom this world was not worthy. And then, a few wasting-weeks later, our lion gave up his ghost. He died surrounded by love and light; paws opened, heaving-chest stilled, yellow eyes closed, and tranquil face tilted toward the sunrise.
The oblation of our shaky hands and sputtery words on that warm February day were of some comfort to him, I’m sure. But now, the hand that rests atop Peter’s head is neither Minerva’s nor ours, but the punctured palm of the ever-living Embodiment of pain and recovery, the benevolent Wound that heals the wounds. And now ‘upon another shore and in a greater light’ a descendant from the House of Moore and a descendant from the House of Judah run like free men toward one another – lion meets Lion, father meets Father – and in that moment an ashen creation trembles with the roars that quicken it to life.
In paradisum deducant te Angeli.
