With Our Wind Knocked Out

James Arthur Kelsey

Bishop of the Diocese of Northern Michigan

1952 - 2007

News of Jim Kelsey’s premature death comes as a crushing blow to friends and colleagues across the nation, indeed the globe. For those in Northern Michigan, the news is an insult, like a paralyzed diaphragm that has stopped our very breath. It is not simply the loss Jim’s vigor that we feel in nearly physical ways. It is the vision of the Church to which he gave himself. We are with the disciples along the Emmaus Road. 'We stand still, looking sad.'

There is so much more to this grief than the shock of the death of a close friend, the frightening specter such a tragedy visits upon us. Jim was inhabited by a Gospel so urgent that it shone a bright light. It was as piercing as the penetrating lights of the prophets themselves. No more clearly is this light than as it shines through Jim’s reflections on the Beatitudes, And it is this world that the gospel turns upside down. Calling have-nots “Blessed”?? Can you imagine?

I want to lay Jim’s work along side the groundbreaking work of Miles Horton at the Highlander Folk School, from which sprang the heart of the Civil Right’s Revolution. It was powered by Wes Frensdorff’s “Dream” of a church of radical companionship. Jim’s church is one of great imagination, of steely commitment to a Gospel of inclusion and of astonishing gratitude. Even while he was taking on the work of reshaping congregational life in Northern Michigan, rediscovering the radical inclusion of the Good News and fighting to keep the focus on the humanizing values at the heart of the Gospel, he would write this line. Let us be thankful that we a part of a Church which is trying, at least, to figure out how to bring these matters to the table, so we might discover what future God is calling us to.

He ended a recent chronicle of the House of Bishop’s wrenching consideration of the emerging, and punishing, Covenant being proposed by many in the Anglican Communion, Jim was able to end his report saying: It's kind of cool being an Episcopalian after all! This was not an expression of foolish optimism, but of the conviction that what was being made alive among us, as yet in small ways, would one day be seen as the beating heart of the Church. We were then, and are now, becoming a people in which hope resides, where everyone is able to exercise their gifts for ministry, and all, positively all, are welcome. Jim's life's work was about breaking down the walls the kept us from the power of our own proclamation.

Now the seed is sown. Jim’s work, even now, brings tears of joy to those who live near the edge of hope. The hope he posessed is a bright light shining through his life.

The world is turning upside down. And those who are losing altitude in the transaction are not well pleased. But as those who have been held down for so long are allowed to rise, with God's new laws of gravity, we are all of us blessed with an opportunity to rediscover how we are bound one to another, to God, and to all of creation.

For now, our attention and care involves finding our breath. With Mary, Nathan, Lydia, Amos, Steve and the whole Diocese of Northern Michigan our innards strain to breathe in a living hope. For now, we are the have nots. We are blessed. Can you imagine such a thing?