Letter #165 to friends et familiares: Good bye, John Lewis

“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
-- Abraham Lincoln 

“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”
-- Martin Luther King, Jr

John Robert Lewis never commanded my attention during his life-time. Yes, I admired what he said. But John Lewis was short, plain, quiet, and Black. My unreflective judgements never mattered to John Lewis or anybody else. 

So, who lost with such unthinking prejudice? 

Representative Lewis's pilgrimage from preaching to chickens as a toddler, to surviving Bloody Sunday in 1965, and on to triumphing in later life made an average man a great American. That greatness lay not in John Lewis alone, but in others, too.

In a fitting funeral yesterday, the nation celebrated that greatness and tasted the ingredients of John Lewis's "secret sauce":

• consideration reflexive enough to care; 
• faith tough enough to persevere; 
• humility profound enough to forgive;
• love rich enough to find the good in others; as well as,
• courage gritty enough to pursue righteousness.

Two presidents did not attend that funeral -- one frail in body, the other failed in spirit. The absence of the latter eased the bereavement, sharpened the moment, and reminded us of the peril of being small-minded. That President's absence, ironically, started our renewal.

Representative Lewis laid the foundation of that renewal by showing us that, notwithstanding the accidents of birth or measures of ability, the questions -- the big questions -- in our lives remain simple and apparent to us all.

The answers, too, are evident, if crushing. We saw, in the men and women who spoke yesterday at the funeral of John Lewis, leaders who had made mistakes, big mistakes. Bitterness, sacrifice, and imposed penance had followed those miscalculations. 

Representative Lewis's undefinable grace, an irreducible content of character, left him no alternative but to find the good, along with its possibilities, in those leaders. In that charity lay the way through those crushing answers, not for Presidents but for us. 

By John Lewis noticing the best in those leaders who spoke yesterday, they could see the best in us. Accordingly, this simple man, with his simple grace, not only reminded us of what American greatness should be, but also made most of us a little greater, too.