“That was a brave thing to do,” said my cousin Dennis, after I had told twenty or thirty people that I was binding The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer for Mariann Edgar Budde, the bishop of Washington, at a poetry slam.
It wasn’t, particularly. Mariann Budde has courage, certainly. She stood on the pulpit in the National Cathedral and said the following to Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and a whole bunch of dignitaries:
Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They…may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people. Good of all people in this nation and the world. Amen”
Trump’s reaction was fury. But who was this bishop, and why had she done something that no one else had done?
Budde was born in New Jersey in 1959, and then started her career at an urban ministry in Arizona. Her work there led her to meet a lot of immigrant families. She spent time in Honduras, and there she had a revelation:
I was leading mission trips to Honduras, still trying to figure out where I fit—there, at the margins of society, or at the center of things. I was on a street in Tegulcigalpa and I had this sense—as close as I would say to a word coming to me—that said: Go back to your country and be with your people.
She did. She went to back to the states and got a Master of Divinity and then Doctorate of Divinity from Virginia Theological Seminary. Then she spent a year or two in Toledo as an assistant priest before moving to Minneapolis, where she was rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church fort eighteen years. She was elevated to Bishop of Washington in 2011.
She made several moves that raised hackles among the comfortable, and certainly the entitled. She got rid of the two stained glass windows that celebrated Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. She replaced them with this, a commemoration of the struggle for human rights:
That raised eyebrows, but the howling began when she got up on the steps of St. John’s Episcopal Church—in Washington, D. C., not Minneapolis. Trump had used the National Guard to clear a Black Lives Matter protest, had marched across the street with his generals in uniform (one of them, Mark Milley, would later apologize for politicizing the military), and had held a Bible up while scowling in front of the church. Budde’s reaction was summed up in The New York Time’s headline for the essay she wrote: Trump’s Visit to St. John’s Church Outraged Me. In that essay, she wrote:
…Mr. Trump used sacred symbols to cloak himself in the mantle of spiritual authority, while espousing positions antithetical to the Bible that he held in his hands. That’s why I drew the line, as did my colleague Archbishop Wilton Gregory when the very next day Mr. and Mrs. Trump made an unannounced visit to the Saint John Paul II National Shrine.
She was asked to give the benediction at the second night of the Democratic National Convention in 2020. There, she prayed for the “grace to do something big for something good."
You can argue that she already had. In fact, she could have been working Ruth Gordon’s maxim: Courage is like a muscle; we strengthen it by use. Budde presided, along with Gene Robinson (the church’s first openly gay bishop), at the internment of Mathew Shepard in 2018, twenty years after he had been abducted, tortured, chained to a fence and left to die.
Mathew Shepard was a 21-year-old college student who met two guys in a bar. By the end of the evening, Shepard was, as Wikipedia puts it, “beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie on October 6, 1998.[1] He was transported by rescuers to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he died six days later from severe head injuries sustained during the attack.” One of the guys pleaded guilty; they were both convicted and received life sentences in prison. Shepard’s death, along with a black man, James Byrd, who had been dragged by a truck for three miles on an asphalt road and then decapitated, were the impetus of the hate crime bill passed in 2009.
Dominick Dunne once wrote that victims of violent crimes die twice: their physical death, and then the smearing of their intentions and actions by apologists and lawyers, eager to get their clients off the hook. Mathew Shepard was no exception: there was no hate involved, some said, the two guys were just after his money. It was robbery, gone very wrong indeed. Other people alleged that Shepard was a meth dealer, and hardly as innocent as he sounded. The vitriol was so great that Shepard’s parents took his ashes and kept them for two decades. To bury them in Wyoming, they felt, would be an invitation to desecrate the grave.
Shepard had been an Episcopalian, and Budde stepped in. She interred him in the Cathedral, steps away from Helen Keller and other dignitaries.
As I watched Budde last week addressing Trump, I thought of the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Budde had confronted Hitler, and the question of how a civilization so, well, civilized as the Germans had come to embrace Naziism. I thought of what Bonhoeffer had said about cheap grace, and checked my phone to see the quote that everybody trots out, because it’s so good and so true:
I thought about all of that, and then I remembered that I had met my own Matt Shepard. I met him in a bar in Madison, Wisconsin, and we talked the evening through. We were both in our late twenties, we had an instant connection, the sex that ended the evening was tender and sweet. He had fallen in love with another man whom I knew—a German professor who had moved to Minneapolis. He was deeply in love, but also lonely, and he found respite for a bit in my arms.
Or in other’s arms, because he was killed behind the Civic Center, in a little alley leading to the stage door. It was an ideal site for fleeting pleasure, or murderous rage.
I thought about that man, and myself, and then I went off to bind my book at the Poet’s Passage. They have an open mic every Tuesday night, and I like to bind books with other people about. But first I had to introduce myself, and explain why I bound books in the first place. What is there about books?
I gave the simple version. I once sat with a group of guys and the question came up: what did you do when you first realized you were gay? A couple people went out and got drunk. Several told their closest friends, and swore them to a lifetime of secrecy. There was a suicide attempt.
“I went to the library,” I said.
Nobody could believe it.
“Well, I had a problem, and I needed an answer. And smart people have the answers, and then they write books. And somebody collects them all, and they put the books in the library. See?”
It made complete sense at the time.
The problem is, it still does.
And so I am binding Bonhoeffer for Budde. I am also binding it for myself, and for the man I loved for an evening who lay behind a Civic Center in a pool of blood. I’m binding it for the woman who took the ashes from the grieving parents, found a little space in her cathedral for them, and then filled up the church with a couple thousand people.
“She did me a favor,” I said, as I concluded my little talk, and then thought, ‘why in the world did I say that?’
Now I know.
