Redeeming

an excerpt from Gracing

J. Kirk Richards

My father’s mother—my Grandma Florence—was a spunky, short, Italian woman who wore purple floral muumuus and smelled of Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion perfume. She pulled her thick, black hair, streaked with white, loosely back with bobby pins.

With a signature raspy laugh, she always made sure we had plenty to eat. She taught me that the foundation of cooking was olive oil, celery, onion, and garlic. She always knew the latest scoop about everyone in the family and was quick to send a little money to any she deemed in need.

An only child, she grew up near Hollywood, California. She was part of a large extended Italian family, whom I picture in my mind like Toula’s family from My Big Fat Greek Wedding—large, loud, food loving, and very invested in each other. But their strong tradition of family became increasingly fractured after they immigrated to America.

When Flo was only four years old, her father, Henry, left the family for another woman. On his way out, he told his wife, Esther, that he had met a woman in Portland and would be back if the woman wasn’t pregnant. He borrowed money from extended family, which he never repaid, and even took Flo’s piggy bank with him.

He never returned.

Flo and Esther were left shattered, with nothing. Flo remembered her mother holding her in bed, weeping and saying, “Why did he leave us? What did I do? How am I going to take care of you?”

Esther started a small restaurant, and the mother and daughter lived in an attached bedroom and bathroom in the back. She worked long days serving roast and potatoes, burgers and sandwiches. When her responsibilities became too much, Flo went to live with extended family while Esther paid for her care and continued to serve customers. She’d complain to Flo about “that no-good father of yours.”

Fast forward many years to after her mother had passed on, my Grandma Flo learned that her father had married the other woman and had raised three children with her. He stayed with his new family until his death. At one point, Flo was able to meet her half-sister, who showed her photos of their father with his new family—happy pictures like those celebrating birthday parties. Later, my elderly grandma, still wounded from her childhood loss, said, “I don’t know why he didn’t love me too.”

As her own life was nearing its end, her son—my uncle—reminded my grandma that she would be meeting her father on the other side. He put a picture of her father on the wall, in hopes that his image would facilitate forgiveness. Early on, my grandma would walk by his picture, point her finger at her dad and give him a what for.

“Bad boy!” she would scold.

As time went on, she softened ever so slightly. While never becoming particularly warm towards him, she at least became less hostile.

I wonder how the heavenly family reunion played out.

I wonder if there is still unfinished work.

Recently I did the unthinkable. I performed temple ordinance work for Beulah Elizabeth Schultz—the other woman who stole Henry’s heart away from my family. I pushed aside the sense of betrayal, as if I was condoning the harm to my family in which she was complicit. But I also had a meaningful sacred experience and felt like the work I was doing was holy—extending an olive branch of reconciliation between Florence, Esther, Henry, Beulah, and my entire family.

I have little clarity on what the whole temple experience means or what realities it brings about. But there is something powerful in the idea that remembering our dead—their suffering, their grief, their sin, their pain, their hopes, their missed opportunities—is in some way redemptive when we seek to make right what was wrong. In remembering Beulah, though we aren’t closely related, maybe I am offering something on behalf of my family that my grandma is no longer able to give but which Beulah can nonetheless receive. And maybe it’s not a betrayal on my part if I am simultaneously reaching for divine healing for all those harmed by this act of betrayal, both among the living and the dead. Maybe I am participating in something redemptive not just for Beulah, but also for my grandma.

I believe that is what Jesus’s grace offers. And as I seek to live in similitude of Him, I believe He asks no less of me.

Redemption may be another manifestation of gracing in that it facilitates not only divine forgiveness but also divine healing. Maybe all this points to Jesus—as everything seems to do—as a wholemaker who reconnects us with God, offering unmerited gifts which facilitate healing for both receivers and givers of wrongs.

The priest Gregory Boyle, who worked for years with gang members in Los Angeles, highlighted this paradoxical redemptive love. He recalled the “precocious, funny, bold” Betito, only twelve years old, who was gunned down by two young men that Boyle also knew. The bullet pierced one side of Betito’s abdomen and exited the other, and he died soon after a valiant surgical effort. How do I respond, Boyle asked in his grief, when “kids I love [kill] kids I love”? The faces of both victims and victimizers plead for compassion.

I love Terryl and Fiona Givens’s insight that sodzo, the Greek word translated as savior in the scriptures, is elsewhere translated as healer. With equal linguistic justification, we could call Jesus not only the Savior of the World, but also the Healer of the World—healer of both hard hearts and broken hearts, of abusers and abused.

There is a need for redemption on both sides. In doing temple work, it may seem that our efforts are one-sided. Those with power are often those with records. The powerless often lack paper trails. We have records for the victors and those who were privileged enough to be buried in marked graves, while the slaves, the poor, and those who never bore children often had no one to record their names. Surely that’s unjust. And in linking the human family through temple work, we run up against these incriminating realities.

Given this historical void, we could understandably give up on the temple project. But we’re a stubborn people. My hunch is that someday, when science catches up to the spirit of the temple project, we will be able to read our family records not just from birth certificates, marriage records, and tombstones, but from our bodies’ own genetic code. And whether we learn about our family in this way or another, there’s more to the project than linking names and checking off ordinances. We’re linking souls. We’re welding hearts from both sides of the veil and both sides of painful conflicts. In this effort, my overarching desire is in gathering the entire human family home to each other and to God.

That’s the fundamental work.