Fillable Printable A Eulogy for My Colleague
Fillable Printable A Eulogy for My Colleague
A Eulogy for My Colleague
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A EULOGY FOR MY COLLEAGUE, MICHAEL M. MENDIOLA
February 1, 2009
by Mary A Tolbert
While Michael did not have the biggest shoes on the PSR faculty, he
certainly did have the biggest sole/soul! Yes, as you guessed, that is a slightly
revised “Michael pun.” One of the “million” he delivered at just about every
conceivable point . Those puns lightened the tension in many a meeting and ma de
hard discussions easier. Indeed, another PSR colleague told me a wonderful story
that illustrates this so well: Just a few months ago, Michael was telling this
colleague about the return of the cancer and the deeply pessimistic prognosis he
had received. At the end of the conversation, as Michael was leaving, he smiled
mischievously and said, “This is a grave concern” and then went away laughing.
He was absolutely irrepressible! His warmth, humor, compassion and profound
joy in living---that so marked his life with his family and friends---was just as
clearly on display in Michael’s professional life as a faculty member at Pacific
School of Religion and the Graduate Theological Union. As a teacher, as a
scholar, and as a colleague, Michael was unforgettable and irreplaceable. In his
death, we have all lost a truly “great soul.”
I had the privilege of teaching several classes with Michael over the last 14
years that I served with him on the PSR faculty. In fact, we had planne d to teach a
class together this past Fall before Michael became so ill. Teaching with Michael
was pure joy! In the classroom, Michael was inspiring, funny, and profound, and
the breadth of his knowledge was often breath-taking: one minute he coul d be
talking about Aquinas and Natural Law and in the next minute, the latest positions
of Queer Theory; from the classical world to the postmodern one, Michael was
equally at home. In the beginning, students would come to his classes maybe
because they had to or needed to; after a session or two, they came because they
wanted to; and after a few more sessions, they came because they could not
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imagine missing even one word Michael had to say. Michael loved learning, and
in the classroom, he was uniquely able to communicate that love to students. He
changed the thinking and indeed the lives of so many of the students he touched
with his inspired teaching. Without question he was one of the best teachers PSR
has seen in many years: passionate, committed to high standards for himself and
everyone else, a superb communicator, and a compelling classroom presence.
Those are shoes that will be very hard to fill!
Michael’s excellence as a teacher sprang directly out of his commitment
both to students and to his own scholarship. Michael gave fully of his tim e,
resources, and skill to any student who needed and wanted help (the “wanted” was
very important). From m eeting students during vacation days to reading and
rereading papers and theses to all hours of the night, so that students could get
important feedback in time for deadlines, Michael was, as another colleague put it,
“impeccably responsible,” or as I often put it to Michael, “too damn committed for
his own good.” But Michael’s commitment to students was part and parcel of his
scholarly commitment to a profoundly embodied narrative ethics, a development
of contemporary ethics that takes with great seriousness the real, lived experience
of people in day to day life expressed in th eir stories. In his book on suffering, for
example, he spends a great deal of time developing what he calls a “thick”
description of suffering. He wanted to know what people really experienced and
meant by suffering in detail before talking about possible ethical responses to it.
As a gay man and as a Latino, Michael was especially concerned with the
suffering that comes from social injustice, and as a bioethicist, he took the pain of
the body, a pain that in recent years, he himself knew only too well, with
compassionate seriousness. However, scholarship for Michael was not only
something one did in books, lectures, and classrooms; scholarship for Michael
needed to act in the world to change the painful realities it analyzed. At PSR,
Michael was the founder of the Bay Area Faith and Health Consortium, bringing
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together health professionals from across the region and especially from Cal’s
School of Public Health with theologians and ethicists to work out best practices
for patient and community care. Moreover, Michael was one of the faculty leaders
in establishing PSR’s ground-breaking Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in
Religion and Ministry. Without Michael that Center would not exist. Scholarship
in action; compassionate reasoning; theory and praxis working together---those
were not just slogans for Michael; they were the embodied soul of his life and
work.
As a faculty colleague, Michael was, as scripture puts it, a man in whom
there is no guile. Michael did not participate in the behind-the-back m achinations
that often plague small faculties---and let’s be honest, large ones as well. He was
who he was at every moment, an enormously rare quality in my experience. What
he told you in the privacy of his office was exactly what he would say in a public
meeting. I always felt relieved when I was in a meeting with Michael because I
knew he would be articulate, fair-minded, reasonable, and absol utely accountable
in all that he said and supported. Michael always spoke the truth, as he knew it,
about his views, his feelings, and his life. If he was angry, he told you; if he was
happy, he told you; if he was depressed, as he was so often in the last month of his
life, he told you. You never had to wonder or guess what Michael thought or what
he felt. It is such a relief to work with someone like that, such a joy. I loved
working with Michael, even on those rare occasions when we did not agree,
because I had enormous respect for Michael’s carefully thought out positions, and
because we could talk about anything, literally anything: death, fidelity, sex, his
desire to go to beauty school, finances, family, politics, anything. He always spoke
out courageously at injustice, and he always expressed his gratitude at the work
and words of others. After many m eetings, Michael would knock on my office
door just to tell me that he really appreciated what I had said or done in that
meeting. And I am not the only one; many faculty colleagues found Michael at
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their doors expressing his gratitude for what they had said. He let us all know that
he, at least, appreciated the time and work everyone put in to making the school a
successful enterprise. And in return, Michael was held in enormously high esteem
by everyone who worked with him, which often meant that he was elected or
appointed to crucial committees and important faculty posts—all of which he
carried through with utter competence and f ull accountability. How can you not
love a colleague like that? Gratitude, humility, courage, fair-mindedness, humor,
intelligence, and an enduring personal honesty were the hallmarks of Michael’s
collegial life. We will not see his like again anytime soon. Michael was a rare soul,
one who was with us much, much too short a time.
Writing this piece about Michael has been one of the hardest tasks I have
undertaken in a long time—not because there are not many things to say about this
wonderful man. I could easily spend hours telling you about Michael. But
because I simply cannot believe that he is gone. I keep expecting to hear his
laughter in the PSR hallways, to find him at the center of every group of excitedly
talking students. He is too vital, too alive to be dead. I want to close my remarks
with a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that says what I am feeling today:
Dirge without Music
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely, Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you,
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains---but the best is lost.
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The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love---
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses of the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
