As my children know, I am a sucker for “Clickbait” on web portal Homepages, especially the kind whose headlines have the word “favorite” in them: Five Favorite Foods of Thin People, Favorite Places to Retire, Favorite Wildflower Hikes, All-Time Favorite Chicago Cubs. In the secret drawer of this website where I throw everything presently-not-presentable, I have my own lists of favorites: Favorite Albums, Favorite Athletes, Favorite Little Books with Big Meaning, Favorite Teacher (Sister Donald, 5^th Grade) Favorite Coach (Jack Miller), you get the idea, and, of course, Favorite Books.

Yesterday, Harper Lee, the author of my favorite novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, died at the age of 89 and the family emails ensued. Ms. Lee and her book hold a place of high esteem and delight in my family. All three of the Miller sons taught and loved Ms. Lee, her book, and its characters. My younger brother read it aloud every year for nearly 25 years to his 6^th grade class at a Jesuit grade school; my older brother taught it for decades in a public high school; I have fond memories of teaching it to 9^th graders at a Jesuit high school 35 years ago and hosting a showing of the black and white film on my apartment wall as my sophomore class passed giant brown bags of home-popped popcorn. When my nephew and niece were but 8 and 6 respectively, almost the same ages as Jem and Scout, they sat captivated as their aunt sat on their bed with them at night and read Mockingbird aloud, translating on the spot difficult words or adult subject matters, changing words like “rape” to “hurt badly.” Ascribing nicknames to each of my three children when they were toddlers, my youngest son became Boo, named after Boo Radley, the sequestered Radley son turned malevolent phantom in the minds and neighborhood of the Finch children and their summer friend Dill. In the end, you will remember, the feared phantom becomes the friendly ghost who saves Scout from the drunken Mr. Ewell. When I haven’t seen my now 20 year old son for a while, I can hear the same inflection in my voice when I greet him– “Hey Boo”–as was in Jean Marie Finch’s first and only greeting to the man who saved her and was standing in the dark corner against the wall, at the end of the film version of the novel.

I will not address the suspicious circumstances and seemingly sordid backroom dealings which resulted in the recent publication of a second novel by Ms. Lee called Go Set a Watchman, a rough draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, when Harper Lee was 89 and even though she had sworn never to write or publish a second book? Nor will I let it disavow my experience of, conviction about, and love for To Kill a Mockingbird.

I will instead remember with gratefulness, as so many have the past two days, a story that for me and for others marked a transition from the house of innocence to the porch of maturity from where we could see or imagine a world that would dignify us by asking more from us than we knew we possessed at the time.

I will remember with gratefulness how its plot wove the tension that is the burden and blessing of being human, how it opened my eyes to the indignity of racism, to the reality of injustice, to the universality of imperfection and brokenness, to the immanence of human complicity which makes evil not a nebulous external force but rather the fruit of the accumulation of bad human decisions based on fear, selfishness, insecurity, abuse of power, and personal and systemic sin.

I will also remember with gratefulness how it opened my eyes to and offered me human incarnations of basic decency, honesty, kindness, courage, compassion, and love in the characters of Calpurnia, Tom Robinson, Atticus Finch, and Boo Radley.

I will remember with gratefulness how the children’s curiosity, yearning, fear, and delight touched in to my own versions of those experiences, both when I was young and even today. One of my favorite scenes in the book is when Jem and Scout begin to discover secret gifts left for them in the hollowed out knothole of a tree on the Radley property that they passed by on the way home from school: a ball of gray twine, their likeness in the form of two small images carved in soap, a pack of chewing gum, a tarnished medal, a pocket watch that had stopped running on a chain with an aluminum knife. Along with Jem and Scout I will remember with gratefulness the discovery of how what once haunted us, paralyzed us with fear, threatened to kill us, can in the end return us to ourselves, give us gifts that while broken delight and enliven us, and awaken us to the unseen, mysterious presence not of a malevolent phantom but of a holy ghost.

Rest in peace, Ms. Lee. Your story will continue to grow us up, to expose us to ourselves, to summon us to our better nature, to build us up to love and good works, to remind us of our call to protect the dignity of each other, to take down walls that divide us, to reveal our inherent connection one to another, to hold our attention and to haunt our hearts by evil that is visible and the holiness that is not, and to wake us to the common deed and the daily love that is essential, enlivening, and eternal.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT AND ACTION:

To Kill a Mockingbird would be a wonderful Lenten text for prayerful pondering.