In Memoriam: Rachel Held Evans
By: Joel Michael Herbert
Tags: Religion, Evangelicalism, Death And Dying, Rachel Held Evans, In Memoriam

I feel like I lost a close friend this weekend. I did, really. More than a friend — a mentor, a guide, a hero.

I never met Rachel Held Evans personally, but we were bound to, sooner or later. Maybe this summer at the Wild Goose Festival. Perhaps at a conference or concert or a Liturgists gathering. But it was going to happen. We were going to be friends. I could feel it in my bones.

I’ve told people before that Rachel and I share a patronus, usually when I’ve pressured them to accept one of her books from me as a gift. I think she had that effect upon a lot of us who followed her over the years. I discovered just today that Rachel’s birthday is the day before mine, 7 years prior. I’m just superstitious enough to think that’s really cool, and think that it explains in part the deep connection I felt with her, like we were best friends that just hadn’t met yet. #geminiforthewin

Rachel spoke with both a language and a tone that were wholly unique to her. She made us all feel like intimate friends, spilling her guts onto a page with such reckless and poetic abandon that we felt as though we had known her our whole lives, as if her voice was an echo of our own in some strange, yearning, primal way, like God herself breathing into life things that as yet were not, words that we could not rightly form into our own phrases, sentences, coherent thoughts on our own… but she did that for us, somehow.

I don’t cry, really. I barely cry over death, even. It’s not that I don’t want to — it just usually feels like I can’t — it’s always been like that. Dobby the house elf and Robb Stark remain the only untimely démises outside those of close family members’ for whom I have shed real tears.

I wept when I heard that Rachel was gone. I’m weeping now. It feels like something so very good, so very beautiful, and so very rare has been taken from this earth, a wholly singular work of art that cannot be replaced. I want her back. I want her voice, her courage, her vision in the wind of this new decade, helping to lead the charge of this reformation that she helped to start, but will never get to see to fruition.

Rachel is a prophet. William Matthews said it on Twitter the day she died, and if there is one word that sums up her public presence, I think that does it perfectly. Rachel taught me it was okay to question things, even if you don’t have the right degrees or pedigrees. She taught me that it is okay to be discriminating in your deconstruction, that your doubts don’t have to look like anyone or everyone else’s. She taught me how to rage against injustice while simultaneously extending grace and finding common ground with aspirants, real or imagined, the sincere ones and the trolls. She taught me how to rebuke hypocrisy without demonizing opponents. She introduced me new mentors that have joined her as guides for me along the way, like Nadia Bolz-Weber and Barbara Brown Taylor. Rachel is a bridge-builder, a truth-teller, a peace-maker. There are far too few of her kind left in the world.

It has been said before, but it’s a strange peculiarity of life and loss that you have no idea how much someone means to you until they are gone. I really had no idea how pivotal Rachel had been for me in my spiritual journey over the last few years, until she was gone, and the weight of the loss crashed in on me like a single-wide in a tornado. She had a knack for saying what I wanted to say…what I needed to say. She put into words some of the deepest, wordless aches of my heart, as I wrestled with God, for years on end, like Jacob on the banks of the Jabbok. Rachel has been a shepherd for me, a guide in so many ways through a very dark and treacherous night of the soul, through questions I still have no idea how to answer, and don’t know if I ever will. She got it. She got me. She taught me how to embrace tension and lack of certainty, to worship and wonder and wail, even when I couldn’t see or understand, or didn’t want to. She taught me that it was possible to have faith, even if I didn’t believe.

If there was ever someone who could truly be called an “old soul,” it is Rachel Held Evans. If she were a singer, her records would be on my shelf next to Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon.

The very first Rachel in the Great Book that our own Rachel loved so much was the wife of Jacob, the patriarch of Israel. She was his rock, his inspiration, his magic, his everything. She gave birth to his two sons Joseph and Benjamin, the most beloved of all of Israel’s children. She delivered her youngest through a long and painful labor, naming him Ben-oni — “son of my sorrow” — succumbing to death shortly after giving him life, her body irrevocably wrecked and broken from the lengthy travail. She never got to see her boys become the earth-shakers that they were. She had no idea that her eldest would literally rule the world, or that a descendant of her youngest would become known as the most influential man in history, second only to the Messiah himself.

Like your namesake, you’ll never get to see what comes next either, but something shifted in me yesterday, Rachel. I thought you’d like to know.

I’m tired of living my life in fear. I’m tired of being told by old white men that I have “plenty of time” to make a mark on this world, that my best days and brightest energies are best spent sitting down and shutting up and listening to them until I am old and wise enough to have something worthwhile to share with the world. None of us are promised tomorrow. Your death brought that reality painfully front and center for me, like a shepherd’s smooth stone square into the forehead of a Philistine giant.

I don’t want to wait anymore to find my voice, to say what needs to be said, to do my part to lead this beautiful reformation forward, to love and serve others in the unique way that I alone can, like you did in your way that only you could. I’m not alone in this sentiment, I know. There are so very, very many of us that will take up your mantle, pick up where you left off, and keep marching on.

No one can ever replace you, friend. I hope that all this faith-God-Jesus-heaven stuff really is for real, and that one day I’ll get to actually meet you, in that sweet by and by where we can finally be friends indeed. No, no one can ever replace you, but there is today, in the aftermath of this loss, a veritable host of us scattered all over the world, in all kinds of different churches, denominations, and even faiths who have been quietly waiting and watching you and your compatriots being brave — wishing we had your courage, your tenacity, your way with words, or just your platform.

I’m not going to stand by anymore and wish the risk wasn’t so high for speaking out against injustice and hypocrisy in the church. I’m not going to wait anymore to say the words on my heart the way only I can say them, because someone else needs to hear those very words, the same way I needed to hear yours. I’m going to be an agent of change, courageous like a true Gryffindor, brave like the true kings and queens of Narnia, Divergent in all the ways that I am uniquely purposed to be… because you showed me how to be all of those things. I know I can because I’ve watched you do it. We all feel the same way about this, I know it.

You’re only 7 years older than I, but in so many ways — and to so many of us, even those older than you —like your namesake, you feel like a spiritual mother.

Thank you, Rachel. Thank you for being brave.

Rest easy, friend. We’ll see you on the other side.