Death of God to Cathedral Dean
My Brother
My Brother
I had one brother. His name was Richard Davis Harding. He was three years younger than I. My mother was relatively old when I was born and had been told that she could not have children and had nearly died when I was delivered. So my parents looked to adoption to enlarge the family. My mother had come from a family of eight siblings and I don’t think she even considered raising an only child. I was also told by my parents that I had lobbied for a brother though I don’t remember that. I do remember the great excitement of getting ready to bring my brother home from the hospital. All of my things were shifted from my room near my parent’s bedroom to another room downstairs so that my brother could have a room upstairs near my parents. I remember being quite happy about all these preparations and looking forward to having a brother with great excitement.
I remember driving to the same hospital where I have been hospitalized when I had the Coxsackie virus and waiting in the car while my mother went into the hospital with my father. My mother and father came back and my mother was wearing a surgical mask which briefly upset me until it was explained to me that the baby had not had time to build up his defenses against other people’s germs and that we needed be careful for a few days. I stood in the backseat and looked with wonder and awe at the new life my mother was holding, just three days old.
My mother worked in a medical building full of offices of doctors and dentists. She was naturally gregarious and had developed friendships with all of the doctors that rode the elevator at the times that she was coming to and from work, going to and returning from lunch. One of these doctors knew that she would like to adopt and had a patient that needed to place a child. When I was an adult my mother told me that some years later she had been offered a baby by the same mother and had turned the offer down because she could not imagine how she would be able to explain to my brother or the new child how their mother had given them both away. My mother told me towards the end of her life that my brother’s biological father was a well-known Admiral in the United States Navy and that his biological mother was the Admiral’s housekeeper.
My brother looked very much like our family. He had blonde hair and blue eyes. He was always big for his age both in height and size. He grew to be a very handsome man with a thick shock of stiff blonde hair and a kind face. He was the archetype of the large and imposing man who gives an impression of great physical strength but who is tender and gentle to a fault.
I felt a great sense of responsibility towards my little brother and in our earliest days we were inseparable. I took tremendous pleasure in showing him all the special places that I had discovered in the woods and we spent hours and hours outside exploring the countryside and when we were older playing elaborate games of war.
As my brother started school our relationship changed and became more complicated. Richard had learning disabilities in the days when such things were only beginning to be recognized. He just did not thrive in school and he had the additional problem that the teachers always compared him to me. Richard was very, very slow to learn to read and both the teachers and my parents at first saw this as a moral problem. They believed that he just wouldn’t apply himself and that he wasn’t trying hard enough. All of us in the house at one time or another tried to help my brother learn to read and I remember my mother expressing great disappointment that I couldn’t help my brother. It was later discovered that he had a learning disability called dyslexia. I remember driving with my parents over an hour every Saturday to Washington DC so that my brother could receive special help at what was then one of the very few places where such help was on offer.
My brother had a rough trip through life and died relatively young. I believe that he accumulated traumas in his life that he could never really fully overcome. To be adopted was a wound and I became more and more conscious of how he suffered from this wound as we grew older together. He was really hurt and humiliated by the “help” he received from our family and from teachers before his learning disability was diagnosed. Even after we all had more of a sense of what would be genuinely helpful for him in school, anything to do with the classroom and instruction was painful for him.
My brother married before he graduated from high school. He and his girlfriend got pregnant. My mother arranged for them to be married by an Episcopal priest in Washington D.C. He tried community college off and on but couldn’t make it go. He found his niche in woodworking and apprenticed to a cabinet maker. One of the very beautiful things that was in our house for many years was the crib that my brother made for his first daughter. He went on to be a union carpenter and to work on nuclear power plants and on some very high end developments in Florida where he specialized in moldings and finish work. He worked on the Metro in Washington D.C. when it was under construction. He also was in the Navy reserve and graduated from Navy Photography School, a notoriously difficult school. He took beautiful and soulful photographs but wasn’t able to turn it into a profession.
His first marriage broke up. He came home one day and his wife and daughter were gone. He remarried and had two more children with his second wife. The same thing happened to him with that family. He came home one day and they were gone. After that his life went steadily downhill. Good construction jobs became scarce. It was more and more common for contractors to pay workers in cash under the table with no social security and no benefits. All this time my brother lived with my aging parents and he cared for them sacrificially in their decline.
My parents became unable to manage their home in Florida even with my brother’s constant attention and all three of them moved to Stamford, Connecticut where I was Rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church. They got an apartment in the apartment house across from the church. I had some good times with my brother in these years and my three sons and my brother built a boat together. He continued to struggle to find those two things that every human being needs, work and love. He found a job working in a cabinet shop. It was summer. It was brutally hot and the cabinet shop was full of vapor from the finishes being used. But my brother was working and doing well. One Sunday he went for a drive with the woman he was then seeing and pulled over to the side of the road and had a massive heart attack. I think the fumes in the cabinet shop contributed to his death.
I was in the procession about to walk into the Presbyterian Church in New Canaan for the service to welcome their new pastor when someone on the church staff informed me that my brother was in the Emergency Room at Stamford Hospital. I went immediately to the hospital and went into the ER in my clericals and asked one of the doctors if he knew where Richard Harding was. The young resident said flippantly, “He used to be in there.” He pointed to a room where I found my brother lying dead on the table where they had been working on him. I said in the homily I preached at his funeral that he was a casualty in the war against human dignity. He was wounded by being adopted. I once glimpsed the depth of the hurt in his heart about being given away by his mother. When I was in graduate school there were a lot of stories in the news about adoptees finding their biological parents. I was learning how to research things and I offered to help my brother with this research. He told me bitterly that they did not want him and so he had no interest in them. This was a wound. He was wounded by having a problem reading that no one understood until great damage had been done. He was wounded by two divorces. He was wounded by the indignity of having to work a day at a time and being paid under the table. He was a casualty in the war against human dignity.
A Personal Story about Illegal Immigration
During this election season one of the most divisive topics on the agenda has been the topic of illegal immigration. Several of the Republican candidates have struck a chord with a significant portion of the electorate by raising the issue. Their critics, including many voices in the churches, have reminded us of the biblical injunction to take care of the alien and sojourner in the land and have implied that those who support these candidates may well be doing so on the basis of racism and xenophobia. I am conflicted about this issue. It poses a genuine moral dilemma to me. I understand that the command to care for the alien and sojourner is at the bedrock of biblical ethics. I do not automatically assume that those who are genuinely concerned by the scale of illegal immigration in this country are operating out of racial animus. I am genuinely concerned by the sheer numbers involved, now famously 11 million and by the impact of those numbers on the poor and marginalized among us. I have this concern for a very personal reason. My only brother died before his time in his early forties and his death was, in my view, due in large measure to the social consequences of illegal immigration for the American working class.
This is his story in brief. My brother was a big, athletic and handsome man. He was very smart but he always had trouble in school. He ultimately was diagnosed with the learning disability, dyslexia. He was afflicted with this challenge before learning disabilities were commonly diagnosed and before there were good strategies for treatment. He found his niche in his High School years. It was not thanks to the school but thanks to a master cabinet maker in the community who took my brother under his wing and taught him to be a superb craftsman. My brother went on to apprentice in the carpenters union. By the time he was in his twenties he was earning very good money, much better than his brother, the clergyman. My brother had retirement, vacation and medical insurance. That all changed. At the end of his life he was making less per hour than he did as an apprentice when he could find work. Typically he was paid under the table and in cash. This had become the norm in the local construction trades. Only the very largest and most visible construction firms used union labor. Everybody else went to the underpass every day to get their help.
In the small city where we lived within about an hour of New York City there was an underpass where the superhighway ran through the city. Starting at about 5 am hundreds of men would assemble knowing that the local landscapers and builders would soon cruise through in their pickups looking to pickup enough men for the day’s work. Mostly these men were from Mexico and Latin America though there were Haitians and men from Eastern Europe as well. What they all had in common was a lack of legal status in the country. Fewer than half of them would get work in any one day. They were extremely hard working and they were in no position to negotiate over wages. The work they did and do was mostly unskilled though some had been well trained in the trades in their native lands. While these men were looking for construction work their wives were finding work as maids in the hotels or as nannies in the homes of the leafy suburbs. The sheer numbers of people involved structurally affected the local economics of labor. Once an employer becomes accustomed to hiring illegal immigrants off the books it becomes easier to carry other employees off the books. Good jobs up the ladder disappear.
This is what happened to my brother. Contractors hired skilled men only for the most demanding work and then only on a temporary basis and paid them off the books without benefits. My brother had no medical insurance and so he didn’t go to the doctor unless it was desperate. He died of untreated hypertension which he didn’t know that he had. If he had in forties what he had in his twenties, he would still be alive.
If you are college educated, work in a professional or managerial capacity and live in suburban America you are not likely to see up close and personal the social consequences of illegal immigration. If you work with your hands or send your children to urban schools or wait in line in the Emergency Room for your health care, you will see them every day.
I have compassion for those who have come to this country seeking a better life. I have had undocumented people in my congregation. I do not want them deported. I know them to be incredibly decent and hard working people, often very faithful members of our congregations. But how do I respond to the biblical mandate to welcome the sojourner without making my working class brother pay the price.
A story is told in 2 Samuel 12, in which the prophet Nathaniel goes to King David and describes a man who wants to give a party for his guest but instead of taking a lamb from his own numerous flock, he steals the only ewe lamb of his poor neighbor. The king is outraged. He swears to execute judgment on this greedy oppressor. “ Thou art the man,” says the prophet. Here is my dilemma, how do I welcome the alien and sojourner without stealing from my working class brother?