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Rev Andrew Weaver: A Fighter for Justice to the End
Those things still mattered to Andrew, though. He displayed a passion for Large Questions that was somewhat surprising in its width and breadth for a man his age. We were both too old to be as didactic in our opinions as when we were younger and Andrew certainly had a leavening humor that helped keep my sometimes dour cynicism in check but there was no mistaking the deep conviction behind the calm demeanor and the sly jokes he used to maintain his passion for justice and humanity without diving into hatred or despair. Indeed, "despair" is the last word I would ever have thought to use about Andrew, no matter what horrible thing we talked about, and we talked about many horrible things - torture, war, prisons, and, of course, central to them all, the most horrible of all. George W Bush. I first "met" Rev Weaver when he commented on a post I'd written condemning the Bush Library proposed for the Southern Methodist University campus and reporting on the controversy that had sprung up in Methodist circles over having a defender of torture honored on the campus of a university dedicated to Methodist values, which - as Andrew pointed out again and again - decidedly did not include the Bushian advocacy of waterboarding and other "harsh interrogation" techniques. A week or so after I wrote it I discovered a loooong comment appended to it that consisted of a letter written by the Methodist bishops against siting the Library at SMU, an impassioned plea to sign an online petition against the Library, and an assortment of comments generated by the petition. I'd never had a comment quite like it before, nor have I since. It was the beginning of an alliance over fighting the Library/Propaganda Center that went on fairly regularly for the next year-and-a-half. Once Andrew had sensed a compatriot in the fight against something he believed was disastrously antithetical to the Methodist principles he believed in, he never let go. I found message after message in my inbox telling me of new developments in the situation or the latest attempts by the opposition to throw a monkey wrench into the works. He was, to put it mildly, relentless. As Mr Clarkson wrote:
Once he had declared himself a fan of my writing, of course, I was his for life. Anybody who thinks I have talent gets my immediate attention and, naturally, respect. But he wasn't flattering me. Andrew flattered no one, I think. If he believed something positive about someone, he said it as simply as possible. If he picked up something negative, he found a way to approach it without lying or even evading but that managed to get across what he meant in a way least likely to cause hurt and most likely to cause re-thinking on the part of the (ever so gently) criticized. When I tell you that he refused to give up on even Bush's potential for eventual salvation, you will understand how far his commitment to humane treatment for everyone regardless of what they did had gone. When I tell you that I spoke to him last just a couple of months ago and that he never mentioned his illness, then or in any of our email exchanges, an illness he had apparently had for quite some time, it will give you a small measure of the man. He was much more concerned to discover that I was on the road than he was about his own approaching death. He seemed more tired than I remembered him being and I remarked on it, but he brushed it aside saying only that he wasn't feeling well and he needed to get some sleep. I thought he had a flu. He will be missed, by those who knew and loved him but also by those of us only touched briefly and with the lightest of brushes by his serenity and compassion. Which doesn't mean I'm not pissed at him. He didn't think to tell me how sick he was and I never got a chance to tell him what I thought of him and how much he meant to me. But then, Andrew never did take compliments very well.
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