John L. McKnight: Mentor, Friend and Spiritual Pumice Stone

All Saints Sunday, November 3, 2024

John L. McKnight died on Friday (11/1/24).  I grieve… even as I celebrate a life given to striving after the best in human undertakings.  Another loss, another bushel of memories gathered, another mixture of gratitude and grief stirred in my spirit.  I had last spoken with John by phone two weeks before his death.

In the mid-1970s, I stood in the back of a conference room in the Bismark Hotel in Chicago as John spoke of changes in our national economy and institutional life over prior decades.  Our society was transitioning from production of goods (agricultural, mining, manufacturing) toward a primary product of human services.  People were objectified, turned into clients.  Shared community being lost, relationships were turned into the “servers” and “the served.” Our economy needed “the needy.”  We specialists could be the fixers of individuals; as the righteous we could offer service without knowing much about the other, beyond an assumption, a diagnosis, a project that meant they were different: poor or sick, addicted or uneducated, in trouble or in some other way needing our expertise, knowledge and assistance.

As I listened those fifty years ago, I was surprised to look down and see the front of my shirt was damp.  Tears rolled off my chin.  John named my arrogance and ignorance.  My education was about needs surveys, prediction, best practice, control and the intervention of strategies to improve “their” lives. That day was one of my many conversion experiences.  John named the sin of trying to fix others without relationship, without knowing the gifts and talents others bring, without looking for a caring community, without learning the assets and capacities my professionally trained eyes too often failed to see.

There is more to say about John.  I have done so in the past and will again in the future.  I recall times he gently challenged my thinking.  Usually with a Socratic probing question. He was an intellectual and spiritual pumice stone removing the calluses of my professional and academic skin.  I think of it now as cataract surgery for my soul.

As I have written in earlier reflections: John McKnight reminds that too often our institutional responses, well-meaning as they are meant to be, can become twisted and up-side-down in outcome.  Self-understandings are molded by interactions with others like those I shared with John over the past fifty years.  My mentors are too many to name; however, on this All Saints Day, I will mention Ms. Stella Newhouse, Gilbert James, Daphne Mayorga, Clarence Smart, Pat Davis, Earl Brewer, Walt Wangerin Jr., Bill Pannell and John McKnight.

When John and I talked two weeks ago he surprised me by saying he was worried about the coming national election.  As I remember it, he said, “I fear the goodness assumed about the the American People is being undercut by the ugliness, fear and hatred in this presidential election.”  I share these anxieties as we head into Tuesday’s election.  Still, I know, whatever the outcome, John’s legacy can serve as a pumice stone on this democracy.  We remember and honor all our saints, as the hymn “Rejoice in God’s Saints” lyric puts it “a world without saints forgets how to praise.” 

We will remember and we will praise.