First Things

Lee, Lenny, and Learning How to See

The first thing I noticed about Lee Hancock was her hands.

The rheumatoid arthritis had twisted her fingers sideways at the knuckles. She had difficulty grasping things. Writing was a challenge. Even a handshake seemed more complicated than it should have been. Her hands were impossible to ignore.

What surprises me now is that I never stopped noticing them.

Over time, however, I noticed Lee more than I noticed her hands. The hands remained. They were still marked by disease. They were still bent and misshapen. Yet eventually they became less important than the person attached to them. Looking back, I think they came to represent something else entirely. They were outward marks of a life spent doing the hard work of ministry, not only among the people she directly served but among the students she was cultivating to serve others.

I first encountered those hands shortly after arriving at Drew University, a place I had chosen because I wanted my assumptions challenged.

I had grown up in Starkville, Mississippi. I loved my hometown. I loved First United Methodist Church. The pastors who served there helped shape my faith and pointed me toward God rather than toward culture. They gave me roots and, in many ways, gave me the confidence to leave home.

But I also knew there was a larger world beyond Starkville. I knew I carried assumptions that I had inherited from my upbringing, my region, and my experience. At the time, I would have said I wanted to develop critical thinking. Years later I would call it discernment, but I did not have that language then. I simply knew I needed my horizons expanded.

One of the approaches that became part of that expansion was the Newark Project.

My memory is that we met periodically in a forgotten room in the basement of a graduate residence hall. The room had seen better days. It felt isolated from the rest of campus. There was nothing particularly inspiring about it. Yet week after week we gathered there to reflect on what we were seeing and experiencing in Newark. Looking back, it felt less like a traditional classroom and more like Clinical Pastoral Education before I knew what Clinical Pastoral Education was.

The real classroom, however, was Newark.

I remember driving there for the first time. I remember being nervous. I remember wondering if I was making the right decision. I remember considering whether I should switch to the non-Newark version of the course. I remember returning home and realizing that the only white face I had seen all day was my own in a mirror.

Some of my classmates adjusted immediately. Some came from urban environments and did not think much of it. Others, like me, found themselves navigating unfamiliar territory. By the second trip, and certainly by the third, the anxiety had largely disappeared. I began to enjoy going. I found places to eat. I explored neighborhoods. The city gradually became less of an idea and more of a place filled with actual people.

That was, of course, the point.

As part of the project, I was paired with a man named Lenny.

The introduction took place through a social service agency that worked with people living with AIDS. A woman there introduced us. I cannot remember her name, though I remember her presence. She cared deeply about the people she served and played a role in helping students like me enter their world.

Lenny was suspicious of me.

Frankly, I was suspicious of the entire arrangement.

The first things most people noticed about Lenny were impossible to miss. The disease, the addiction, the homelessness, and the poverty were real enough. But they were not the whole story.

Lenny was an IV drug user who had contracted HIV through a contaminated needle. He was homeless. He was poor. He was sick. Like most AIDS patients of that era, he was dying. What exactly was this white seminarian from Mississippi supposed to do for him? What exactly was I supposed to learn from him? Why did he agree to this? Why did I agree to this?

The questions lingered for a while.

Yet week after week we kept meeting.

We talked about his life, his family, his struggles, his exposure to HIV, and the difficult years that followed. He warmed to me. I warmed to him. I spent the semester with Lenny, trying to learn how to see. I would not say I was walking in his shoes. That would be too much. But I was observing what life required of him and what life had done to him.

This was the era of Ryan White and the AIDS Quilt. AIDS was not viewed then the way it is viewed now. Fear surrounded the disease. Stigma surrounded the disease. Many people assumed AIDS meant gay. Others viewed it as a moral judgment rather than a medical condition. Entire communities had been devastated, and many Americans seemed perfectly comfortable looking the other way.

Lenny lived inside that reality every day.

AZT was the only medication capable of extending his life in any meaningful way, but obtaining it was a full-time job. He had to travel to one agency to secure a voucher and then travel somewhere else to wait in line for the medication itself. The process consumed entire days. Then he still had to find food, shelter, make medical appointments, and somehow find enough strength to do it all over again.

It was as if the system had been designed to exhaust him.

What strikes me today is not simply that Lenny suffered.

What strikes me is that he persevered.

The moment Lenny became Lenny was not when I learned he had AIDS. It was not when I learned he was homeless. It was not when I learned he had used drugs. It was watching him continue. It was watching him carry burdens that should never have been his to carry. It was watching him refuse to surrender.

Lenny was carrying society’s buckets, even when he could barely carry himself.

AIDS happened. Lenny was responsible for the decisions that contributed to his illness. He would have acknowledged that himself. Yet none of that changed the fact that he was created in the image of God.

That may sound obvious.

It was not obvious to me then.

Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I believed it theologically but had never really tested it.

I had heard sermons about the image of God.

I had studied the image of God.

I had written papers about the image of God.

What I had never done was sit across from it.

Lenny taught me that AIDS was not a penalty but a plight. He taught me that people are more than the first thing we notice about them. He taught me that a person can be an addict and still be created in the image of God—a homeless man and still be created in the image of God—an AIDS patient and still be created in the image of God.

He also taught me who my neighbor was.

Years later I would realize that Lee was teaching much the same lesson.

At the time, I thought she was teaching a course about AIDS and culture. Looking back, I think she was teaching discernment. She was teaching us how to see. She was teaching us how to examine assumptions and test them against reality. She was teaching us that critical thinking was not merely an intellectual exercise. It required us to encounter actual people and then ask whether our assumptions could survive the encounter.

Without Drew and without Lee, I do not think I would have arrived there.

That is not a criticism of Starkville or of First United Methodist Church. They formed me in important ways and gave me gifts I still carry. But Drew expanded my world, and Lee forced me to examine parts of myself that I had never previously questioned. She helped me escape some of the limitations of my Southern upbringing without requiring me to abandon everything that upbringing had given me.

Lee was one of the most effective pastors I have ever had, though most of the ministry she offered me happened in a classroom rather than from a pulpit.

She was not merely imparting knowledge. She was equipping ministers to see.

She was empowering students to become Aaron and Hur for people carrying burdens too heavy to bear alone.

The truth is that I did not understand most of this while I was sitting in that basement classroom.

I do not think I understood that Lee and Lenny were teaching the same lesson through different lenses until years later in ministry. The lesson took time to ripen. Some truths do. We encounter them long before we understand them.

When the semester ended, I was glad.

Like every student, I was ready for a break. The assignments were finished. The papers were submitted. Life moved on.

At some point afterward, I learned that Lenny had died. My recollection is that Lee told me, though I cannot swear to it all these years later.

I was sad.

I was also relieved.

Heaven is a much better place to be than life as a homeless, impoverished, drug-addicted AIDS patient in the inner-city Newark of 1996. Not because I wished him dead. I did not. But because I wished him peace, and because there are circumstances in which death becomes a kind of healing.

Thirty years later, I still find myself returning to Lee and Lenny.

They gave me some of the foundational encounters and theological truths upon which I would build a ministry. They taught me how to see people. They taught me how to question assumptions. They taught me that discernment is not an abstract exercise but an act of encounter.

Most of the encounters I have had in ministry have been Lenny moments.

The actions I took in response were my attempt to have Lee moments.