Dear Friends

The Professor and the Bishop

Cross Roads, June 15, 1988

Dear Friends,

I want to describe to you a powerful experience I was recently privileged to share.  I don’t think the principals involved in the story will mind my telling it.

The story begins several years ago when I first met Bishop Michael McDaniel, of the North Carolina Synod, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.  When he learned that I was the Rector of the Chapel of the Cross, he immediately told me the story of his “conversion” some forty years earlier.

He was a student at Carolina and by belief a “sophomoric agnostic” (in his words).  Now that he had entered the intellectually stimulating world of college, he considered Christianity for the unlearned.

One evening he was walking by our church and the door was open.  As he looked in and his eyes became accustomed to the dim light that shone out from behind the cross, he was stunned to see Clifford Lyons, his Shakespeare professor and a longtime parishioner here, kneeling in prayer.  His skeptical stance was suddenly confronted: How could he maintain his disdain for Christianity in the face of the obvious deep faith of his most stimulating and admired teacher?

Michael began to attend the Chapel of the Cross, although he was Lutheran by upbringing, and he joined the Inquirers’ Class.  At its conclusion, he asked David Yates, then Rector, if he could be confirmed.  But David told him that he had already been confirmed a Lutheran, and that he should go back to his own denomination and call it to be faithful to its heritage.

So began a journey that has led him to ordination and eventually to election as Bishop in 1982.  He now serves as chairman of the most influential advisory committee to all the Bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran in America.

Bishop McDaniel had never told Clifford Lyons that story; but a few weeks ago, when he came to the Chapel of the Cross to assist at a wedding, he got that chance.  He and his wife and I went to visit Clifford, retired since the early 1970’s, in his home.  The story he had told countless others, he finally shared with the man who was the unknowing catalyst of it all.

It is difficult to say who was more deeply touched: the Bishop, expressing his deep gratitude for all that he had received from his unwitting mentor, or the Professor, amazed at how profoundly he had affected another’s life.

It was a privilege to share that moment, one which I shall carry with me for a long time to come.  Let us never underestimate the powerful influence that we have on one another.

    -- Stephen