Tag: community

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Jesu

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I met Jesu 15 years ago. He arrived to worship on a Sunday, and after church – like so many refugees who came to church – he asked me for a Bible to take with him to the small apartment he shared with several other men, also refugees, separated from their families. I gave him a Bible – a King James Version – and then I fretted about it all week, the fact that I’d given him a Bible in archaic language. I understood he’d want to learn to read and to speak English well. He showed up again the next Sunday with the Bible I’d given him in his hands. Jesu had realized quickly my mistake. We traded Bibles that day. This time, I handed him a Revised Standard Version, the better to learn a new language.

I learned that Jesu had had to flee his country overnight after being threatened with death by the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group who was active in Sri Lanka at the time.

My memory of Jesu in the early days of knowing him is that he looked like a deer in the headlights. I am often reminded of what I call the “greater wisdom” of the United Nations to have sent him to such an expensive part of the country. But he adapted well, and quickly, and to becoming a citizen of the United States.

Jesu was a fast learner. And he also worked quickly to bring his wife, Letchumi, and first born daughter to the United States. They arrived some time later. When Simiya stepped off the plane at San Francisco International Airport and walked with her mother to her father, she was surprised. From pictures she’d seen, she had thought that everyone in the United States was white, and there stood her waiting father – as dark-skinned as could be!

Jesu, Letchumi, and Simiya moved into a one bedroom apartment in a neighborhood not far from Lake Merritt United Methodist Church. And from that one bedroom apartment, they have built a new life in their new land. A year later, a second daughter arrived. Letchumi had been surprised when the women of the church gave her a baby shower after worship one day. In her country, the family that was having the child gave the gifts! And so, Saumiya joined the family.

In Sri Lanka, Jesu had been a pastor. He had met Letchumi in the village in which he had his church. In the United States, he is pursuing another path. He has nearly completed his education to receive his license to be a Certified Public Accountant. His elder daughter, Simiya, also attends University to become a CPA. Having been raised so poor, she has her sights on another life for herself. I could see it unfolding in her even before she finished high school. And Jesu and Letchumi see their life now as the stepping stones for the life their daughters will live.

When the new baby girl was still in a car seat, I picked Letchumi up at the apartment one day and drove to the Jamba Juice in my neighborhood in North Oakland. I had spoken to the manager, who I’d come to know, as a regular customer. He agreed to meet Letchumi, to give her a job. While she went to meet with the manager, I walked up and down the sidewalks lining the Safeway parking lot with little Saumiya toddling at my side. And so, Letchumi – who has several degrees from her own country – started at Jamba Juice. That was almost 14 years ago. Since then, Letchumi has become a manager at Jamba Juice. And her beautiful, smart daughter, Simiya, has joined her as a worker at the same store.

*

Jesu and I share a birthday – August 2. In the years since he and Letchumi and their daughters have been here, we have celebrated our birthdays together each August. We also gather during the Christmas holidays, when Jesu and his family bring us a complete, generous, home-cooked Sri Lankan meal. As we sit around the table, we catch up on the activities of Jesu and Letchumi and family, we hear about their hard work and studies to make a new life in a new land. Soon, Jesu will have completed the test to receive a CPA license, and he’ll be looking for a firm in which to work. Letchumi sees her daughters’ futures ahead of them, and she and Jesu watch with pride as their daughters make their way successfully in this place.

Jeff and I think of Jesu and Letchumi and their family as part of our extended family. As we talk around the dinner table at holiday time, we talk about the day in the future when we might travel to Sri Lanka to meet the family there. This year, Jeff teased about our getting too old to make such a trip!

Who knows where our paths will lead us? – Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 12/2025

community, memories, remembering

Meeting the Bishop

Mary Elyn Bahlert

The year was 1981. That was the year I declared my intention to be ordained as a minister in the United Methodist Church at my local congregation, Kenwood United Methodist Church in Milwaukee. I had plans to attend the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. Marjorie Matthews, the first woman to be consecrated a Bishop in the Church – the whole Church, across the world, across history – was Bishop of the United Methodist Church, Wisconsin Annual Conference.

At the time, I was still working as a Public Affairs Officer for the Food and Drug Administration, a position I’d taken the year before, after an early career with the Social Security Administration. Through my Sunday attendance and activity at Kenwood UMC I had learned about a trip to England, the “birthplace of Methodism,” where John Wesley, known as the founder of Methodism, had been born, in autumn. I signed up for the trip. I hadn’t been part of the United Methodist Church for very long, and I knew little of the history of the denomination (having been confirmed in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, I knew a lot about Luther and I had even memorized Luther’s Small Catechism) and I thought the timing of the trip was perfect for me as I prepared to leave my career to go to seminary. I signed up for the trip to visit Wesley’s England after securing a passport. I’d never traveled outside of the United States before.

And so the thought of the trip was exciting and well-timed for me. I would be traveling alone, and I hoped to meet a few folks who were also part of the tour. I had learned that Majorie Matthews, the Bishop, would be traveling on the first leg of the trip to London. Knowing this, I’d teased several friends that I’d be traveling with the Bishop, as if she and I were friends.

Apparently, Bishop Matthews was on my flight from Chicago to London Heathrow. When the flight landed, I made my way to the bus that waited for the group to take us to our hotel. As I stepped into the bus, I saw Bishop Matthews standing at her seat. I nodded to her, and she reached out to touch my arm. “Sit with me,” she said. She explained that she’d be in London overnight, as I would, and she asked if I would be interested in being her roommate for the night, to spend some time seeing London. After that night, her obligations would begin, and she would no longer be traveling with my group.

Bishop Matthews loved beautiful clothes. In our free hours that first day, we shopped together in London. I purchased a beautiful black skirt and matching blouse with a floral print that was more elegant than anything else I owned. Bishop Matthews served as my encourager. I was learning by being with her that as an ordained woman, who I was now would be part of who I would become. I could still enjoy the beautiful clothes I loved. I owned that outfit for many years.

And – I had a story to tell my friends when I returned home. Yes – I had traveled with Bishop Marjorie Matthews, the first woman Bishop – ever in history – in the world. I had an outfit to prove it!

*

The following Spring, when I was in Berkeley as a student at PSR, I received a note from Bishop Matthews that she’d be attending a meeting of the Council of Bishops in the Bay Area. She invited me to come to see her. When I did, she introduced me to the Bishop of the Northern California-Nevada Annual Conference, a kind and politic action. I was beginning to learn about the importance of community and how we can be generous to one another.

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A moment…

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Mom and I stood together in the checkout line of the local supermarket where she shopped in her neighborhood in Milwaukee. I was home on a visit from the Bay Area of California. We always loved those days together, two “Milwaukee girls” who explored the city, finding new and revisiting old sites.

She didn’t say it to me; she said it to herself. In the line ahead of us, an elderly Asian woman and a little boy, who appeared to be her grandson, stood in front of the checker. We heard the checker ask for some amount of change, and the elderly woman, her hand full of coins, turned to the little boy, extending her hand toward him. He peered into her the palm of her hand and chose a coin or two. She handed the coins to the checker.

“And now he feels ashamed,” I heard Mom say to herself. She had seen the moment, just as I had, and I knew then that it had brought forth a memory of some distant moment in her life. She would have been standing at the checkout with her mother, Feodosia, who had never learned to read, and she would have been the child she saw now, looking into her mother’s hand and choosing the right coin. And she had felt ashamed.

I understood then that my mother had a heart for those who are the “other” in our country. I had always known it, having grown up in a house where we did not speak slurs about those who were/are “other.” I grew up learning to respect those who had gone before and to respect those who were different than us, those whose lives had been difficult in ways I could not imagine, those who had left their land and their people so that I could be standing in that aisle that day, a witness.

And I loved her even more for that moment.

community, nostalgia, reflecting

Life in the West – a sense of place

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I hadn’t visualized living in the American West for most of my life, but here I am. I’ve lived in Oakland for over 25 years, after I completed my work as a Pastor in Oakland, and I expect I’ll be here for another while – God willing.

When I was young, I imagined that I would leave the Midwest, and I was certain I’d move to the East, to New York City, perhaps, or to Washington, D.C. My imaginings always took me to cities. To big cities. I love the diversity of cities, the abundance of neighborhoods, each one with its own personality, and I love the choices we take for granted in the cities. I love the bustle of things, and I love the way even cities become quiet on holidays, or on early Sunday mornings. I love the diversity of people – diversity of color, of background, of education, of family. I love it all.

And I’ve been privileged to have come West, where I arrived as a student in seminary in Berkeley in the 1980’s. I was fulfilling my dream to go to seminary, to become a pastor.

My husband Jeff is from the Milwaukee area, from Brookfield, a suburb of Milwaukee. Part of him yearns for the quiet country life he came to love and to respect when he spent time with his maternal grandparents on their farm, northwest of Milwaukee, where Jeff’s mother had grown up. His mother, though, waited for the day she graduated from high school to leave that place for another life. Sometimes Jeff reminds me that it’s his turn to choose a place, a country place… I expect he must be dreaming again of finding a place that gives him love and care and a respite from whatever might be bothering him at the moment.

But we are connected here more than by time and a place. We have strong community here; community is important to us as a value, and we know it would take a long time to build that again in a new place.

And – I remind myself – we are not 40 years old anymore!

And so, from year to year, our connection, our deep bond to this place deepens and deepens. And when we travel, living in the West makes it easy to tell people, when they ask where we are from: we’re from California. Everyone knows where California is!

Looking out to the West, over the Pacific, from home. Photo by meb, 3/2025

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The day they died

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Jeff and I were driving home from Sacramento on Saturday, March 21, 2009. I leaned over to turn on the radio in the car. There was a repeating news story from Oakland – where we were headed, and where I was pastor of a downtown church -being broadcast on the news, details changing and being added as more information came to the broadcasters. Four Oakland police officers had been shot by one young man that afternoon. Two were motorcycle police officers, two were members of the SWAT team that had gone to the home of the suspect and were murdered by the suspect as they climbed the stairs to the apartment he was holed up in. The attacker was shot dead by officers.

When we arrived home, I checked the messages on our answering machine and discovered several calls. John Hege, the son of a family I served in the church in Oakland, was one of the motorcycle officers who had been shot. John would not die for a day or two, after he had been declared brain dead.

Like so many others, I was in shock. I tried to call John’s parents, John and Tam, but they were not home. The police department had brought the affected families together and they were in the care of officers. I tried to get to John Hege, Jr., who lay brain dead at Highland Hospital, but I was not permitted access to the officer.

*

Friday, March 27. Like so many others, I watched the funeral of the four police officers who had lost their lives on television, broadcast from the Oracle Arena. As the service ended, I walked to Mountain View Cemetery from our house, and met the funeral director who was caring for John’s family. I sat in the hearse as we waited for the family to arrive. I looked back at the hearse, realized there was no casket – four caskets had been visible at the community service. In one of those simple moments at such a time, I asked the funeral director where he was. He nodded toward my arm, leaning on the urn that held John’s ashes. We almost laughed as we broke the silence of that moment.

I rode in the hearse to the Hege plot, high in the hills, and waited with the family at John’s graveside. Tam and John and their two daughters and their families stood silently with us. I said a few – unimportant, but necessary, I suppose – words in the presence of this sombre gathering, and the funeral director nodded at John, the officer’s father, giving him the urn with his son’s ashes.

I stood behind John as he kneeled over the grave and leaned over to place all that was left of his son into the grave. As he kneeled, he appeared to fall over, and I leaned over him, reaching for his shoulder, just as he set his son’s ashes in the grave.

Years later, telling the story to someone who has not heard it, I come to tears each time. In my role that day, I did not cry. I witnessed. I was a witness to the grief that hung over us all, to the grief that enveloped John’s family.

*

There are some moments in life that remain, some moments as a Pastor that I remember, vivid moments that come to mind as if I am living them again. That day on the hill, witnessing the grief and the resignation of John’s family, comes often to my mind. When I pass the sign on the freeway that names the four officers killed that day, I nod, as a witness, and to my memory.

Sometimes it seems strange that beauty remains after such a grave loss.

Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert