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Tom loved people, in all capacities and in all stages of life, in sorrow, doubt or contentment, he could read you like a Geiger counter and respond accordingly. If you were feeling rather uppity and self-congratulatory about yourself or your inflated ego had momentarily lost sight of dry land, his wit and humor would reel you back in with a rhetorical sharpness that made you wonder how he figured you out before you did. If he caught you while you were experiencing lifes spin-cycle of failure or doubt, he knew how to instill hope without probing the impasse of your pain by his presence alone. The synergistic timing of our initial meeting was twofold, I was in the belly-of-the-whale over the demise of my twenty-year marriage and I was in the beginnings of self-discovery and possibility for my life. I had just read Sexism and God-Talk by Rosemary Radford Ruether, which gave voice and clarity to the cacophony of patriarchy I had experienced in the Catholic Church. Reading Ruether launched me into my undergrad and graduate major of Theological Studies with a feminist hermeneutics. The image of God as male with its litany of idolatry and exclusion came easily for me, but not for Linda. While entirely sympathetic to imaging God as mother or the Divine Feminine, Linda can just as easily image God as loving father, which I have to say irritated me to no end. As a newly christened, self-identifying feminist-theologian-in-training, I was sensitive, even Mary Daly-ish in my regard for the imposing maleness of God to the determent of women. But how could my (healthy) friend not be just as capable of rendering the divine in both maleness and femaleness given the reality of her parents? Somewhere along the timeframe of our friendship I acknowledged to Tom that if I wanted to image God in the masculine, I need only think of the Divine or Jesus as him, and then the fists of defiance could soften. You see Tom really did incarnate the Divine with resolute humor and acceptance of everyone he encountered. The gender of God dissipated as the manifestation of potentiality exponentially grew in Toms presence. In our last time together, 3 weeks before his death, Tom, Marie and I sat together one last time. While weak in physical body, his wit and humor was soundly in tack. For moments at a time I could forget the meaning of my visitwhich was to say goodbye and thank him for healing my own father-wounds while expanding my image of the divine to include both genders. Tired and ready to nap, we hugged each other one last time, only it took longer to let go, both physically and metaphorically. I was losing the tangible reminder of Gods love for mejust as I am and not how I hope to be. As I listened to each of Tom and Maries six children take part in his memorial service, I surrendered my tears of grief for the loss of such a beautiful, fully human figure. The glory of God, reminds church father Irenaeus, is the human being fully alive. No one I ever met embodied this sentiment with more gusto and truth than Tom Jorde. And no one desired more for those he met to also participate in life fully alive, fully engaged. His death was not unexpected and more importantly, he was ready. In their last encounter together Tom expressed a unique sentiment to each of his six children. To Linda he pronounced, Its been a privilege, which carried beyond his fatherdaughter relationship to mean life, in
all its complexity, had in fact been a privilege. Never in the shadows, Tom lived his life on blast for God and all he knew. Life was a daring privilege or nothing at all. Goodbye my friend, the privilege, thank God/esswas all mine. Oh Blessed be, oh Blessed be. Cynthie Garrity-Bond: Feminist theologian and social ethicist, is completing her doctorate at Claremont Graduate University in women studies in religion, with a secondary focus in theology, ethics and culture. For the past two years Cynthie has been teaching in the department of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University where she completed both her BA and MA in Theology. Her research interests includes feminist sexual theology, historical theology with particular emphasis on religious movements of women, agency and resistance to ecclesial authority, embodiment, Mariology and transnational feminisms. Having recently returned from Southern Africa, Cynthie is researching the decriminalization of prostitution from a theological perspective.