This is the first in the St. Hilda’s Episcopal School Series, written by Fr. Tim Sean Youmans, Casady School, Oklahoma City.
“Coach Brown Haunted by Moses.”
That was the headline in my copy of The Forward Tonsure that came in the mail just as Karen, Noah and I were headed to Baton Rouge for the Christmas break. The Forward Tonsure is the quarterly student-run newspaper for the Episcopal School in Cheyenne, Wyoming. St. Hilda’s.
For those who may not know, the “tonsure” is that bald spot that monks shaved into their heads. It is supposed to represent the wisdom they have gained from God in a life of prayer and contemplation. Some shaved that bald spot in the back of their head, but other monks, the ones in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, shaved theirs in the front--the forward tonsure. It is supposed to demonstrate that they are wise before their years. Isn’t that strange?
So St. Hilda’s Episcopal School’s mascot is the Monks. And their school newspaper is called “The Forward Tonsure.” So, there you go.
I keep up with St. Hilda’s for a couple of reasons. One, I grew up in that town--Cheyenne, WY--and even though it’s been thirty years since I lived there, I’ve got some residual curiosity about my hometown. So a couple of years ago when I started work at Casady School I struck up Facebook friendship with Mthr. Emily Scrutchins, the school’s Vicar who teaches religion there at St. Hilda’s. They call her “Mama Scrutch.” She and I keep in touch via the Facebook and she put me on the mailing list for the school newspaper.
Just before our Christmas break, Mthr. Emily sent me a heads-up to look for a “story behind the story” in the front page interview that Junior Elliot Peercy did with Coach Brown, the Upper Division women’s basketball coach. There isn’t anything too unusual about the interview, rather it was the “call of concern” that Headmaster Sullivan received about what was reportedly an “underground obituary section” for the school paper.
Elliot, this student who conducted the interview, had recently heard a story on the car radio about obituaries. Her father, Sam Peercy, only allows them to listen to two stations while driving in the car. One is the classic rock station, which when her father was her age played music from bands like Sam Cooke, Mahalia Jackson, Bob Dylan and Creedence Clearwater Revival, that sort of thing.
He has noticed recently that the classic rock station now plays music that he listened to when he was in high school. He’s none-too-happy about that. When did Bon Jovi become classic rock? The other station he allows is National Public Radio. Sam tells his kids that he is an NPR Republican. They aren’t exactly sure what that means, but their Dad says it with an air of defensive superiority.
Elliot heard on NPR of a reporter at the New York Times who writes celebrity obituaries. What was peculiar about it was the reporter doesn’t wait to write the obits after the person has died. Somewhere, in the history of the paper, it was decided that to get a jump on the story of a celebrity's death, the obit was written ahead of time, even seeking out an interview with the person, without their knowing exactly what it’s for, asking them different kinds of leading questions. Like, “If you could write the epitaph on your tombstone, what would you want it to say?” The reporter writes the story, then files it away, and it’s ready to go when the celebrity actually dies.
Well. Headmaster Sullivan got a call from a concerned booster of the Lady Monks basketball team because, unbeknownst to those teachers being interviewed, Elliot had developed a list of teachers she wanted to interview, but in the order that she speculated might die first, Coach Brown being the first one on the list.
Beloved Coach Brown, who has led the Lady Monks of St. Hilda’s Episcopal School to eight Western Preparatory Conference Championships in her thirty-four years as coach at that school. And so the story behind the story, as Mthr Emily tells me, was: “Interview with a beloved teacher? Or the dark oracle of Coach Brown’s impending death?
Headmaster Sullivan was not amused.
One of the things Coach Brown mentioned in the interview was recently seeing the movie Exodus: Gods and Kings. It’s that movie that is out in theaters starring Christian Bale as Moses, essentially “Batman as Moses.” She told Elliot in the interview that she has always identified with Moses, for a couple of reasons.
When she was a little girl, her parents moved away from the small town she grew up in near Selma, Alabama. Hallow Call, population 613. Hallow Call had a few episodes of racial violence in the early 1960s, a few teenagers got hurt, and a little girl died. And it was all brushed under the table. Coach Brown’s Mom and Dad decided to move the family to Denver to be in a safer environment. Her mother told her when she was a little girl, that they were just like Joseph, Mary and little baby Jesus, when they fled King Herod. Wise men, her Mother told her, had warned them, and so they needed to move. Denver was their Egypt, and little Coach Brown was going to be just like Moses.
Coach Brown said, in the interview, that what her mother told her a little girl got stuck in her head. Now, as a coach, a teacher, she always thought of herself as someone who was supposed to help rescue others. Most of the time it was in small ways, but then over the years it had also been more serious.
She said in the interview (how did she phrase it?), “Jesus moved down to Egypt and lived in that place that he’d heard all those stories about Moses. Moses, who was asked by God, at great personal risk, to rescue those people. Jesus,” she said, “as a little child, must have been haunted by Moses. Jesus was supposed to rescue people. Maybe he didn’t know exactly how, or exactly why, but he knew that’s what he was supposed to do. He was going to save people.”
Headmaster Sullivan wasn’t able to bury the rumor of the “pre-obituaries.” In fact it was the very parent from the Lady Monks booster club that ended up spreading the rumor, until it circled back around to the Coach. Parents get bored too. And a rumor like that? Well, it was too good to sit on.
Elliot ended her interview with Coach Brown with some editorializing. This is what she wrote. “For all that Coach Brown has brought to our school these past 34 years, it’s important that we all ask the same question that she asks every new year, around the Second Sunday of the Christmastide, the Sunday when we read the story about the wisemen warning Jesus’ family to flee danger.
Who in your life needs you to rescue them this year? Who in your life needs you to be the wise man, the wise woman in their life? Like Coach Brown, we need to be haunted by Moses, like Jesus must have been, certainly not in the same manner, but someway, somehow, in the way God needs YOU to be. Coach Brown haunted by Moses.”
Well, that was the headline from The Forward Tonsure at St. Hilda’s Episcopal School in Cheyenne, WY. +++
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