My Uncle Fred
My Uncle Fred passed away about 12 days ago, moving on to be reunited with his brothers, and best of all, with the Lord. I wanted to tell you a bit about him, not in the way of a complete recounting of his life, but more along the lines of a personal appreciation.
He was an absolutely amazing classical tenor. He could probably have had a career at the Met, or something similar, if he’d wanted that. (He might have needed cosmetic surgery to make him look Italian.) On the other hand, with all his amazing talent, and great success as a teacher of singing, he never quite managed to turn ME into a tenor…. or even a singer. Nobody bats a thousand.
My Uncle Fred was a philosopher. No, really. Not somebody who sits around woolgathering, but someone who read what all the other woolgathers sat around thinking about, and then thought about that. For a long time. He was unusually adept at communicating to his philosophy students the fruit of the many generations of philosophers that he had studied. Yet, he encouraged them to think for themselves, not to be intimidated by the weight of all those heavy thinkers, who certainly don’t seem to have been intimidated by each other. He left his students believing there was always a chance that they might think a genuinely new thought, but that meant they’d have to learn what other people had already thought, so they’d know it when they saw it.
He was a theologian and pastor. He was a skilled communicator from the pulpit, and a caring shepherd for his flock. (I know, I’m writing too much about wool.) Speaking from personal experience, he was an absolutely safe place to store confidences. He genuinely loved people, all kinds of people, and saw them as opportunities to show his love for God, by loving them.
Uncle Fred was just enough of a politician to survive in the world of academia. (Remember Henry Kissinger’s comment: “University politics make me long for the simplicity of the Middle East.”) When I was a young professor, and in some serious political hot water at my university, he was exactly the right combination of mentor, strategist, behind-the-scenes operative, therapist and (I suspect) rhetorical hitman, to help me keep my job. But he loved teaching more than university politics, and when he had the chance, he moved out of higher education administration back to teaching, an exception to the Peter Principle if ever there was one.
He was quite the golfer, an avocation I never understood, and still don’t, though I hear he was very good. I had a suspicion, for a time, that he imagined the faces of philosophers with whom he disagreed to be stenciled on the golf balls. In retrospect, I now believe it more likely that he had in mind lazy students. Or maybe he was just doing ballistic research. Maybe he had fantasies of being a reincarnated Scottish king. He seemed to know an awful lot of golf jokes. Thursday was golf day, and it didn’t really matter if the Big One finally shook southern California, or the Martians landed, or the president invited him for tea; golf is very important, you know. And a man has to have some principles.
He was pretty interesting to watch in faculty meetings. He’d sit and listen for a time, while the various perspectives on the trivial issues of the day were aired. Then he’d clear his throat, an utterly characteristic gesture, a sort of announcement of pronouncements to come, and as the room fell silent (they knew what was coming), in a very few incisive sentences he’d explain what was wrong with all previous statements, all the while appearing to compliment the wisdom of those who’d made them. Besides singing, this rhetorical tactic was the other thing he failed to teach me. Not for lack of trying. But for me, it was like a person with a club foot watching a ballerina on a high wire. If I was fast, sometimes I could knock him off the wire, but I could never do the dance. I saw him literally end a few faculty meetings, working without a net, with no one having anything much left to say.
I’ve ended a few in my time too, but somehow it isn’t the same when the paramedics have come to save people who’ve slit their wrists. Uncle Fred was definitely a man of words. He used to say that I was too, but I suppose it’s possible that he may have meant something else.
For some reason, my Uncle Fred seemed to precede me in lots of places. I recall being very proud, at the age of 18, of having started a jazz band in my undergraduate college, and then seeing a 25 year old photo, in an old college annual, of Fred Shackleton directing the Anderson College Band. He played the trombone, too. Nobody’s perfect.
Does it sound like my Uncle Fred was three or four people? You don’t know the half of it. I haven’t even mentioned much of his various accomplishments, speaking and conference invitations, publications (worship songs sung by hundreds of thousands or millions of people, scholarly work in theology/philosophy, popular and curricular work in ministry), honors he received, etc. Actually, I used to wonder if he had a cape or something stowed away under his suit jacket. But it is a fact that he was simply supremely gifted in a variety of ways, such that most people would be thrilled to have one of those gifts, let alone all of them. And then he worked very hard in polishing those gifts, and using them in service. In all of that, somehow he managed to encourage people to excel, to bring out the best in them, and tended to leave the lesser mortals in his life (that would be most folks) believing they had something unique to contribute, too.
The last time I saw him, he asked me to rub his ankle, which still hurt from a recently cleared up skin infection, and which was hard for him to reach. So while we chatted about the old days, and I thought about how much he looked like my dad (who I knew was waiting for him across the great divide), I rubbed his ankle.
It was an honor.
