Tribute to Charlie Cook
Dec 12, 2008
by Academic Dean Alan Gregory
On the 12th of December, 2008, with barely a dry eye in the building, the Southwest community said a very fond farewell to Charlie Cook on the occasion of his retirement after thirty-seven years of association with the seminary.
Board, faculty, staff, students, and alumni, gathered with stories, jokes, songs, movies, photos - including a few distinctly embarrassing ones - and gifts for a teacher whom alumni invariably name as foundational for their ministry.
Charlie, of course, knew both sides of the ETSS classroom. He arrived as a student in 1971, graduating in 1974; he then served as a parish priest in Texas, North Carolina and Missouri, before his appointment in 1985 as our Assistant Professor of Pastoral Theology and Director of Theological Field Education. He received tenure in 1990 and full professorship in 1995. On Will Spong's retirement in 2001, Charlie became Professor of Pastoral Theology.
When remembering Charlie's teaching, most students mention the stories, telling, and often hilarious anecdotes of ministry in and around the Church.
Charlie taught without benefit of gimmicks, electronics or "PowerPoint." His pedagogy was informal, the kind in which learning sneaks up on us and settles in before we notice. Rather than lecturing as such, he led conversation, animated and wide-ranging, with the occasional delight of a side-trip down a rabbit hole.
Over time, Charlie's case studies, his wry analyses of parish life and his expert story-telling settled in the mind and nourished a subtle, nuanced view of pastoral care as a priestly calling. Many students had their idealistic notions of a Church fit for angels and free of the curmudgeonly and disagreeable, gently brought to earth by Charlie's realistic account. He inducted students into systems-theory in a form, the practical import of which they were able to grasp readily.
Students in Charlie's class were also taught alertness to the shifts and flows of power and the realities of its abuse. Realist, though he is, however, there is no cynicism in Charlie's view of the Church: his is a "warts and all" but still affectionate understanding, accepting of the Church's limitations, but generous and hopeful as to its possibilities. This honest, clear-sighted faithfulness underlies Charlie's exposition of the "servant leadership" he modeled and advocated.
Parishes are the social equivalent of planets on which the laws of gravity intermittently recuse themselves. Charlie, though, managed to guide generations of our students to a nimble footing in this unpredictable and peculiar environment.
An especially significant tribute to a faculty member is the regard of colleagues, especially in a small school like Southwest, where we bump into each other routinely and hiding is virtually impossible. We are, too, a diverse and strong-willed bunch, rarely seeing an argument we wouldn't like to have.
For over twenty years, Charlie has counseled wisely, soothed the ruffled, pulled the scuffling apart and dried tears. The result is a striking level of trust and respect from his fellow faculty. He is a colleague for whom friendship and the good of the seminary trump ideological allegiances.
The quality of relationships, their integrity, truthfulness and fairness are of primary importance for Charlie. His cherishing and defense of them has been to our blessing. In his leadership as a senior faculty member, Charlie has presented a paradox. For many, he represents stability, an advocacy for continuities of vision and faithfulness to local tradition. First, read and respect what is there, he always insists, change can wait. Yet Charlie is also strongly insistent upon the inevitability and, indeed, goodness of change, and has suggested and promoted it at surprising moments, sometimes in advance of those generally more eager to dismantle the place.
This is a stubborn and odd inconsistency, even a paradox, but it is a good one, growing from Charlie's faith in the Spirit that both sustains and stirs up a flawed and wayward Church that, nevertheless, is a loveable body of God's grace.
This tribute was first published in the March 2009 issue of Ratherview, the magazine of the Seminary of the Southwest
