On the eve of Recommitment Sunday, Elizabeth O'Connor died (10/17/98). "Safely into harbor," Mary Cosby said to me in the kitchen at the Church of the Saviour headquarters in Washington, DC.
In October, 1963, I first learned about Church of the Saviour from an article which Elizabeth wrote in Faith At Work, titled "What the World Needs is Saints:" Saints are people who can give themselves in ways that seem fanatical to those who live by the usual ethical and moral terms...They have thrown the familiar "duty" maps away. Her article ended with the words, What is God calling you to do?
Nobody had ever asked me that question before or suggested it was the task of the church to ask it. I ordered her first book, Call to Commitment, as Peter left for Vietnam and I turn to clay in a search for my own relationship with God. Soon her next book, Journey Inward/Journey Outward introduced me to the concept of a mission group in which we would share disciplines to strengthen our spiritual resources for a common task in the world. I began to read my way through her bibliography as a way of learning more about the truth she was telling.
The April 1968 issue of Faith At Work carried another of Elizabeth's prophetic articles, "How To Be Good News." In it, she quoted the founding pastor, Gordon Cosby: We are not sent into the world in order to make people good. We are not sent to encourage them to do their duty. The reason people have resisted the Gospel is that we have gone out ...to impose new burdens on them, rather than calling forth the gift which is the essence of the person himself." By then I was living in Hanover NH and working on a coffeehouse staff patterned after The Potter's House, one of the Church of the Saviour missions. It was my first taste of covenant community and I was eager to discover the gifts and call which God had planted in my life.
During the early 70s, three books came out with the core of her teaching at the School of Christian Living: Eighth Day of Creation, Search for Silence and Our Many Selves. Like manna in the desert for me, they contained readings from many sources. I used them for meditation and filled my bookshelves with the authors she introduced me to. Later I learned that, as a child of the Depression, she had "sporadic schooling" but took writing courses as she could. Later she completed therapeutic training in New York and Virginia Seminary honored her with a doctorate, but her thirst for knowledge and lack of conventional education gave her a certain freshness as she addressed the practical questions of living the path of Jesus.
In 1976, Peter and I arrived at Church of the Saviour one month after it divided into six small worshipping communities. Elizabeth's book, Letters to the Scattered Churches, outlined some of the basic disciplines which we would need as we gathered around separate calls. Her questions for a money autobiography still challenge us regularly! Then came The New Community, which elaborated themes from her last article for Faith At Work (Nov/Dec 1979), titled "Each of us has something grand to do:" If we are...to be the harbinger of the new, we must give attention to the moving center...which carries us out into the world to be the builders of a new heaven and a new earth. Like the other centers, it does not function well unless it is recognized, challenged and supported.
Elizabeth moved into the Eighth Day Community and wrestled with her call to low-cost housing for senior citizens. Her body became her guide, healing as she yielded to call in her most personal book, Cry Pain, Cry Hope (available through FAW).
Elizabeth's last teaching has been her dying process. Though multiple surgeries left her frail, she continued to see people and write when she could. In her last letter to the community gathered around her far and near, she quoted from Theodore Roethke: