A Warm Memory of a Frigid Christmas

The Christmas Florida Froze

What’s your favorite Christmas memory? As a pastor, here’s one of mine.

When Christmas Eve comes on Sunday my mind reverts to 1989. It was the year of the big freeze. Temperatures in Orlando dropped to 22 degrees. Many of us woke up in dark, cold houses without power. Ruptured irrigation pipes turned Florida landscapes into “winter wonderlands.” Massive orange groves were wiped out. 

We wondered if anyone would show up at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church for worship that morning. But people came, perhaps hoping the building would be warm! We had power and some heat, but not enough to warm the entire sanctuary which was designed to allow hot air to rise into the rafters in the summer heat. The room was so cold the pipe organ was out of tune.

As we processed down the aisle, I noticed a small, grey-haired man sitting with Susie Blackmun, her husband William Brown, and Kaia, their 2-year-old daughter. When we reached the chancel and turned around to face the congregation, I suddenly recognized the man’s face and made the previously unknown connection with Susie’s last name. 

Our Associate Pastor, Annette Stiles Pendergrass, was preaching that morning. During the hymn I whispered in her ear, “Don’t feel uncomfortable, but you’re probably the only United Methodist in America who will be preaching to a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.” During the passing of the peace, Susie introduced me to her father, Justice Harry Blackmun. With a subtle wink of her eye she said she would tell me the story later.

When we served Holy Communion, I noticed that Susie and her father lingered at the communion rail for a long time. Later, I would understand why.

The Long Journey to the Altar

Susie said she had been living “under cover.” Very few people knew her father was Harry Blackmun, the Supreme Court justice most remembered as the author of “Roe v Wade,” although that was only a small part of his legacy on the Court. She decided to “go public” on Christmas by introducing her parents to the congregation.

Not long after, Susie shared her story in The Orlando Sentinel. In 2004, The Washington Post included a feature story on “The Justice’s Daughters.” The short version is that around the time Nixon nominated her father for the Court, Susie went into full rebellion like so many of her generation. It included rejecting the Methodist faith her parents believed and the church in which she had been raised.

Susie spent seven years sailing around the world as a sail boat crew member. She met William on a stop in the Caribbean. They married, settled into our neighborhood and began searching for a pre-school for their daughter. Susie said over-hearing the young parents talk about our church enticed her to try it. 

The relationship with her parents had been improving (grandchildren have a way of doing that!), but she had not told them about the church. Over breakfast that morning, she invited them to come to worship with them. The invitation came as a joy-soaked surprise to her father. ”He almost fell over,” Susie said. “He couldn’t believe it.” When she said it was a United Methodist Church, they were even more delighted.  

The opening lines of the Sentinel article captured what happened that morning.

In the church that day, Susie Blackmun held her father’s hand at the communion rail and watched him cry. Here was this towering figure of contemporary American history, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, author of the Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion, standing in an Orlando church, crying joyfully at his reconciliation with a rebel daughter.

It’s certainly not a moment that Harry Blackmun was eager to share with the world -especially his world, where one’s passions and prejudices must yield to rational thought, reason and legal precedent. But this was his daughter’s coming home, and this was no time to be rational.

Susie described the experience when she wrote:

When Dad and I knelt together at the communion rail -a meeting place I never, ever would have envisioned -and he clenched my hand while tears streamed down his face … The old wounds, from battles that had raged ever since I’d reached puberty, were at last beginning to heal. We were a family again.

Justice Blackmun was so grateful for the church that he returned a year later as our guest preacher on Laity Sunday and sent me an autographed portrait of the Court. It includes the signatures of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Justice, and Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve. 

That’s my warm-hearted memory of what happened on a frozen Christmas Eve morning. It keeps happening when the love that became flesh in Bethlehem becomes flesh in us. May it happen again for us this Christmas … without the freeze!

Merry Christmas!

Jim