Phyllis Tickle ((c) Courtney Perry)
Phyllis Tickle was there on the worst day of my life. More accurately, the morning after the worst night of my life. There she sat, along with Doug Pagitt, on the patio outside of her room at the Town & Country Resort in San Diego. She didn't console me exactly, because she was tougher than that. She was mad, and she wanted to help me fix what had gone wrong with my life. For all of her words, Phyllis was ultimately a person of action, and she wanted to do something about this.
In the subsequent years, I finally took action to disentangle myself from a terrible situation, and Phyllis cheered me on, talked me through it, shared her own struggles, and, above all, told me that she believed in me. Our last email correspondence, just four weeks ago, contained the same perspective. There she lay, dying, and she wrote that she was praying for me. She had asked me about my career amidst the present turmoil, pain, attacks, and betrayals. I surmised that my public life may well be over, and she responded with vehemence:
It has NOT ended it...it only is preparing ground for what is to come. I know that, Tony....you have to believe it. But believe it or not, it is the coming truth. Something is in preparation...painful, wrenching, but preparatory. I won't be here to see it, but it will happen...is happening. God help you both through it, but the movement or plan or intention or whatever word one wants to use is afoot. That much I know...p
That's it, in a nutshell. The last word--on this earth--that Phyllis had for me was everything I'd ever known her to be: passionate, confident, and a messenger of the truth of God.
I met Phyllis in 2003, also at the Town & Country Resort. That was at the National Pastors Convention, at which we had launched an adjacent Emergent Convention. The conventions reconvened in Nashville a couple months later, and I asked for some time with her. I was 35 years old, she was 70. I was overwhelmed by the publishing industry, being that emergent was the it-boy of the moment among evangelical publishers, I needed help in navigating all of their interest. Phyllis didn't blink. "Honey, you need an agent." And then she immediately began listing agents she thought would be a good fit with me.
Not long after that, she penned the foreword to The Sacred Way, which still stands as the most complimentary piece anyone has written about me. And soon, our friendship went from professional to deeply personal, very much a result of that night in San Diego in 2008.
I suppose it's not unusual to have a friend who's twice your age. But what I marveled at was how Phyllis treated me. We were equals, from the start. We talked about life, marriage, publishing, and the church. We did so publicly--from a tent at the Cornerstone Festival to the dais of cathedrals--and privately--in each other's kitchens. I considered her my mentor and sage, but she would have none of it. We were friends. Period.
Before one of her last talks (you can listen to it below), Sarah Cunningham introduced Phyllis as a den mother, and there's some truth to that. But not so much a Cub Scout den as an actual mother bear, both fiercely protective and warmly caring.
When Doug and I planned events solely around her personality and work, which we did in both 2008 and 2013, we did so because we knew that she would be the easiest possible "celebrity" to work with. And indeed, she was. She completely entrusted all details to us, never once questioned a single decision we made, and simply arrived on stage with the best content you could imagine. During that second conference, unbeknownst to us, she was battling a fierce flu, and she spent most of her nights in the bathroom. Yet when we hooked the mic over her ear, she was off and running, the furthest thing you could imagine from a diva or a prima donna.
At and after that event, she taught me a valuable lesson. In her closing talk, she used a line that I'd heard her use many times before: the birth control pill, she proposed, caused a tectonic shift in the lives of women, allowing them to truly compete with men in the workplace. This, in turn, changed the nature of the family, and one of the results was that the spiritual formation of children took place less in the home and more in the church...or not at all.
Her comment irked a couple women at the conference, and they did what people do these days in a culture of microaggressions, perceived slights, and victimhood: they complained about Phyllis on social media. As the conference organizer, I had hoped to bask in the afterglow of a job well done, but instead I was worried about the online conflict. Phyllis wasn't. "I'm sick as a wobbly colt," she wrote me, but she assured me that attempting an online defense was pointless. She cared not that people misunderstood her. That was their problem, not hers. Instead, she begged me to send email thank-yous to everyone who'd made the event happen. Gratitude over defensiveness, every time.
Phyllis and I shared many things. We both loved gardening, dogs, the Latin language, books, and whiskey. We fundamentally disagreed on some things ("emergent" vs. "emergence"). We talked often of divorce, parenting, writing, and speaking.
Phyllis Tickle was a singular force in my life.
Which got me to thinking yesterday. I'm as prone to skepticism as any educated, white, upper-middle class suburbanite. The death of metaphysics has rocked me and left me wondering if there really is anything out there, anything beyond the material.
Phyllis was not similarly vexed. Instead, she was supremely confident in God and the afterlife. She, the epitome of the educated Western scholar, talked unashamedly in her final interview about a near-death experience at age 21. She had an out-of-body experience in a hospital room, she heard a voice, she was drawn to the light. From just about anyone else, this would have been cliche, but from the mouth of Phyllis Tickle, you just know this encounter was as real as anything you've ever touched.
So this is what occurred to me last night. It is simply unthinkable to me that a life so boisterous and loving and full of light would be confined to 82 years in time and the plane of existence that we experience on this planet. That makes no sense. Hers was not a life that can be explained as the culmination of evolutionary activity. Phyllis Tickle was not simply the product of biological traits and processes.
No, Phyllis Tickle was something more. Phyllis Tickle was transcendent. And there is no way that her light was extinguished by her mortal death, for that would be definition of inanity. I don't mean that Phyllis lives on in our memories, though she surely does. I mean Phyllis lives on with God, and we will get to enjoy her company again.
What I'm saying is that the largeness of Phyllis Tickle's life proved to me the existence of God.
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Listen to one of Phyllis's last talks, at Christianity21 Denver.
Read a book of essays about Phyllis by her friends.