|
Home
: News and Events : A Tribute to Joe Breiteneicher - Martin Lehfeldt
A Tribute to Joe Breiteneicher - Martin Lehfeldt
My 12-year friendship with Joe began with a shared interest in promoting the creation of more philanthropy, and especially thoughtful philanthropy, in the South. It became ever closer as we discovered many other common passions and pet peeves.
When Dylan Thomas’ father died, the son wrote, “Do not go gentle into that good night…rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
But Joe did go gentle – gentle and quietly, with enormous dignity, grace and class. He was an incredibly kind and even sentimental man. His pugnaciousness, his wrath, and his contempt were not directed against the dying of the light; they didn’t have to be – he had already put them to better use in his battles against unfairness and injustice. And he reserved some of his choicest venom for the rich and powerful who refuse to take responsibility for the rest of God’s creation and God’s people.
Have you ever met anyone who radiated so much energy? Ideas, opinions, commentary, dreams and visions raced from Joe’s fertile brain to his lips to his listeners’ ears in many genres – bombast, lyrical tirades, and uproarious stories. His super-heated rhetoric virtually compelled you to join him in his obvious appreciation of whatever he was talking about.
And yet… he could listen thoughtfully and intently and encouragingly to elicit the best ideas of his family and friends and colleagues and clients. And not just listen to them, but also applaud them and share them with others – as proud of those ideas as if they were his own.
Joe could be richly sardonic and sometimes even cynical.
And yet…he was a deeply reflective and spiritual person who read philosophy and revered the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr. Who else would have used a trip to Kentucky for a Berea College board meeting to make a private pilgrimage to the graveside of Thomas Merton?
Joe could be impatient and hyper-critical. He knew that life was too important and too short to be wasted on petty stupidity and over-dramatic concerns about one’s own problems. So woe to anyone whom he found worrying about the correct placement of a comma when presented with the articulation of a beautiful vision or preferring to play it safe and think bureaucratically when offered the chance to take beautiful risks.
It’s difficult to stop talking about this richly complex, witty and subtle man…this wine connoisseur, who also could enjoy sitting at a working man’s bar and knocking down a couple of brews…this incredible visionary who simply didn’t know how to have small dreams…a man who could be diplomatic, but seldom chose to be…this loyal cheerleader of his family members and colleagues and friends…this lover of life in all of its many forms. However, I do know – and it might have been Joe who reminded me – that in order for a speech to be eternal, it doesn’t have to be everlasting; so I will wind down these remarks.
This kind of service is about memories. Here’s one that I will treasure forever:
Joe loved good poetry and appreciated an elegant turn of phrase. However, as I told him a few weeks ago, the greatest tribute I could pay him is one that I will now share with you. I do so with some nervousness, but draw comfort from the fact that I am speaking in an historic shrine of free speech. Nonetheless, before doing so, let me apologize in advance to those who will take offense and urge parents to cover their children’s ears. Now here’s the tribute: No one I have ever known could sprinkle his conversation – his eyes twinkling all the while – with that wonderfully emphatic, expressive, centuries-old, all-purpose, Anglo-Saxon word, “Fuck” with the same élan, the same dash, the same relish, and the same joyful abandon that Joe Breiteneicher did. In a world of polite and ambiguous speech that often masks honest expression, Joe’s candor was, shall we say, refreshing.
Joe and I said our final good-byes via e-mail. He told me that the “oncological endgame,” as he put it, was near. Then he wrote, “Please take care of all the things we worry about together.” He concluded, “Oh, and give them hell for me.”
So what I have to say next and finally is for Joe. All of us who loved Joe can’t get away with that simple, sweet emotion. Because we loved him, we have inherited a responsibility. And shame on us if we don’t accept it. Here it is: this very evening, before this service concludes, take a solemn oath that you will continue the fight for all that is good and noble; that you won’t be suckered by the distortions of power-hungry politicians who cynically seek to manipulate us, or the arrogance of corporations who see the world as their private preserve to rape and plunder, or the play-it-safe philanthropists who have forgotten the meaning of the true “public good,” or the dogma of any institution that exists only to perpetuate itself or the evil of hubris wherever it shows its ugly head. Vow that you will keep before you the vision of Dr. King’s “beloved community” and that you, like Joe, will voice your outrage when anyone disrupts our progress toward that community.
Dylan Thomas wrote another poem about death. It begins, “And death shall have no dominion.”
If you – if we – will continue to fight that good fight, then Joe’s death will indeed establish no dominion.
Martin Lehfeldt is President of the Southeastern Council of Foundations in Atlanta, Georgia.
|
|