Ron Nored was a small, slender, handsome African-American man, with a quiet demeanor, a smooth, deep voice and a dignified bearing.  He was the kind of person you took seriously right from the start, but you also soon learned that he had a disarming sense of humor that he reserved for some of his truly most serious moments, and he had a purposeful smile, actually a chuckling grin, that complemented the enormous passion and drive deep down within that statesman-like, pastoral presence. 

Ron was one of those people who could have done nearly anything in life and been personally successful.  He was good-looking enough, had the voice and was publicly graceful enough to be a news anchor (which he was for a while).  He was athletic and strong enough to be anything from a boxer to a baseball player (both of which he was for a while).  He also had an obvious intelligence and personal presence that evoked such respect from people that he could have been a bishop (which he would have been, if he had lived a while longer). 

Ron had all the gifts that would have allowed him to be or do or go anywhere he liked.  He got many opportunities, many offers, many invitations to do just that.

Instead, Ron decided to live his life, not so much for himself, as for God and for the people right next to him, who were living the same life that he grew up living.

Ron was one of those people blessed and gifted enough to leave poverty behind personally but who never left poor people behind.  Ron grew up poor, and although he was able to escape poverty, he never saw that as a reason to abandon people who were living in poor neighborhoods. Ron—incredibly talented, amazingly bright, tremendously spiritual, unfailingly effective—Ron decided to live his life in Ensley, Alabama, among people struggling for survival and for the success that would have come to him so easily if it had only been about him personally. He lived his life with the people of Ensley, and ultimately he chose to be buried where many of them are buried.

Ron never shut the door on the people around him—literally. He was always surrounded by people, and he was forever fighting to get people in the door or in the program or registered or signed up.  He never could stand the thought of becoming exclusive, self-important, elevated and aloof.  He was, as neighborhood people might put it, always a soft touch.

But Ron was never a soft touch because he was naïve to what was going on around him.  He knew, with some sort of spiritual wisdom not born of age, what was going on with people, from the old person down the street barricaded in her home against the decline of the neighborhood to the corner drug addict who would ask him for cigarettes and money.  Ron was one of those rare people who could give you a cigarette, then ask you for the match, tell you that you needed to get your life turned around and leave you amazed that you were coming to the next neighborhood meeting to plan the future of Sandy Bottom. 

You see, what’s most important to know about Ron is that he never felt the need to get rid of anyone in order to bring in the Kingdom of God.  I’m not sure where he got that incredibly radical, unheard of idea, but Ron never believed in displacing or rejecting anyone as a way of building community.  He worked personally with the people already there, and even if there was a shortage of something, as there always is with people, Ron never let that stand in his way—or theirs.  BEAT never displaced a single resident of Sandy Bottom who had been living in the neighborhood prior to the transformation of the area into Sandy Vista.  Economic development theory always says that you have run off, displace, or at least discourage the continued presence of the current residents and try to attract some group of mythical “higher quality” residents in order to make “good things” happen. 

I never heard Ron say much about that idea.  He didn’t need to. The words just kind of stuck in your throat if you started talking that way. His chin would drop down to his chest, and he would look disbelievingly over the top of his glasses, as if he were wondering if you could really be mixed up enough to be saying something like that.  When he raised his chin just enough to start talking you knew before he said a word that he was a towering brick wall against such thinking. His life and ministry were a living, breathing, uncompromising contradiction of that kind of foolishness. Ron started with the people around him.  And then he stuck with them, no matter what. 

Ron believed that torn lives and shredded relationships could be healed and rewoven into a fabric of community, and that the fabric of community was strong enough to cover the naked while dressing up the whole neighborhood in fine linen. 

Ron had a strange notion that God could save people’s lives, individually and socially, and that God could work through people, whether they realized it or not, to transform their world.  He must have gotten that idea from people like Jesus and the prophets, and from Martin Luther King and people like that.  They are the people Ron’s life most resembled, anyway.

I keep going on with that part about not displacing people, because it was so important to Ron and he would talk about it over and over when we were talking and writing about BEAT together.  It was important because it was the only way he could see that the church and its message could be credible to anyone, including him.  “BEAT is not about building houses,” Ron would always repeat.  “It’s about building community, and the houses build themselves.”  

Most people, including me, would have said that it would have been easier to pick up mountains and throw them into the sea or to raise the dead or heal lepers than to revitalize a place like Sandy Bottom.  But today there it sits, wearing the name Sandy Vista, a name that only barely discloses the higher reality that there is an actual human community alive and well there today, where there were only hollow hopes and decaying houses before.  People discovered one another in Sandy Bottom, and the power of that, wedded to the power of a stubborn, defiant, undying confidence in God’s faithfulness, was like a massive infusion of life into an otherwise dying body. 

Why would anyone need to be displaced to revitalize the neighborhood?  The very thought was bizarre to Ron. Ron wanted everyone to stay in Ensley and for more people to come.  That’s what happened, and he stayed, too, even when he had numerous offers for bigger, certainly easier, things elsewhere.

For Ron, the neighborhood was everything, and it always had the final say.  He had his own opinions of what should happen, of course.  He never once shrank back from being an outspoken leader and pushing hard for his own ideas.  But once the neighborhood made a decision, for or against his own ideas, that was it.  There was only one direction left:  the neighborhood’s, and Ron was its tireless spokesman.   “Building, sustainable, self-directed neighborhoods” is stamped all over the BEAT story and all over the Center for Affordable Housing, because it was somewhere imprinted on Ron’s brain.  He never thought any other way.  Some people thought it strange that Ron never lived in Sandy Bottom by buying a house for himself there.  But Ron never thought he had to make Sandy Bottom “his” neighborhood.  He knew that they could make it as a neighborhood, so he himself made sure they remembered that it was “their” neighborhood above all.  His death points out the wisdom of his decision.

Finally there is a lesson from Ron that, just as Andrew Young often says about Martin King, Ron “did not spring full-grown from the head of Zeus.”  Ron was remarkable, his life even miraculous in a real sense, but Ron, like those whom his life most resembles, was 100%, undeniably, unquestionably human.  It would be reassuring somehow to us if we could “divinize” Ron and turn him to a super-man, a being not like us, so that we would be safely beyond the call of the same forces that made his life what it was.  But Ron would have told us that we can no more displace our real selves to try to go find some mythical “better self” who will come in and make us into people like Ron than we can displace our neighbors and call life good. 

Ron, in his personal life, was undeniably human, touchable, vulnerable, fallible, funny, unguarded, risk-taking, quick-witted, part comedian, part mischievous child, part typical African-American, typical male.  Since he was a male, I suppose it goes without saying that he was also a sinner, like all us males. Like most of us, male or female, he could be demanding, impulsive and stubborn, traits he harnessed on behalf of others, just like his greatest gifts.

So, Ron was not superhuman, some alien down here among us masquerading as human.  His life reveals that a commitment to God and to community, regardless of whatever shortages we find in ourselves or one another, is always enough, if we are willing to take the chance to believe in God, in one another and somehow in ourselves.  Ron would have been the last to call himself “special” or “unique” or to be flattered if we were to do so.  He always found that strangely odd, somehow yet another attempt all over again to displace our real selves for some imaginary, mythical person out there in the future somehow.  Ron’s faith was the central focus of everything he did, and after that, he was just himself, plain and simple, and he didn’t have time to really try to attempt to be anything else.  After a while, he said he had just become too set in his ways to bother with pretending to be great or something he wasn’t.  He often told me he didn’t have time to “be anything but MYSELF and if that is good enough for God, then that will just have to be good enough for everybody else.” 

Ron believed that everyone was capable of doing what he was doing.  We may disagree with him on that, but we will have to live with the fact that we never convinced him to change his mind.  “If it can happen in Sandy Bottom, he wanted people to know, it can happen anywhere.”  And, he would have added, “if it can happen with us and with me, it can happen with anyone. Because God can do great things. You just have to stay with the vision and stay with the journey.  It’s a journey, a journey of faith.”  Those words are synonymous with Ron for me, personally.  It’s why he spent so much time working on and talking about his books.  They weren’t written to celebrate what only he could have done, but what he thought everybody could do.

Perhaps you can see the Ron I knew and GBM knew a little more clearly now.  Beneath it all, Ron was passionate about God and about people, all people, and deeply connected to his entire, wide-reaching family and fiercely loyal to his many, many friends. He could joke about all of us, copy our voices, our walks and our facial expressions alarmingly well.  He could needle people’s egos, bump people off their high horses as easily as reaching for a cigarette in his pocket and then pick them up and hand them back their dignity as if nothing had happened, smiling to the side in that mischievous way he often did.  He could make unbelievably silly faces at the least expected moment and then turn around and speak his mind with all the seriousness of an apostle.

I think it was all a sign that Ron saw himself as totally safe in a world where too many of us see nothing but reason to be afraid.  Ron knew the pain of living as much as anyone, but he believed that God was greater than it all.  I think that was why Ron could say nearly anything to anyone because he already knew that he was never going to reject anyone who was simply willing to respect others.  His questions could be probing but never threatening, unless you were trying to hurt someone else, of course. 

Ron helped so many of us to see more clearly how to escape the traps of racism and class-ism because he stubbornly refused to bow to them, and he refused to listen to the people who believed that only socially or economically powerful people or people with big names and big degrees or big titles and big companies, could do anything about the big issues of life.  Ron was always glad to meet with them to show them what they could do—and how they could work for the neighborhood and what it had already decided to do.  He gave them a seat, at the neighborhood’s table, and made it clear that we are all welcome to a seat at the table, so long as we remember whose table it is.  By so doing, he made it possible for people who were haunted by the demons and fears of race and class to believe in something far more powerful and to experience a little taste of the Kingdom of God over in Ensley and wherever else he went.  He invited us, maybe even steered us, into a seat at the table and gave us practice at simply sitting around the table working with one another for a better life for everyone.  Along the way, we all slowly discovered what it was like to be with one another, without the baggage of all the things that we think can’t happen or that we can’t live without.   We all got to feel what it will feel like in heaven all the time.

Ron was one of us.  That’s the main lesson of his life.  We can’t turn him into a superhero and justify sitting around waiting on the next Superhero to come along. 

Ron was one of us.  He did what he did despite his own shortcomings and the shortcomings of all of us around him.  He took away all our excuses for disqualifying ourselves or one another from getting on with the work of building human community with a blueprint of faith. 

Ron was one of us.  He never chased anyone away who was willing to become part of a future shared lovingly with other people, regardless of who they were. He wouldn’t have let anyone chase us away and expected us stand up for every other person, too.

Ron was one of us, and he reminds us that we are all part of one another.  He truly rewove the fabric of community.  And whenever the voice of “the way things always have been and always will be” tells us that it’s nice to talk about a better life for everyone, but it just can’t happen, Ron would be the first to dismiss the very idea with that abrupt glare of his.  “If it can happen in Sandy Bottom, things can happen you can’t imagine ” Ron’s voice will always say to us, “so you can’t ever give up, on God, on the community, on one another.” 

Ron was one of us, and he still is.  So, Ron has some expectations of the rest of us, because he will always be one of us here at GBM.

We have every reason to look up to Ron, but we would do better to look out around us at the city, the neighborhood, the world around us, because Ron believed that God was always pouring his Spirit down on the earth to lift up everyone. Ron had little use for lifting your vision up to heaven if it didn’t open your eyes to the people around us.  The flow of God’s Spirit was not so much from earth to heaven, but from heaven to earth and Ron rode that river of love beyond the walls of GBM and Bethel AME into the streets of Birmingham, the alleys and ditches of Sandy Bottom.  We are supposed to be riding that same river of hope into the lives of the very real people around us, right now.

        At the end of his life, Ron came back down to earth for us all because he died, just like every other human being has or will, when we all thought he was way too young to die.  As his death approached, Ron seemed to only grow stronger in his deepest convictions of love and faith.  "I'm ready to go or to stay," he told me every time I talked to him.  "Whatever God decides."  "Don't give God choices like that," one bishop told him.  "You've got work to do here."  That's why he worked so hard to stay with us, and with his family, just as long as he could.  Determined to the end.  That was Ron Nored.

        Of course, it may very well be that Ron is now, as he always was, merely ahead of us, and so simply out of sight because he is already over the next hill of our common journey.  Just as he was always at work over in Ensley, he is most likely simply now at work on building a whole new development of BEAT homes to be ready in the next world for people who are homeless in this one.  None of us can really protest that.  It was what Ron was always doing, getting places ready for people to live where they couldn’t imagine living before. Of course, we will all be glad to know Ron when we get there ourselves.  But it also goes with saying that if you and I die before the final construction work of the New World is finished, we should probably all be sure to pack a hammer and a paintbrush and a grant application or two in the coffin or the urn with us, because Ron will undoubtedly have a job for us to do ten minutes after we are dead and we will have no place to hide.

And since Ron already has Josie Lee to make the phone calls and Chico Bomchel to round up the materials, the work will obviously be waiting on us. Housing the whole world within the new creation brought about by the Spirit of God that re-creates human community.  That’s going to be an even bigger job than the one we have right now.

We have a much smaller, but just as important job to do. In fact, it’s really the same one.  Moving on with the work that Ron taught us to do, right here, right now with the living, breathing people already around us.  That’s the lesson of the short but good life of Ron Nored.

May we get on with it. 

Because life, in this world at least, is short, for Ron, for us and for our neighbors.     

                                              --Robert Montgomery, October, 2003

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