For Wilshire Baptist Church
My good friend Paul Mangelsdorf died early Saturday. I’ve mentioned him on several occasions in this blog over the past few years, usually in the context of me riding DART downtown and meeting him for lunch and noon mass at the Catholic cathedral. I call him “my good friend” because that’s how he described everyone he knew – from bus drivers to bishops.
I became Paul’s good friend in 1983 when we met while working at the Dallas Chamber of Commerce. Our career paths diverged and merged later at DART. When my first wife Debra, a Catholic, died, Paul became my ongoing connection with that tradition through mass and lunch. We were good friends in the faith.
Paul was devout and not shy about sharing his faith or his strong opinions about how church should be conducted. In the past year it was common for him to pause after mass and say, “I’ll be right back. I just need to talk to Father a moment.” He’d disappear around the corner and when he came back and I asked him about his mission, it was always the same: “I told Father his homilies are too long.”
I cringed the first few times I heard that but eventually I began to smile. You see, the noon mass compresses into 30 minutes what usually takes an hour on Sundays. Paul’s complaint about the length of the mass wasn’t selfish; he worked on a flexible schedule and wasn’t bothered by it. But he knew that most downtown office workers have just one hour for lunch, and if the priest spoke too long and left congregants with just 15 minutes for lunch, they wouldn’t come back to church. Paul wanted his good friends in the faith to feast on the “bread of life” in addition to whatever they got at Corner Bakery or Subway.
Paul’s faith was nurtured his entire life at St. Thomas Aquinas just a few blocks from Wilshire. We enjoyed that proximity and visited each other for special events. Paul was a regular at Wilshire Winds concerts and always heaped praise on the Winds afterwards. That was generous coming from a man who loved music and sold season tickets for the Dallas Symphony in the coda of his career.
Paul brought others of his good friends to our Winds concerts, and to lunch and mass downtown, and to dinners and concerts at other venues. He was always on the phone arranging gatherings. And that may be his greatest legacy: he was a gatherer of friends. He lived Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”
Today I have a diverse group of friends for which our only connection is that we knew Paul. Although common ground might be found later as we got to know each other, Paul was the tie that bound us; he was the good friend to all. We’ll gather at St. Thomas soon to say goodbye to our good friend and pledge to continue his legacy of friendship.