A Martyr for the Cause

By Mike Ivaska

Early in the morning, on Saturday July 13th, 2019, Will Van Spronsen was shot and killed by police outside the Tacoma Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. Van Spronsen was carrying a rifle and molotov cocktails, and was apparently attempting to set fire to the Detention Center. Within a day, his manifesto was being shared on social media all throughout my town, which also happened to be his town, the community of Vashon Island, Washington. Two-and-half weeks earlier, at 12:05am on Tuesday, June 25th, my father Paul Ivaska took his final breath and passed away in a hospital bed in Seattle from heart failure. Their deaths bookended a three-week break from my pastoral responsibilities at my church to mourn the death of my father and settle into life after caregiving.

I never knew Will Van Spronsen. I have no desire to speak ill of someone who has passed (nor do I desire to speak glowingly about his choice to use violence in making his point). His family lives right here on the island with me. Though I do not know them either, they are my neighbors. I owe them the respect they deserve while dealing with their loss. I owe them my prayers on their behalf. Those who knew Will Van Spronsen say he was deeply disturbed at the treatment of immigrants and detainees by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and their affiliates. Clearly he was passionate about his beliefs.

By contrast, I knew my father very well. He was, and still is, my hero. I am a pastor today because of him, as is my brother. About a year before Dad died, as he and I sat at a table in his neighborhood bakery sipping hot coffee and eating possibly the best buttermilk donuts I have ever tasted, he and I got to talking about politics and church. Dad could not stand Donald Trump and was very frustrated at the unquestioning support he felt Trump was receiving from the evangelical community. Our conversation wandered, as it was prone to do, from politics to religion to last night’s news. I asked Dad about being a seminary student in the 1960’s. I was curious how he felt about the tumultuous events of those years. I knew he hadn’t been a pacifist, because he had been Air Force ROTC for part of college and wanted to become a pilot. When he did better on the navigator’s exam than the pilot’s exam, however, he chose not to continue. One of Dad’s college roommates at the University of Wisconsin, a Frenchman, had been a veteran of the Algerian War and was a card-carrying communist. My dad learned French cooking, workers’ rights, and how to make a really good cup of coffee. He often wondered if his name had wound up on a list somewhere because of that friendship. It probably did.

Between college and seminary, Dad’s number came up for the draft. When the local draft officer heard that Dad was considering seminary, he gave him a pass and my father never had to go to Vietnam. Dad had not yet technically enrolled in seminary. It was just a thought he was pondering. The draft officer made the decision for him. 

On April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed by an assassin’s bullet. My dad was in the middle of his seminary education. A student group organized an event in response and invited a well-known African-American minister and civil rights leader to speak. The seminary said no. My dad’s recollection was that the school administration, some of whom he knew pretty well, did not deny the speaker on the basis of his race. They were denying him on the basis of his orthodoxy, or lack thereof. The students who invited the speaker were outraged. They moved the event off campus to a local Baptist church and invited the speaker anyway. Conservative students on the campus defended the administration’s decision, and echoed their reasoning. The progressive students called the decision racist. My dad wound up in the middle. 

My father hated conflict, a trait I have inherited from him. After growing up in a small farm town in 1950s Wisconsin and having been raised in a Conservative Baptist church, by going off to the University of Wisconsin, having a communist for a roommate, and picking a seminary that wasn’t Baptist, Dad began to think of himself as a pretty liberal guy. But the reality is, my dad was a dyed-in-the-wool moderate. A mediator to the core. And so, in the midst of the conflict at his seminary, my dad wound up on a task force to mediate the conversation and encourage dialog. Specifically, my dad’s job was to compile a bibliography of books on the subject of race, racism, and the Christian faith. Some of the books I have inherited from him I suspect were on that list. In the middle of the heat and the controversy, my dad suggested conversation and good books. That was Dad.

Almost forty years later, in 2004 while he was pastoring in his fourth church, Dad’s days of being a vocational pastor came to an end. While my parents were in California attending my grandfather’s funeral, the elders met to discuss some criticisms that had been leveled at my father, and to consider Dad’s ability to fulfill his role any longer. The church had grown significantly in the sixteen years Dad had been there, but the last five years had become years of criticism and struggle. Voices started to say that the church had outgrown Pastor Paul’s personable, but not highly administrative, style. Others wondered if he was firm enough, doctrinally speaking, or a dynamic enough speaker. The church was in the middle of a building campaign to replace its old sanctuary, which had burned down, and things were becoming directionless. I remember those years pretty clearly. Dad was burning out. The elders decided he had to resign. He was crushed. We all were. So much of how things were handled was unfair. I don’t dispute that it might have been time for Dad to move on, but the way things were done condemned my father to the pastoral equivalent of being sent to Siberia. He was 61. Exactly the wrong age to go looking for a new church. He was too young to retire and too old to be hired. He fell into a deep depression.

A year after my dad lost his job at the church, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. The disease eventually took her life. Looking back, my dad knew that losing his job was God’s gift to him, so he could provide the undivided support Mom needed. Mom always had health issues, and our family was debt-poor all throughout my childhood. Dad losing his ministry meant my parents also lost their home, because they lived in the parsonage. They eventually moved in with me. 

The year Mom died, Dad was given his own cancer diagnosis. That began a decade-long, ultimately losing battle. After giving nearly his entire adult life to the church and to ministry, my dad died poor. He reconciled with his last church, which was beautiful to see. He came to terms with his denomination’s more-or-less abandonment of him at that most difficult time. He had a flourishing lay ministry in the last church he attended, providing counsel to many hurting people and being an honorary grandfather to an entire gaggle of children. He never had any money, and my wife and I, aways being paycheck-to-paycheck, could rarely ever help. Dad lived his final years in subsidized city housing, buying his groceries with food stamps and suffering the aches and pains of a body that was wearing out. He lived, in the end, what my Catholic friend Andrew calls the “martyrdom of old age.” But his life was still beautiful.

In our passionate and volatile age, an age that seems ripe for actions like of those of Will Van Spronsen, I look back upon my dad’s life and wonder at its significance. Ours is not the age of the moderate. People who empathize with both sides of a debate are usually seen as cowardly, compromised, or secretly holding to unsavory views. Looking back on my dad’s moderation and mediation in his student days of the 1960s, I am not sure if many back then or today would consider anything about him heroic. Still, I think, maybe there is a certain heroism in refusing to succumb to the pressure to draw lines. While undoubtedly there was something going wrong on both the right and the left in that seminary, there also seems to have been a lot of talking past each other and typecasting being done while the two sides fought what honestly appear to be two different battles (one for doctrine, one for justice), each side using the other as a straw man easily damned.

Dad’s greatest and final ministry was being the best husband he could be to a dying wife. He always knew that despite all his hard work as a pastor, in the eyes of many whose opinions he valued, his ministry was a failure. Nearly four decades of church work left him poor, sick, and more or less abandoned by the ecclesiastical family he had served with the prime years of his life. As Dad’s heart took its last, long descent over the final month of his life, one of the side effects was poor blood circulation to his brain, and Dad grew very confused. Towards the end, it was clear Dad did not really want to go. He was disoriented, but he knew he was dying, and didn’t want to do it. He wept. He wanted to stay. My brother and I, along with our uncle, took turns staying by his side at the end. We played hymns and sang. We prayed and talked about Jesus and heaven. As Dad began to come to his end on this earth, his mood changed and even in his speechlessness was visibly moved by the words of some of those hymns. The last words Dad ever said, spoken long after we thought he had ceased being able to speak, were, “Thank you, Jesus, for all of it.” The following night Paul Ivaska died. He did not go down in a blaze of glory. He did not die fighting injustice or proclaiming the gospel on some hostile shore. But if a martyr is one who bears witness, and if a martyr is one who loses everything for the sake of something bigger than oneself, then perhaps an old man who died poor and ill at the end of a life given for friendship, church, and family, is also a life given for a cause.