The first time I met Cory Oberlin was on a phone call. His name and contact information had shown up in my mailbox a day or two prior, a letter informing me that he would be my roommate for my Freshman year of college. We were both 18. He called me up and introduced himself to me, and we immediately tried to find ways to relate to each other. There wasn’t a lot there. Then one of us mentioned the TV show “The Simpsons” and it turned out we were both obsessed with it, and we spent the next few minutes just throwing quotes back and forth at each other until both of us were assured we were probably going to be able to stand one another, at least for the year.
We barely did stand each other. One witness of our relationship commented, “You two being put together proves they did not read our incoming student surveys at all.” Neither of us had ever shared a room with another person before, and we acted like it. He wanted to party, and I was a teetotaler. I was rigid, persnickety, and difficult. Cory was sloppy and inconsiderate. We were both stubborn and impossible and we exasperated each other. We bonded over the Simpsons and almost nothing else.
I found out much later that when his parents came that Fall, he had talked to them about finding a way to switch roommates, and they encouraged him to just stick it out and see what happened. I am so glad for that. I cannot explain to you what happened. There was no one moment, no singular event. We just kept being around each other. I got him to listen to Dylan. He taught me the benefit of taking a nap. More often than not we argued, but the arguing began to go from fighting to bickering. Somewhere along the way we found out we loved each other.
I remember in the Spring, people were picking their roommates for the following year. Perhaps tellingly, I had not found anyone with whom I’d want to room. I half-heartedly asked a few different people, but they had already found someone. Back in our room, I sheepishly asked Cory if he had a sophomore roommate yet. He said no. Had I? No. There was an awkward silence. “I mean, we could live together again, you know,” I said. “That would be weird,” he said. Yes. Yes, it would. Then he said, “OK. Let’s do that.” We shared a room for two and a half of our four years in college and shared a house our senior year. Shortly thereafter we were neighbors in Los Angeles. We didn’t live together, but he found me a roommate a mile away, vouched for me, and brought me into the friend group he had already created. Some of them thought I wasn’t cool enough to hang with them. They were right. Cory didn’t care. We were brothers now and that was that.
Last week I got another phone call. This time from a dear mutual friend. Cory had died.
He and I had, as the saying goes, drifted apart. We had had some brief phone calls and texts in the last few years, but we haven’t been in the same space in nearly 10 years. I can say that Cory struggled with alcohol addiction, and that I was not completely shocked that he died too young. But if I say that I have to also say that addiction is not the story of him – it is not his defining feature. I could list the reasons we drifted apart, but they look like nothing compared to what we had and what we meant to each other.
God, I love Cory Oberlin. I love him so deeply. We were so radically different and so frighteningly, beautifully alike. We could make each other laugh. We could ruin each other’s day. We were quite capable of being unkind to one another. We absolutely had each other no matter what. When I was a child, I often wished I had been a twin. I didn’t get a twin. I got Cory.
It is as if our friendship reconfigured my DNA and he is now in my marrow. He is one of the great loves of my life. He did not complete me. He did not make me a better person, whatever that means. And I did neither of those things for him. Rather, we were fused to each other, and that fusing had more to do with my shaping into an adult, into the person you know, than I will ever be able to describe. For several of our most formative years, our shared life was an anchor, a homebase, a place of utter belonging that I have not had in any friendship before or since. I don’t know what those years would have been like without him, and I don’t want to know. Thank God I will never know. I will always have the gift of being transformed by Cory’s love.
Neither of us were religious when we met. Both of us had been raised in Christian traditions, and both of us had left them. I still called myself Christian and found myself as the religious apologist when we spoke about it, but Cory was perfectly happy to be disconnected from church. He did not need to point to God in order to find reasons to try harder, to do better, to be a loving and kind person. Sometimes I think I’m the unoriginal one because I fell for organized religion despite its obvious flaws, while Cory was able to pursue a spiritual life outside those strictures and structures.
I was very nervous to share with Cory that I had become religious again. And he certainly was skeptical about it and had no problem sharing that with me. When eventually I decided to become a priest in the Episcopal Church, Cory said, “I have mixed feelings. I think you’ll be very good at it, but you’ll be leading people into a lie.” That was maybe the meanest thing he ever said to me. And when you think about it, it wasn’t actually all that mean. Tactless and insensitive, maybe. But heartfelt and honest and completely in keeping with years of our interactions. In fact, it was much less cruel than many things I had said to him in our time. I wasn’t even phased. “I know, man,” I said, “I know you think that. Thanks for saying I will be good at it.”
Cory once said that if he was right about there being nothing after you die, he would be very annoyed, because he’d like just a moment after death to know he was right. I love the audacity of that so much.
He asked to come to church with me a few times. He expressed desire to see me, as he said, “do my thing” once I had become a priest. He loved me, and was proud of me, and did not act like his feelings were mixed. And he continued trying to understand his own spirituality on his own terms. He explored and wondered and tried and thought and wrestled. I don’t know where he was with all this when he died, but I have no doubt he never stopped being curious and hopeful.
I don’t think he would have any mixed feelings about redirecting this almost eulogy into a reflection on Jesus and religious life. He’d likely disagree with it, but he’d love the attention. Over the last week, other than just mourning and reminiscing, I have been wondering a lot about just how I fell in love with him, and about how that love transformed me. I have come to believe it was the day-to-day unexciting sharing of life. Our conversion from enemies to frenemies to friends to brothers was not eventful. It was boring and unromantic. And I think this is how conversion actually works. We can be tricked into thinking that it’s a grand romantic gesture, an unforgettable moment. But usually conversion takes up residence and changes you so slowly you didn’t even know it was happening.
People in my Christian tradition don’t often talk about having a personal relationship withJesus. It’s not our style. We are very intentional about honoring the mystery of God, and about seeking and serving Christ in the people in our lives. We tend to rely more on finding God in the community than in the quiet of our rooms.
But I think we should pay attention to our personal relationship with Jesus. Because, well, as Christians we have one whether we think about it or not. But also, if we don’t tend to that personal relationship, we are free to keep Jesus in the realm of symbol, myth, lesson, legend, ideal. He is none of those things. Jesus is the roommate we didn’t ask for and aren’t at all sure we want. If we acknowledge his presence in our everyday lives, in our hearts, in the quiet of our rooms, we will find out that he is stubborn and impossible. He will upset the rigid, persnickety balance we pretend to have created in our lives. When we come home to this relationship day in, day out for years, we will find ourselves transformed. He might even teach us the benefit of taking a nap.
It’s not just that I believe in Jesus. It’s that every day that I make a point of sharing life with him, my heart is broken open, I become a more curious, hopeful person. I am anchored. I fall in love.
Anyway, it’s my life in Jesus that gives me hope that Cory and I will be together again in some fashion. I believe he is at peace now, that his restless heart has found rest, and that the love we have shared will continue to transform me. I love you forever, Cory. If I’m right about the afterlife, I look forward to seeing you again.
