Becca Stevens was a young priest in Nashville when she asked for advice on a sermon from Charles Strobel, the priest and Room In The Inn founder who died Aug. 6 at the age of 80.
"No one remembers anyway," Strobel joked about the short attention spans of parishioners, putting Stevens at ease.
Stevens, who founded Thistle Farms and was a longtime collaborator of Strobel’s, disputed that advice, eulogizing him over the din of construction noise at First Horizon Park at a Friday morning memorial for the baseball-loving Strobel.
"We remember, Charlie, what you preached not just with your lips but through your life of radical hospitality," Stevens said.
Strobel has been celebrated across the city this week for his decades of work on behalf of the homeless community, a large contingent of which made the trip to the baseball park. They were joined in the grandstands by current and former mayors, representatives from the Room In The Inn chapters that cropped up around the country and Nashvillians of all kinds. Mayor John Cooper has proposed naming the city's first permanent supportive housing center for him. Famed musicians Emmylou Harris and Buddy Miller performed — so too did a choir of Strobel's great-nieces and great-nephews.
Former Mayor and Gov. Phil Bredesen said the event reminded him of John F. Kennedy's funeral decades ago. Strobel "isn't being celebrated by the usual delegation of friends and family," Bredesen said, though they were there too. Rich and poor, important and unimportant, were in attendance, Bredesen said (though Strobel's identification of which was which might have differed from the standard).
Unlike JFK, Bredesen said, Strobel is not being commemorated by a propane torch.
"His eternal flame is a more subtle and more divine one: He lives in the hearts of those he ministered to, those he called to service and to those he called his friends," Bredesen said. "... We're here because he was our friend, and he was very, very good at being a friend."
