Remembering Mahdia Lynn
September 18, 2024
Dear Church Family,
It is with profound regret that I write to inform you that our church administrator, Mahdia Lynn, has died. We are awaiting word from the authorities, but we understand that she likely had a medical event over the weekend and passed away.
Mahdia was a remarkable woman who was courageous and lived a principled life of great purpose. Mahdia was deeply beloved by the First Congregational family. She had grace and charm and great love for our community. She not only ably served the church with her administrative talents, but also shared in the life of our congregation, attending events and supporting our mission to express God’s love. Mahdia gave of her entire being to our church. We are shocked and heartbroken by her sudden death.
I have been in touch with her family and her extended family in the Muslim and Trans communities. They are tending to her familial and spiritual concerns, and I have made myself available to them as clergy and counsel.
Mahdia will be deeply mourned by our church and the greater community who knew and loved her. To that end, we will be opening the parlor of the First Congregational Community Center (1417 Hinman Ave) tomorrow evening, Thursday September 19 from 7:00-9:00PM for those who wish to gather, mourn, and remember our dear friend, Mahdia.
Rest in Power, Mahdia Lynn.
Grace and Peace,
--Pastor Jason
A Tribute for Mahdia Lynn
delivered by Minister Eda Uca at FCCE on Sunday, September 22, 2024
It’s been a heartrending and shocking week for those of us who are struggling to digest the sudden passing of our church administrator Mahdia Lynn. Many people in this congregation were blessed to have made life with Mahdia for longer than Ashley and I have been FCCE members, and my extremely brief tenure as minister of community life. And Mahdia lived such a big life, though it was intolerably short in years. So, my intention this morning is to share a bit of my own testimony, a slice of my own friendship and experience of Mahdia. And I hope to hear more of your friendships and experiences of Mahdia, in coffee hour, and in the weeks, months, and years to come.
I actually first met Mahdia some six years ago, before either of us were affiliated with this church. In fact, I knew about Mahdia—or, I knew of her work—before I moved here for graduate school, from the east coast. I knew of Mahdia’s work because she was a leftist faith-leader, organizer, educator, and writer, who had built a national platform for her work. Mahdia made significant contributions to queer Muslim, trans inclusion, and suicide prevention, prison abolition and dis/ability rights. I had heard of Mahdia because she co-founded and directed Masjid al-Rabia a pluralistic women-centered, affirming and accessible third-coast mosque. Masjid al-Rabia had their first meeting in the basement of a UU church a month after Trump won.
Two years later I was in Evanston, and Mahdia and I met up for dinner. We smiled over falafel and discussed the intersections in our stories. We were both third wave feminist faith leaders, but whereas I was a Muslim convert to Christianity, she was a cradle Catholic revert to Islam. I was enamored by Mahdia’s work to the point of holy envy for serving my Muslim community in ways that I could not. I didn’t think much of it when I dropped her off from dinner at the senior residence where she lived and worked to scrape by. Or, more precisely, I thought it was exactly the kind of low wage job most of the brilliant, gifted healers I knew were working because it was impossible to keep a 9-5 and also do your real work more than full time.
The Mahdia I met in Evanston 6 years ago was electric—like a current wrapped in plastic, she had power and knew how to direct it. Our last connection in that period was a brief phone call before we absconded to different winter holidays. I sat down my notes and we chatted while Mahdia worked. She was running the twitter account of a peer organization that day, and was using the platform to lampoon her detractors while at the same time, teasingly insisting to me that as a trans woman, she identified with birds, not because they were free and lovely, but on account of their really being tiny, ancient dinosaurs. (The birds-used-to-be-dinosaurs story was viral at that time.)
The Mahdia I met several years later at FCCE was just as brilliant and full of goodness, but she wasn’t flying like she used to; she was slower now, grounded, and calm. After I got the job [as FCCE’s Minister of Community Life], Mahdia confided that she had, in the interceding years, suffered a catastrophic stoke. And like so many overstressed and underresourced queer feminist projects, Masjid al-Rabia broke apart during the pandemic, when needs exceeded capacities and the wheels came off.
Mahdia’s response to her stroke was probably best captured in her depiction of a different, earlier hospitalization from her blog: Mahdia writes, “I decided two things from that hospital bed: one, that I have no choice but to live; and two, that everything needs to change.”
Mahdia, who was already disabled before her stroke, and who had nevertheless given all of herself to LGBTQ Muslim survival, gave up the grind of activism, and reorganized her entire life so that she might survive. One small example: Mahdia didn’t follow the news (figuring that if anything really important happened, she would hear about it from us) and she wasn’t even on social media anymore (except a few subreddits on bunnies and sci fi). She found the constant stream of online noise—which she used to navigate so deftly—too stressful, apart from her own curated exposure, which she carefully managed to protect her health. And then there’s the fact that Mahdia had a seizure disorder, for which reason, she did not drive. The extreme care Mahdia was taking in order to keep living, is in part—in part—why I was shocked but not surprised when Mahdia left us this week. Mahdia was not given to self-indulgent panic, melodrama, or hyperbole, and so it follows, that if our thoughtful and wise Mahdia had organized her entire life around living, there was a very real danger that she could die.
Many of you have said to me this week, that your Mahdia was the picture of robust health—and she was so strong and so bright. Our memories of Mahdia are precious because she was precious. Our memories are unbroken cords that bind us to her even today. They are the means for Mahdia to keep living now, and a pact that we’ve made to meet again in the time to come.
And, it is a fact that accidents happen, and sometimes perfectly healthy young people die. So, I might have kept my silence on Mahdia’s daily determination to live, and we could have tried to process her passing as the kind of paradox that sends people into the arms of the divine, or sometimes, causes them to lose their faith in God.
My reason for speaking on Mahdia’s determination to live, is not therefore (really) to provide explanation or closure for her death. We will never know exactly what ended Mahdia’s life, and our faith in the resurrection of the dead (which we share with our Muslim siblings) is a testament to our own resistance to whatever so-called “closure” such explanations might provide.
My reason for speaking up on behalf of Mahdia’s determination to live, is that I want this community—this trans inclusive, LGBTQ affirming community—to understand that the way trans women die too early, isn’t only as we might imagine it, from occasional notices in headlines. To be a trans woman, or to be a queer, young, Muslim in America, and to be an overworked and underresourced activist trying to serve these communities, is almost necessarily to have endured a lifetime of stress and strain in a very short time. Henri Nouwen, speaks of wounded healers, drawing an analogy between those drawn to justice work and the resurrected Christ. But there is a thin line between wounded healer and walking wounded, and the brilliant, gifted, amazing queer people you know, are treading it most of the time.