A wall-shrine to Nikki Bado.

"Cui Bono" tattooed on my wrist.

More than any other, I think about one of my greatest teachers around this time of year. I first took a class with Nikki Bado in my sophomore year of college. She was a professor of Religious Studies, and quickly became one of the people I admired most. Taking classes with her deeply shaped me as a student, and her lessons still shape me as I go through seminary. But she was also a religious role-model to me. Besides being a scholar, she was also a Pagan priestess and one of my first mentors as a young Pagan.

Nikki taught me how to deepen my religiosity by reflecting critically on it. Questions she taught me to ask still guide me. How does my body feel when I worship, or move it in certain ways? How does my religious past inform my present? How do I locate my beliefs and practices in wider social contexts and power structures? One of the lessons that has impacted me most deeply is a phrase she taught me, “cui bono”. Latin for “who benefits”, it guides me through examining systems of power and oppression. It also directs me to consider the individual choices I make in day-to-day life. Who benefits, or fails to benefit, from the things I choose to do, and how I choose to be in community with other people. Being her student taught me to be a much more intentional Pagan and Unitarian Universalist.

Nikki was larger than life. She was firm in her convictions, considered in her artistic tastes, and an incredibly funny storyteller. Ironically, I found out she died while I was out of town presenting a research project she guided me through. Fittingly for her, the day she died was Earth Day, in 2016. Some months before she died, I remember having a conversation with her and some other students about the afterlife. To this day, I distinctly remember her saying that, “Whatever happens after I die, I hope there’s good jazz and good barbecue.”

While I’ve never sat down to celebrate her with jazz and barbecue, there are many other ways I tend to her memory. After she died, another student of hers gave me a bracelet that had been on her person whens he passed away. I keep that on my home altar in our living room. Whenever I go to Samhain rituals at this time of year, she is one of the ancestors that I lift up and honor. I have the phrase “cui bono” tattooed on my wrist. And I keep a shrine to her on the wall of our house, which you can see here, full of things that remind me of her. Some of them are mementos I have put on Samhain altars. Some of them are Buddhist pendants that remind me of another one of her academic passions, itself a gift to me. And the photo itself is one from her funeral collage.

But more than anything, there are two attitudes that help me celebrate Nikki’s memory. One is a deep love of life and all its pleasures. Nikki lived a life full of good music, good food, good books, good art. The other is knowing that people like Nikki have deeply shaped my life, and theirs echo through mine. Living a life in love with life is one of the best ways I can remember Nikki. May your ancestors lives echo through your own in abundant love.