Life Goes On (12 page)

Bernie was still dazed, so I drove him home in the patrol car, then walked the half dozen blocks to my house. Walking the streets at night was becoming a maddeningly familiar practice and one that was leaving me fairly tired.

The next morning, during meeting for worship, Hester Gladden stood and with obvious glee told how she'd burned the book, describing in delicious detail the curl of flames and the great plumes of smoke, which, she theorized, was not unlike hell, which was where the author of the book was headed, along with anyone who read it.

I sat in my chair behind the pulpit, reflecting on the sad state of theological education in the meeting. My Sunday school class that morning had been dreadful. We'd drawn one of Dale's questions from the hat. He writes a dozen questions for every one of someone else's, so we invariably draw one of his.

This morning he'd asked whether those who believed in a premillennial rapture are really Christian. I'd made the mistake of asking
him what he meant by the term
premillennial rapture
, which led to a fifty minute monologue on the end times. If I'd been a fox caught in a trap, I'd have chewed off my leg to get away.

The questions I've been thinking of putting in the hat are these: Why am I silent about such insanity? Why am I so passive in the face of this fundamentalist lunacy? Why do I sit and listen to this foolishness with a smile on my face, as if his ideas merit my thoughtful consideration? Those are the questions that have lately been consuming me.

Deena and Dr. Pierce have stopped coming to the class. Deena told me it was nothing personal; they just didn't see how starting their week with Dale Hinshaw was a benefit to their spiritual journey. The class had dwindled down to Stanley Farlow, Dale, and myself. If I weren't the pastor, I wouldn't be there.

Now Hester had taken up book burning. Hester Gladden, whom I've known all my life and remember as a pleasant woman, now stricken with this cancer of intolerance. Attendance at church has been dropping. The only people we attract are folks like Albert Finchum, people who are dying and know they won't have to attend very many Sundays.

Hester finished speaking and I rose to my feet, propelled by some unseen force that I now believe to have been the Holy Spirit.

“What in the world does this have to with Jesus?” I asked.

Although this wasn't the question I anticipated asking, it seemed to grab everyone's attention. Miriam Hodge smiled, Hester and Dale frowned, and Asa Peacock, who didn't realize it was a rhetorical question, said, “Nothin', as far as I can tell.”

Then, having held my tongue for four long years, I found my backbone, looked directly toward Dale and Hester, and said, in as firm a voice as I could muster, “And I'm renewing my subscription to
Progressive Christianity.
”

And with that, I gathered up my Bible and strode from the meetinghouse, suspecting my days as a pastor were numbered, but feeling wonderfully alive nonetheless.

D
ecember blew in on a snowstorm. It was supposed to have rained, but the temperature dropped and it snowed instead, twelve inches, catching everyone off guard, including the county highway department, which had sent all its workers home. The roads out in the country drifted shut, sealing the farmers off. The few men who made it to the Coffee Cup on Saturday morning tried to remember the last time this much snow had come so early. Bob Miles dug through the old
Herald
s and found it hadn't snowed this much this early since 1953, so he wrote a big article about it being a fifty-year snow. He also announced that my son Addison had won that year's snowfall contest, accurately predicting the first inch of snow would fall on the third of December, which was his birthday and the date he picks for everything to happen.

Church services were canceled, except for those at Harmony Worship Center, who said that in light of all the Lord had done for them, the least they could do was slog through a little snow to
get to church. Harmony Worship Center, I'm discovering, is one of these churches that never loses an opportunity to remind the rest of us how virtuous they are.

Miriam Hodge phoned me on Saturday evening to ask whether we should cancel services. Uly Grant and I had spent much of the day shoveling the parking lot and sidewalks, only to have them covered again with fresh snow. It was like trying to clean the house while the children were still home.

I was all for skipping church, reasoning it would give people more time to forget my behavior from the week before when I'd left the church in a self-righteous snit, fed up with what was passing for the Christian faith these days.

“What are the roads like out there?” I asked.

“We're shut in.”

“Why don't we go ahead and cancel, Miriam. I'd hate for someone to fall and break a hip. Let's just keep folks home.”

“I agree.”

We divided the congregational directory in half to make phone calls. I asked for N-Z, so I wouldn't have to tell Dale Hinshaw, who I was sure would question our commitment. “What do you mean we're canceling church? Don't you think maybe we oughta trust the Lord to get us there okay? Boy, I bet the Lord is looking down on us right now and this is just breaking His heart, that Christians these days will deny their faith over a few snowflakes!”

We slept in the next morning, then woke up and ate pancakes. The boys wanted to go sledding, so we went to the basement,
dug out the sleds, waxed the runners, and then headed toward the park, to the hill above the basketball court. By then, the sun was out in force and the snow was starting to melt. By noon, patches of pavement were showing through the snow, and by suppertime it was forty degrees and the streets were clear.

After supper, I walked down to the meetinghouse to check on things. It was very quiet, the temperature had dipped, and there was an icy sheen on the streets, so I picked my way carefully, staying to the snow so I wouldn't slip.

I let myself in the back door and walked through the meetinghouse, turning on lights as I went. I sat in the fifth row, on the right side, where I had sat with my parents and brother, Roger, in my growing-up years. Just behind Ellis and Miriam Hodge. I lifted a hymnal from the rack in front of me and thumbed through it, reading the words and singing a few songs to myself.

Then I set the hymnal aside and closed my eyes, letting my other senses take over. The feel of the worn pew cushions, the smell of the meeting room—a mix of library smell, Murphy's oil soap, and the little blue discs Asa Peacock had been hanging in the toilets for the past thirty years.

The first things I learned about God I learned in this place, and at such an early age they had embedded themselves in my mind, like a child's handprint in fresh cement. I'd since learned other things about God, but it was those early images that were the most firmly entrenched. The God of my childhood was a tribal God, the personal God of Harmony Friends Meeting, who busied Himself tending to our wants and concerns, most of them
involving safe travel, gainful employment, good health, and, failing that, a quick, painless death in our sleep.

As a teenager, it occurred to me that praying for God to do things that could be achieved with a little common sense and initiative was a misuse of God's talent. Though Pastor Taylor had always encouraged us to stand during the silence to share our insights about God, this was one revelation I kept to myself, having discerned that most folks, once they've made up their minds about God, tend not to appreciate further enlightenment.

Growing up, I had other thoughts about God, none of which I felt led to share with anyone else for fear of upsetting people. Like why, if God were so loving, He hated Communists and anyone else we happened to be against. Or why, if God were all-powerful, He allowed Dr. Neely's little boy to die. Or why a God who cared for the sparrows sent a tornado to tear down Stanley Farlow's barns, destroy his crops, and have the bank seize his farm. But I never asked these things, preferring instead to toe the party line and have the Friendly Women tell my mother what a fine young man I was.

Unfortunately, once you get in the habit of forsaking your convictions in order to be liked, it's hard to stop. I still catch myself nodding my head in agreement to things I haven't believed in years, then later despising myself for my cowardice.

Before I became a minister, I thought the hardest part would be writing a sermon every week. And at first it was, but then I built up a sufficient arsenal of clichés I could string together in a few hours' time and deliver something that seemed profound. The
hardest part, I was learning, was telling the truth, when telling the truth meant losing your job, uprooting your family and moving them two states away to a church that hadn't heard of you. It added a whole new meaning to the biblical proverb that the truth would set you free.

I heard the creak of the front door and turned as Miriam Hodge walked in, stamping her feet clean on the floor mat.

I called out a greeting and asked what brought her into town.

“I'm on a milk run,” she said. “I drove by and thought someone had left the lights on.”

“Nope, just me.”

“Well, sorry to disturb you, Sam. I'll let you be.”

“No, that's fine. I was just woolgathering. Come on in.”

She shrugged off her coat, hung it on a peg in the vestibule, and came and sat beside me. “So what is it that causes our pastor to be sitting in the meetinghouse all by himself at eight o'clock on a Sunday evening?”

I smiled. “Oh, just the usual things.”

She looked at me, a mix of curiosity and sympathy on her face. “I've been worried about you, Sam.”

“How come?”

“Well, I've known you all your life and I can't ever recall you storming out of church.”

“Is that what I did?”

“You tell me, Sam.”

I thought for a moment, watching tiny rivers of water run off Miriam's boots and onto the hardwood floor. “Yes, maybe I did.”

“So who are you upset with?”

“The usual suspects—Dale and Fern and Hester and every other narrow-minded kook in this town.” I told her about the Finchum daughters breaking into the meetinghouse and Dale's thoughts on the premillennial rapture. “What's wrong with these people? Why can't they think?”

Miriam chuckled, then let out a brief sigh. “So you stormed out of church because you're mad at them?”

I don't recall that I had ever been exasperated with Miriam Hodge, but her questions were starting to irritate me. “Well, of course I'm upset with them. Who wouldn't be?”

“Has your annoyance changed anything?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Sam, do Dale and Fern and Hester appear to be changing their behavior in order to please you?”

“Not so I've noticed.”

“Then being upset with them isn't working, is it, Sam?”

“I suppose not.”

We sat quietly, listening to the steady ticking of the Frieda Hampton memorial clock.

“I don't want to hurt your feelings,” Miriam said after a bit, “but could I make a suggestion?”

“Sure.”

“Why don't you stop trying to change them and work on changing yourself instead?”

“I'm not the one with the problem” I said, slightly peeved.

“Sam, how old are you now?”

“Forty-two.”

“Don't you think it's time you started being the person God created you to be?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it's not working, Sam,” she said, pointing to the pulpit. “You stand up there and say things you don't believe, just to make certain people happy, people who will never be happy anyway. Why not, instead of hiding your beliefs from everyone, just be who you are?”

“It isn't that easy,” I said. “I could lose my job.”

“Sam, you know what I think? I don't think you were mad at Dale and Fern and Hester last Sunday. I think you were mad at yourself. I think you're ashamed that you've spent sixteen years in ministry kowtowing to everybody and his brother and caving in and never taking a stand on anything important.” She stomped her foot. “Grow up, Sam. Stop your whining and stop walking around like you're the only one with a burden. Give up the illusion that everyone is going to like you and just grow up.” With that, Miriam Hodge rose from the pew and walked toward the front door. “Oh, and yes, Sam, I'm glad we had this little talk. Please give Barbara my love.” And then she left.

If, when I had awakened that morning, someone had asked me how I believed my day would unfold, getting chewed out by Miriam Hodge would have been the last thing on my list.

I wanted to chase after Miriam and tell her she was mistaken, but inwardly I knew she wasn't, so I remained seated, angry and ashamed of myself. I was angry for having surrendered to spiritual
mediocrity, for neglecting my obligation to speak the truth, insofar as I understood it, and ashamed for caring too much what others thought of me and too little about what God might think.

I forced myself to reflect on Miriam's words in spite of their sting. It was not the kind of sting I felt when Dale rebuked me for failing to toe some arbitrary religious line, but a rarer sting—the one I felt when the lash of truth ripped my soul. And in those moments, the fifth pew became for me a seat of revelation: I had forsaken the gospel. Not Dale's gospel, miserly in its application, rigidly defining whom God loved and whom God didn't. That kind of gospel merited forsaking, and it was time I said so.

No, the gospel I'd forsaken was the one that served notice to the world, that refused to stay silent when people were crushed down and robbed of dignity and hope. I had learned about this gospel in seminary, but had abandoned it at the first sign of resistance, back in my first church, sixteen years ago. Now I was paying the price in self-contempt.

“Starting now,” I promised God, “it's full steam ahead.” I said it out loud, so God could hold me to it. “But Lord, if I get fired, You'll have to provide for my family.” I said that out loud too, so I could hold God to it.

And sitting there, in the fifth pew, I was baptized. Not the dunk-in-the-water kind of baptism, but the sense that I was immersed in God's presence. A deep peace flooded over me, a calm assurance that all would be well, that the Dales of the world would not prevail.

“Lord, fill me Your truth and grace,” I prayed. “And help me not be a jerk about it.”

Then I rose to my feet, my loins girded for battle, ignorance and apathy my enemies, grace and truth my arms.