I-YOUniverse

Gordon Atkinson’s comment at CCblogs on my piece Requiem for Cannibals prompts me to write about homophobia, the church, and me.

A prayer for healing

A couple decades ago the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Richmond offered a service for healing at which unidentified people who were gay and HIV+ or living with AIDS assisted. If you wished, you could receive anointing and prayer for healing. I was anointed and prayed to be healed of my homophobia, which flared up in my training to be a pastoral counselor.

 About then, a Southern Baptist Convention president announced in San Francisco that AIDS was God’s judgment on homosexuals. Of course, most people don’t know that in Baptist polity, rightly construed, he was speaking for himself alone.

I felt I must do something. So I began volunteering with the local AIDS ministry. In those days we still didn’t know much about how the disease was spread; antiviral cocktails hadn’t been discovered yet.

(Although this is about 20 years ago, I am not disclosing identifying details about clients or volunteers.)

Panic up close and personal

The training I received in a neighborhood Episcopal parish house was glorious. I met vibrant Christians who were really making a difference. Sunlight literally bathed the room.

But nothing prepared me for my first visit. On the living room wall was the large family portrait like they take for church directories: a vigorous healthy young minister in all his pastoral dignity, his beaming wife, and two-year-old daughter. When I met him, however, he lay on the bed, weighing less than 100 pounds. Half conscious, he rolled about, crying out, “Lord, have mercy! Have mercy!”

I used up my latex gloves changing his diapers. When I wrongly fed him a bit of cheese, he choked. I had to reach my unprotected hand into his mouth to remove the cheese. Of course, now we know that, although dumb, that action is not as life-threatening as it felt.

I drove home, and succumbed to a panic attack.

The prodigal Sonny

I decided, given my own physical challenges, to volunteer in an AIDS hospice rather than in private homes. My client now was a 6′4″ skinny 20-something man with a sunny smile, so let’s call him Sonny. I met him once a week for a couple years.

When His Baptist family of birth ejected him because of his addictions and attendant problems, Sonny learned to survive on the street. His vocabulary, however, was better than mine. I quickly learned to trust Sonny to use all his survival skills at all times. He knew how to direct my guilt symphony with the expertise of a Leonard Bernstein.

I had to stop seeing Sonny for my favorite pastime, spine surgery. But, when he was baptized by a Baptist pastor and received into the church, he called me to tell me. Shortly before his death, he enjoyed a Thanksgiving feast at home. His father gave him a key to the family home.  

I love Sonny. I miss him to this day.

For simplicity’s sake I’ll use “gay” as shorthand for “male homosexual, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered” persons.

 Entering into the church’s closet

While the church is wrangling about homosexuality, about one in ten of its members wrestles with core identity concerns about being gay. A much larger percentage love gay family members, co-workers or friends. Gay teens experience a much higher rate of depression, addiction, and suicide than other teens. Unlike minorities whose difference is visible, gay youth often feel utterly alone; they know no one like them. Church is the last place they dare go for help. Many media images of gays are unhealthy or destructive.

Several years after leaving a church, I got a phone call from a member. (Again, identifying details changed.) ”Can I come see you?” she said. The issue was her son’s being gay. After her own conversion, she lived totally for Jesus. She believed the Bible condemns homosexuals. But her son hurt so deeply. He rejected his homosexual nature, but could not change; he felt damned.

His mother called to ask me to share my understanding. She took it and studied the Bible intensively on her own. I passed on copies of Fr. John McNeill’s Taking a Chance on God and Walter Wink’s Homosexuality and the Christian Faith.

Frankly, I was dumbfounded. Years earlier, she was closed. Now, not having seen her for a long time, I found her heart tender and open to her son’s suffering. The seed God’s Spirit had hidden in the soil of her heart, after long dormancy, had germinated.

After walking away from—where to turn to

A third instance, more recent. Homosexuality was the headline everywhere. When my Sunday School class asked me to teach what the Bible says about homosexuals, I did. The pastor told me to stick to the safe parts of the Bible; instead, I walked away. I should have done it sooner, more simply. People have a right to their beliefs; I, however, will never again be involved in a church that does not expressly welcome gay people.

You’ll find whispers of openness (often more powerful than shouts) on my blog. From day one, I described e-thou encounter (precursor to I-YOUniverse) as a welcoming affirming space. Those words describe Baptist churches who welcome gay members (go here: http://www.wabaptists.org/.) 

On the side bar is a link to What We Wish We’d Known, a fabulous resource nicknamed The Blue Book compiled by caring friends, here: http://www.pcmk.org/Blue_Book_V5.pdf.

Other resources can be found at the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, here: http://www.bpfna.org/.

I never thought my post about enduring schism and living to tell the tale might covertly endorse the fear and hatred of people who are lesbian, gay, transgendered or bisexual.

Fighting is not the best way. Use your good energies to make a difference. If you can’t agree, walk away. Shake the dust off your feet. Put the church assets in God’s hands, and walk away.

What Paul did

One biblical model is how Paul dealt with Hebrew-Greek racism:

When [the legalist faction] opposed and reviled him, in protest he shook the dust from his clothes and said to them, “Your blood be on your own heads! I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.” Then he left the synagogue and went to the house of a man named Titius Justus, a worshiper of God; his house was next door to the synagogue.

Acts 18:6-7 (NRSV)

In taking up the Collection for the poor of Jerusalem, he continued throughout his life to reach out to those who excluded themselves (Rom. 15.26-27).

Where I am now and here

Concerning this phobia (like all the others), still I have miles to go. But it’s way past time for followers of Christ like me to get up off our assertions and

reach out to,
learn about,
get acquainted with,
invite home for dinner,
celebrate the weddings and anniversaries of,
share the heartbreak of,
be politically active on behalf of

gay people, black people, Hispanic people, undocumented immigrant people, Jewish people, Muslim people—

 WHOSOEVER’s a pretty big group of people—

It’s way past time for followers of Jesus to be and to do everything, anything you do when you’re for real.

 Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane.”

Matt 26:36 (NRSV)

Some words are so redolent, so full of beauty and meaning, that your eye can’t slide past them without pausing.

Bethlehem, “house of bread,” is such a word—Bethphage and Bethany, two others, the first meaning “house of figs”; the second, “house of the poor.”

Bethany, among the poor, is where Jesus stayed the night before his final confrontation with religious authorities. The next day in powerful action parables he cursed the fig tree and cleansed the Temple. (Mark 11.1-14)

 Alone

Gethsemane is another word, which needs nothing but itself. It’s found in today’s gospel reading of the Daily Lectionary, BCP. Here, in an ancient olive grove named for the olive presses that might have stood there in the garden, Jesus spent the night before his arrest, praying.

Though he longed not to be, he was alone. (NRSV brackets the angel of Luke 22.43.) From the larger group of 11 men and others perhaps, he invited Peter, James and John to go a little farther with him.

Some people have a vocation to go deeper with God in prayer, if they will.

Despite his repeated requests and warnings that “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” the disciples fell into a sleep heavy with grief and confusion. They did not understand, yet they surely must have sensed their Master’s mood was grim, even before he told them, “I am deeply grieved, even to death.”

 Moment of decision

The real moment of decision did not come during the trials before the high priest or Pilate or Herod. It didn’t come when Pilate asked the crowd, “Which man shall I release to you?”

No, it came now in this quiet garden, here on the side of the Mount of Olives.

 Precedents

Maybe he recalled the prophecy of Zechariah, how in the end time

the LORD will go forth and fight against those nations as when he fights on a day of battle. On that day his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives.

Zech 14:3-4 (NRSV)

Or perhaps he remembered how David fled Jerusalem,  ascending the mount, bare-foot, his head covered, weeping. (2 Sam 15.30)

Whom did he identify with more—the triumphant Son of Man, or the failed aging king?

 Before they are useful

 Jesus knew what awaited the fruit of these trees. The first to be produced was light, fruity virgin olive oil. Further pressings produced lower grade oil used for lamps. Prized as a cosmetic, as an emollient and medicine; blended with spices, it provided the basis for the holy oil to light the Temple and  to anoint prophets, priests, and kings.

But Jesus knew what stood between the oil of such glorious usefulness, and the fruit developing on the tree. Raw olives are too bitter to eat. Immature green olives, struck or picked from the tree, are brined or soaked in water or oil.

Those allowed to mature are crushed by a huge millstone. The resulting mash is pressed through screens, vegetable matter and water are then removed.

In this verse John acknowledges in a similar image that Jesus knew self must die on the cross:

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

John 12:24 (NRSV)

 A Post-Easter realization?

The gospels agree that he repeatedly predicted

The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.

Mark 9:31 (NRSV)

Is this actually a post-Easter realization? Did he never wonder (as most of us would), there alone in the darkness: “What if I am wrong? What if there is nothing more?”

 Blowin’ in the Wind

Perhaps a light wind stirred. It was months before the olive harvest. Did the breeze unveil cream-colored blossoms now and then among the thick gray-green folliage? Did their fragrance scent the night air?

What passed through his mind?

We are told he prayed, ”Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.”

The cup of wrath. Staggering. Drunkenness. Vomit. Judgment. Not at all like the cup of salvation he had so recently shared with his closest friends.

He groaned—groans too deep for words.

 Intimations of Life

Perhaps he gripped the twisted trunk of a stump before which he knelt. Perhaps from the old ax blows he saw new foliage sprouting. Perhaps he remembered what Job said:

There is hope for a tree,
     if it is cut down, that it will sprout again,
     and that its shoots will not cease. 

Job 14.7 (NRSV)

Perhaps.

 Unveiling Jesus’ psyche

How did this account of Gethsemane come to be told? Jesus’ friends lay all asleep. He was alone, but for the wood, the leaves, the blossoms.

Did the Risen Christ tell the story, fill in the gaps the disciples didn’t know or couldn’t remember?

Here’s what we know: he came from that place, put on trial the greatest legal system known to humanity, and won eternal life for us and all our kind.

The best words about Gethsemane

The best account, apart from the glimpses preserved in the gospels, is in the words of Sidney Lanier, writing in 1880 (according to Oremus):

Into the woods my Master went,
clean forspent, forspent,
into the woods my Master came,
forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to him.
the little grey leaves were kind to him,
the thorn tree had a mind to him,
when into the woods he came.

Out of the woods my Master came
and he was well content;
out of the woods my Master came,
content with death and shame.
When death and shame would woo him last,
from under the trees they drew him last,
’twas on a tree they slew him last
when out of the woods he came.

I’m currently reading 12 books—actually, 11. One “book” on my list is the Sacred Text Archive online, which contains hundreds of scripture-type books. But Internet reading ain’t the same, is it?

You see, I’ve got all this time on my hands. Due to chronic pain, I have to rest my joints and muscles a lot; my brain keeps going 100 mph, however.

Maybe I should memorize the DSM IV, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 4^th ed. This 1000+ page tome contains all the quirks, defense mechanisms, and mental disorders a psychiatrist can dream up.

Believe me, you’re in there. (Me, too.) And your insurance company has your number, the code which stands for the emotional or mental problem you want them to pay for the treatment of. It goes in a box on a form in a computer file. And it’s public knowledge. Ain’t no such thing as privacy where your insurance company’s money is concerned.

I like the classics: Shakespeare. I have all the plays on CDs, so I listen to one or two a week. I can’t keep up with the President, who read three Shakespeares.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKiWWi8rdJQ

Oh, I failed to mention how much I enjoy teaching DVDs: Shakespeare survey, history of Africa, Greek myths, Greek tragedy, surveys of Russian literature and existentialism.

Bitten by the used book bug, I find essential used books on Amazon and eBay; there’s always some book I, y’know, got to have. I’m careful, though.

For instance, C.F. Andrews, my current rage, referred to The Hidden Life of the Soul by Jean Nicolas Grou, a French Catholic writing at the time of the French Revolution. I found it on Amazon for $1777.00.

At that moment I got very nervous about the buy-it-with-one-click button.

Alibris had The Spiritual Life by Grou for $3.95, which’ll have to do for now.

Yesterday I became aware how I’m racing internally from one spiritual aid to another, trying to get better being still, better being for others, etc. It’s like all this popcorn’s exploding in my brain, and I’m compulsively consuming.

As a Nursing Home chaplain, I got a beautiful leather gilt-edged 1928 Book of Common Prayer to read with residents. I decided to start reading from that the Gospel and Epistle each week. Today the gospel was Luke 15, the waiting Father.

I’m into lectio divina. I have four or five essays on how to do that, and a small book somewhere on my shelves. I haven’t seen it in about five years.

Anyway I was lectio-ing away at the exquisite King James Version (naturally, because I’m in my Elizabethan English phase—y’know, the beauty of the language!) And these words hit home:

“And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat,” Luke 15:16 (KJV)

Dead bang! The Spirit uses scripture like a shrink uses the DSM IV.

Here I am, cramming anything and everything into my intellectual spiritual maw, like a whale engulfing krill by the millions.

What’s up?

Last week I jet read through Andrews’ Christ in the Silence; now I’m reading him one or two paragraphs aloud. Take this morning:

There was evidently a suppurating disease at the heart of Western civilization, draining its life-blood, which only the infusion of a life-giving spirit could staunch and heal.

C. F. Andrews, Christ in the Silence (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933), p. 31.

Suppurating – causing to generate pus. I guess he’d seen many a suppurating wound on bodies in Calcutta. In the West he saw suppurating souls.

The earthquake, tornado, and lightning strikes passed, and finally, finally I got still. I realized, both Sandy and I have some run ins with medical types in the next few weeks. These are supposed to be fairly routine. But I’ve had more than once, a medical appointment rip up my life, shred my planner, implode my future. Even so called routine ones give me the heevie jeebies.

“You’re skittish about these appointments,” the Spirit said. No scolding. “Don’t be afraid.”

Lectio divina. That means reading only six books at once, huh?

Well, I’ll stick to 10, at least until we get the all clear from the docs.

At the Day of Judgment,

we shall not be asked what we have read,

but what we have done;

not how eloquently we have spoken,

but how holily we have lived.

The Imitation of Christ I.3

“The Woman having a cataract removed?

Doctor, I’ve loved her, forty years I’ve loved—

her eyes. Notice how they sparkle, like

light on water? How they dance about:

beauty and dragonflies? Or, silent, how

they welcome you, invite you in, begin

a water dance with dragonflies of you,

offer safe warmth home?

You see how her beholding is no ques-

tions asked, no traps, no locks?—just grace for grace.

Another sees, perceives, beholds Truth

with a Mother’s love, like she does, One

who is love, who teaches you to, see-

ing, love, being, love, that cataracts,

downpours over steeps, in surgeon’s hands,

in your surgeon’s hands become light.”

A Tale of Patmos

                “Old John’s nurse at Patmos called,” his wife Minnie said.

                “What about?” Nick asked.

                “They found him standing in Route 29 on the double yellow line, staring at the sun again.”

                “I keep telling that doctor his meds ain’t right,” Nick said. “Where’re them oatmeal raisin cookies y’made?”

                “Wrapped in foil, there on the end table by the door. Been a snake, they’d a bit ya-Elmo!”

                Daddy named him Elmo out of spite. Daddy hated Elmo Knickerbocker III, the state senator two generations removed, the family’s only claim to fame. “Near-sighted bilious old goat” is how Daddy described him under his breath. Nana, Elmo’s maternal grandmother, insisted he had old Knickerbocker’s distinguished dome-like forehead and elegant grey eyes.

                “Wouldn’t you rather take ‘em cookies yourself? He likes you,” Nick whimpered.

                “Oh, hush. It’s you he always asks about: “How’s Nick?”–y’d think there was no one else in this wide world.”

                So Nick backed the SUV out of the driveway. Every trip to Patmos cost $16.72 gas money they didn’t have. Before he got to the corner, he’d wrestled open the foil and begun munching on a cookie.

                Minnie wasn’t a looker. None too bright, neither (he told himself), though she could whiz Little Joe through his trig like it was soccer practice. However, he had to admit, nobody came that close to matching Minnie’s cookies. For rich buttery taste and soft crumbly texture, wasn’t a woman in the state could equal her oatmeal raisins.

                Alice (down the block, worked at Wal-Mart 32 hours a week, wore a blonde wig, said it made her look like Madonna) she made a passable snicker doodle. But Minnie never messed with the snicker doodle. She stuck to the tried and true: oatmeal raisin, or white chocolate chip, or caramel chocolate chip, or iced double fudge brownies.

                If the guys at work missed a batch of Minnie’s iced double fudges in a week, they thought she was goin’ through another one of her female spells. More than once, after work, a man stopped by with a sympathy card and a bunch of carnations in his fist.

                Patmos “closest thing to Glory this side of the Pecos” was Nick’s last choice of Nursing Homes for old John. It was decrepit, cramped; had so many coats of paint, the walls were an extra inch thick. But Nick didn’t catch on in time, that old John was going to choose whichever Home Nick hated most.

                His first day at Patmos, ignoring Nick and Minnie’s protests, the administrator moved him into Room 16, a frilly pink room overlooking the back parking lot and the garbage, dumped behind a bright green wall. Large clay pots full of blooming pansies prettied up the view. And in the center a small fountain featured the angel Gabriel blowing his trumpet, out of which a stream of water flowed on Family Days. The rest of the time, they shut it off to save money.

                It always brought to Nick’s mind a chubby angeling pissing in a pond.

                Nick tried to explain to old John the difference between 16 and 666. Of course, no other suitable room was available. (Translation: you’ll pay more for a room with a better view.) Nick thought of asking for a demon discount. But the administrator was not religious, except when introduced to prospective residents; old John had already signed.

                What they did, after repeated exorcisms failed to scare Satan away, is this: Nick found a decorative spray bottle at the dollar store, Minnie painted a cross with gold sequins on it, they filled it with water, and the volunteer chaplain blessed it. They sprayed the door and windows of the Room, and when Satan or his minions appeared, old John was to give ‘em a direct hit. To Nick’s and the chaplain’s disbelief, it worked.

                That afternoon, by the time Nick nosed his truck into the narrow parking place at the Home, there’re only three oatmeal raisins left. Pity to take the old man only three. So Nick left them in the truck to eat on the trek home. Next trip he’d make it up to old John.

                Anyway, Minnie never asked John how he liked the cookies, because he never remembered them, and he got upset.

                “Hey, Snickerdoodle,” old John said, when Nick walked into his room, “you bring me some o’ Minnie’s white chocolate chips?”

                “The name’s Knickerbocker, Nick Knickerbocker,” Nick said, as always. “You can call me Nick. No cookies this afternoon. Things get so jammed up in the summer, she just don’t have time.”

                “Ate ‘em all on the way, eh?”

                “No, “Nick said in perfect honesty. He couldn’t figure a tactful way to mention the old man standing in the middle of the highway.

                “Too bad,” old John sighed. “Before the End comes, I crave one more o’ her oatmeal raisins, but now there’s no time.”

                “No time?” protested Nick. “I’ll get her to bake you some next week for sure.”

                “Too late,” the old man shook his head. A single wisp of white hair floated at the top of his forehead, oscillating gently back and forth.

                “Aren’t sick, are you?”

                “Nope, I’m in tip top condition.”

                “Well, what do you mean, no time?” The second he said it, Nick wanted to suck the syllables out of the air right back between his lips.

                The old man gathered Nick by the shoulders into a conspiratorial clinch. “Snickerdoodle,” he whispered loudly, “I’ve had me a visitor!”

                “Has that gorgeous 79-year-old doll from Room 19 been checking you out?”

                “No, I mean a heavenly visitor! I saw the Lord!”

                Nick tried to be patient. “I’m going to talk to Dr. Valentine about your meds. I think they’re out of whack.”

                “You don’t believe me, do you, Snickerdoodle?”

                Nick took a deep breath. “No, old John, I don’t. I don’t believe in angels, or demons, or 666, or that obsolete old Bible you got on your laptop. I don’t believe a thee or thou of it, not one.”

                “Somebody sure addled your eggs today.”

                Words tumbling out of his mouth, Nick backed out the door. “Y’know, come to think of it, I forgot, I do have some oatmeal raisins in the truck for you. Minnie baked ‘em up this morning special. Don’t know why they slipped my mind.”

                He fled from the room.

                Old John’s reputation for a Seer spanned the whole state. Like others read the morning newspaper, he delved into End Times; every now and then he had a vision. Angels streaked across the heavens. Locusts plagued. A huge neon 666 appeared in the heavens.

                When he got back to Room 16, he found old John at his laptop, reading the book of Revelation, King James Version, red letter edition.

                “Y’see! Y’see!” old John said. Out loud he read, “I John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ. I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day!”

                “Oh, you crazy old coot!” Nick shouted. “You’re living in a Nursing Home some marketing guru called “Patmos closest thing to Glory this side of the Pecos.” You ain’t seen no angels, no Jesus!”

                 ”I saw the Lord, high and lifted up. His head and his hairs were like wool, white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength!”

                Nick reached down to pull the foil wrapping off the oatmeal raisins. Old John snatched the spray bottle of holy water off his dresser, shouted “Get thee behind me, Satan!” and spritzed him right in the kisser.

It’s freaky (at least some people will think so) to make friends with the dead. You could say that’s what I’ve been doing over the past few months, reading up on Charlie Andrews (1871-1940), friend of Gandhi, British missionary and consultant at large on problems of race and labor relations in India, Africa, the South Pacific, and South America.

He has so much to teach us.

Missionary with an Unusual Vision

His father belonged to a Christian cult characterized by speaking in tongues and keen anticipation of the Second Coming of Christ, but Charlie studied at Cambridge with some of the best biblical scholars of the age. Knowing the critical study of scripture, he chose to go into the Anglican ministry.

But even early on, phrases in the creed about the damnation of the lost troubled him deeply.

He went to India, where he taught at St. Stephen’s College. He had a deeply caring nature, and found himself welcome in corridors of British power as well as the hearts of Indian colleagues and the lowliest of Untouchables. He pressed the college to elect an Indian president, rather than an English one.

He became an early ally and lifelong friend of Mohandas Gandhi, spending time in his South African ashram. Charlie wrote several books introducing Gandhi to the West.

Facing the Problem of Racism

The issue of race prejudice troubled him deeply, whether in India, Africa or the United States. He found himself identifying strongly with the Indian people, eventually leaving his mission appointment, a decision he explained like this:

It was the inner moral beauty of India, which I was seeking to know at first hand. I could see it and almost grasp it. Sometimes I could instinctively recognize it in human faces I met. But at Delhi [seat of government and of St. Stephen's College, where Andrews taught] I could never fully comprehend it. There I was in constant revolt against the narrowness of government control of education: I was also in revolt against much that has rightly been called “foreign mission work.” For I had no wish to be “foreign” any longer; rather, I longed to be bound up with the life of India in every respect. If I were to find Christ truly in India as the Son of man, then I must live and move among the people of India as one of themselves, and not as an alien and a foreigner.

C.F. Andrews, What I Owe to Christ (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1932), p. 241.

Ministry of the Written Word

During the 1930s Charlie continued to be a negotiator, teacher and writer while living in England and in India at Santiniketan “Abode of Peace” the ashram of his friend the poet Rabindranath Tagore (who won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature for his poem Gitanjali). Among many other books, articles and pamphletts, Charlie wrote an account of his faith What I Owe to Christ, an exposition of John 13-17 entitled Christ in the Silence, of the Lord’s Prayer Christ and Prayer, and of The Sermon on the Mount.

He came to believe, as Tagore said, that the West had sold its ideals (to give just one example) in the scramble for Africa in the mid to late 1800s, and in the continuing war-lust and greed of the Great War and its aftermath (the buildup to World War II). He struggled against giving allegiance to the tribal god of parts of the Old Testament and instead gave his life to the universal Christ, who taught, “Love your enemies.”

I wonder what Charlie would think about the world situation today. Surely he would rejoice with India, as it stretches and grows, but I think he would worry that it may adopt Western practices of hurry and greed and lose its soul. He would without a doubt condemn the war in Iraq.

He Being Dead yet Speaketh

Jesus said, “[God] is the God not of the dead, but the living.” Henri Nouwen in his book Our Greatest Gift writes that at death our spirit is released from the local limits of the physical body, and is free to commune with those who love us. I’ve found this profoundly true with family members. I find it also true of those I read, like Charlie Andrews, whose life of love for friends, whole nations, and the world, continues to speak today.

My childhood church had a holy heirarchy (lowest to highest):

Sinners

• lowest were those who committed the Unpardonable Sin (somewhat vague in nature). I got the notion in my young head that these guys were queers (whatever they were).
• The Pope, the Anti-Christ (hard to tell which was which)
• Madeleine Murray O’Hare, who was perpetually petitioning the FCC about something
• godless materialistic communists
• drunkards
• Catholics
• then other sinners
• In the summer Christian ladies who wore short shorts always got a dishonorable mention. Connected to them in some spooky way were loose girls who got themselves in Trouble. This was never specified.

Among church goers

• lowest were 6th grade boys. The Nominating Committee could never find or keep a teacher for them.
• Negroes and Mexicans who knew their place, weren’t uppity
• Methodists, who were low on the list because they preached the social gospel. You could go there all your life and never learn the Plan of Salvation and how to be saved.
• seminary professors. These took discernment; they could be infidel intellectuals who disbelieved the Virgin Birth, and read from the Revised Standard Version.
• backsliders
• About here you’d find the folk who white-knuckled the pew in front of them to keep from walking the aisle, even after you’d sung the invitation hymn twice through. You discovered who these people were by peeking when the preacher signaled the choir director to go into the second invitation hymn, “Almost Persuaded.”
• lukewarm believers

The next group included most of the saints

•  godly grandmothers and saintly mothers (pretty much always kneeling in prayer)
• then your soul winners
• next, your prayer warriors
• then you had deacons. But they were kinda hard to classify because every so often them and the preacher got into a knock down drag out with each other. Of course, the preacher always won or got run out of town.

Climbing the ranks of righteousness, you’d find

• boys who’d surrendered to the ministry. Preachers loved to recall their struggle, especially if it was long and bloody. Here’s where weeping mothers kneeling in prayer, and in the most exciting cases alcohol and backsliding, often came in.
• beloved former pastors who did everything right, and refused to take salary increases. These were the deacons’ favorite.
• current pastors. Again, this category was confusing, because in theory preachers were men o’ God, but in practice they caused right many first class dust ups, the best of which required kids to be sent from the room.

The nosebleed section of sanctity included

• missionaries
• medical missionaries. The great thing about these guys is that they were only around once or twice a year. If possble you had one to display during the Lottie Moon Offering season (otherwise known as Christmas shopping days).
• Martyrs
• Billy Graham

This system comes in mighty handy for those who want to avoid their sins. You always have a scapegoat: gay or drunk or Catholic or ladies who wear short shorts, and almost always a goal that’s out of reach: medical missionary or the next Billy Graham. So at both ends you’re off the hook.

The problem is, it doesn’t match up with what the Bible says, that we’re all sinners, none is righteous, no not one.

And, while it helps us avoid our sin, it also causes us to avoid our Savior. In his sight there is no heirarchy. Only people he loves and righteousness he freely gives.

This is our son Jim in his brand spankin’ new Mazda 3, approx 30 mpg on the highway. Good lookin’ rascal isn’t he? Takes after his old man. The car is a bit shy.

The used book bug’s bit me. It’s such fun to find classic books, and get them at a bargain.

Sandy, who opened the package containing the book Christ in the Silence, called out, “Hon, this book is signed.” I checked it out eagerly. I compared the signature Charlie to the known signatures of letters in the archive at mkgandhi.org, and it appears to be a match.

The dedication reads, “To George with much love from Charlie, July 9, 1933.” The impress visible in the lower right corner reads “Chapel Cottage, Iden Green, Benenden, Kent.”

I fall in love with an author. I discover somebody I like and for awhile there’s nothing, nobody else in the world for me but them. At the moment it’s C.F. Andrews. I want to get in his skin and understand what empowered this somewhat neurotic Victorian clergyman to become a labor negotiator and spokesman for the Indian people, wherever they were in the world.

So I purchased What I Owe to Christ, 1932, the external story, and Christ in the Silence, 1933, the internal account of his spiritual life, one through Amazon Marketplace and one through eBay. I’d hoped the latter might give me a glimpse into the synthesis of Christianity and Hinduism that he achieved. Though he is cordial toward Hinduism, he writes as an orthodox Christian in these works.

Christ in the Silence is an extended meditation on the Farewell chapters of the gospel of John. It’s almost as if you get there through Charlie Andrews’ pen.

I know there’s a lot of sappy theology in my head. But, if God wanted to send me a PostIt that read “I love you” I can think of few things he could do that would mean more than putting a signed work of C.F. Andrews on the spiritual life in my hands.

I confess I gobbled it up in two days. Now I’m reading a page or paragraph at a time.

BTW, if you know anything about the persons and places mentioned above, drop me a line, will you? Thanks.