Hammer and Tongs: Living and Working with Gusto

A Letter to Former and Present Members of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Columbia, Missouri

2011-12-11T16:04:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,

I learned today that you have called a new pastor. I am pleased about this and wish you and him every blessing in your new life together.

It was my joy to serve you as your pastor during some of the happiest as well as some of the darkest days of your history. I thank God for this. In His good Providence those times prepared all of us for the work we are now doing and shall be doing in His Church and Kingdom.

Kathy and I want to thank you for your generous gift upon our leaving Columbia, for all of the help that you gave us in our move (and in working on the house), and for all of the kindnesses you have shown to Emily since our departure.

We are settling in to our new responsiblities, to life in the city, and to life away from each of our children. We have found grace in time of need and much joy in our new work in the church and school here.

We join to wish you a very blessed Advent season and a Merry Christmas!

In the unbreakable bonds of the Gospel,

Thom and Kathy

I am a Western Man

2011-11-19T16:59:00.000-08:00

I am a Western man. My temperament, the shape of my mind and soul, have been crafted and formed by the land and sky of the American West. It has taken me most of my life to figure this out. I lived for twenty-three years in the mountains and hollows of West Virginia and it was there that I began to suspect the truth of my nature. While beautiful in the extreme, I was never quite at home there. I suffered from what Larry McMurtry has called "sky deprivation." I always felt a depressive, claustrophobic angst while living there. There were too many trees, too little sky. When traveling back to Oklahoma and Texas on visits, I always found my spirits lifting when we crossed the Mississippi, just as I experienced the opposite as we drove past Morehead, Kentucky, returning.

I had a brief love affair with England during the early 90s. We almost moved there in 1991. It was only after a visit to my family burial plot in southern Oklahoma in 2005 that I realized what had attracted me to the North of England. Apart from the blistering heat, the landscape- with its pastures and woodlands, and its enormous sky- was very much like the landscape of certain parts of Yorkshire.

When we moved to central Missouri in 2007. a new peace settled into my soul. I would sit for hours in the early mornings, the late evenings, and the nights, drinking in the unbounded sky. Upon our return to Texas this year, my joy in the Western landscape has been completed. The landscape of childhood is the landscape of the soul. My return to my childhood landscape has been a return to my deepest and truest self. It has been a return to an inner peace that had long evaded me.

My love for the Western landscape, however, goes deeper. As a child I traveled thousands of miles across the whole landscape of the American West. From Fort Worth to Los Angeles, from North Texas to Idaho and Montana. This was because I was placed in the care of family who lived in these places. In 2009,my daughter, Kate, and I drove from Columbia, Missouri to Yuma, Arizona. I was revisiting places I remembered from my childhood travels (and one adolescent "March hare" hitchhiking trip, when I thumbed my way from Okemah, Oklahoma to Boise, Idaho in twenty-three hours). In the Panhandle of Texas, the high plains of New Mexico, and the deserts and mountains of Arizona, the bones of the earth are laid bare under an omnipresent sky. It was good to see it all again.

So, the landscape and skyscape of the West is etched into my nature as surely as my mother's and father's genes.

But, there is more to it than this. My people are Westerners. My great-grandfather, J.C. Smith came from northern Georgia, first to Texas and then to Indian Territory before the turn of the 20th Century. He was a horse and mule trader and farmer. My maternal grandfather, A.T. Brown, began his working life as a ranch foreman, a horseman and cattleman. They both lived in Oklahoma before statehood when it was still a "wild and wooly" place. It marked them both, and though different in size and temperament, they were neither of them men you would "mess with"-if you had good sense. They were Western men. And while they owed much to their Anglo-Celt heritage and blood, the West had imprinted them early and left them marked for their whole lives.

My daddy was the inheritor of all this. From childhood, he collected the stories and the songs of this region and its people. Imbued with with a voracious curiosity and an infallible memory, he stored away the history, the myths, and the lore of these Western people. Charming and humble in the presence of others, handsome and cheerful, full of interest and humor and compassion, the people would open to him their hearts and their memories in a way that they would not and had not to anyone else. When in his late twenties he began to hunt and collect arrowheads, his love for and interest in the West compounded. This he passed on to me.

Not that I was a willing recipient at first. Like all young boys, I was caught up with my own "long, long thoughts." But he was insistent without being overbearing. Part of this was unintentional, being the overflow of his own enthusiasm for the matter.

Item: I began learning to read as my daddy would stop to read to me the cast iron historical markers of Jack and Young counties, Texas.

Item: I began to love old and strange tools and relics on a visit to a Mr. Weldon in South Bend, Texas. He had a room filled with Indian relics, cowboy gear, and snakes and lizards preserved in glass apothecary jars lining the walls. I was five or six at the time.

Item: I began to have a sense of American history and the struggle of the Western settlers on a visit to old Fort Belknap, north of Graham, Texas. I can still remember the cold, misty November day, and the displays in the fort's museum as daddy read to me the various explanations and went on to explain that dark things had occurred in and around this fort on the Salt Fork of the Brazos. This was in 1957.

Item: Daddy took me to the Cooke County Public Library in Gainesville, Texas when I was seven or eight and got me a library card. The first books I checked out were about the men who won the West, and about the tribes who lost it. I became a young ethnologist and even went through a time when I resented my daddy for being "a white man."

He had infected me with the germ he was victim to. I would never get over it.

The second most formative influence on my "Westerness" was my daddy's younger brother, Kenneth. While serving in the U.S. Air Force, he was stationed in Mountain Home, Idaho in the 1950s. While there, he met and married Nora Reed from a little railroad town called, Orchard. Having no children of their own, they took me into their hearts. It is because of them that I saw so much of the American Rockies. We camped in the mountains, fished in the streams and lakes, hunted jackrabbits and trapped badgers on the sagebrush deserts, and reveled in it all, the beauty and grandeur, the starkness and fastness.

It is they who took me to Jackson Hole and the Grand Tetons, to Yellowstone, and to the Snake and Salmon Rivers. It is they who traveled hundreds of miles out of their way, so that a thirteen year old boy could see Charlie Russell's studio and home in Great Falls, Montana. Once they took me into the mountains north of Boise to meet a family living without electricity and other conveniences in a cabin by a rushing stream. The father and husband was aged and had been a hunter and trapper from the early days of the 20th Century. We ate a fine meal of fried chicken and produce from their garden cooked on a wood stove by their spinster daughter. The raspberry's cultivated by that stream were the finest I have ever eaten and the water was cold and sweet. The stories, if anything, were even sweeter. I was formed and molded by these experiences and by their own enthusiasm for the West. They are still in Idaho, still in love after fifty-plus years, and still enthusiastic about the history, the landscape, and the promise of that big country.

Since my maturity the West has been one of the defining realities of my mind and soul. I have a wall of books testifying to this. My collections- of songs, of stories, of people, and of things- all connect in some way with this country. While I live, I wish to live here, and when I die I wish to be buried here in the family plot on the tip end of Love County, Oklahoma, formerly "IT" or "Indian Territory."

And, yes, I still have my daddy's arrowheads.

The Brothers Simms, by E.D. "Shinbone" Smith, Bomar Oklahoma, formerly Indian Territory or "IT"

2011-10-16T14:20:00.000-07:00

They used to be these two bachelor brothers that lived and farmed down in Addington Bend, east of Thackerville named Simms. They lived in a little old shotgun house with two rooms and a shed for a kitchen. Their given names was Larry and Clary. They wasn't much different from the rest of us in them pore days, except they was bachelors and they lived with each other.

Now by the end of the wintertime, they had spent a lot of idle time around the tin stove in the front room of that house and they would git on on another's nerves a considerable amount. Then they would begin to argue and fuss. They would argue and fuss almost about anythang, as they waited for the spring plowing to come.

Since they divided time cooking for one another, one of the thangs they argued about was each other's cooking. This would go on for days. One morning Clary said something belittling about Larry's biscuits and the ruckus began. Clary allowed that Larry's biscuits were so bad that the dogs wouldn't eat them.

"Well," says Larry, "let's jist put that proposition to the test." And picking up two of the items in question, went out on the porch and called old Blue up. He pitched the biscuits in the hound's direction, and, after sniffing them, Blue quaffed them down, but with some difficulty. Then, the way dogs sometimes do, he promptly licked himself.

"See there," says Larry, "he et 'em!"

Yessir! He shore did! But he had to lick his ass jist to git the taste outa his mouth!"

From John Graves...

2011-07-19T19:08:00.000-07:00

"If a man couldn't escape what he came from, we would most of us still be peasants in Old World hovels. But if, having escaped or not, he wants in some way to know himself, define himself, and tries to do it without taking into account the thing he came from, he is writing without any ink in his pen. The provincial who cultivates only his roots is in peril, potato-like, of becoming more root than plant. The man who cuts his roots away and denies they were ever connected with him withers into half a man." Goodbye to a River, p. 145

We're Having 'Company'"

2011-07-14T16:36:00.000-07:00

I have been reading and rereading various accounts of the lives of the early white pioneers in their settlement of the frontier of Texas from the 1850s on. I am embued with an emotional attachment to them and their lives in that country. Some of my earliest and most lasting memories are of being taken by my daddy to Fort Belknap in Young County, Texas as a six year old. He rehearsed the old stories of the old people in my young ears; they stuck. To this day, after over fifty years, my blood gets up when I read or hear tell of that place and time.

It was a grim and harsh time in a stark and unforgiving place. Not that it isn't beautiful, because it is. The Texas Cross Timbers meet the prairie there. The sky is an azure bowl over it all. The bird life fills it with song. But, it is riddled with all manner of things that sting, bite, pierce, nettle, and generally aggravate the human animal. Some of these things can be deadly-it is filled with Western diamond-backed rattlesnakes- "coontail rattlers" the old people called them because of the distinctive black and white stripes on the end of their tails just before the rattles themselves start.

When the earliest white people came there it was the home of various Indian tribes, and the hunting raiding territory of two of the most dreaded and dreadful- the Comanche and Kiowa. The white people were, thus, intruders. And for this, they paid dearly. Attacks were common. The Comanche in particular indulged in brutal acts of blood-letting and rape. They also took young captives to raise and "Indianize," the most famous being Cynthia Ann Parker from farther south and east, who became the wife of Peta Nocona, and the mother of Quanah Parker, one of the last warrior chiefs of the Comanche. When she was recovered and returned to her surviving family, she withered away and died in East Texas, a relatively young woman. She pined away over her lost children and her lost life on the high plains of West Texas.

So, in addition to the brutish living conditions of 19th century pioneers, the harsh climate, the isolation that drove people mad, there was the constant threat of Indian raids and the sheer brutality these involved. Fear and caution were the every-day stuff of life.

One of the only sources of relief, of pure joy, of life-worth-the-living were the occasional social gatherings they were able to enjoy. Not that these allayed all the fear and caution. John Graves remarks that even at brush arbor revival meetings (that would sometimes go on for weeks), the Henry rifles and Colt's revolvers would be stacked outside these brushy temples of salvation.

Whether it was a birthing, attended by a few women, a hog killing, a counter-raid on the Indian predators, or a dance, the pioneers took every opportunity to be together when they could. These times, whatever their form, were times of friendship, joy, and play- in a word, "love." The old stories were rehearsed, the new ones told; food was shared; laughter, tears, sighs were exchanged. For a time, albeit brief, the troubles were pushed outside the circle of fellowship. We can understand, therefore, why the words, "We're having company," "We've got company coming," would brighten their eyes and relieve their spirits.

It is this, in the stresses of modern life which we face, that can bring a similar renewal of spirit. The "crazy little screens" that fixate us- the social networks, the video games, and all such-like, are paltry substitutes for real people and real friends, real "company."

"It is not good for man to be alone."

It's In the "Seeing"

2011-07-07T07:44:00.000-07:00

"It was a wonder to him now that he'd once failed to appreciate the beauty of this land. The trick of it, he'd lately realized, was to pay attention to the sky as part of the landscape. The rising sun was gilding high cottony clouds from below. In a few hours, as the light shifted upward, those clouds would send amethyst and turquoise shadows racing over the emerald ground, and their sweep across the land would reveal subtle undulations in the terrain that only appeared flat to the careless observer." Mary Doria Russell, Doc, page 287

Good-Bye, Columbia!

2011-07-01T12:24:00.000-07:00

God willing, sometime in August Kathy and I will leave Columbia to take up new responsibilities in Dallas. Our feelings have been mixed in making this decision. We have loved living in Columbia and in central Missouri. We have made many lovely friends here and leaving them is painful. We have made a home here with studios and workshops. We have loved our church home and have known real joy in serving its people. When we came here- four years ago tomorrow- we intended to be here for the rest of our lives. But, we are never in control of our lives and our intentions often come to nothing, or better, they come to different ends. The Christian believes that an inscrutable providence directs and guides his life, and that while it is incomprehensible, it is also loving and wise in its intent. This, we believe.

We are going to Dallas to take up a new work in the Saint Timothy School of Chapel of the Cross Reformed Episcopal Church (Anglican). Kathy will be Lower School Administrative Assistant and Pre-School Director. I will serve as Assistant Head-Master and Instructor in the Humanities for the middle and upper grades. I will also be creating a department of Fine and Manual Arts for these grades. It is hoped that this will develop into a school of drawing, painting, and sculpture, as well as a school of woodworking and metalsmithing. Those who have invited us to take these roles believe that our knowledge and experience equip us for this work. More importantly, we shall be working toward the formation of persons, rather than just the information of minds, believing as we do that that formation of the moral imagination is at the heart of all true education. This is why we are glad that Saint Timothy's School is a vital part of the life of Chapel of the Cross Episcopal Church. Learning shall take place in an environment of liturgy and Christian teaching.

Moving is hard work. Leaving is painful work. Starting over is daunting work. We are engaged in all of this with a spirit of prayer and trust. For those of you who pray, we ask for your prayers. For those of you who do not pray, we ask for your good thoughts. You may rest assured that you all have both our prayers and good thoughts.

For every kind gesture, every encouraging word, every loving act that we have received from you- in the education and arts community, in the Christian family- we thank you with all our hearts. We love you and will never forget you.

In the 1820s and 30s many people in the East abandoned their homesteads and cabins to travel to a new land of promise in Texas. Often they would scrawl on the doors of these erstwhile homes, "GTT," meaning, "Gone To Texas." Without defacing the property here, that is my sentiment. Pretty soon, when you think of us, you can think in these terms

GTT.

Farewell!

A Short Summary of My Life

2011-05-29T21:44:00.000-07:00

"O LORD, Thou hast made me rich!"

"On a Popularizer" Louis Untermeyer

2011-05-21T19:39:00.000-07:00

Midwife to all the Muses, you grow rich
By making the immortal less divine.
With what finesse you trim, and cut, and stitch,
Feigning that every stitch---in time---serves Nine.

"On a Self-made Philosopher" Louis Untermeyer

2011-05-21T19:35:00.000-07:00

"Life was my university,"
He boasts, and awaits approbation;
Revealing to the nth degree,
The sad results of education.

"Thou Hast Made My Light Darkness"

2011-04-23T12:01:00.000-07:00

I have before me a little book that measures approximately four and three-eighths inches by seven inches. It is bound in red Morocco leather with five raised bands on its spine; it is sewn on cords that make the raised bands and these testify to its extreme age. There are still remnants of gold leaf on the scuffed binding and its edges are marbled in blue and yellow and red. There is no title because it was made to be a "common-place" book or a diary, which, indeed, it is.

On the fly-leaf inscribed in faded brown copperplate is the following

the Reverend Octavius Winter
1801
"his book"

and on the pages that follow are a collection of daily personal thoughts, notes of events, quotes from old authors, and prayers and meditations. Occasionally there are snippets of newspaper notices pinned to the page, the pins rusty and causing rust stains to the pages to and fro. On one such page is such a clipping that reads

"Deceased on August 5th, Margaret, infant child of the Reverend Octavius Winter, and wife, Louisa, of Hawley."

Between these pages is a lock of fine blond hair, presumably from the child.

Sometimes, the page is covered with Scripture texts. Here is an example.

"Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord."

"The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord."

"I know, O Lord, that the way of a man is not in himself, it is not in man himself to direct his steps."

"Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding; in all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy steps."

"His trust is in the Lord, none of his steps shall slide."

At other times, there are notes on his preaching:

" Dec. 6, 1801. Morning at Shelbyville meeting. Preached from I Peter 3:18. The wheels of the chariot did drive heavily."

"January 10th, 1802. Hawley. Very cold from a week of hard frost. The meeting-house very cold; the air blue with breath. Preached with liberty from Romans 8:28-30. The people very joyful despite the conditions. 'Bless the Lord, O my soul.'"

After losing the child mentioned before, the Reverend Winter went through several months of conflict with his church board. During this time, his wife, again pregnant, was in bad health. Four months into this pregnancy, she appears to have miscarried. She continued in poor health and at the end of the year, died. In the middle of a single left-hand page with nothing else recorded on this or the facing page is this:

"November 22nd, 1802. Buried today beside our dead child my dear companion, Louisa Day Winter, aged, 31 years and two months. 'She was life and light to me.' We were married for six years and seven months. In hope of the Resurrection."

This is surrounded with a faded inked border, once black.

Six months later, the church board terminated him as pastor of the church.

"May 26th, 1803. Today, I am relieved of my duties as pastor of the church in Hawley. I have no prospects, though I am told that one of the churches in the Ohio country is seeking a minister. I am thrown on the Sovereignty and Grace of God to provide for me and my two remaining children. Lamentations 3:21-24. His Will be done."

There is not another entry until November 1803.

"Nov. 22nd, 1803. On this dark day one year ago I buried her who was my life and light. Light has gone out of my life in the succeeding months. I despair of life and fight dark suggestions from the evil one to end my life. My faith and the needs of my small children aid me in resisting this temptation. But, my faith is without comfort and consolation. The Lord has deserted me according to the meaning of the Puritan divines. He has not forsaken me, but He has withdrawn His sensible Presence from my consciousness. Is this because of some sin or unfaithfulness on my part? I am like a dead man, like a bottle in the smoke. 'Return, O Lord, how long!'"

Then follows this prayer

"O Lord my God, Thou art my God.
I have trusted in Thee all my life.
I have loved Thee in prosperity and adversity.

I am sinful and weak.
I am frail and mortal.
Thou hast taught me these things.
Thou hast taught me to speak these things.

But, I am Thy servant.
From my mother's womb,
Thou hast been my God.

Lord, I have trusted Thee
And Thou hast not met me in the way.
I have trusted Thee
And Thou hast deceived me.

Thou has taught me to say,
"in all thy ways acknowledge him,"
And Thou hast not directed my steps.
Thou has promised to instruct
And teach me in the way I should go,
But, Thou hast not guided me with Thine eye.
I have trusted Thee,
And Thou hast crushed me.
I have loved Thee,
And Thou hast made my light darkness.

I am ready to die,
And Thou art not nigh.
My soul is impaled on the horn of a unicorn
And Thou hearest not my cries.

'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?'"

This is the last entry in my beautiful little book. The rest of its foxy pages are empty. This is fitting. It is proper that this man's anguish should be testified to by the emptiness of what remains. As such, it is a dark book, but a holy book.

Sometimes our anguish and abandonment are the last word. There is nothing else to be said. Let the empty pages bear their silent witness to our loneliness and despair.

But, while despair may have the penultimate word, it must not have the final word. It does not have the final word in the life of the Reverend Octavius Winter.

For there is another book, of the same size and binding, this one dated, "1805."

An Easter Meditation: Home

2011-04-21T09:14:00.000-07:00

At a deepening
Of the Isinglass River
I lie down in stones and tea-colored water,
I think: be careful, do not say
Home,
The the bones of that word mend slowly.

This lovely little piece by the New Hampshire poet, Marie Harris, has plunged itself into me seizing my heart in its painful and powerful grip.

In thirty-two words (thirty-one if you count "tea-colored" as one word) it manages to touch some of our deepest human longings, fears, memories, and hopes. It catches us in our many acts of longing and fear, where we are balanced between the child-like hope for joy and the all too adult condition of recollection of shattered expectations.

And, it manages to cut into one of the profoundest and most atavistic yearnings of the human heart: The yearning for Home. This longing is the longing for the lost Eden of our primeval parents. It is the yearning of Israel by the waters of Babylon for the Holy Land. It is the homesickness of Wendell Berry in all his work for the land and people he glimpsed in his childhood seventy years ago. It is my own mental geography that tends backwards to the red clay and ancient post oaks of Love County, Oklahoma.

To state this theologically, we would be compelled to say that home-longing is the human heart's longing for God. "Thou hast made us for Thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee" Augustine. We are strangers and aliens- to ourselves, to others, to our place on the earth. Our anxieties, fears, sleeping dreams, and waking fantasies all tell us this. Our best writers (like Ms. Harris) confirm our suspicions. Listen to Stevenson

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This is the verse you 'grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter, home from the hill.

Which echos Job's anguished cry, "Naked I came from my mother's womb, naked shall I return thither!" Job (like Stevenson), the earthy man, made of earth and returning to earth, sees her as his final earthly home.

All of which makes me think of Easter, of Resurrection Sunday.

The message of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is this: embodiment, earthiness, corporeality are our original state, the state for which we long, and a new embodiment is promised us in the reality and corporeality of his resurrection. The grave (our entombment in the earth) is not the final home of the Christian. What is promised is a new life, an embodied life, in a new heavens and a new earth where righteousness will finally pervade all things.

In this promise is hope: hope that assuages our longings, fears, and nightmares, hope that supports us in our homesickness, hope that assures us that death in all its forms shall be swallowed up in the victory of Jesus.

O Death, where is thy sting?
O Grave, where is thy victory?
The sting of death is sin,
And the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God who giveth us the victory
Through our Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the promise and assurance of Home.

Funny Little Man: A Meditation on the Middle Aged Male

2011-04-09T12:41:00.000-07:00

Funny little man,
Peering in,
Looking out.
Calling up his dreams,
Staring down his doubts.
Counting up his triumphs,
Discounting all his routs.
Adding up his score-card
With his ego hanging out.

The Blessed God who made him
Smiles, at times, no doubt
At this funny little man He made
And his silly mental bouts.

Funny little man,
Peering in,
Looking out.
Staring at his face,
Sizing up his snout.
Quirky little grimaces,
Kinky little pouts,
Funny little person
With probos sticking out.

The Blessed God who made him
Laughs, at times, no doubt
At His funny little man he made
With his puffy little snout.

Funny little man,
Peering in,
Looking out.
Taking readings on his torso,
With its silly little spout.
Laying down its measure,
Sizing up its clout,
Funny little pear-shaped pot
With its spigot poking out.

The Blessed God who made him
Grins, at times, no doubt,
At the funny little man He made
With his funny, runny spout.

The Granny and the Child

2011-04-07T14:36:00.000-07:00

In the musty, musky cool
In the blue-gray half-dark
Of sanctuary, asylum
From northwest winds
That were the wrath of God-
But on hell-hot August days
Sanctuary became larder, pantry
With row upon shining row
Of greens and reds and ochers
Of beans and okra
Tomatoes and corn-
The only cool place in their world-
Sanctuary of another sort.

Daddy-long-legs kibbled
Across the mealy floor
And cow-hide bottomed chairs
Creaked and sighed.
Coal oil mixed with damp
And all mixed in a child's nose
With an old crone's
Powder, sweat, and snuff.
And unnameable things
As animal as a dog's damp pelt
When he buried his face in it.

Trunk.
Holding a few faded memories
Of a ragged courtship
And a rugged marriage:
Sweet memories soured by
"that's my husband, Mr. Smith's first wife."
Memories captured in images
Pressed within the shiny hard-shelled album
Its stiff, foxy pages coming loose
In the damp.
Fading sepia faces with eyes
That never faded in their button-blackness
That never blinked or smiled:
Dour stern men
With tired, severe women
Buttoned to the tops of throats
On hell-hot days.
Mouths razor slits dividing faces in half.
Black button eyes
That still burn into the mind
After half a century.
Women standing, always standing
Men sitting upright and stiff
In cow-hide bottomed chairs
(Giving rise to ribald jokes
Whispered under whiskey breath.)

"Your great-grand-daddy..."
"Mr. Smith" (always Mr. Smith)
"J.C. Smith"
"John Calvin Smith"
"Some called him 'Black John'
But I never cared for that."
"1857 to 1936"
"Gone, but not forgotten."
History, family, belonging, blood.

The hide of the chair bottom
With red Hereford hair
Still clinging to parts not sat on-
"My husband, Mr. Smith,
Went to feed that creature
On a cold, frosty morning in March.
The thing, being stroppy
In its hunger and its cold
Turned its bad-morning-mood
On its owner...
Pinned him to the cow-lot floor
Until with prodigious
Swearings and cursings
To raw for female ears
Fought off the wild beast of Ephesus
With a feed-scoop shovel,
And covered with red clay and cow shit
Went promptly into the Big House
For his .41 Colt's revolver.
And, returning to the beast-
Now feeling better for its morning romp-
Without compunction or doubt,
Shot the creature dead
With one brass cartridge
Its deadly nose pewter-colored.
Turning away from the blue-gray smoke
That filled the air with an acrid taste
He called to his hired men
Staring with saucer-eyes from their perch
On the corral fence,
'Butcher the son-of-a-bitch
And bottom my storm cellar chairs
With his hide!'"

I, the child, with the old woman
Sat in those chairs
Tugging at their remaining hair
Marveling at their feel and smell
Touched now forever with the wonder of their Story
Dangling legs from its hairy ledge.

***

Old woman singing.
Spidery voice
Wispy, haunty airs
"Barbary Allen"
"Old 97"
"In the Sweet By and By"
Old and forgotten
Like the songs
Old and ignored
In the daily routine
The endless drudgery of
"the Place."
Old woman:
"Granny"
"Granny Eller"
"Granny Smith"
With the small boy,
Motherless boy
Also ignored
In the sweat and grunts
Of the daily work.
Companions:
In songs, stories, smells,
And nasty words.
Once she unbuttoned her cotton bodice
From the throat down
Pulled her withered breast
Out for him to see, to touch.
He remembers
Its cracked-frosted-persimmon-wrinkledness
Her talcum powder filling its wrinkles
Transforming it into a strange, fascinating
Confection
Like a snow-ball cookie
From a brown paper bag.
Our secret.
Shared twice
And then, abruptly stopped
As the demand became regular and insistent.

***

The child, as children do,
Saw more, understood better
Than grownups would allow.
She lay songless,
Toothless
On a morning when not even a crow
Cawed.
She lay speechless
Rendering grown, stern men
Speechless.
Men cried.
Men, who had often said,
"Don't cry," to the child,
Cried with the embarrassing abandon
Of weeping men.

The funeral men came
In their shiny, black car
And carried her out of the Big House
Under a candle-wick cover
With blue satin letter
Advertising their trade
And soliciting the same.
Letters that followed the contours
Of the slight, withered form under them,
Letters that were an ill-mannered
Waste of money and effort
To those whose mother and granny
They mocked in royal colors.
No royalty here.
Calico and wool
And funny, dark stockings
Rolled to the bottoms of her knees.
Clothed in a royalty
She would had sniffed at with contempt
Not merely to the top of the throat
But over the head.
"Why over her head?" the child had asked
And received no answer.
Out of the house
They rolled her
Into the unforgiving cold
(a cold that froze the ground to stone
so that the funeral had to be postponed
until equipment could be brought in).
Gone.
Finally gone.
Gone, finally.
Final.
"Gone, but not forgotten."

***

The cold, hollow church house
Loud with even the smallest sounds
Pine planking on floors and walls
Varnished and shining.
A Methodist church.
Plain- but not so plain
As the Campbellite one-
A picture of "Our Savior" in front
Looking sad and sweet
For the occasion.
So she ended in the Methodist church,
She, who by degrees of examination, had been
A Baptist.
A Campbellite.
A Pentecostal
And a Baptist again.
Then a follower of the Wesleys
And their hymnal,
For she loved singing most.

The reedy singing.
The weedy sermon.
My father
Young and strong
And smelling of Old Spice
Lifted me over the coffin's edge
To see the child's companion.
All I remember
Is the black mustache
On the wrinkled, upper lip.
She had no smell at all,
Nothing I could identify as her
But the fragrance of carnations was strong.

Then, into the cruel cold
To the iron-hard burying ground.
"Mount Zion."
With its gaping red wound in the earth
Beside the monolith covered with letters
He could read,
But not the words,
Except for "Smith"
Which was his name, too.
The blue-gray stone topped-
Where snow had been brushed away-
With two hands clasped
(which he could read)
"Friends."

My Papa with snow-white head down
Snow against snow
White against white
Weeping again for his Mama.
"Now I am not the only motherless child."
And with a child's selfish abandon
And aloofness from all pain
Not its own
I began to run and play
Among the tombstones
Sticking my tongue to
Their frozen surfaces
Till its own surface was raw and unfeeling.
I played among the dead
Until an old woman dressed like
A big, shining crow
Caught me by the coat collar
And told me in a shrill hiss
That the dead are troubled
By the living
Walking on their graves.

***

And then home
To the Big House.
To the smell of fried chicken
And cakes and pies.
To laughter and
Whispered conversations.
To unusual displays of affection.
The fire turning
The andirons cherry red-
Irons forged in Black John's forge
From wagon tires
By one of his hired men-
Heating the room
Almost to the back edges
And far corners.

With stomachs full
And the exhaustion of
So much emotion spent
The child is forgotten again
For a time.
Left to himself
Seeking his friend
He goes to the back room.
Her room.
As so many times before.
Nothing touched.
Nothing moved.
Nothing changed,
Out of respect for the dead.
These things could wait for another day.

Whispering for her
In the blue-gray dusk.
Calling for her in the cold
That turned his breath into a blue delight
Of smoke or steam
His child's brain
Grasping, but losing.
Catching, but dropping
The fact of her absence.
When, at last,
He sees the cavity left by
Her rigid body in the feather bed
Only days before-
The concavity covered now
With sagging quilts.
"Granny?"
"Granny?" he whispers.
Peering under the covers
He sees that she is not here.
But, smelling her again-
Her hair,
Her snuff,
Her sweat and lavender-
He climbs into the cold space
Carved out days before
By her suffering,
And, then, by her dying,
And pulling the heavy quilts
To the top of his throat
Falls asleep
In the presence
Of all that is left of her.

A Warning to Young Artists

2011-03-24T17:18:00.000-07:00

There will always be those
Who envy you
Your life, your talents,
Your gifts.

They will see you
And define you by these,
None of which you define
Yourself by.

They will not see
The pain, the loss,
The grief
That attend such things.

And, because they see
The richness of your life
They will demand
That you apologize

For these riches
They covet.
And in their pain
They will add to your own.

Our First Summer by Marie Harris

2011-03-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

At a deepening
of the Isinglass River
I lie down in stones and tea-colored water,
I think: be careful, do not say
Home,
The bones of that word mend slowly.

My Katebird (To Emily)

2011-03-05T18:12:00.000-08:00

Of all the birds
That fill the skies
With their color,
Their antics,
Their song,

My Katebird is
The brightest hue,
The jolliest flier,
The sweetest singer,
Of them all.

She flits across my eye,
She dives throughout my mind,
She fills my ear with joy.
She hovers to calm my heart.

Jim and Velda, 1949

2011-03-05T18:10:00.000-08:00

"Daddy" Part V: "It's going to be alright."

2011-03-04T19:48:00.000-08:00

Now, I am keenly aware of the fact that all of this can be explained from a purely psychological model. I have read William James and his followers. I have also seen plenty of religious conversions, good and bad. Moreover, I have examined my own religious conversion to paleness, trying to understand it and myself. People of faith will accept as valid what happened to my daddy, people who have no particular religious faith will explain it how they will. There is no reason for the believer to doubt both aspects of religious conversion, the spiritual and the psychological. Orthodox Christianity has always maintained that God meets us as human beings and addresses us in the complex of mind, emotion, and will that makes us uniquely human.

In his case, however, I must say this of my daddy: From that August day in 1974 he was never the same again. His life was turned around to a new and healthy direction. This would be true until he died in 2000.

Nor is any of this to say that the rest of his life was one long consistent trajectory. Far from it. It was marked by the same circuitous inconsistencies that characterize most lives. But, one thing is certain to everyone who knew him: From the mid-70's to the end, Daddy reordered his life in a new and overwhelmingly constructive way. He reinvented himself.

A large part of the credit of this goes to his new wife, Ann. Daddy and Ann married in the mid-70s- 1975? I don't remember the date, but I do remember the circumstances because I married them in a private ceremony in the living room of the Baptist parsonage Kathy and I were then living in just out of Tulsa. I also remember the Dragon managed to get our number and phone at two or three in the morning the following day. She was drunk and savage and she managed to push all the old buttons of fear and hate in my mind. It would be years before I was beyond that. When I finally learned of her death in 2007 I would be beyond that and would find nothing in my heart but sadness and pity for her.

Shortly after their marriage, Daddy and Ann moved to East Texas where they engaged in a semi-homesteader existence. They lived in a variety of settings, the most demanding being a utility shed bought from Wal-Mart and turned into a homesteader's cabin. The only running water they had was from a sole hydrant a few yards from the front door. By working and saving, the two of them were able to buy a few acres where they placed a very used trailer. While living in the trailer, Daddy build a sizable log house from the native pine trees on and around the place. The floors ran in every direction, but it was snug and comfortable, having a bathroom and plenty of running water. Daddy had been born in a log house and always said he wanted to die in his own log house. When the trailer burnt to the ground, Daddy was able to run into the burning structure to retrieve his arrowheads, but everything else was lost. He and Ann were great ones for starting over. They finally were able to purchase an old frame house and have it moved to the acreage.

During these years Daddy accumulated a large group of friends. He was always serving people, looking after them, especially the aged. He continued to collect their stories as he visited with them.

After settling in the area Daddy and Ann joined the local Baptist church where they were to remain members for many years. With work, church, and community, Daddy lived an exemplary life. He was liked, loved, and respected. Most of the darkness that had long plagued him was dispelled.

But, it is always a mistake to view people through tinted glass and it would be such a mistake to view Daddy in this way. One of his famous introductions to what he was about to say was, "I ain't going to lie to you..." His honesty about his personal demons was one of his most attractive (and disturbing) traits. Times of darkness would periodically fall upon him and when they did he had a ritual. He would buy a bottle or two of bourbon, give the pickup keys to Ann to hide, and go on a weekend "toot" as he called it. In the early stages he was a happy drunk. Ann once looked out the window to see him him stark naked, standing upright over the seat, driving the tractor round and round the yard- singing. Toward the end of such forays, he grew dour and maudlin. He would sometimes call me toward the end of his toots and talk about early days, pour out his grief over real and imagined failures, and declare his love for me over and over again. These were distressing conversations, but as I grow older and more self aware, I find it harder and harder to judge him for these times. On Monday mornings, he would be up early, bathed and shaved and smelling of Old Spice. He would be the earliest to work and covered his hangover and guilt with a flood of songs and teases. Months would pass before such a thing was repeated.

Our times together during these years were good, though too often few and far between. When we did visit, it was a time of unmixed happiness. We never had an argument or quarrel for twenty plus years. And while the visits were too few, the phone conversations were regular. He has been gone for ten years and I still occasionally think, "I need to talk to Daddy about this."

His love for me, for Kathy, and for his three grandchildren was devout. And it was returned. In his last illness, I came into the living room of his house to find his then lax, six-foot frame cradled in the lap and arms of his oldest grandson, Martyn.

During the last decade of his life, he and I made the pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. that I mentioned earlier. I have never seen him happier and more alive. It is a joy to be with a man who delights in everything he sees. And delight he did- in everything, from the new threshing barn at Mount Vernon, to the buffalo hide teepee at the Natural History Museum, to Jefferson's "little mountain," it was all a dream come true to him.

One morning, while there, we finally found parking near the Viet Nam Memorial. We walked past it to the Lincoln. He was very quiet and deeply moved as he stood on the steps looking at the great Emancipator.

When we returned to the car, someone had parked close to us and I had a tough time getting the car out. Finally, Daddy got out and began to direct me. I kept touching the bumper of a new Volvo behind us. A young well-dressed man came over and began to protest that I was damaging his vehicle while Daddy assured him to the contrary. As the exchange grew more animated, I rolled the passenger window down and quietly said, "Daddy, get in the car." After I had repeated this several times, he acquiesced and took his seat. But, the young man was persistent. He leaned over and began to tap on Daddy's window. Daddy began to roll his left shoulder and roll down the window at the same time with his right hand. Placing my hand on his agitated left arm, I said quietly, "Don't hit him." With a similar quietness, he replied, "I'm going to draw the son-of-a-bitch's picture in the sand!" "If you do," I countered, "we may be here in jail for a year." I finally managed to get the car out and away. After a pause, Daddy said, "You could tell he was a Yankee by the way he talked. They're all arrogant bastards like that." But, within seconds, he was back on the sunny side enjoying the marvels of our nation's Capitol. He was sixty-six or seven at the time. But the old embers glowed beneath the gray ash.

In the next years, the embers would continue to glow. He would read and study his arrowhead collection; he would serve others and drive his pickup through the community with his faithful Bassett hound, Magoo. He would become more relaxed, more at peace with himself and with everyone else. He would maintain his simple Christian faith and his devotion to hard work. All with the passion that had always marked his life. Things would go on as usual on that little patch of ground in the Piney Woods of East Texas until his last great trial came upon him.

And when it came he would learn to die.

...to be continued

"Daddy" Part IV: Back to the Light

2011-03-04T18:30:00.000-08:00

It would be a mistake to conclude from all this that my daddy's personality regularly reflected the darkness I have been writing about. To the contrary, he was usually bright, chipper, and full of laughter. He was a great one to sing. An early riser, he would meet the day with a song, often one whose words he made up as he went along. I was not an early riser and could be quite surly in the mornings when he got me up for school. He loved this; it sharpened his musicality and his versifying. Here are some of his songs I remember:

Get up, Tom!
Get out of bed!
Or I'll pour cold water
All over your head!

or, again,

Little Tommy Tucker
He ain't no good,
He won't haul water
And he won't chop wood.

He was always teasing, always pestering, and (almost) always with good humor. It was the same at work. He would sing, he would nick-name his colleagues, he would shout and laugh. Sometimes he pushed it too far and surly, grown men would grow exasperated and threaten him. He was big and fit and he could be violent, so they were pushed beyond their limits when this happened.

I have often thought of this bright, sunny side of his with wonder. Maybe it was his generation. Maybe it was his genes. Maybe it was just his way to assuage his pain. Whatever it was, it was what it was. Too be sure, if he had enough to drink, he could descend into a maudlin self-pity, but I only witnessed this a few times in all the years I knew him. And he could get into towering rages. These were terrifying in the extreme. But, for the most part, he was his sunny self. This is why so many people never knew him as "the Hurt Man."

After moving back to my grandparent's home, I lived a charmed life. I hunted, trapped, and tramped the woods and fields along the western bank of the Red River where they lived. I lived out-of-doors almost as much as at home. I camped alone in the woods and hunted coons with hounds with a band of friends my age, as well as with older hunters. I learned to play the guitar and began to play with various country bands. I was an above average student and popular with my peers. Life was good.

From time to time Daddy would visit or I would visit him, but gradually we grew apart. My resentments peaked with my adolescent hormones. I nursed my grudges and hurts; those around me sometimes aided this. He knew this and it saddened him. His life was more and more coming apart at the seams. He moved his family back and forth from Texas to California where he worked off-shore on oil wells. These were the darkest days of all and the two daughters from that marriage suffered most. When we were together in his last days, one of them casually remarked, "Was that when Daddy threw the Christmas tree into the front yard?"

Little by little his marriage to the Dragon was wearing out, was wearing him out. They had divorced once and then remarried. I asked him once why he finally left. "Well, son, you don't remember this, but I bought a 1951 Ford roadster in '67-'68 and fixed it up. It was like the one I had when your mother was still alive. Well, she got drunk and went out in it and totaled it. I beat her up so bad that I knew if I stayed with her any longer, I might kill her some day. That's when I left-for good." He was coming apart and he knew it. The darkness was destroying him and he knew it.

I became a Christian in the late summer of 1967 and began almost immediately to "preach." I was full of zeal and aptness to speak, but I was as ignorant as a sack of hammers- ignorant of the Bible and of life. Daddy was not ignorant of either, but I made up my mind to convert him from his evil ways. He was very patient with me, but he was not ready to listen to a child, his child, talk to him from a position of moral superiority. We grew farther apart.

And then, he met my wife-to-be, Kathy. He was dazzled by her. And, I think he was transported by her to his life with my mother twenty years before. (He would sometimes, years later, say of her, "Oh, son, but she is a fine woman, fine like your mother was!") On the day he met her he told me for the first time the story of my mother and him, their happiness and tragedy. Daddy came all the way from Texas to Tulsa for our wedding. We were returning to one another.

I was preaching a revival meeting in Thackerville during the last days of August 1974. Kathy and I were staying with my grandparents. My grandfather's health was failing and he had to be hospitalized late in that same week. I took him to the doctor and then to the hospital. He would never come home again.

On the last day of the revival meeting, a hot Sunday morning, I preached from Genesis 25:8, "And Abraham breathed his last and died in a ripe old age, an old man and satisfied with life" NASB. I don't remember much about the sermon, except that I stressed that the only way to die "satisfied with life" is to die in faith in Abraham's God. The reason I stressed this particular point is that Daddy had come into the service after it began, dressed in his best suit, shirt, and tie and looking like a million bucks. He was not sunny that morning, he was grieving. I knew he was grieving over his dying father, but he was also grieving over his life, our lives.

When the pastor of the church gave he altar call, Daddy already weeping, came forward. The old women of the church were almost shouting and the old men were weeping and muttering loud "Amens." When I met him at the front he said, "I'm coming back, son, I'm coming back!"

As people prayed, we went into a little side room in the back of the church. When I closed the door and turned around Daddy was on his hands and knees, crying out to God and weeping. "O Mighty God..." he kept repeating, "O Mighty God..." And then, as his sobs racked his big frame, he began to cry out in grief and penitence, "I have been angry with you, Lord. I have hated you, Lord! I repent! I am sorry! I ask for your help to start over, to come back!" On and on he went like this for some time. I said nothing, but wept and agreed with everything he said. By the time he finished, there was a pool of tears beneath his bowed head the size of a dinner plate. Then he embraced me, squeezing the breath out of me. We held each other for a long time. "It's going to be alright, son," he kept reassuring me.

I had little doubt that it would.

...to be continued

"Daddy" Part III: Darkness Visible

2011-03-04T11:32:00.000-08:00

The years to come would be years of darkness.

A great part of this is because my daddy had no real foundation under his life. While my mother had been building a personal character that dated back to her young years, daddy had been playing at life. My mother had become his foundation, but he had only just begun to build a personal, moral character. And remember, too, how young he was: only twenty-four at my mother's death.

Moreover, my daddy had embraced a Christian faith that coincided with the happiest brief years of his young life. It would be impossible for anyone not to erect the argument that he did. "I have lived a sinful life. I turned from that life to a life of faith in God and obedience toward God. That changed coincided with my marriage, my child, my family, the respect of others, bright hopes for the future, etc. Ergo, a life of faith and obedience produces happiness-in this life and in the life to come." I know from countless conversations with him that my daddy reasoned in this way, and that he struggled his whole life not to reason this way, even when he had come to know better.

To put in succinctly (and daddy would not have put it quite this way) my daddy's darkness was exacerbated by a theological conundrum, a theological conundrum at least as old as the story of Job.

Once in the 1980s we were walking together in the dark on the Young Place near Thackerville where we were both brought up. The sky was wondrous that night and, despite the glow of Dallas-Fort Worth seventy miles to the South, the Milky Way was luminous, overpowering. It was a numinous, mystic moment and we were both breathless beneath the immensity and splendor of it all. In the quiet daddy said, "I have tried to be happy in all the wrong ways...you know this. Women...drink...money. But, all I ever really wanted was to have a family...which I did for a while. And, then...then...God took it all away from me? Can you tell me why? You're the preacher, son, tell me why!" It was a unique, uncharacteristic outburst on his part.

And there was little I could say. There are, ultimately, no rationalistic answers to questions like these- at least, there are none that will finally rest the restless mind. The answer of faith, that can give rest to the mind, at least for periods of time, is that God has his purposes in all things, and that these purposes have a good and gracious end. Or, as one has said, "When we cannot trace God's hand, we can trust his heart." This will never satisfy those without faith, but it does bring peace to believers.

So the dark years that my daddy lived from 1952 to about 1972 were aggravated in part because of his own personal warfare with God, the God who had betrayed his trust, the God who "took it all away."

He waged this war by throwing away almost every moral principle he had embraced under my mother's influence. There were the girl friends, and the drink, and the language, all of which she would have found repellent. There were the marriages (four? five? six?) and the child out of wedlock that he would not claim as his own until she was twelve. There were the two other children that, finally, he left in despair with their wreck of a mother. And, there was the worst of the marriages to a woman who was the dark, abused addict, the depraved moral opposite of Velda.

And there was "Tommy."

After a year of traveling the country with Tommy in the front seat of a 1951 Ford roadster, daddy finally took me to his parents to care for me. There I would live until he entered the marriage with the one I would come to think of as "the Dragon." I would live with her and my daddy for the next eight years, years marked by her slappings and kickings, by her savage verbal abuse, by her drunken binges and countless infidelities, by her crude manners and exposures of herself, by their violent fights that sent me running home from school on Fridays to hide the shotgun shells and knives before the week-end drinking began. And on, and on...

But, enough.

It all became so bad in the end that my grandparents pleaded with daddy to let me return to them. And in time, I did. I have no doubt that I teetered on the edge of sanity in those days. My salvation was found in books, in weekends at my grandparent's, and by my personal space that I kept with the meticulous tidiness of a child whose other life is out of control.

All of which ate away at him. "Take care of my baby, Jim. Take care of Tommy!" It was daddy who later told me of this exchange. He had failed utterly and he could not forgive himself. Yet he could not help himself. Such guilt in such an over-heated conscience leads some men to suicide. In daddy's case, he just plunged deeper into the darkness.

But, it was during these days that we spent the time together that I spoke of earlier. He was always there. And he was always doing things for me, buying things for me. He bought me a Remington .22 rifle on my twelfth birthday that cost him the better part of a week's wages. He was his whole life the master of the grand gesture.

When he was dying and we were talking about some of these dark days, he began to sob and said, "I should have left you with Mama and Papa, but I wanted a little bit of you, too!" That moved me deeply, but the fact is, like many parents in broken marriages, he wanted it both ways. He wanted the child, but he also wanted a life detrimental to the child. I speak without bitterness, even if I speak bluntly.

Not that there wasn't bitterness aplenty during those dark years. He was a god to me, but a fallen god. There is no bitterness like a violated child's. The is no spring of bitterness like disappointment in a fallen god. Daddy knew this. I know this.

So I went back to Thackerville. It was heaven on earth to me. It was salvation.

And daddy plunged deeper and deeper into the dark. Even the light that I was to him was gone.

...to be continued

"Daddy" Part II: "Velda"

2011-03-04T08:54:00.000-08:00

Her name was Velda which is Germanic and means "power." She had been born and raised in Love's Valley in Love county, Oklahoma, not ten miles away as a crow flies from where my daddy had been born and raised. They grew up not knowing one another existed and a score of years would pass before they first met.

She had moved with her family to California as a teen and would bloom there like one of the ubiquitous orange blossoms of her adopted state. The image is appropriate because every one who knew her remarked on her beauty and the sweet fragrance her life emitted.

In the late '40s Daddy was stationed at March Air Force Base in Riverside. He and Velda were introduced through his uncle and her aunt. Daddy at the time was young and handsome, and wild.

On one occasion, waiting to visit with her, he and his buddies were killing time in Ontario, sharing a bottle of Bourbon. When the time came to go to her home, Daddy told them, "Don''t bring that bottle to the Brown home." Dismissing this, the custodian of the whiskey carried it to the house and, sitting in Mr. Brown's favorite chair, stashed the half-pint bottle of Bourbon on one side of the cushion of the chair and a bottle of Coke on the other. When Mr. Brown arrived home from work, he took his paper to his favorite chair and began to read. Shifting in his seat, he noticed something strange and fished both bottles from inside the cushion. With a glare, he strode with the bottles to the front porch. Pitching the whiskey into the air, he threw the Coke bottle at it. Both exploded. Returning to his chagrined and embarrassed guests, his pulled up all of his one hundred and twenty-five pounds and said with a voice husky with anger, "Jim, don't you ever bring that stuff into my house again!" He would never have to say this again.

The romance grew, while Daddy's wild ways continued. Once, laughing, he told Velda of a night he spent in the jail in Big Bear for drunk and disorderly conduct. Velda did not laugh and sternly told him, "Jim, if you are going to continue to have anything to do with me, you are going to have to change your way of living." He did.

Shortly, thereafter, he professed faith and was baptized in the Ontario Church of Christ. And, soon after that, while the family was making plans for their wedding, the two of them traveled to Quartzite, Arizona, where they were married by a justice of the peace. I think this reflects a certain wildness, or, at least, nonconformity, in both of them.

They were unspeakably happy and they spread that happiness wherever they went. Velda, like Jim, was a happy, garrulous, gregarious person. Everyone remembers them as a couple who spread joy wherever they went. "There was always so much laughter wherever they were," my aunt remembers. That is how they are remembered: Two beautiful, happy people.

On October 25, 1951, their only child was born. Daddy always called me on my birthday, and he always began the conversation with these words, "It was snowing on Mt. Baldy the day you were born. It was the happiest day of my life." The happiness continued and the dozens of Kodak photographs from the period attest to this. There was only one shadow; Velda suffered from acute indigestion and it seemed to get worse and worse. Other than this, their life was full: Velda keeping their little house, loving her child; Jim working and occasionally preaching at the Church of Christ. It was a good life. It was a charmed life.

But Velda's suffering increased. After her doctor tried everything to relieve her symptoms, he finally referred them to a specialist in Pasadena. They made he trip to Pasadena together. They had been there before to enjoy the famous Rose Bowl Parade. After he had examined her, the doctor came to Jim in the waiting room and said, "I want to operate in the morning."

Jim was with Velda's parents in the hospital waiting room where the surgeon joined them after the operation. "Mr. Smith," he said, "I am so sorry, but your wife is suffering from advanced colon cancer. There is nothing we can do for her but make her as comfortable as possible in the coming months." Jim managed to croak out the inevitable question, "How long?" "Six months," the doctor replied. And six months later- to the day, Velda died.

The next six months were hell. Velda wasted away from her normal one-hundred-forty pounds to barely seventy-five. She was given more and larger doses of morphine for the pain, but toward the end, she was screaming with pain fifteen minutes after the last dose. Her grieving mother cared for her and for Tommy while Jim continued to work. At times, she would weep and say to Jim. "Take care of my baby, Jim. Take care of Tommy!"

On her last day, she was taken to the hospital in a white ambulance with Jim sitting, chatting with the driver. Thoughtlessly, making small talk, he said, "I remember the last time I rode in this thing..." Velda, with tears, uncharacteristically cried out, "Jim, Shut up!" They together had been bringing Tommy home.

She died in the night. She had turned twenty-four her last birthday. The funeral that followed, the friends, the family, the expressions of grief and love and sympathy were all a blurr. There are colored slides of the grave, covered with flowers. There were memories of how he grieved, how he keened out his pain at the grave and finally had to be pulled away, all of which trickled my way over the years.

But, for twenty years he would say nothing, would tell me nothing of my beautiful, engaging mother, apart from snippets like, "She was fine." "She was good." "She was better than I ever deserved." "She was beautiful."

On a March day in 1973, on the day when he first met my own beautiful wife-to-be, the floodgates of memory were opened, and as Kathy and I sat and listened and wept, he, also weeping, told us the beautiful and tragic story. I was twenty-one and for the rest of his life we would be best friends.

...to be continued

What is the Christian Gospel?

2011-03-04T07:59:00.000-08:00

The Christian Gospel is the good news that the Creator has become a creature in order to recover a creation in rebellion against himself.

The Christian Gospel is the good news that the eternal God has become man in order to recover, restore and reorder fallen mankind.

The Christian Gospel is the good news that the Holy One has become so identified with human sinfulness as to cancel sin as guilt and evacuate it of its power.

The Christian Gospel is the good news that the Life of the world has died in order to render death powerless over mortal men.

The Christian Gospel is the good news that the Righteous One has through his obedience secured a righteousness that God's righteousness can accept.

The Christian Gospel is the good news that the God of grace has chosen to receive and accept those who deserved his wrath and cannot achieve his favor.

The Christian Gospel is the good news that God accepts for Jesus' sake those who believe in him, with no regard for the best thing about them and despite the worst thing about them.

The Christian Gospel is the good news that the True Man by his Spirit is engaged in restoring our true humanity to wholeness, justice, and beauty.

The Christian Gospel is the good news that the Communal God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is calling and cultivating a community of human sons and daughters who love him and one another, as well as their fellow humans.

The Christian Gospel is the good news that nations are being and will be brought to this transformative reality through the preaching of the good news.

The Christian Gospel is the good news that the present creation will be renewed in a transformation that will finally realize and participate in God's original purpose in creation, in glory, holiness, justice, and beauty.

Fear of the Dark

2011-02-28T09:39:00.000-08:00

The child will fear the dark
And all the fears the dark contains.
The monsters the imagination makes,
The things unknown and unimaginable.
Such terror is real
In the presence of unreal things.

The dark holds terrors, too,
For those no longer young.
Their fears are fears of real things, things known,
Things half-forgotten and buried half-alive:
The foolish choice, the cutting word,
The act of passion or wrath.
Such terror is real
In the remembrance of real things.

Suggestions for Receiving Criticism

2011-02-25T15:22:00.000-08:00

1. Realize that criticism is necessary for our growth as human beings and as Christians. Joe Bayley used to say, "Criticism is the manure in which the Lord's servants grow best." The Book of Proverbs is full of encouragements for us to receive criticism.

2. If the criticism is valid, then it is good for us.

3. If the criticism is invalid, it cannot harm us. Indeed, it may help us in a variety of ways. For example, Some of us are temperamentally, "thinned-skinned." This is not, in itself, a bad thing. Such people are, frequently (not always), more sensitive to others. But, to remain thinned-skinned is a character flaw. Receiving criticism, even when it is invalid, can help toughen us up.

4. Criticism helps us to see things more three-dimensionally. It helps us to get perspective. "He he trusts his own heart is a fool." "There is a way that seems right to a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death."

5. Criticism received can keep us from mistakes and disaster. There is a story told about the Indian women who were plundering the dead after Custer's defeat on the Little Big Horn. While Custer's body was not mutilated as the other fallen soldiers on the field, an old woman was seen pushing a sewing awl into the dead General's ears. When asked what she was doing, she replied, "Maybe he will listen better in the next life."

6. Develop a spirit that not only receives criticism when it comes, but invites and welcomes it as necessary for a better life.

7. Develop a spirit of self-criticism and a circle of friends who will lovingly criticize you when necessary. But, make sure these friends understand your perspective and personality. Flannery O'Conner said, "I am willing to receive criticism, but only from those who understand what I am trying to do." This is wise.

8. Do not let your own self-criticism and that of others degenerate into an unhealthy self-hatred.

9. Be slow to criticize others, but faithful to do so when it is needful and helpful.

10. Be open to the criticism of God by his Word and Spirit. "Whom the Lord loves, he chastens..." "As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten..."

11. Do what you know to be right with boldness and with little regard for the criticism your actions may generate.

"Daddy"

2011-02-21T10:01:00.000-08:00

My father, James Patrick Smith, died ten years ago this past Thanksgiving week. I think about him every day and, perhaps because of this anniversary, I have been thinking about him more than usual. He was an intriguing, unique, and polychromatic personality, utterly unforgettable. And this is all the more interesting, given that he acted out his three-score-and ten-years on a small and obscure stage. I have written about him before in fragments, often tragic and sad, so I thought it might be good to give a larger, less tragic and more balanced picture of him.

In the sermon I preached for my daddy's funeral, I said, "Loving Daddy was never a problem to me, but I have spent my whole life trying to understand him." The quest for understanding goes on, though not so furiously as before, even now. Love seeks understanding, especially of those we love profoundly and totally.

That love is rooted in his undeniable love for me. In the young years that I did live with him, we were almost always together. If he could have me with him, I was there. He loved me- profoundly and totally. One can love profoundly and totally without loving perfectly- or let us hope so.

As I have said, my memories of my life with him are memories of being much with him. How many country roads we traveled together. How many country grocery stores we stopped at for cheese, crackers, and cans of Vienna sausages, (cans that had to be opened with a key soldered to their tops) and bottles of grape or strawberry pop. This was lunch. The roads led to "camp sites" of American Indians in plowed fields, or creek banks, or washed-out gullies. There he would patiently scour the ground flicking bits of flint with the walking stick he carried (the stick had been brought back from France by his gas-crippled uncle Pat after the Great War), occasionally stooping to pick up a shard, rubbing away the dirt with his fingers. He was, of course, looking for arrowheads, "projectiles," he sometimes called them. I found the whole thing a bore after a while. But he was there, I was there, we were there together. Arrowheads, "points," "projectiles," "relics"- these were his passion then. I know now that the cotton-headed boy was his greater, even his greatest, passion.

He was given to passion, my Daddy. I wonder if he ever did anything in his life without passion, except to die, and that because the tumor eating away at his brain had robbed him of his ability to do everything he loved to do. When he faced a life without work, without puttering, without thinking hard about things, he simply gave up. Not, that it mattered all that much; the tumor was more powerful than any of us, even than the doctors and the therapies.

Because of this inexhaustible passion for life, Daddy lived big, thought big, dreamed big. He gave of himself in a big way. And, as he would be the first to admit, his mistakes and bad choices were also big. That is the problem with passion. Unless it is wedded to prudence, it can lead to a big mess. And, in Daddy's case, it frequently did.

But, I want to reflect on the bigness of his soul that compelled so many people to love him. Because so many people did. The funeral home in Winnsboro, Texas was full that day, full to the point of standing-room-only. People had come from a two-hundred mile radius to be there and to honor the man in the casket dressed in a new pair of bib-overalls.

Part of the attraction was purely his physical good looks. Over six-feet, tanned, muscular, straight as an arrow, he was a presence. Strong features with a glorious smile, flashing teeth, and sparkling eyes. And a loud, friendly voice. I write in fragments-the charm, the winsomeness, the magnetism can only be caught in fragments.

And he never met a stranger, as the saying goes. He was always greeting people, introducing himself, engaging others in conversation, sometimes despite themselves. I took him to Washington once (Washington was Mecca to him, the Smithsonian the Black Stone), and as we waited in line at the Archives to see the founding documents of the nation, Daddy, in ball-cap, tee-shirt, and suspenders, engaged an, at first, dubious well-dressed couple in a conversation that ended in their telling him all about themselves. He was ebullient, effervescent, talking, shouting, laughing, teasing, and sometimes, darkly threatening. He was all over you and after you left him the fragrance of him remained. I have no doubt that the couple from the Archives still, remember, sometimes, that man from Texas.

He had a way of communicating love for people. He wouldn't have put it that way; it would have offended his sense of propriety. He would say, he "liked" people. Countless people he would describe in his highest praise, "He's a good old boy," or "a good'un," or, "a dandy feller," "She's a fine lady." And if you were his friend, as a handful of people inside and outside his family were, he would die for you-or kill for you.

He ended his formal schooling in the tenth grade to go and work in the oil fields of south Texas. But, possessed of a quick intelligence and a omnivorous curiosity, he made himself an amateur expert in the history of the American West and of Indian ways in his native Oklahoma and Texas. His love for reading was insatiable and his interest in things profound. I learned to read at his side on those country trips as he stopped to read the ubiquitous Texas Historical Markers that dotted Young and Jack Counties. One of my earliest memories is a visit to old Fort Belknap in Young County, where he read and explained the various "relics" to me-at age five. On our Washington trip, I had to pry him away from all the explanatory markers, saying, "If you do that, we'll be here for years." "Well, son, you've got to read if you ever want to know anythang," was his half-humorous reply. He taught me before I learned it again and again in the presence of the formally educated, that formal education does not make an educated person. "The educated fool was a fool before he was educated," he would sometimes say, quoting his own daddy.

He was the best early story teller I knew and one of the best that I have ever known. This was in part, because he was a natural collector of people and their tales. They relaxed with him and shared their lives. This had been true of him even when he was a boy. When his buddies would be playing ball or fishing, he would often choose to ride the old mare over to a family home-place, to eat dinner, and play cards or dominoes with the "old people," and hear and collect their stories. He also loved and collected their "turns of phrase," like the rest of our family. These enriched and colored his speech, and continue to do the same with mine. When we came together in my adult life, it was a time of rehearsing the old stories, made richer and sweeter by their re-telling. They are retold now by my own children.

Part of his genius as a story-teller was his encyclopedic, infallible memory. We would sit and revisit the old people and places and one of us would say, "What was that feller's name?" or "Where did they come from?" and after a moment, one of us would remember. Usually it was Daddy. He remembered where he found or traded for each of the nearly one thousand arrowheads in his collection. He could remember a tree in a vast woods that he had shot a squirrel from sixty years before, and could take you there. To be in the presence of this memory of place was to be on the edges of the visual memory of the plains-mountain men and scouts, red and white, that memorized the vast American West a hundred years before his birth.

Those who remember him remember him as the happy, funny man. He was always grinning, always laughing, always teasing. His stories were replete with humor. This was due in part to his penchant for "collecting" odd characters, discerning the traits that made them odd, and then rehearsing these things to others with a measure of exaggeration for comic effect. Wherever he was the place would ring with his laughter.

It may come as a surprise to some, therefore, to know that he was a deeply wounded, conflicted man. He carried within himself this large hurt, this colossal pain in all the years I knew him. And in some ways he will always be to me, "the Hurt Man." I want to try to talk about that hurt, that pain.

To be continued...

The Landscape of the Soul

2011-02-20T19:29:00.000-08:00

"You will want to come home,"
My Daddy said, just before he died.
"You will want to come back
to where you were raised."

Like other things that fathers say
I dismissed it, outright.
I pushed it away.
But, it stayed somewhere
In my head.
He was right.
I was wrong.
The way that fathers and sons
Are.

The landscape of childhood
Is the landscape of the soul.
Something like this
I had read in an old book.

And now,
I long for open country
For big skies
Where the sun
Can be seen to rise
And to set
On a horizon clearly defined.

I long for a country of extremes-
A western country where
The drawl is soft.
I crave the booted walk of men
That carries a swagger
Of self confidence
Rarely seen in claustrophobic minds
Of city dwellers
And people of mountains and hollers.
Where a smile of welcome
Not a scowl of suspicion
Meets the visitor, the stranger.
Where the wind makes a sea
Of the tall prairie grasses.
Where the hint of Indian drums
And the memory of buffalo herds
Are in the sod and brushy timber.
Where the rattlesnake is still feared
And watched for at every country gate.
Where the rivers have a muddy cast
And dark, northwest clouds adumbrate
The wrath of God.

The landscape of childhood
Is the landscape of the soul.
My daddy knew this intuitively,
And never read it in a book.
I read it in a book
And learned from life
To trust my intuitions.

Ironies

2011-02-18T09:05:00.000-08:00

When my beautiful, gracious mother died at age twenty-four of cancer, my father was swept into a vortex of pain, anger, and confusion. He lived there for the best part of the next twenty years.

After traveling with his infant son of thirteen months across the country for a while, he finally placed the child in the care of his own parents on a farm just outside Thackerville, Oklahoma. It was in that large, bustling household that I lived for the next four years. It was an environment of love and discipline and I thrived there.

Daddy worked the oil fields, fished the Red River, and, in his own words, "caroused." I have no idea where he lived at the time. There was a succession of girlfriends and working-fishing-carousing buddies. I remember him most in those years by his absences, though a child's mind has a way of distorting and exaggerating the reality of things. When he did come to the Big House, it was always with presents and exciting curiosities. I remember him coming once with a trunk load of writhing, flopping catfish, and I used to love to play with his oil field worker's hard hat. And he always brought his ebullient self, full of talk and laughter and stories.

When he left, I cried, but he always promised to see me again. "I'll see you again next Saturday."

I remember one such Saturday. I must have been three or so at the time. It was a warm day, so early in the morning I scooted my little red rocking chair out on the front porch that extended across the full length of the old house so I could sit and watch the long road for a first glimpse of his black Ford. And there I sat for the best part of the day. When evening fell, my heart began to fall with it. All day I had watched and no Daddy. After supper, I returned to my sentry post until dark, when my "Big Mamma," my grandmother, came and gently said, "He's probably not coming today, honey. Come on in." I do not remember crying or saying anything. I do remember the sense of loss and disappointment that filled my young mind. It would not be the only time that such a thing happened.

Fast forward forty years. I was living in West Virginia and literally traveling the world. My trips to see my Daddy, then living in East Texas, were infrequent, too infrequent.

On April 9th, 1998, Daddy turned seventy. I was, on that day, three hundred-odd miles north of him in Tulsa, Oklahoma, taking part in the ordination service of one of my pupils. It was an engagement that I could not excuse myself from. I had told my Daddy about it all and he was sadly resigned to the thing. I was conflicted and guilty about missing his seventieth birthday, but my sense of duty won out.

Late in the day, after the ceremony and services were over, I phoned him to wish him happy birthday and to send him my love. How was your day? How are you feeling? Who did you hear from? Were any of the family members there?

He was fine. It had been a day much like any other. No one had showed up. He had received phone calls from his brothers and sisters and some of the other children. He and his wife had eaten a dinner of catfish at home, alone. And then,

"I watched the road all day long, thinking you might come," he said.

On the Haystack by E.D. "Shinbone" Smith, Bomar Oklahoma, formerly Indian Territory, or "IT"

2010-10-12T10:15:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I reckon that we had the same kind of depression and such that I hear so much about these days. People got the blues and some people was jist plain bluesy all the time. Like everthang else in a small community, these thangs was noticed and occasionally commented on, but, for the most part, people jist kept going. They had to if they was going to survive, especially during the Depression. People didn't talk about such thangs when it came to themselves. I expect that some of the women would talk to old Doc Grey, but I doubt if any of the men I knew did. I never knew a man that would go to a preacher about such thangs, though he might if it was a spiritual question. Ever once in a while, the old men would set on the porch or a river bank fishin and maybe they would mention being down or discouraged. When I was a kid, I would hear this once in a while. It always took place in the dark and they always thought that being a kid I wouldn't be interested or understand what they was talking about. Truth is, I was always listening and interested, even when I didn't understand. I can remember their chicken-billed, hand rolled cigarettes aglowing in the dark when they'd talk. I expect they eased one another in this way more'n they knew. Kindly like the "therapy" they are always talking about today. And they wasn't any drugs, except the kind that comes out of a whiskey bottle or a Prince Albert can. Sure enough, some people turned to whiskey in such times, and some of 'em, turning, never turned back. I always figured that real troubles are not drowned in that way because real ones can swim.

I expect that some wives and children and not a few horses and mules suffered more from male depression than the male himself. And a few inanimate thangs have been beaten purty bad because they was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Female depression was probably more common and more tolerated because it could be chalked up to "female trouble," and I know that some women were as addicted to patent medicines as some men were to whiskey.

We had occasional suicides, men and women. People jist wore out and there are stories of rat poison and straight razors. It didn't happen very often, but that meant that it made a big impression when it did happen.

I reckon that people had other ways of coping, hard work being the main one. My old daddy used to say if a man got up early enough and worked hard enough, he didn't have any spunk left by bedtime to fret much. But, speaking of daddy, I have known him a time or two to go out south of the barn where there was a big sandy place and fall down and wallow around for a while, jist groaning to beat the band. The first time I snuck out and witnessed this, it scared me near to death and I thought he was having a fit. When I run and told Mama, he jist said, "Don't mention this, and try not to worry. It's jist your daddy dealing with his demons," which didn't help a bit because she chucked the devil into the thang. She also said, "And don't go sneaking around watching folk's business. It won't make you happy."

I remember one situation worth mentioning, now that I'm talking about this thang and that has to do with Old Man Killigrew and the haystacks.

Old man Killigrew was of the old school and didn't take no stock in modern thangs. Refused electric lights even after the rural electric come. Wouldn't own a car, but went to Thackerville in a wagon or on mule back when he needed anything, which wadn't often. Plowed and cultivated with mules and a goose-neck hoe. You git the picture. Now, long after most everybody else got hay balers, Old Man Killgrew still ricked or stacked his hay the old timey way. We kids used to jist love to visit the Killgrews because we got to play in the hay ricks, making caves and tunnels and slides down the side.

Well, ever now and again, the Old Man would get in a state and the old lady and the kids would say, "It's about time for Daddy to go up on the haystack."

And, sure enough, he'd git him an old bucket for his thunder jug and a blanket and a ladder and would climb up on one of them hayricks and jist stay for two or three days and nights. Never took any liquor with him or reading material, jist that bucket and blanket. And he'd sit and sit until he sat it out.

The old lady was amazingly tender about the thang. She'd take him his breakfast and dinner and supper up to him three times a day. She'd take him a jug of water and empty his bucket and bring it back. The memory of that old lady makes me kindly tender, jist thanking about it.

After the second or third day, Missus Killigrew would tell the children, "Daddy's about ready to come down from the haystack," and sure'nough, he'd come down, wash out the bucket, put the ladder back in the barn, fold the blanket and put it up, and go back to work, right as rain. Had himself a little retreat from ever'thang and was fine a frog's hair for a long spell.

Human beings are copers. They find a way to cope and survive- if they survive. It's one of the thangs I have watched throughout my life, and one of thangs I have enjoyed watching and studying.

Jimmy Decker, Part III, by E.D. "Shinbone" Smith, Bomar, Oklahoma, formerly "Indian Territory" or I.T.

2010-07-29T09:37:00.000-07:00

Well now, the next day Sheriff Clyde McGill paid visits to Jimmy and Tommy Tink. Tink by this time was sober, if hung over, and admitted to most of what he was accused of, the end result of which was that he agreed in court to pay for Jimmy's dental work instead of going to jail. Jimmy got the money, alright, but no dentist ever saw any of it.

The preacher had another "come to Jesus" talk with Jimmy and the end result of that was that Jimmy jist up and quit coming to church altogether, along with them kids. I have to admit that by then we weren't too cut up about not having Jimmy around, but them kids...them kids was something else. I'd see them once in a while down at Daughtery's grocery store in Thackerville, and would buy them candy or pop. They was always appreciative of anything you did for them. But they jist sort of disappeared little by little from our lives.

A few months later, and this didn't surprise anybody much, Jimmy was out late in that old truck of his and hit another feller east of town. Both of 'em was drunk and neither one was much hurt, but the end result of that was that Jimmy lost his license to drive, which put a crunch on him and the kids. They moved to Marietta where he worked at the cookie factory and bought an old bicycle to get around on.

That oldest girl, Hannah, got a baby with old J.D. and moved in that new trailer house down at White Rose. Pretty soon, she had another baby and then another. J.D. never had to work another day in his life, like he said, and along with the welfare and whatever they kept getting from old man Killigrew, they managed to get by. The trailer was pretty much of a mess after a couple of years and the dog population there continued to grow.

Little Jimmy got into trouble with drugs and robbery down between Gainesville and Denton, and after two or three warnings went off to "pick cotton for Uncle Bud" down at Gatesville, Texas, courtesy of the Texas taxpayers. He got out, got into more trouble, and finally ended up in the Huntsville penitentiary for stabbing somebody to death down around Mexia.

I am proud to tell you that that youngest girl, Elizabeth, turned out good. She made good grades, graduated valedictorian of her class and went off to the University in Norman on a scholarship. She married well and became a schoolteacher. We hear about her ever' once in a while, though she has never come back home, so far as anybody knows.

Jimmy continued to hang around with a rough crowd. He took up with several women in Marietta, but never for long. He let his hair grow long and got to looking kind of rusty. From time to time I'd see him peddling that bicycle down the main street in Marietta and would beep my horn or holler at him. Each time he would see me, recognize me for sure, but would never acknowledge me. I finally quit trying to get his attention when I would see him.

Well, after a year or two, he got his license back and commenced his ramblings to various joints on the River and elsewhere. He was in a beer joint up on Hickory Creek south of Ardmore around Christmas last year and got into an altercation with with an old man over a shuffleboard game. Evidently, Jimmy accused the old man of cheating and when he wouldn't admit to this, Jimmy hit him. Well, this was a tough old bird and Jimmy didn't have the sense to know who he was dealing with. The old booger gathered himself together and when Jimmy turned away, he reached around with a Case pocket knife and severed the carotid artery on the right side of Jimmy's throat. He bled to death on the nasty floor of that dive.

I went to the funeral and there wadn't nobody there but Hannah and J.D. and their babies, and Wanda (who cried uncontrollably; Hannah never shed a tear, that I could see), and one or two of Jimmy's drinking buddies. There was a preacher there I didn't know who assured ever'body that Jimmy was finally in a better place. The whole thing and all the memories it brought back depressed me for the best part of a week.

I thank alot about it all. I thank about them kids. I thank about Jimmy quoting the book of Romans with a glow on his face. I thank about that cold night before Christmas with that big barn of a moon.

And I thank about "once in grace, always in grace" a lot, too, especially when I thank about Jimmy.

When I thank about that, I don't know what to thank.

Jimmy Decker, Part II, by E.D. "Shinbone" Smith, Bomar, Oklahoma, formerly "Indian Territory" or I.T.

2010-07-27T09:38:00.001-07:00

When we got to the front door and knocked, the youngest girl, Elizabeth, let us in. You could tell she'd been crying. The oldest girl, Hannah, was sitting on the couch encircled in the arms of a teen-aged boy with a fat lower lip. It took me a minute to recognized him as that boy of Wanda's with the steel plate in his head. Little Jimmy was standing beside his daddy holding a big chunk of ice on top of his daddy's head. The ice was melting and running in streams down Jimmy's face.

Jimmy was sitting in that armchair straight as a poker. He was holding a glass of milk in his left hand and sticking out of the very center his mouth was a nasty washrag, rolled up like an over sized cigar, half soaked in blood. When we greeted him, he removed the washrag with his free hand, curled back his swollen lips, and showed us the empty space where his two front teeth had been.

"Fonofabitch knocked my teef out" he said. "But, I safed 'em in thif milk fo they can fut 'em back in." At this, he held up the jelly glass of milk holding the missing teeth.

Well, when he displayed his mouth and the bloody rag, the girls started crying all over again.

"What happened here?" the preacher asked.

Jimmy had returned the rag to the vacancy in his mouth, so Wanda's boy had to take it from there.

Seems that this Indian feller from down the street had been over, and there had been a little party, and him and Jimmy had been sharing a jug when the party turned nasty. This Indian was a rough customer named Tommy Tink. He drove a red pick up truck with a sticker on it that said, "I'm a lover and a fighter and a wild bull rider," was the truth, mostly.

"He wanted to fight me," J.D. (Wanda's boy) said. "Said he was the best fighter south of Marietta and had whupped ever'body worth whuppin' and what did I thank about that? I said I would fight him, at least rastle him, so we pushed back the furniture and went at it. Well, I pinned him to the floor and it made him mad, so when I let him go, he slapped me across the mouth. That made Jimmy mad, so he came in between us and Tommy hit Jimmy in the mouth. Jimmy jist stood there, kindly dazed, spitting his teeth into his hand, when Tommy hit him again on top of the head when he had his head down. Then he said he was going home to git his fuckin' gun and was goin' to kill all of us, including the puppy."

"Puppy?" the preacher inquired.

Jimmy took the rag the rag out of his mouth again and took up the story where J.D. had left off.

"Yeah, I waf tryin' to get the kidf a Chrifmas preffent. Tink haf thefe bull dog puppief and I traded him for one of them for the kidf."

Elizabeth went into the kitchen and brought back a little brindled bulldog pup that was yawning from being waked up.

"Ain't he purty?" remarked J.D.

Well, he was at that, but that wadn't the main thang on our minds at the moment.

"You think Tommy means business, E.D.?" the preacher said to me.

"Well, he ain't one to mess with, especially if he's had enough of that cheap whiskey."

The preacher thought for a minute, and said, "Here's what I think we'll do. We'll take the kids to the parsonage and put them to bed. I'll stay there and sit up til you get back. You take Jimmy to old Doc Grey and take J.D. home. When you get back I'll take you to Bomar. You kids, get your stuff together. You won't have to go to school tomorrow, today, that is. What do you think, E.D.?"

"That'll work," I replied.

"What about the puppy?" the kids said in unison.

"Well, J.D. can take him home with him. The missus won't mind three children and their daddy, but that pup will be pushing things."

Well, we got their stuff together and turned off the gas stove and were all going down the steps when Jimmy stumbled and dropped his glass of milk. The tumbler went tumbling and its contents were spilled in the grass. There was Jimmy on his hands and knees feeling around for his precious teeth, while the kids and J.D., along with the pup went and got into the preacher's car. The preacher got a flashlight out of the car and after a long spell, the three of us managed to find the missing enamels. Jimmy wanted to go back and get more milk, but the preacher told him that it was an old wives tale about keeping them teeth in milk anyhow. So, we all piled into the front seat to start our early morning mission.

As soon as the preacher slammed his door, the smell of dog do filled the confined space. The preacher was already wound up and that jist pushed it a little too far.

"That does it!" he shouted, "That damned dog has shat in my car!"

Well, we was all kinda quiet at this unministerial outburst, and I was holding back a grin, when in the quiet, J.D. says,

"Oh, goody! We'ved been tryin' to git him to do that all day long!"

Now, I couldn't help grinning after that.

"Well, you go in that house and git something to clean it up with!" the preacher said.

Now, we all got out of the car while we waited for J.D. to get his cleaning materials and went about his job. When he finished, he jist dropped the paper and its contents on the ground by the car and started to get back in.

The preacher said, "Boy! Were you born in a barn? Get out and take that around back to the trash can."

Maybe J.D. wadn't born in a barn, but his manners had the smell of a barn about them. He jist didn't know any better.

Well we got them kids and the preacher over to the parsonage, got Doc Grey up to look at Jimmy, (between Doc and Jimmy that little examining room smelled like a distillery), and I started with J.D. down to White Rose. The little pup jist slept on his lap.

J.D. directed me down the roads and turns and we came up to Wanda's place.

Now, instead of that old shack I had heard about, there was this brand new trailer house sitting there.

"Goodness gracious, sake's alive, boy!" I exclaimed, "Y'all surely have come up in the world! How did your mama manage that?"

J.D. jist slapped himself twice up the side of his head where that steel plate was and said,

"Old man Killibrew done that when mama threatened to take him to court on account of it bein' his mule that kicked me! Won't never have to work a day in my life, neither!" With that, he took the pup and got out of the car and went into his new home.

I jist sat there awhile takin' in all that had happened in the past two hours, finally grinning to myself. When J.D. came back to the door to see what the matter was, I waved, reversed the car, and headed back to Thackerville and the scene of the crime...

To be continued...

Jimmy Decker by E.D. "Shinbone" Smith, Bomar, Oklahoma, formerly "Indian Territory" or I.T.

2010-07-26T12:33:00.000-07:00

One night the preacher called on the telephone and said he wanted me to go with him to the Decker place. As a matter of fact, he got me out of bed as it was past midnight when he called. I pulled my clothes and coat on and waited on the porch for him. Shortly, I saw his headlights rounding the bend down in the draw in front of the house and walked out to meet him.

Getting in the car I accepted his apology for getting me up, but he said he thought he might need me in this situation.

"Which situation?" I asked.

"Well, Jimmy came over to the parsonage about an hour ago and said he had trouble there at the house and feared for his life and the life of his kids."

Well, it was the week before Christmas and more than a little chilly and the moon was coming up late and it was one of them thangs the scientists talk about, because the moon looked like it was as big as my barn it was so close to the earth. Pretty though, and you could almost read by it it was so bright.

Jimmy Decker had moved into the community with his three younguns and started coming to the church. He was from way up north somewhere, I thank it was Minnesota of some such place. He had been a rough customer and lived for a while in the cab of his old Ford truck, til Togo Sloan offered him an abandoned chicken house on his place. This was before Jimmy got his younguns. Jimmy used to get drunk and drop onto this old pile of cardboard and raggy quilts to sleep it off. The rats had made a house up under that cardboard and he could hear 'em scratchin' under his head, whereupon he'd slam his fist down on his pillow and they'd run to the bottom of the pile for a while.

Anyhow, the Free Will Baptists was having a brush arbor camp meeting over west of the railroad tracks and Jimmy got to going on account of the singin' and he up and got saved. Purely cleaned him up, inside and out. Quit drinkin', got a hair cut ever' two or three weeks and went to work. After a while he got tired of the the doings at the Free Willers with their "in grace, out of grace," and started coming to the Baptist church where the emphasis was on "once in grace, always in grace." He was there ever' time the doors was open and he come along in knowledge in a powerful way. For instance, he got to memorizing Bible verses and before long he had the whole book of Romans down pat- could rattle it off like an auctioneer in a sweat. Ever'body jist was amazed at the way Jimmy come along, and some of 'em even thought he might surrender to preach and was prayin' that the Lord would call him.

Well, Jimmy had these three kids by an old gal over in Addington Bend. They never was married, but they was his alright, same black hair and black eyes. Well, their mama was trashy and that ain't a harsh judgment in her case. Had this old boyfriend that went to messin' with the two girls and that littlest one wadn't but four or five. So Jimmy come to the preacher and told him about the mess and they went to Marietta and talked to John Steel Batson who was a high-powered lawyer and a member of the State House of Representatives. Well, John Steel got 'em a lawyer friend who eventually got custody of them kids for Jimmy. He rented a little place over west of the tracks and folks give 'em food and clothing poundings. You should of seen Jimmy and them kids when they showed up at the church in them new clothes, all clean and shiny. It would've brought tears to your eyes. It did mine.

Well, they went along for a good while like that, regular at work and school and church. People was always doing for them and glad to do it. And Jimmy, he'd help anybody with needs, especially the old folks. He was handy, was Jimmy, and smart. The whole thang looked like something out of the book of Acts.

Now, after about a year like this, Jimmy started seeing this woman down south of White Rose, close to the River. Ever'body knew about her and she wadn't much more of a moral character than the mother of them three kids. This went on for a while without much anybody knowing about it, but in a small community like ours, people talk.

The first time Jimmy got in trouble, the preacher bailed him out of jail up in Marietta and took him to this girl friend's place because the kids was there. Her name was Wanda and she was a tragic thang-heavy set, teeth missing in front, and far from clean. She had this addled boy who had been kicked by a mule and had a steel plate in his head. The old house was a decrepit mess- when the preacher steadied himself on a porch post when he went up the steps, the post fell over and hit one of twenty or so dogs that filled the yard. The kids was all cryin' when they saw their daddy- he'd been in a fight and had a nasty black eye. Anyways, the preacher got 'em in his car and took 'em home and the next day had some kindly, but plain dealin' with their daddy. Jimmy straightened up for a while, went forward and rededicated his life to the Lord, but before long he was heard to be down on the River and staying nights in that little shack of a place south of White Rose. Those of us who watched it all happen, watched in pure grief, on account of how good Jimmy had started on the Christian way. But, mostly we grieved about them kids.

So, that's about where thangs stood on that cold night in December with that big old moon, and me and the preacher going across the tracks at Thackerville to that little rent house of the Deckers...

To be continued...

Dora and the Military Parade, by E.D. "Shinbone" Smith, Bomar, Oklahoma, formerly Indian Territory, or IT

2010-07-22T19:49:00.000-07:00

Dora Wood was not the most pleasant woman I ever knew. In fact, Dora could be down right unpleasant. Her preacher once visited her while her younger sister (they was both old as the Territory) was present, and when he complimented the sister more'n he did Dora, she began to pout. Well, this preacher was young and kindly brash, so in his prayer he prayed that Dora would be more thankful for her blessings and be kinder to the younger (old) girl. Whereupon, Dora interrupted the praying and chastised the preacher for praying such.

Not always pleasant, was Dora.

Now, she had had a good bit of bad luck. Her husband up and left her during the Depression with a little girl child to care for. If it hadn't been for a Widows' Home taking her in, she would have had it rough. Never got over that, being abandoned and left with the child and having to live in that Home. You know how it is with some folks, the bitterness of thangs jist sort of stains them like dye does cloth. Cain't never get it out, it goes so deep. That girl grew up and sorta left ever'thang about her former life, including her Mamma. Went off to Washington, D.C. Got a college education and married above her former station in life. That'ud kindly embitter anybody and it did Dora. Jist made a bad thang worse.

Well, anyhow, Dora finally had to go into one of them Nursing Homes and little by little lost her mind. Nobody came to see her but the preacher and me. That girl would send her money on her birthday, which she didn't have any use for (and, to her credit, payed the bills), but she never did come around and I think that jist made Dora go off into the past even faster. Humans survive in lots of ways, and I ain't one to be much critical about the ways and means they manage to do so.

So, one Saturday, I drove over to see Dora in the Home (Come to think of it, pore thang, she'd spent most of her life in Homes of one kind of another besides her own, and if that ain't another reason to have pity on the pore old thang, I don't know what it would take.) Anyhow, I went in and found her dozing in a wheel chair in the hall in front of her room; they'd sorta tied her in the damn thang, so she wouldn't fall out. I gently woke her up and said,

"Dora, what are you doing out here in the hall? Why aren't you in bed?"

"Oh, E.D.," she said, I ast them to put me out here so's I could see the parade."

"Parade? What 'parade'?" says I.

"Oh, the military parade. They's going to be a big military parade. And Papa, and Uncle Job, and a bunch of other people are going to come marching by anytime now."

Now, her Papa had been in the Spanish American War and her Uncle Job had been in France in 1917, but they both was dead and buried in a little cemetery down in Leon. So, I thought it best to get her mind off this nonsense and cheer her up.

"Why don't we go down to the singing? There's a Gospel group from the Free Will Baptist Church down there with a guitar and a piano. You know how them Free Willers can sing."

Well, Dora purely loved singing and Gospel singing was her favorite. I could see by her furrowed brow that she was torn and tempted. I let her worry that thought for a while by keeping my silence.

Finally, she said with a sigh, "I'd purely love to..."

"Okie-dokie, Mizz Wood," I said with relief, "Mr. Smith will be your chaperone." And I began to wheel her down the hall.

"I'd purely love to, E.D.," she repeated, "but then I might miss the parade!"

A Balm in Gilead

2010-07-22T19:42:00.000-07:00

Some times I feel discouraged
And think my work's in vain.
But then the Holy Spirit,
Revives my soul, again.

There is a balm in Gilead...

Negro Spiritual, 18th and 19th Centuries

Levi and Vlurma Ponder by E.D. "Shinbone" Smith, Bomar, Oklahoma, formerly Indian Territory or "IT"

2010-07-14T11:39:00.000-07:00

Old Levi Ponder lived to be one hundred and two. So when I call him "old" I don't jist mean that he was dear to us, but that he was jist that- old. His wife, Vlurma, was ninety-two when he died. They had been married seventy three years. They lived on a little place they worked south of Thackerville jist west of the White Rose schoolhouse. They never had no children neither, which led some of the folks to wonder why.

Part of the answer, and maybe all of it may have been revealed in old Levi's last illness. I was standing there in the bedroom when this young doctor says, "Vlurma, Did you know that Levi had this horrible hernia?" As he asked this, he held his hands about a foot apart, and all of us was afraid he might throw back the bed covers so that we could see the real thang. "Yes," Vlurma replied with her customary shyness. "How long has he had this thing?" the doctor pressed. "Jist after we married. He was pulling stumps in the north field when it came. It jist kindly got worse and worse over the years." "Well, why didn't he get it fixed?" said the young feller. "Levi never took much stock in doctors," says Vlurma. "Besides," she added, in what was for her an unusual commentary, "one of the things I was able to do for Levi through the years was to help him fold that thing ever' morning into his underwear." You could tell that she thought of this as an act of wifely affection, and I was kinda moved by it.

Well, after Levi died, Vlurma stayed on the little place in that little house of theirs for a year or eighteen months, but ever'body knew she was in bad health and couldn't take care of herself rightly, so some of us who was close to her (she is distantly kin to me) persuaded her to go into a nursing home down in Gainesville. It nearly killed her to do it, but she was kindly lost after old Levi died, so she resigned herself to go.

I used to go down and see her about ever' week, beings as how I was partly responsible for her being in that place. I purely hate them places and hope I die before I have to go to one myself, so I guess out of loving her and feeling guilty about putting her in there, I tried to go see her ever' week. It ain't too long a drive from Bomar down there anyhow.

Well, ever' time I went, there Vlurma would be settin' in this rocking chair and lookin' out the window. Always the same. She was always glad to see me and we would visit, and talk about news in the community, and the weather, and old times, and such like. Sometimes I would roll her around the place in a wheelchair.

One day, as I was rolling her down the halls, I says to her, "Vlurma, they's singin' in the big room today. Would you like to go hear the singin'?"

"Levi never took much stock in singin'" she replied in her quiet way.

After a while, I tried again. "Vlurma, would you like to git a book out of the library? They's lots of nice books in there."

Quietly, she says, "Levi never took much stock in reading."

In the silence that followed, I took another stab.

"Vlurma, honey, would you like to go watch the television in the television room?"

"No, thank you, E. D.," she says, polite as can be, "Levi never took no stock in television."

Well, I was getting kindly flustered by then and I says,

"Well, Vlurma, what did Levi like?"

In a big voice that I had never heard her use in all the years I had known her she said

"Levi liked to work!"

The Holiness of Everyday Stuff

2010-07-14T09:08:00.000-07:00

I believe in the holiness of everyday stuff. That is, I believe that the stuff, the matter of our daily lives is good and holy, that it is sacramental. From the toast we butter every morning to the soft beds we lie upon every night (if we are so blessed to have bread and beds!), and everything in between, we are touching the stuff that God has made, given, and blessed.

I believe this because the Holy Scriptures, the Bible, declare it to be so. St. Paul, writing late in his life, says, "For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected..." I Timothy 4:4. Paul is engaged here in commentary on the first chapter of Genesis. God created all things. God created all things good. God created all things to be received and enjoyed by the acme of his creation, man.

Stuff is not, in and of itself, bad. Those who teach that it is are teaching the doctrines of demons and deceitful spirits, as Paul says in verse 1 of the same passage. In particular, food and marital sex are singled out as good, because then, and throughout the history of the Christian Church these have been hot points of controversy. To the Jews, who had been reared in a tradition of kosher food laws, this was a serious departure from the faith of ancient Israel. But, Paul, an orthodox Jew often insisted upon this change in God's program, see Romans 14 and I Corinthians 8-10. In doing so, he was following the lead of Jesus in Mark 7:14-23. Furthermore, Paul is following the Old Testament on the question of marital love. The Old Testament often celebrates this gift and devotes an entire book to it in the Song of Solomon. Food and sex are good, as is everything else that God has made. It is the goodness, the appropriateness of these things that enables us to say of them, "They are sacramental."

This view of life opens life to a whole new way of living. It takes us back to the origins and to the purpose of things. It tells us why the world and all that is in it is. It gives a basis for probing and understanding what things are for. It gives us direction and purpose and boundaries for our lives. It tells us that, as great and wonderful as human beings are, we are inadequate and clueless in understanding the whys and the wherefores of things apart from Divine Revelation. If the stuff of this life-all of it- is made by God, then we are in a position to seek from God, the Maker, insight and understanding as to the purpose and use of these things. Christians, thus believe that life, including marriage, food, work, and everything else is defined and delimited by God. This leads, even in the delimitations, to a life that is potentially full and, in a healthy way, safe. The modern view is that man himself defines and delimits all of this. There are no limits, except those posed by the experts. This is because the modern rejects the idea of a Divine origin and regulation of stuff. The Christian Gnostic, because he believes that stuff is bad or questionable, places himself in a position similar to the modern secularist. He must determine and set the limits of life from inside his own head and from his own experience.

The Christian, by accepting the Divine origin and regulation of all reality, is in a position to live fully, joyfully, and safely in the world (though, God knows, it is a scary place!). He is in a position to live sacramentally.

The key to this, according to Paul in the Timothy letter, is found "in the word of God and prayer." We "gratefully paticipate" in all these things as those "who believe and know the truth." "We receive them with thanks." Verses 3,4. In this way, "they (the stuff of life) are sanctified (made holy, consecrated to God) by the word of God and prayer." Verse 5.

This makes every bush a "burning bush" and every parcel of ground "holy ground." It means our work, play, worship, sufferings, joy, and all else are holy things. This gives our lives significance, safety, and satisfaction, because it gives to all of it a real sanctity. This is a sanctity guaranteed by the Real Presence of Christ. He who became flesh is with us in our fleshly lives. He who ate bread and fish, who drank water and wine, is with us in the mundane realities of our quotidian existence.

Not bad. Not bad at all!

Queen Elizabeth I on the Lord's Supper

2010-07-14T09:04:00.000-07:00

'Twas God the Word that spake it,
He took the bread and brake it;
And what the Word did make it;
I believe that, and I take it.

(A form of the same thing is attributed to John Donne.)

"The Thespians Come to Town" by E.D. "Shinbone" Smith, Bomar, Oklahoma, formerly, Indian Territory of "IT"

2010-06-30T06:54:00.000-07:00

You young people won't have known this, but way back before the War and in the worst part of the Depression, they used to be these traveling actors that would come into county seat towns and put on plays. Sometimes they'd come of a Friday and put on shows on Friday and a couple of shows on the Saturday following, but sometimes they'd just come and do two or three shows on a Saturday. Of course, Saturdays was the day when we all come to town, to get groceries and feed, go to the picture show, and just visit and catch up on the news.

Well, this traveling troupe of "Thespians" as they called theirselves come to Marietta and set up to put on a play in the courthouse there. Word had got around in the weeks before and they was a mess of people in town on the day of the play. They was all over the place. The courthouse square was covered with people and the streets were lined with cars, wagons, and horses. It was like a county fair. Folks was selling popcorn and boiled peanuts and fried pies. This preacher was holding forth on the corner in front of the First National Bank. He had a little group of people with him to sing and a fat lady to play this little pump organ; she was twice the size of that little pump organ, and that was a funny sight. The old men were sitting in front of Sprouse's hardware store, whittling, and talking, and chewing tobacco, and watching the good looking women- and some that wadn't so good looking. The cafes and saloons was making a killing. And everbody excited about this play, which was called, "Murder at Midnight." Everthang was set to start at one o'clock.

Now by twelve noon they had opened up the main court room, turned on them big ceiling fans, and opened up the tall windows on on either side to get any breeze they could. People had rushed in to get the closest seats on the main floor and in the balcony. It was hot as Dick's hatband and the ladies was fanning themselves with Dodson Funeral Home fans with pictures of the Good Shepherd on them. The men was jist sweating through their overalls and shirts, tugging at their collars buttoned up to the top. They young'ns was restless and whiny like they was in church, saying out loud ever once in while, "How much longer, Mama?" They had shifted the judge's bench and witness stand and other furniture to the side of the main floor and set up their props and furniture for the play. You could almost smell the excitement over the sweat and cheap perfume and pomade.

Well, unbeknownst to the paying crowd there in the main court room of the Love County courthouse, they was this crisis going on down at the Excelsior Hotel. The second main actress had come down with laryngitis and could barely make a squeak. She wadn't the main actress, but she was important to the story of the play, so the troupe was in a state of pure anxiousness- and I do mean anxiousness. They was thinking about all them dimes and quarters they was going to have to refund these people. They was three or four civic leaders with them and they was worried about that bunch of hot, excited folks in the courthouse and what they might do even if their money was refunded.

Finally, (and it was getting on toward 12:30) the head Thespian says, "Is there a woman here in town that could stand in for Eugenie? Somebody with her looks and maybe with a little sassiness that wouldn't mind being in front of a crowd? We could cut the script so she wouldn't have to say but a few lines."

Well, the city fathers got their heads together and finally said, "How much would you be willing to pay?"

"Three dollars. A dollar for each of the three presentations."

Well, that nearly took all the air out of the room as most of them men in the courthouse was working in the fields for a sight less than a dollar a day.

So somebody says, "Go see if you can find Ruthie Fulks."

Well, before long they come back with Ruthie. Now Ruthie was a character and her looks showed it. Lots of makeup, Marcel wave hair do that was a little out of style, and a slinky shift of a dress that covered a fine, if kindly plump, figure. She had a bought cigarette in her hand and the nails were fire engine red. She also had a way about her that kindly made everbody set up and take notice when she came into a room.

So they made her the proposition and she asked, "How much?" When they told her, her eyes got big and she nearly tripped over her own tongue accepting. So the main Thespian starts to tell her what few lines she had to say and when to say them and what else she had to do. The civic leaders left the Hotel and went and got their seats in the courthouse that their wives had been saving up on the front row of the main floor. They set there wiping sweat from their worried brows with starched linen handkerchiefs.

Directly, jist after one o'clock, the main Thespian comes out of the Judge's Chambers behind the stage and the people started to clap and hoot like they was at a New York opera house. He raised his hand and silenced the crowd and explained the emergency that they had jist resolved and told em about Ruthie Fulks and her gracious willingness to help out. Now, at the mention of Ruthie, the crowd sorta sighed and began whispering to each other and the wives of the City Leaders cast some dark looks out of the sides of their eyes at their husbands setting there. But after a short spell and the assurance of the main Thespian that "The Show Must Go On!" they all settled down for the first act, fanning and fidgeting, but trying to behave like the upper crust down at the front.

Now, the first act, went well, and the second. Ruthie made a brief appearance in the second act and had an even briefer set of lines. The third act was where it got interesting.

The scene is a hotel room with a bed and a davenport and such. (They had to move thangs around between acts with the people watching, because that's the best they could do.) The main Thespian is sitting on the davenport with his head hung down, sighing and muttering to himself. Then, in comes Ruthie in a robe and slippers.

"You have wronged me, " says the main Thespian.

"I have not. I have been true," says Ruthie. (The people was quite impressed because she seemed to be a natural actress.)

"I don't believe you anymore. I cannot trust you!" says the main Thespian. Then, he pulls a revolver out of his jacket. The crowd gasps. The women clap their hands over their mouths. The men scoot out on the edge of the pews they are setting on. Several of the smaller children cover their eyes with sweaty, grubby hands.

"Oh, John, no! Please! No! No! No!" says Ruthie, with such conviction that the women have tears in their eyes and some of the men have to swallow down hard.

The main Thespian aims and fires. The shock of the gunfire and the smell of the smoke jist ratchets up the tension. Ruthie slaps her ample bosom and blood starts to come out through her spread fingers, blood the color of them little pretty fingernails of hers. The crowd gasps- I swear you could of hear it out on the courthouse lawn. One old lady began to sob and somebody, a male, was heard to mutter, "Well, I'll be damned." You could cut the tension in that big room with a knife.

The main Thespian drops the revolver as Ruthie drops to the floor and begins to tear at his long, fine hair with both hands, all the while pacing back and forth across the stage. He is saying, over and over again, and each time with greater dramatic effect

"What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?"

By now, they's lots of the women weeping, even some of those grand dames down on the front row. Everybody is tense and kinda cut up. They have forgot that this is a play and have been carried away by the story and the acting. They've even forgot that that is Ruthie Fulks layin' down on the floor there in a pool of blood. The main Thespian continues to pace and to cry out

"What have I done?"

Well, between one of them "What have I dones?" old Grover Daugherty, who has been sucking on his second half pint of Bourbon since his drinking day began earlier that morning, stands up in the balcony. He is not steady on his feet by a long shot, and he is not only drunk, he's tore up and cryin'. Grover wipes his runny nose on his sleeve and hollers out,

"I'll tell ye what ye've done, you Thespian son-of-a-bitch! Ye've done killed the only whore in this town, that's what ye've done!"

Are All the Nuts in Church?

2010-06-29T08:07:00.000-07:00

I sometimes think that all the nuts are in churches. But, then, I go to an occasional rock concert, flea market, or Wal-Mart, and realize that nuts are everywhere.

What makes church nuts even nuttier is their piety, intensity, and general humorlessness.

Here is the most recent example of church nuttiness I have come across.

My mother and sister-in-law attend a Baptist church in Oklahoma City. Last Sunday, as they went around greeting and welcoming people, they came upon a stranger visiting the church for the first time.

As my mother-in-law offered her hand in greeting, the female visitor tendered a piece of white bond paper, approximately two inches square, upon which was printed the following message:

"Let me extend to you a WORD
of greeting rather than shaking
hands. In the interest of Public
Health, we have decided to
avoid the practice of public
handshaking. We prefer the
Biblical method of greeting
people, by 'Saluting' as
described in Romans 16:1-16."

Never mind that Paul in Romans 16 says in verse 16 (part of the suggested proof text offered above), "Salute one another with a holy kiss" (KJV).

Oh, well... as they say in Yorkshire, "There's nowt so quair as folk!" (There is nothing so queer as folk!)

A Part of a Family, Part III

2010-06-23T10:41:00.000-07:00

So, who was this boy the Wynn's invited into their home, into their family? What did they find when they began to discover who I then was?

Ken and Bettye Wynn were in their late twenties at the time. They were idealistic, devout, and committed to their sense of Christian calling. They were loving, self-sacrificing, and generous. I never knew for sure what their income was, but I know that they were living on a very constrained budget. With their talents and education they could have easily had careers where they were making a great deal more money than they would in a second-fiddle role in a medium sized Baptist church. They had three small daughters and there would soon be a fourth. They never asked me to contribute to the family economy, and I am chagrined to say, I never offered to, though I had a considerable amount of discretionary cash because of my preaching junkets and part-time job. O the follies of youth!

Ken was devout, but easy going. He was great fun and had a gentle way about him. Bettye was charming, but her piety had a tougher edge to it than Ken's. We got on wonderfully together. They had a fine sense of style and their home was filled with beautiful things, antique furniture that no one then cared about, pictures, books, and music. Bettye was a wonderful cook.

Here were two people on a limited income who had determined to fill their lives with beauty and style. The girls were what little girls are in a well-ordered home, sweet and happy.

Their taking me into the heart of this family was fraught with Christian idealism and naivete'. They would soon discover what a complex and complicated human being they had taken on. I would soon discover that living as a part of a family was radically different from the life that I had lived for seventeen years. It is a testimony to their faith, patience, and generosity that it succeeded at all, and that it succeeded over a period of two-plus years is nothing short of astonishing.

During those years, I began to learn what it is to be a part of a family. I was challenged and by circumstances, forced, to begin to live in a world where my wants and wishes were not the center of everything. Gently, the Wynns began to exert a discipline upon my life. Schedules, commitments, obligations were to be honored. Doing things with the family in mind became a solemn responsibility. There were inevitable conflicts, and some of them were sharp, but their unfailing love supported and conquered me. They were remarkably forgiving.

After a breakup with a beautiful girl in my junior year, I went into a deep depression and found solace in music. My tastes had broadened to include folk and early rock and I would lose myself in the music and lyrics of Woody Gurthrie, Dylan, and the Seekers. I decided I would go back to a life of rambling around and music, like Woody. I used to sit on the porch of his old house in Okemah and play my guitar and sing. When school ended for the summer, I packed a knapsack, took two hundred dollars from my account (I had a part-time job and preaching honoraria), grabbed my Gibson guitar, and headed to I-40 below the bluff that Okemah sits upon. I was on my way to Boise, Idaho, where my father's brother, Ken, lived. My first lift took me all the way to Gallup, New Mexico. From there I was picked up by a drunk who had been in Gallup with his mistress. He took me north to Shiprock. He kept the needle on one hundred most of the way and I was grateful for the straight highway between Gallup and Shiprock. As I walked on highway 491, I watched the morning sunlight coming down the Shiprock. A Navajo man took me across the northeast corner of Arizona and the Indian Reservation to Monticello, Utah, where I cleaned up in a Sinclair station and had breakfast in a truck stop. I was walking on clouds with happiness. From Monticello, I got a lift to the Junction of U.S. 191 and I-70. From there, a trucker took me all the rest of the way to Boise. I had made the whole trip in twenty-three hours.

I called my uncle from a truck stop there and he came to get me. He and my aunt had no idea that I was coming. When I climbed into the front seat, the first thing he said was, "Get your heart broke by some old girl?" I stayed with them for two weeks, during which time my aunt's father was dying. I had known the old man for some years as I had visited Idaho on two other occasions with my uncle and aunt. We visited him on his death bed on the sage brush flat of Orchard, Idaho. He looked at me with his rheumy eyes and said, "Don't throw your life away, Tommy. Don't waste your life." It went home like a dart through my heart. I walked out on the desert. It had just showered and the smell of petrichore and sage filled the air. I decided I would return to Oklahoma and to the Wynns if they would have me back.

The Wynns had no idea where I was. I had left no note. I had taken the things that meant the most to me and that I could carry. They were frantic with worry for these weeks. In retrospect, I cannot imagine their anxiety, anger, and fear.

When Mr. Reed died in the ensuing days, we were suddenly on our way to Fayetteville, Arkansas where he would be buried. After the funeral, we returned to the family homeplace in Thackerville, where I phoned the Wynn home. Bettye answered the phone and when she heard my voice, she began to sob. "May I come back?" I asked. "You will have to talk to Ken and he is not home right now." When I later spoke to Ken, he was gentle, but firm. I would be welcomed back, but certain things would have to change. On the next day, my grandfather took me to Marietta where I boarded a Greyhound bus for Oklahoma City and Okemah.

The Wynn's received me back like the Prodigal Son that I was. It was an astonishing display of Christian love and forgiveness. I have not forgotten this and hope I never shall.

There were new rules, new restrictions, a new insistence that I consider others as more important than myself. Little by little I began to make progress in living with others and not living solely for myself. Their love supported it all.

My senior year in high school was one of the happiest of my life. I had settled down within the Wynn family, I continued to preach, and I was in a happy relationship with a beautiful, sweet girl who was a true soul-mate. I was popular at school, voted president of the senior class, and took part in the Thespian productions of the English department. I had some very fine teachers and won the regional academic award for art history as well as dabbling in drawing and painting.

After I began my freshman year at Oklahoma Baptist University, the Wynn's moved yet again to Woodward, Oklahoma to serve in the 1st Baptist Church there. I visited them, even had a room in their home for a time, but gradually we saw less and less of one another. I had met the woman who was to be my wife in Tulsa and was spending more time there when away from school.

In the ensuing years, my ties with the Wynns slowly dissolved. There was no bitterness or conflict. I was busy with my new bride and a new career as a pastor in the Tulsa area, and the Wynns were going through some very difficult times of their own. Over the years there were occasional letters and cards, but we lost touch the way people do in this life.

Only recently have I reconnected with members of the Wynn family. I am now in touch with three of the girls and indirectly with their father.

I have written these posts in order to pay my tribute to them for their love and kindness to me. The years I spent with them were formative in making me what I have become. They taught me in a profound way what it means to be a part of a family. They, thus, enabled me to enter with greater wisdom and tact my wife's family. I have also reconnected with the various wings of my own family through the years, and they played a role in this as well. Because of their example, they have enabled me to have my own family. Ours has been a home filled with beautiful things. Ours has been a home where each was expected to consider others as better than himself. Ours has been a home where love and forgiveness are paramount.

I owe much of this to the Family Wynn. I would here offer them my profound thanks.

A Part of a Family, Part II

2010-06-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

The summer of 1967 found me in Ontario, California with my maternal grandmother and my aunts and cousins. I had spent summers with them from the mid-fifties on. Once there, I began to haunt record shops looking for old timey music. Through one of these I connected with a man who led a bluegrass band and began playing with them at jams held in his home. This band had cut a record with a label called "Rural Rhythm Records" and was slated to do another that summer. This looked like an early break into a music career. I began playing rhythm guitar and singing lead with this group. They really were an accomplished bunch of amateur musicians. We had a fine banjo picker, a female vocalist, a dobro player, while the leader played upright bass, mandolin, and flat-pick guitar. By this time I had memorized over a hundred songs as well as writing several of my own. Don't misunderstand me, these were not great songs. They were the standard, "you, untrue, blue" variety of country songs. But, some of the melodies were unique and quirky, and this is what record producers are looking for. I met the then owner/producer of RR and performed some of my songs for him. He was mildly impressed, probably in part because I was fifteen years old.

The leader of the band was one of the most disgustingly immoral men I have ever known. He was unscrupulous and manipulative. I was always uneasy with him and this increased as the summer waned. I came to believe he was stealing my songs and promoting them as his own. When I became convinced of this, I walked away. Full stop. This has always been my way of dealing with people I am convinced have betrayed me. I walk away...full stop. In one way, it has been easy for me to do this, given my frequently interrupted young life.

This is not to say I wasn't disappointed. I was crushed. We were weeks away from doing the record which would involve our covering standard bluegrass favorites as well as including one or two of my songs. I was also embarrassed because I had told people at home that I was about to cut a record with this band.

I quit my job, bought a plane ticket (my first), and flew back to Dallas on my way home. When I got home, my grandparents were dismayed. There was no work for me there and I had left a decent job, and they had enjoyed the peace of not having to worry about me and put up with my shenanigans. This only added to my depression and sense of failure.

On the first Sunday after my return, I rose early, cleaned up and dressed in my best music playing clothes, and asked my grandfather to drive me to church. My grandmother nearly floated above the ground she was so pleased.

When I arrived at the little Baptist church there were many whispers and nods. I tried to sing the hymns, which I did not know. I bowed my head when they prayed, stood when they said stand, sat when they said sit. I endured the sermon because my friend, the Rev. Spann was the preacher. He was the reason I was there. I needed a friend. He was a friend, a true friend who could be trusted.

At the end of the sermon he gave the customary Baptist "invitation" for people to come forward "to be saved." I found myself strangely moved and with great deliberateness, went forward.

Over the intervening forty-plus years, I have looked at this experience through every lens available to me. I know it can be explained in purely psychological terms. I was a prime candidate for a "conversion." William James would have smiled wryly at it all and quietly explained it as typical. I would now agree with nearly everything he would have to say.

But, I would go on to say this: That was a watershed day in my life. It was the point from which the rest of my life would take its trajectory. I believe that I encountered God on that hot, July day. I believe he encountered me in that little village and in that ugly little building. I am what I am today because of that encounter. The rest of my life would be spent in living out that initial encounter and trying to understand its ramifications.

Well, I don't have to tell you, if you have followed this story up to this point, that I took hold of this new life the same way I had always taken hold of things: with hammer and tongs.

Soon thereafter, I would "surrender to a call to preach the Gospel," and in the tradition of earlier Southern Baptists, would become a "preacher boy." When I preached my first sermon later that summer the whole place was packed and they had to bring in folding chairs. From that point my preaching career was launched. I began to preach in some little place every weekend.

I was as ignorant as a box of bolts. I was a new convert. But, what I lacked in understanding, not to say wisdom and experience, I made up for with sheer exuberance, zeal, and personality. I had found my place and it had the commendation of God. I had also entered into a very dangerous place, spiritually and morally. It is but for the sheer and tender grace of God that I did not go down in a tragic shipwreck of faith and morals.

It was at this time that I met the Wynn family, the family I would come to live with in Okemah, Oklahoma. They saw my gifts, my potential, and came to love me. They also saw the lack of discipline and oversight in my young life. They were living in Healdton, Oklahoma at the time. Without notice of any kind, I would just show up on their doorstep, having hitchiked the fifty miles or so to get there. During this time they were "called" to Okemah and invited me to go with them. They spent an evening talking with my grandparents and receiving their permission for me to go. Mama and Papa were old and tired by this time, and, while it grieved them to see me leave, I am sure, in one respect, they were relieved to see me go. They also were hopeful that a better school and social situation could improve my future prospects. So, on that warm, sunny November morning, I loaded my rocking chair, my books, and my clothes into Ken Wynn's pickup and headed for a new life.

To be continued...

A Part of a Family, Part I

2010-06-22T14:36:00.001-07:00

Just after my seventeenth birthday, I was invited to live with a family that I had become friends with during the previous months. This change involved my leaving my own family in southern Oklahoma. They were willing to accede to this change because they saw in it a chance for my own improvement. I will never forget the morning I left the old home-place. I loaded my few belongings and said good-bye to my grandfather, my "Papa." He was not one to demonstrate his emotions, but his eyes were red-rimmed and full of tears when I hugged him and said, "Bye, now."

The young, for the most part, are oblivious to feelings, except their own, and I was no exception to this rule. I know now something of the pain the old couple must have endured and the loneliness of that remote old house in my absence. I now have pain and regrets over the many sorrows I caused them, including this one. But, this same oblivion is what makes the young adventurous and daring, and I was nothing if not adventurous and daring. I was ready for a new start, a new life!

The family I moved in with were a Christian couple with three young daughters. They had moved to another Oklahoma town to be the music/youth director in a Baptist church there. The plan was for me to live in a little cottage behind their church-provided home, but soon, I was ensconced as a member of the family in one of the three bedrooms in the house. This, itself, posed a hardship on the girls, who had to room together in a smallish bedroom. I mention this only to reveal yet another aspect of this family's generosity toward me.

What did they find when they began to discover who I then was? I was warm, personable, gregarious, full of fun. I was talented, gifted, bookish. I was also wild, undisciplined, impulsive, given to extreme mood swings. I could be kind and gracious one minute and carried away in a towering rage the next. In many ways, I was a mess. And, I do mean a mess!

The fact is, I had been on my own in one form or another all my life. After my mother's death, my father traveled the country with me in the front seat of his 1951 Ford sedan. I was thirteen months old. We crisscrossed the country together as he tried to literally drive out his pain and leave his grief behind him. But, pain and grief like his cannot be evaded; they met him whenever he arrived at a new place. Finally, he needed to go to work and he took me to his parent's home, the one I would leave on that November day in 1968. There I lived like a little prince for the next four years. After that, I went to live with my father and his new wife. The next years would be hell on earth, and a part of that hell would be the long hours that I spent alone, even as a small child, while my father and his wife worked. In that loneliness I developed my own inner-world, a world where I could escape, a world where I was king. I would from time to time invite others into this world, but I was always the leader, the defender of my kingdom, and the sole arbiter of that realm. This continued into my early teens.

When I reached my early teens, my life with my step-mother had become so abusive, and her marriage to my father so volatile, that my grandparents feared for my safety and sanity. They pleaded with my father to let me return to them on the pretext that my grandmother needed someone with her when my grandfather worked at his night watchman's job. My father resigned himself to this and I was back at the happiest place on earth to me!

The next two years were idyllic. I was free to roam at will the woods and hills of southern Love County, Oklahoma. I had several rifles and shotguns along with other woodsman's gear: a Hudson's Bay axe, steel traps, a backpack, knives and hatchets of all sorts. When not in school, I was in the woods and on the Red River, in all weathers and at all hours, hunting, trapping, fishing, and just being alone. I learned woodcraft from my grandfather and uncles, from books by Daniel Carter Beard and Ernest Thompson Seton, and from experience- watching, listening, smelling, tasting, touching the wild world. I shudder to think back at some of my exploits, so dangerous and daunting they were for a boy. I once made a trek, through nine or ten inches of snow, that went on for about eight or nine miles, looking for furbearers and their den-trees. I returned in the bitter cold as the sun was setting in the clear reddened sky, my pant's legs frozen like stove pipes from the knees down in the sub-freezing cold. But, I remember, too, the sense of achievement and pride I had in that trek and the joy of coming home to my Mama's hot cooking. I know now that, though they had worried about me, they were proud of me, too.

During this same period, I made friends with two brothers, Eddy and Lonnie Foster, who were also enamored of the woods and woodcraft. We were inseparable, but I was still the leader, though both were older by two or three years. Together, we hunted with hounds- coons, possums, anything with fur on it. We became accomplished at it and were admired in the community for it. Together we made a camp on the spring branch belonging to my grandfather, and at my insistence, built a log cabin on the spot from trees we felled ourselves, notched, and rolled into place. It stood for years on the spot until it rotted away. I still have photographs of it in ruins.

But, despite the friendship, I was often alone in the woods and on the River... thinking. "...and a boy's thoughts are long, long thoughts." My life, though social and in some ways, gregarious, was still an interior life, a life of thinking, reading, exploring, doing...alone. My grandparents were people of the land and of the woods, so they were content to hold their breath and pray, and let me go.

In my fourteen year, I fell in love with bluegrass and old-timey country music. At the same time, my youngest aunt had married a guitar picker who began to teach me to play. I went at it with the same savage, manic fury that I went at everything. My fingers bled from practice in those early days. Little by little I began to be proficient. When I was good enough, I began to play with older pickers and singers at home dance-parties. A child musician-singer is always a wonder to adults, especially one that can perform without nervousness before a crowd. I was such a child.

Soon I was playing at county "hootenannies" and with adult, accomplished pickers. I even started a band of my own called the "Midnight Ramblers." There were three of us, but I was still the leader. The band finally failed because of territory battles between an older member and myself. Finally, I began to play and sing with an adult group, whose leader had been a Nashville session musician. With adults, I was willing to "keep my place," so long as they did not place too stringent demands on me. During this time, my grandparents let me go wherever and whenever I wanted; they could do little else without having me incarcerated. I was willful and wild. I was also popular, with girls and with adults, especially after they had had a few drinks. My group began to sneak me into venues that were strictly adult- bars, joints, VFW clubs.

During this period, my grades suffered and I was often half-there in class because of my midnight ramblings. I adopted cocky, brash, and adult airs. Even those in my family who loved me found me insufferable. They were worried about the company I was keeping and about my time on the road. I couldn't drive and had no car if I could have, so I hitchhiked around the county and beyond. Well they may have worried, and did. They warned me, pleaded with me, and threw up their hands in exasperation. I was on my own- though they were there to feed me, clothe me, and shelter me... and, I now see, to love me. It was a horrible time for them. When I remember my treatment of them, I am full of wonder and shame. There was already talk of "going to Nashville" and making a music career. This was enhanced by the fact that I had already begun to write my own songs.

During this time, I was befriended by my high school English teacher, the Rev. Clyde B. Spann. He was intrigued with my intelligence and, I think, my aplomb. He encouraged my reading and my writing, which I had begun to do seriously. He also prayed for me and remained a true friend to me despite my arrogance and country brashness.

Things were coming to a head in my life and the result would be "wondrous strange," not just to those looking on from the outside, but, even more so, to me, myself.

To be continued...

"Don't Worry about the Mule Going Blind" or A Life of Calculated Risk , further thoughts from Ecclesiastes

2010-06-20T14:04:00.001-07:00

The human animal, like all animals, is beset with fears. We live in a world that can hurt us, physically and emotionally, and we learn this early on. Whether or not fear is intrinsic to our human nature or is a learned condition is something I will leave for the experts to argue about, but I know from experience that it is known early and continues unabated throughout life.

The fact of fear drives us to seek security in a variety of ways. We protect ourselves and well we might. Whether it is seen in a provident concern for financial or physical security, or the avoidance of people and things that may harm us, we spend a lot of time, money and mental energy creating safe places and comfort zones in our lives. We play it safe.

This is right and good...up to a point. Where it becomes a problem is when it gets in the way of a life well lived, a life fully lived. Thus, for some, the fear of travel and of travel in airplanes is so profound that they refuse to travel. How sad this is and how impoverished their lives compared to those who have seen other lands, tasted other foods, and engaged with other peoples in their own cultures. I am glad that I grew up on the Southern Plains and on the Red River. My childhood was spent in some of the richest historical spots in the United States in terms of the saga of the American West- Young County, Texas and Love County, Oklahoma. But, I am also glad that I have walked the streets of London and Paris by myself and have seen the Southern Alps of New Zealand. I am the richer because of this. I am also less inclined to think that, as much as I love my native country, ours is the only good, beautiful, and culturally rich place on earth. It is not safe (in an absolute sense) to travel, but it does make for a richer, fuller life.

Ecclesiastes in chapter 11 urges his readers to a life of calculated risk. While the Wisdom Tradition of the Bible (Proverbs, Job, the Psalms, along with Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, and the Sermon of the Mount and James in the New) counsels caution and safety in many areas of life, e.g., "In the multitude of counselors is safety," it also challenges us to avoid playing it so safe that we do not open ourselves to the surprises and blessings that come from taking calculated and deliberate risks.

Thus, the writer says, "Cast your bread upon the waters, and after many days it will return to you." It is generally conceded by scholars that what is being urged here is an investment in goods carried by merchant seamen. Travel on the sea has always been hazardous and risky, and this was especially so in ancient times. The land-locked Israelites seem in particular to have had an aversion to the sea, see Jonah and Psalm 107. So, such counsel as is found here is contrary to human nature and its propensity to play it safe.

Another picture from the Bible comes to mind. It is that of Jocabed, the mother of Moses, placing her endangered little son in an ark of bullrushes and setting him afloat on the Nile, only to have him returned to her as his wet-nurse. The child is risked, he is saved, and he is returned to his mother.

We must try to live our lives with such a resolve: To risk ourselves in a manner that will ultimately enrich us. This calls for a courage, a daring, that is intrepid and undaunted. Whether we think of giving ourselves in service to others who may not appreciate us and may actually hurt us, or the giving of our financial resources to worthy projects, or simply trying new things that will stretch and improve us, such action calls for courage.

The fear factor at this point is compounded by two things mentioned by the Preacher ("Ecclesiastes" means preacher or questor {Eugene Peterson}).

The first group of things are those inevitable things that take place in the world that can literally blow away or smash our lives to pieces. (This would include all the metaphorical things that can do the same.) "If the clouds are full, they pour out rain upon the earth; and whether a tree falls toward the south or the north, wherever the tree falls, there it lies. He who watches the wind will not sow, and he who looks at the clouds will not reap" Vv. 3,4. Rain, winds, falling trees... these are things that can and do happen in the world and they can wreak havoc in the lives of those who happen to be in the way.

The point is, we must never let what might happen get in the way of our living. If we do, we shall not live fully and richly. The fear of catastrophe is an impediment to a fully-lived life. Let us be undaunted in the face of storms (literal or metaphorical). Life is worth the risk. The old timers I used to know had a saying that fits this. "Don't worry about the mule going blind, just load the wagon!" Don't worry about the "what ifs," the "could happens," just live!

The second thing that may abridge a fully-lived life is speculation about the purpose of God in our daily affairs. This is a chronic problem among people of faith, especially people of Biblical faith. They are constantly wondering "What is God saying in this?" "What is God's purpose in that?" Pastors are regularly confronted with the anxiety and even the neuroses of the faithful in this regard. To this Ecclesiastes says, "Just as you do not know the path of the wind and how bones are formed in the womb of a pregnant woman, so you do not know the activity of God who makes all things" V 5. Astonishing! And, liberating!

The fact is (and this, unfortunately, is not "known" by many people of faith) we do not really know at any given moment what God's intention is in the details of our daily lives. We have some understanding of the larger, over-arching purpose of God from such texts as Romans 8:29-30 and Ephesians 1:3-14. And I want to emphasize that even this understanding and knowledge is based on faith, not on things that are provable from observation of the details of our lives. But, in terms of the daily details of our lives, we cannot declare with any certainty what God's intentions are. I lost my mother at age thirteen months. Why? Because of sin in her life or my father's life? The thought is repellent. Because God wanted to teach us a lesson? No less repellent. Because... Oh, quit! We do not know and cannot now know. My poor father wasted nearly half his life brooding over such questions. And those "church-people" who presume to declare the "whys" and the "wherefores" of such events are arrogant no-nothings who remind me of Mark Twain's censure of a certain minister, "He was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity, that he might fill it!"

Brooding and fretting about the purpose of God in the daily troubles and threats of life will only impede daring, risky living.

What we are called to at such a point is faith in God himself. This, too, is a risky thing. Faith always is. One thinks of "Pascal's Wager." I also think of the people of faith described in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews. Here are people who risked everything because of their faith in God. They forsook their homelands, they sacrificed fame and fortune, they offered up their very lives in faith. They were undaunted, intrepid, fearless, and courageous. And all of these things were borne of their faith in God.

Jesus calls us to a such a faith and to such a fully-lived life, promising life and abundant life to those who forsake trust in themselves, their own plans, their own devices in order to trust in him.

Armed with such faith, it is possible to live a different kind of life, a life of faith that is undaunted before the "could happen" things of life, a life undiminished by fruitless, futile questions of what God's purpose is in this or that thing. This is the fully-lived life.

It is such a life that is promised in the word of Jesus, "You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."

Billy Carlton Overton and the Lost Cow by E.D. "Shinbone" Smith, Bomar, Oklahoma, formerly Indian Territory, or "IT"

2010-06-17T19:55:00.000-07:00

They used to be this old boy down in Love's Valley named Billy Carlton Overton. He had lived down there all his life and was kin to old Sob Love that the Valley is named for.

Old Sob was a character of biblical proportions, and I ain't exaggerating a thang. He was married to six different women. The story goes that he would sit with a Winchester '73 rifle on the north bank of the Red River at a crossing there and when he would see a wagon coming over with a good lookin' woman on board, he'd shoot the husband and let him float down the river and take the woman as a wife. That's what they said. I couldn't say, but I do know for a fact that I have been to the Love family cemetery and seen the six graves of the wives of old Sob and ever'one of 'um said, "wife of Sob Love, aged about 33 years of age." Some folks said that "Sob" stood for "son-of-a-bitch" and that was that.

Anyhow, old Billy Carlton was a nephew of of Sob and lived his whole life out in the Valley. Farmed and fished and generally got by on a shoestring, if you know what I mean.

Well, one week a cow of Billy's come up missin' and he worried and fretted about it for a spell. Wadn't nothing he could do, either. So he decides to take matters in his own hands and go to the church to announce his loss and ask the people there for their help.

Now, Billy, he wadn't much of a churchman, if you know what I mean, so ever'body was kinda surprised to see him show up on Sunday. Some of 'em was praying for him to git saved and hopin' that the Lord had prepared his heart for the Gospel.

Now, they allus had the announcements at the end of the service, so old Billy says, to the preacher,

"Preacher, I have somethin' to say at then end. I have lost a cow and want the people to help me find her."

He said this with a loud voice, because old Billy couldn't hear hisself fart, he was so hard of hearing.

And the preacher said, "That's jist fine, Billy," and that was that.

So Billy set through the whole service, down to the altar call, and he didn't go up front either, to the consternation of several people who were praying hard for him to see the light.

The preacher finally said the last prayer and began the announcements...

"Mary Lou Smith and Glen Hutchins is getting married next Saturday in the church here..." the preacher began.

Well, Old Billy couldn't hear the details and thought the preacher was talking about his cow, so he hollers out

"Yessir, and the way you can recognize her is she has all the hair pulled outa 'er tail and one tit missin'!"

Crazy for God: How Then Shall We Live? Part III

2010-06-11T11:27:00.000-07:00

And then Monday comes, and with it, a new week A new week with new challenges and expectations. A new march of days that will test our faith, hope and love. And with the week comes a whole new assortment of fears, anxieties, and doubts. Life is, after all, life. We are expected to live it, and we are expected to live it as Christians.

How shall we live it? And, how shall we live it without lapsing into the extreme of spiritual craziness on the one hand, or despair or apathy on the other?

Let us live in freedom. Most spiritual insanity, in my experience as a pastor, comes from guilt, fear, or insecurity. People ridden by such things live in a state of dis-ease. When the dis-ease becomes acute enough they lapse into degrees of insanity: disease. The proclamation of the Gospel in the weekly service of God by the faith community declares freedom. We are freed from guilt by the promise that Christ's blood has answered every demand posed by our sins. We are freed from fear by the proclamation of "Fear not! I am with you." We are freed from insecurity by the assurance that our lives are in the hands of a God who works all things according to the purpose of his will and, therefore, is working everything together for our ultimate good. This is a part of the freedom announced every week as the Gospel is placarded in Word and Sacrament. We live best when we live in this freedom. It is ours. It is not something that we must yet achieve. It has been given us in grace. We must affirm it and live in it.

In this freedom, let us work. "Six days shall you work" is not a sentence to drudgery, but a charter of liberty. We are made for work. We are only happy if we have good, sensible work to do. Whatever our work, be it on an assembly line, in an office, on a work site, in a study writing, or in a studio painting, we are engaged in God's own work in the world.

In this freedom, let us play. The play instinct is endemic to the creation. The lambs and puppies all play. The Psalmist celebrates the play of the whales in the sea. Children play and so do their adult counterparts. God has wired us to play, just as he has to work.

In this freedom, let us engage in fellowship with others. We can never be happy or healthy if we are solitary. We are social, even as the Trinity himself is social. We must cultivate our social relationships: in talk and listening, in laughter and mutual tears, in telling and hearing stories, in acts of help and words of encouragement. And, I am not simply talking about Christian fellowship! We must cultivate fellowship (a shared life) with every human person that will permit us to do so. The human qualities of compassion, shared goals, empathy, outrage, humor, etc. are not the sole province of people of faith. Sadly, people of faith (especially the CFG types) are often lacking in these things. This is what made Mark Twain comment, "Heaven for the climate, hell for the company!" Let us nurture friendships, inside and outside of the community of faith.

A caveat here. There is a type of CFG religion that sees such relationships with those outside the faith as a means to an end. We befriend people in order to convert them. There are even books and programs described as how to do "Friendship Evangelism." This is pernicious and mercenary! Rightly, do those who unmask such motivation in Christians despise them for it. We are to love our neighbor as ourselves, not to use them or to manipulate them, but for themselves alone.

In the freedom of the Gospel, let us engage in other acts of mercy and help. Let us be rich in good works. Let us be generous. Let us act kindly and compassionately. Let us seek justice and right in our dealings with others. Where possible, let us intervene to prevent and alleviate suffering and unfairness.

In all this, let us live in an environment of prayer. Let us live in praise, for the new day, for the glories of creation, for the blessings of work, play, and friendship. Let us pray for others in their needs, weaknesses, and sins. Let us pray for ourselves in the face of the same things. Let us live in prayer. He who lives in prayer, lives in God. He has bid us come, he has dissolved every impediment to our coming, he loves our fellowship, he delights to engage with us and to answer our prayers.

Let us, in this freedom, live in wonder. "Every day is a god," Annie Dilliard reminds us. And for us who believe, every day is a wonder and a wondrous gift from the God who made it all, directs it all, and will one day redeem it all and bring it into a glory unimaginable to us now. To live in such a "theater of glory" (Calvin) and not be full of wonder is tantamount to being blind, deaf, and utterly senseless. It is one the tragedies of CFG religion that it is so self-absorbed that it cannot appreciate the dappled light upon a trout stream or the chuckle of a six-week old infant who has just discovered laughter. Shame.

Let, us, finally, live in hope. Let us live in hope of the next Lord's Day when we will again experience heaven on earth in covenant renewal. And let us live in hope of the final, great Lord's Day that will usher in an eternal state of rest and peace, unknown and unknowable to us now. In that state, sins will be forever expunged, hopes fulfilled, injustices and violations rectified, "for God himself will wipe away all tears from their eyes."

Then we shall be where we would be.
Then we shall be what we should be.
Things that are not now, nor could be,
Then shall be our own.

This, too me, is the ideal life. It is life that is alive and that lives! It is the categorical opposite of the craziness I have earlier critiqued. It is a reality to me, in that I have experienced it. It is an aspiration to me, in that I never, alas, experience it perfectly. It is a worthy life and a worthy aspiration. Won't you join me in living it and breathing out after it?

Crazy for God, the Alternative, Part II

2010-06-10T19:23:00.000-07:00

So... What constitutes a sane Christian spirituality? How do we live lives devoted to the Christian God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and yet avoid the "craziness" I have castigated in my earlier post?

Of course, there are those whose think any religious faith, if it is a serious faith, is crazy. I know such people, know where they are coming from, yet continue in my contrarian position: that faith, serious faith, in the God described in the early Christian creeds, is credible and humanizing.

And such faith is is lived out, not solely in my own mental and emotional world. It is not a private faith. It is not a private spirituality. It is public, and that, in at least two ways.

First, it is a public faith in the Church's historical declaration of that faith in the creeds. The Church has declared from ancient times, "I believe...we believe..." What follows is a declaration of faith that is rooted in the historical reality of Jesus Christ and his works. From this historical faith we move to other articles of faith that logically follow this faith in Jesus. This is not an experience, or a feeling, or a self-generated idea. This is the ancient and timeless faith of Christians in community throughout the ages.

Secondly, the faith of Christians is a faith declared and experienced week by week in their public gatherings throughout the world. It is in community that Christians declare and experience their faith. This happens when the following elements are present.

The worship of the true and living God in liturgical sharing.

The confession and forgiveness of sins through the proclamation of the Gospel.

The proclamation of the Word in preaching.

The renewal of the covenant of grace in the sacraments.

The reunion with one another in Christian love.

The blessing of the living God upon the week to come.

Each of these and all of them together ensure a real and vital Christian faith and help to preserve us from the insanity of religious mania. Let me try to unpack each one with a few comments...

We meet for worship. We come together to share our delight in the beauty and glory of God. We come together in the presence of God to acknowledge him in his works of creation, provision, protection, and salvation. We come together to delight ourselves in his faithfulness and love.

This is a communal act. It is not an act of private devotion. It is an act of shared devotion. This is what makes the singing of hymns important. In hymn singing we are expressing our faith, love, and hope in a united act of worship. We are taken out of ourselves. We are saved from ourselves- our moods, troubles, tragedies. We are forced to consider the larger reality, not just of God, but of our being a part of a historical continuum that has existed for centuries and exists now in the worshiping community.

This same principle is what makes liturgy important. The liturgy is, once again, the community acting, speaking, thinking outside the narrow confines of personal failure and victory, sorrow and joy. It is the community joining together in all these things, and others like them, yet doing so in a shared experience of wonder, love, and praise in the presence of God. In the liturgy this shared faith and experience becomes a shared language as we speak together of God and to him.

This shared experience is never more profound and poignant than in the confession and forgiveness of sins. When we publicly and in unison confess our sins and weaknesses, our sorrow and resolve to repent, we are reminded of basic truths and experiences shared by all who join us in this act. The basic truth is we are are all a sorry, tragic mess. In liturgical, shared confession there is no place for one to consider himself better than another. And there is no room for one to consider himself worse than his brother, his sister. We are confessing together, "We have sinned." We are saying to God, to the world, and to one another, "We are miserable sinners." Though sobering, there is something profoundly joyful, even humorous about this.

When we are told in the Gospel that God has mercy on sinners, that he will forgive sin, that he has no delight in judgment, but delights in mercy, we find a corporate, communal relief and joy. Because we have been honest to God, because he has responded in an affirmative "Yes!" through his mercy in Jesus, we can, together, start over. We are, together, given a new beginning, a beginning like the first fresh day in Paradise!

In that freshness, we are ready to hear God speak and he speaks to the gathered faith community in the reading and preaching of his Word, the Bible. As forgiven souls we can hear him speak to us in correction without despair, in instruction without discouragement, in affirmation without pride, and in hope without presumption. This is what preaching is in the hearing community. It is the speech of God informing and fortifying us for a new week in the world.

Having spoken to us, God calls us to share in the mysteries, the rituals of the family. This is the meaning of the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. Every family has its rituals and the family of God is no exception. In baptism, we are together reminded that our inception in this family is marked by this ritual. We have put on the family dress. We have been clothed with the family insignia. Being dressed for dinner, in the Eucharist we are brought to the family table for a family meal where our Lord presents himself to us as the bread and wine of our sustained life together. Both are marks and seals of his covenant of grace, his pledge to remember us in mercy and faithfulness. And these are shared mysteries. It is not just "Jesus and me," but Jesus and us, and more, Jesus and all who share our faith in heaven and in earth!

In all these acts of worship, humility, and renewal, we are aware of the persons around us. They have faces that we can recognize from a block away, they have stories that have become ours as ours have become theirs, they have graces that encourage us, and they have sins and weakness that aggravate us. But, they are our people, our family. Each time we meet together we are aware of our love for them. Each time they disappoint us, we are challenged to forgive them. When they move or die, we are grieved at our loss of them. When new people appear, they are welcomed in love and anticipation of our shared life together.

Having received our worship, having forgiven our sins, having spoken to us in his sure Word, having renewed his covenant with us in family mysteries, having strengthened us in a revisitation of love, God does more. He sends us out under his benediction of grace and peace to live like real human beings in the world and in a new week replete with possibilities! "The LORD bless thee and keep thee, the LORD make his face to shine upon thee. The LORD be gracious to thee and give thee peace." Whatever the week holds, whether triumph or tragedy, we face it together in the assurance of God's blessing, care, protection, presence, and peace! Not a bad way to start a new week!

Now, it should require no special pleading to make the case that this approach to Christian spirituality is a healthy, happy, and holy alternative to the CFG ("Crazy for God") condition I have denounced earlier. Augustine prayed, "Lord, save me from that evil man, myself!" We need to be saved from our personal evils, but we also need to be saved from our tendencies toward insanity, especially religious insanity. The weekly, communal worship of God is his most important means to effect this aspect of our salvation.

Crazy for God, Part I

2010-06-10T11:21:00.001-07:00

My title comes from Frank Schaeffer's tell-all book about his parents, Francis and Edith Schaeffer. Now Frank is frank and that's a fact, and it is clear to all that he has had his "issues" through the years (Haven't we all?). The idolizers of the Schaeffers and L'Abri have been scandalized and the hagiographers have been burning up their keyboards trying to set the record straight. What is missed, it seems to me, is that Frank was there and, whatever his issues, he does have considerable inside information about these things.

I, like so many, owe a great debt to the Schaeffers. It was their written work that saved me from fundamentalism and gave me the beginnings of a Christian world-view. I love their memory and thank God for their legacy (at least most of it). But, "the best of men are men at best," and all idols, even evangelical ones, have feet of clay.

Frank's frank assessment that his parents were "crazy, crazy for God" rings true because I have myself been victim to this condition and have spent most of my life in the company of people who were susceptible to religious mania of one kind or the other. I am not being cute. It has only been during the past few years, when my life has thrown me into the company of non-religious people, that I have come to see how pervasive and pernicious this condition is.

So, I want to venture into this dangerous ground and talk about the marks of being "crazy for God." I do so, not to hurt people. To the contrary, this kind of mania hurts people. It does great harm to the individuals possessed by it. It does great harm to their families. And, it does great harm to the people we are trying to give Christian witness to- the non-religious. It is with the wish to help, rather than hurt, that I write.

I think it is this kind of religious extremism that we are warned against in Ecclesiastes 7:15-18. "Be not righteous over much...be not wicked over much." The writer is warning us against an extremism that eschews moderation and temperance.

The "crazy for God" (hereafter CFG) condition is marked by monomania, that is, an obsessive and inordinate attention to and zeal for one idea or a few ideas clustered around one idea. In our case "God" is the one idea and the cluster may be salvation, death, hell, heaven, the good life, etc., all emanating from "God." This is the God-obsessed soul or the God-intoxicated soul. In either case, whether "obsessed" or "intoxicated," these are not generally considered to be healthy states of mind. And the CFG person is generally not a healthy soul.

It is little wonder that the CFG person would be obsessive even if God were not the obsession. Hence we see personalities like Gary Busey's. He is obsessive about drugs, sex, and alcohol. He experiences a conversion. He becomes CFG. The temperament is already there, the occasion/ideology presents itself, and, Voila!, we have a new soldier of the cross. The same thing happens with this personality type who converts to Islam, to Veganism, or to Amway.

Such people become obsessed, or, perhaps, better: possessed. Their every thought is focused on God-things. Their speech becomes laden with God-talk... They have to be so careful here: There must be no talk of being lucky, or being proud, or being happy. It is not luck, but Providence. It is not pride, but thankfulness. It is not happiness, but joy. The English language itself becomes a mine-field where one must be very careful as to where one puts one's foot. And within the community of the CFG folks, a misstep means correction or rebuke. I once was corrected for announcing a "pot-luck dinner" at church by a CFG lady of some years who primly reminded me that the proper jargon was "pot-Providence." And the "possession" goes to every other aspect of life. Every motive, every thought, every action, every word, every omission, and every ambition is scrutinized with surgical exactness to make sure it is "godly." No wonder people on the outside have little interest in and downright aversion to such a life!

The CFG personality is also driven by the baser passions of the human psyche, such as fear, guilt, shame, triumphalism, and pride. How many people are in professional religious vocations, not because they love God and love what they are doing, but because of these dark little critters hidden under the rocks of their minds. So much of what I have described in the earlier paragraphs of this piece is too often driven by these dark things.

Now, it is a fact that people who are motivated by such darkness often soar off into the darkness of darker things. I have at other times described such people as those who have screwed the lid down so tightly on their darkness that they have broken off the bottle neck and all the dark stuff comes flying out- uncontrollably. Hence the scandals among the faithful, the sex, power, money stuff that comes to the forefront in the lives of people like Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart, and the Hiker of the Appalachian Trail. These are all CFG people.

There is another factor in this and it is difficult to discuss because of the subtleties involved in it. Christianity is a evangelical faith, it is one of the world's converting faiths. That is to say, it is concerned, in obedience to its Lord's commission, to "make disciples." The problem arises when the darker triumphalist tendencies of the heart to conquer, to overcome, to dominate replace a living and sharing of the Good News that rests upon the sovereign grace of God to gently and sweetly persuade minds and hearts toward himself. CFG people do not appreciate this distinction. As such it is not surprising that they are in spirit much like the New Atheists in their passion to be right and to make converts. There is little contrast between the spirit of a Pat Robertson and a Christopher Hitchens. Perhaps the one is CFG and the other, CFA (Crazy for Atheism).

Over all, the most glaring trait of the CFG folks is their complete incapacity to enjoy life. The festive, partying, eating, drinking, dancing, laughing, singing, shouting life of the Bible is seldom if ever present among these folks. The boisterous, loud, over-the-top living that affirms life, sex, birth, work, fun, money, possessions, the sun and the moon, the sea and the dry land, and even affliction and death, and on and on and on... This is not possible for the CFG person. He is miserable because-and this is the tragic irony of it all- he is not obsessed with God but with yet another projection of his sad self that he visualizes as God (which itself is a form of idolatry).

I close with a little poem that I cannot find the source of. It has meant the world to me for over thirty years. It is the antidote to the CFG mania and admirably capsulizes the truth of Ecclesiates 7:15-18 (and the rest of the book). Here's how it goes:

Man,
Feare God
And bee merrye
And give not for this worlde
A cherrye.

A Low Place in the Ground by E. D. "Shinbone" Smith, Bomar, Oklahoma, formerly Indian Territory or "IT"

2010-06-09T20:12:00.000-07:00

When my Uncle Nat was jist nine, they was building the big fireplace in the big house. Granddaddy Black John had got tired of messing with stoves and wanted him an open fire in the parlor that he could whittle in front of and spit into if he chose to, though Granny Eller would git after him about spitting in the house- even if it was into a fireplace. So on a fine fall day the mason come and they commenced.

The mason was a feller named Ransom J. Stuck and he had two boys who come with him to mix the mortar and carry the hod of bricks. These boys was none too bright and mixing mud and carrying bricks was about all their intelligence was up to. But, they was right smart workers and that makes up for a lot, even limited brains. The old man had them boys digging a pit for the footer of this fireplace while he sawed out an opening in the north wall of the house for the chimney. Once the hole was dug, they broke up all kinds of old bottles and jars in the bottom of it to discourage the gophers and armadillos from digging under the foundation. They poured a good mess of concrete into the hole and reinforced it with junk iron from the old forge north of the house. Then old Stuck got down to laying the bricks. Granddaddy had traded a cow for them bricks and they was good 'uns, too. Red as the Red River in flood. Now, Ransom may have been jist a sight brighter than his boys, but that old booger could lay them bricks- plumb and level as the Pyramids of Egypt. He had got up to about hearth level when he and granddaddy and everbody else was drawn to somebody hollerin' over west of the place. Now, this hollerin' was serious hollerin' and so they all knew that something serious had taken place.

Now, about a mile northwest of Granddaddy's place was a family of share croppers named Hughes. They lived in a little Jenny Lind house with two rooms and a shed for a kitchen. Four or five kids and a worn out old woman in that pitiful house! Old Hughes- Tom, I think was his given name- though everbody always called him "Hughes" or "Old Hughes," he was a character and put on certain airs, though he was as poor as Job's turkey. For instance, he chewed tobacco and ever time he spit, he made a big deal of the thang, spitting and saying "Phooey!" when he did, like some big exclamation mark. Always wore a cheap red bandanna around his neck like a picture-show cowboy. And always wore a big hat and tucked his overalls legs into the top of his boots. When he come into Thackerville, the men would always say, "There comes old Charlie Goodnight," or, "I thought Booger Red was down in Texas." It was kindly pitiful, if the truth be known.

Well, this feller come a hollerin' for somebody to come, so Granddaddy hitched up a sorrel mare to his buggy and off they went over the new plowed ground of the west field, bumping and thumping all the way. Now, unbeknownst to Granddaddy and everbody else, Uncle Nat had crawled up into the luggage hole in the back of the buggy and was holding on for dear life as Granddaddy whipped that mare across that new plowed ground.

Well, they get to the Hughes place and Leland Foster, the foreman for the Gladney Ranch where the Hugheses share cropped is standing in the yard next to Mrs. Hughes who is sitting on an up-turned lard bucket with her face in her hands. When Granddaddy approaches with the feller who'd come a hollerin', Leland jist tosses his head in the direction of a big post oak tree down the hill from that little shack of a house. Granddaddy starts in that direction when he notices Uncle Nat following him.

"Nat, what the hell are you doing here?" he says.

"I jist wanted to see what was goin' on, Papa."

"Well, come on then. You wanted to see, so now you'll see!"

As they come near that old tree they could see Hughes hunched over with his head on his chest like he was asleep or drunk. Only thang is, they was this dark stain all over his chest that went down past the crotch of his overalls. His booted feet were funny, too, with the toes turned out. Uncle Nat suddenly thought about hog-killin' time. In the sandy dirt next to his blood-stained hand was a cut-throat razor, and we're talkin' about it literally, now, son.

Granddaddy squatted down and grabbed a tuft of old Hughes's hair and gently lifted the head.

"Well, the son-of-a-bitch meant business, anyhow," he said in the loud voice that he normally used.

Old Hughes had cut his gullet clean to the neck bone, first on the left side and then on the right. Two cuts. The blood had sprayed in a half circle all over his front and around him on the ground.
At the sight of the wounds and the pale neck muscles drained of blood, Uncle Nat began to retch and turned away.

"I reckon you'll thank twice next time you want to see,'" Granddaddy said.

Well, they got Leland down and the hired hand and carried the body up to the buggy. The hired hand had to hold the head up to keep it from pullin' completely off. They managed to get the body in the baggage hole and Uncle Nat got up front with his daddy for the ride back to the big house. They wasn't any real roads up to the Hughes place, so they went where the sheriff and the undertakers could come and deal with the mess.

When they got him home and out of the baggage hole, they laid him out on the back porch and poured buckets of water over him to kinda clean him up. Uncle Nat carried that water from the well.

Well, the Hugheses moved away- nobody knew where, and the old house finally sagged and caved in. There's a cattle manger there where they feed the cows, and a barn, but apart from that, there's nothing left of the place.

Uncle Nat and me were squirrel hunting over that way one time, years after this had happened- that was long about 1911 or 12, I reckon. Anyhow, that was thirty years or more after that sad thang, and Uncle Nat took me to the tree and told me the story. Leland or somebody had scooped out dirt at the place to cover the old man's blood out of pity for the family, and the low place in the ground was still there. Still is, far as I know, because ever time I am over that way, I look and remember. That low place in the ground is still there.

I remember asking Uncle Nat, "Did that thang bother you any?"

"Bother me? I slept with old Hughes most nights for the best part of the next year!"

"Why'd he do it, you reckon?" I asked.

"Well, they was pore as pore could be, and he had all these big idees," he said, "and the old lady put it this way: 'I expect he jist give out.'"

Ever time I sit in front on Uncle Nat's fireplace with a big hell-roarin' fire in it, I thank about old Hughes and that fine fall day. It's a fine fireplace, too. Old Ransom J. Stuck could make a flue on a fireplace that would draw mighty fine. This one will pull a lady's skirt and petticoat up.

"He Was Loved" by E.D. "Shinbone" Smith, Bomar, Oklahoma, formerly Indian Territory or "IT"

2010-06-05T16:20:00.000-07:00

They was this family of Burkharts that lived across the Red River in Sivell's Bend. They had a purty fine place over on Fish Creek-had beef cattle and few dairy cows they milked, along with a few crops. It was a rough piece of country with lots of limestone rocks and jist as many rattlesnakes. One of them big rattlers killed one of their hounds one time and the fang marks on the pore devil's head measured two inches across. But, the Burkharts had inherited money from their daddy who had the first dime he ever made. So, all in all, compared to some folks they was purty flush.

They was a half brother in the family, named Blaine. He took his inheritance and invested it and, though he wadn't rich, managed to live purty good without ever having to work very much. Built him a camp down on the Texas side of the River where he batched. Said he never did meet a woman whose company meant more to him than his own, though they was rumors that a woman or two was seen there from time time. Mostly, if he wanted company, he'd call in his buddies and they'd fish and play cards to all hours- and for days on end. And drink this home-brew and corn whiskey that old Blaine always had a-going. That whiskey would pop the top of your head right off, and I ain't speaking from somebody else's reportage, neither. So, to the rest of the family and to most of the people on both sides of the River, Blaine Summerall or "BS" (he enjoyed the irony) was a "ne'er-do-well." Didn't work, liked to have fun, and drank too much. That'll jist about do to describe a "ne'er-do-well" in our part of the country.

And that's the problem that old lady Burkhart had with him. She'd been a Parsons before she married and her old daddy was a Parsons and a parson, which is to say, he was a Baptist preacher. And among the thangs that they positively hated was not working, having fun, and drinking of any kind. Mr. Burkhart, John Daniels or "JD," he sorta took on her line about thangs when he married her, though his convictions didn't run as deep as hers. She was a very handsome woman, especially when she was young, and some men can put up with a lot to have a good-lookin' woman as a bed-partner. So Mizz Burkhart didn't have no time nor patience with half-brother Blaine. JD, on the other hand, kindly felt sorry for BS. He'd lost his daddy when he was jist a shirt-tail kid and always had this lonely, melancholy streak. Truth be told, he kindly envied old BS a little, too, like a lot of hard-working, serious-minded, and mostly tee-total men in the community did.

Ever once in a while JD'd invite the half-brother up to the big house for supper. Mizz Burkhart would be polite and cook the best of meals (Lord, she was a cook!), but her manner would display her disgust for pore old BS (She always address him as "Mister Summerall."). Any time he was around her mouth was so tight it looked like a razor slit. Anyhow, they'd have a big, fine supper and then set on the porch and talk until after dark. Then BS would light his lantern and walk the four or five miles back to his shanty on the River.

One dark night after one of these fine meals, they's settin' and talkin' and there's this lull in the conversation. All of a sudden old BS jist starts to cry. And I don't mean a weepy kind of cryin' neither. He is sobbin' and snortin' with the tears and snot runnin' down over his shirt front. JD and the old lady jist set there astonished because grown men didn't cry in our community unless they was drunk, and the strongest thang they'd drunk that evening was the iced tea. Finally, JD says in a tender voice, because he'd been purty tore up hisself over BS's outburst, "Brother, what is the matter?"

"I was jist thankin' about what's going to be done with me after I die."

"What-a-ya-mean 'after I die'?" says JD.

"I mean where'm I going to be buried?" says BS.

"Why, Brother, you'll be buried right out yonder with Daddy and Mammy and me and all the rest of us, I reckon."

"Are you sure?" asks BS.

"Sure, I'm sure. In fact, I promise it!" says JD.

"Well, Brother, I thank ye!"

After a few minutes, BS pulled himself together, thanked the Mizzus for the fine supper, lit his lantern, and cut a trail for the River camp.

The old couple set in the dark for a spell before she cleared her throat.

"You'll not be burying him in the same place as me!" she declared.

"What on earth do you mean? He's family." JD protested.

"John Daniels Burkhart," she said, raising her voice jist a little, "I will not be buried in the same place as a shiftless, no-good, drunkard!"

And that was that. JD knew better to argue with her when she took on that tone, so he put the whole thang in the back of his mind, though from time to time, he'd study it.

Thang is, the old lady died a few years later and before JD or BS. She kinda burned out the way a lot of these tightly-wound folks do. JD outlived BS, BS being eight year older. They buried Mizzus Burkhart close to JD's momma and daddy, and left a place between them for JD when it come his time.

JD found old Blaine dead one morning down at the camp jist starin' up into the rafters like he was seein' the angels comin' for him. Folks said he'd drunk so much of that corn whiskey that the embalmers would be wastin' their time and the family's money to embalm him.

But, JD remembered his promise and he also remembered the old lady's strong feelings. He'd studied the thang till he had figured out a way to honor both of them.

So, today, if you can find the Burkhart family cemetery- it's all growed-up with weeds and catclaw, and watch out for them rattlesnakes- you'll find JD and his Mizzus laid to rest right like I said before, right next to the old couple. And exactly thirty-three paces (JD paced it off himself, and very carefully) to the North under an old cedar tree and a respectable distance from the rest of them, you'll find BS's stone and these words engraved in it

Blaine Robert Summerall
1889-1963
Brother to John Daniels Burkhart
"He Was Loved"

The Indian Paintbrush blooms on his grave in the spring.

Epiphany

2010-06-03T11:40:00.000-07:00

For years he lived in dark mines, digging in the bowels of the earth. He thought he was mining coal, so dark and nasty his existence was. He despaired and cursed his life and was tempted to curse God. Only when he came back into the air, into the light, under the broad, blue sky, did he see that he had been finding gold.

SEMPER FI, Part II

2010-05-31T07:12:00.000-07:00

"The conditions were awful. It would rain and rain for days. Your clothes would finally begin to rot off you. We lived in a sea of mud. And the heat and bugs. Some of the guys caught malaria bad. Then the stench of death- you could taste it in your mouth. I don't really know how we did it... Had too, I guess."

John Allen Deahl is sitting opposite me in a green leather office chair. He is dressed in his uniform- the one he wears when he does color guard service at military funerals. Behind him is this U.S. Navy flag and the "Welcome Home" banner. He is squinting because of the spotlight I have set up. I am drawing in paint with a brush on the large canvas on my easel- 4 x 6 feet. I am working on the design and composition and am beginning to sketch him into it.

"Pretty soon in them conditions, you lose the idealism, you know the thing that made me go to Pittsbugh on December eighth. You just want to stay alive and you want your buddies to stay alive, so you just make up your mind to kill that Jap bastard that is tryin' to kill you. It comes down finally to killing so you and your buddies will get to go home when the whole sorry mess is over. I still have bad feelin's about the Japs. I won't buy their cars or their TV sets. I saw this commercial the other day about "Mitsubishi" cars. Mitsubishi made the engines in the planes that bombed Pearl Harbor and now they're selling their cars in this country! Crazy!"

"I didn't realize this was goin' to be such a big painting. Makin' a reg'lar production out of this ain't you, Preacher?"

I ask him, "What kept you going?"

"Well, Chloe for one thing. I kept this picture of her in my helmet through the whole thing. The idea of Chloe being here when I came back. I didn't have much of a faith when I left home, but when you see what you see out there, it makes you think. Made me think, anyhow. And, I wanted to get back home and go to work and make a life. Hunt, fish, you know."

"We saw awful things, Preacher. And, we did some awful things. Didn't seem awful then and I still think some of it is funny. We was stackin' these dead Japs one day. Just to get 'em outa the way. There was this dead Jap officer who died with this huge erection- this happens some times when people die in battle. I read once that it happens to hanging victims. Anyhow, here was this Jap officer with this big hard-on, so we just tied a little white flag of surrender to it! I still think that's funny. I haven't even never told my children the stuff I'm tellin' you."

"I mentioned this forgiveness thing, Preacher. I want to forgive these people, but I can't forget what they did. They were horrible, worse than animals- what they did to the Kid and others. What they did to prisoners in them camps. I try to forgive 'em, then I remember something and I'm right back where I started. The Bible says that God forgets when he forgives, so I reckon I haven't forgiven them if I keep remembering stuff. Whatd'ya think."

I tell him that God's forgetting is probably a figure of speech to stress how fully God forgives. God can't not remember, but he chooses to forget in the sense of not holding it against us. We can do the same thing. Forgiveness is not forgetting, but choosing not to hold things against those who have injured us or those we care about. John studies this for a minute.

"I think I like that idea. That's stands to reason about God "can't not remember." I'll think about that, Preacher. How many times will I need to come up here? Not that I'm complaining; I like talkin' with you."

I tell him that three or four sittings will probably be enough and that I can borrow the uniform to work on it and his medals and ribbons without him in it.

In the weeks that follow he talks on and in doing so I think he talks a lot of pain out of his memories- memories over fifty years old.

"There was this sky-pilot, a chaplain, who talked with me near the end about faith in God. Told me God must have had something in mind for me to keep me alive through all those campaigns and all the mess. That's when I started to pray more regular. If I got back home I wanted my life to amount to something."

"Preacher, I'm really glad you decided to do this. All this talking has done me good."

When I finally finish the portrait, I ask Chloe and John to come and see it. Their reaction is mixed.

"I thought you were going to paint him like he was back then," she says. "And he looks so sour, so grim." All John says is, "Preacher, that mole on my face is as big as a Japanese beetle!"

I enter the work in the bi-annual West Virginia Juried Exhibition. It places and hangs in the Capitol complex for three months. I hear that Chloe and John are taking friends and family every week to view the portrait. I have called it "Semper Fi."

Months later the phone rings. "Preacher!" he says. "Come down sometime today when you get time. I want to show you something."

At the end of the day, I drop by. John leads me into his den and asks me to have a seat. Then he goes to his gun cabinet and digs around in it. When he returns he has a bayonet in one hand and his Marine Ka-Bar knife in the other. "I want you to have these. But, don't tell my kids that I gave 'em to you." I am visibly moved and so is he, but he brushes it aside. "I could get into a load of shit if they knew I gave 'em to you."

Years later, I am telling another Marine friend this story.

"He must have thought a hell of lot of you to give you his Ka-Bar and bayonet."

Yes, I think he did.

SEMPER FI

2010-05-30T15:33:00.001-07:00

His name was John Allen Deahl. He was born in 1920 and died in 2006. I was his friend from 1979 til the day I buried him in a cemetery in South Charleston, West Virginia. I was his neighbor and pastor for twenty-two years. We spent lots of time together because of our love of art, wood working, hunting, and tools. We regaled one another with stories and jokes (not always the Sunday School variety!). He may have been the funniest human being I have ever known- and I have known some funny ones. He was also rough and tough. There was a brutality in him, even though he was a very gentle, neighborly man. I am going to tell you how that brutality came to be in him.

He married his high school sweet-heart, Chloe. She told me once that her father, a German-Swiss farmer, not given to emotional displays, sobbed on her wedding day. He was sure that John was the wrong man for his little girl. But, they enjoyed over sixty years of wedded life, raised six children and sent them to college, working as a glass-cutter and a nurse. Chloe was a girl of film star beauty; even as an old woman who had endured fifteen major surgeries ("My body looks like a road-map," she once said to me.) and the births of those six kids, she was still strikingly beautiful til her last illness. Chloe was tough, too, more than a match for John. For more than sixty years they were faithful Christians, serving and worshiping in the church I pastored.

On Saturday, December 6th, 1941, John traveled from his hometown of Butler, Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh and bought a brand new Oldsmobile sedan with money he had saved working in the glass plant in Butler. On the following day, he took his uncle for a spin in the new car, the radio providing background music for their conversation. When the programming was interrupted with a special announcement, John pulled over on the berm of the country road they were on. They listened in silence as the announcer declared that the American Pacific Fleet had been bombed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

After they had listened for a while, John clicked off the radio and turning to his uncle, said, "I want you to go with me tomorrow to Pittsburgh, take this car back to the dealership, and get my money back. I am going to join the Marines." And that is just what they did.

From the 8th of December 1941 until the 18th of November 1945, John A. Deahl served his country and his fellow-Marines as a combat fighter in the Pacific. He endured some of the most horrific fighting and dehumanizing conditions in places like Guadalcanal and Okinawa. He watched as his fellow-Marines were cut down or obliterated. He suffered the privations and terrors that have been so well documented in the recent HBO series, The Pacific.

"I had this buddy from Baltimore," he told me, "who was always going into no man's land in the lulls between engagements...lookin' for souvenirs. You'd a been like him. Looking for all this Jap junk. Wanted him a samurai sword... Well, we kept tellin' him, 'They're goin' to get you, kid. You keep it up and they're goin' to get you, sure as hell.' Well, preacher, they did get him and we heard him screamin' all night long. Found him the next day. They'd tortured him all night long. Animals. Worse than animals! They'd cut off his privates and stuffed 'em, in his mouth before he died. Animals! I've had a lot of trouble forgivin' the Japs because of stuff like that. I still don't know if I have forgiven them. I know as a Christian I should, but it's hard."

How I came to hear such stories is a story in itself and I will tell it to you...

I am like the "kid" in the story John told. I am always looking for treasures among the junk that other people collect. Some days I am lucky. On this particular day I was very lucky. I was prowling in a real junk store (not an "Antique Mall") on west Washington Street in Charleston. It was a gloomy day and I was about to leave when I spied this plastic bag with something colorful in it. I opened the bag and inside it was a woolen U.S.N. ensign with the battles from the Pacific written in India ink on the canvas rim. Also, there was a home-sewn banner, probably a "kit" from the same period, with the eagle of the American Seal and the words, "Welcome Home" emblazoned on a navy blue ground. I was breathless, as hunters and collectors of such stuff are from time to time. I got both pieces for fifty dollars. I went straight to John's home to show him the stuff. And I asked him if he would sit for me to paint his portrait in front of the flag and banner. He agreed and we started the next week. In the meanwhile, I made a large stretcher and stretched and primed a Belgian linen canvas on it. I let it dry and waited for Tuesday afternoon of the coming week...

To be continued...

Angels Watching Over Me, My Lord

2010-05-29T19:55:00.000-07:00

Tbone imagines the angels watching him at various points of his life...

Angel 1: "What's he doin'?"

Angel 2: I'm not sure."

Angel 3: "Not THAT, surely not THAT!"

Angel 1: "He's goin' to do it. I'm sure of it!"

Angel 2: "Naw, surely not...I don't think he will."

Angel 3: "Well, he's done that kinda dumb, stupid thing before..."

Angel 2: "Yeah, I remember, now..."

Angel 3: "No, no, no! Please, Tbone, don't do that! Please, please, please..."

Angel 2: "There he GOES!"

Angel 1: "Oh, NO, please God, NOOOO!"

Angel 2: "He's DONE IT NOW..."

Angel 3: "Well, we're in for OVERTIME again! Blast YOU, Tbone!"

Gratitude and the Sovereignty of God

2010-05-28T11:43:00.000-07:00

One of the curses of getting older is what I call "the retrospective obsession." This may be because we think the happiest years of our lives are found in the past. Or, to the contrary, we may be captive to injuries or violations that took place in the past, and we cannot or will not forget or forgive them. Sometimes, we are fixated on bad choices and violations we have ourselves perpetrated. Mark Twain, speaking of his own dark memories and the sleeplessness they entailed, said, "Like the rest of mankind, I am never quite sane at three o'clock in the morning."

The Christian world-view offers us a way to put our whole lives into perspective- whether the past, present, or future, whether the good, the bad, or the ugly. This is because the Christian view believes that the whole of life is under the wise and loving direction of a sovereign God. I say, "believes," because this is a faith claim. Like all faith claims this cannot be achieved by observation or verified by proofs. When St. Paul says, "And we know that all things work together for good..." Romans 8:28, he is saying that we know and are confident of this through faith in God.

Permit me, to again be autobiographical. My own life has been a life of extremes, extremes of tragedy and blessing. My beautiful and vivacious mother died of cancer just after my first birthday. My young father, lacking her faith and stability (she was his faith and stability), wandered, literally and spiritually, for the next twenty years. I was a fellow-traveler in these wanderings, moving over fifteen times before my thirteenth year. For a time, I lived with him and one of his several wives. She was a tragic mental and moral wreck, and having herself been a victim of abuse, abused me from the time I was five until I left at age thirteen.

But, from eighteen months til five, I lived with my paternal grandparents and their younger children in a household of pure love. They taught me what it is to be loved and cherished. This grounding in love enabled me to survive those bleak, dragon-filled years of abuse.

In my high school years, I lived with a Christian family who opened their hearts and home to me. I have written elsewhere in a critical vein of those years, but I want here to record my undying gratitude to them and many others like them who loved, nurtured, forgave, and put up with me. Many of these helped provide me with the financial assistance necessary for my formal education, and one unknown person paid for my first year of college- courses, books, room and board. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were motivated primarily out of their love for Christ and for me. I would be a cad if I did not recognize their role in my life and achievements.

My adult life has been spent in service to three Christian congregations. The first of these received me in my early twenties and survived the ten years I spent among them. (This is a argument for the existence of God!) My family and I were supported, encouraged, respected and loved by these people. In those ten years, there were many mistakes, petty quarrels, betrayals, and misunderstandings. Many are to blame for these things, not least of all myself. But, when Kathy and I visit the people from that time and place, the thing we indulge is our love for one another and for those who have gone.

My next church was a conservative congregation made up primarily of people the age of my parents and older. I was a child of the fifties, so I was in their minds like one of their adult children. I was also of a liberal bent of mind. Given those things, conflict was inevitable and sharp. They suffered from this, as did I. But, during the twenty-three years my family and I spent there, they generously supported us, enabled us to build a beautiful home, put up with my excessive travel to preach at conferences, tolerated and encouraged my art-making, and endured and forgave my eccentricities and all-out-less-than-Christian lapses in judgment and behavior. I buried most of that generation, and our mutual love for one another enabled me to turn their funeral orations into a final act of love and an art form.

During these years, Kathy and I have enjoyed a marriage of growing love and respect and have raised three beautiful, interesting children.

Now, all of these years have been marked by the same things that mark every human life: moral failure, ignorance and stupidity, miscommunication, good intention gone awry, bad intentions fulfilled (and, mercifully, thwarted), acts based on unworthy convictions, hurts, deaths... But, they have also been crowned with blessings: acts of love, self-sacrifice, altruism, humor, gratitude, generosity, sympathy, support, encouragement, and countless other things like these.

I am what I am today, not simply despite the bad things, but because of their mixture with the good. I have known darkness, but I have also enjoyed immeasurable, blinding light, the light of love. I have been loved and continue to be loved by countless people. I have been blessed to love them back. My life is multi-storied and rich because the stories of these people have become mine, and mine has become theirs. And this love has been lived out in the face of much human weakness and sin- theirs and mine.

All of which is true, I believe, because of the preexisting and over-arching love of God. The love of God has worked in my life in such a way as to make me a better sort of person. The love of all these various friends has worked in the same way: to make me a better sort of man. This is true despite my many moral and spiritual weaknesses, blind spots, and vulnerabilities.

Thus, God in his wise and loving sovereignty works the warp and weft of our lives, creating things of beauty and strength. This he does through his love and the love of other human persons.

Which leads me to say one, final thing: All of it, the whole sometimes baffling, always complex, but wondrously polychromatic thing, makes me grateful, grateful for each actor in the play and for the great Director of it all. Grateful.

Truth and Dialectic

2010-05-28T10:03:00.000-07:00

"The truth is like a fiddle string, or a piano wire. Loosen the tension and you lose the tune." Rabbi Tbone

"The truth is never at one extreme or the other. Neither is it in the middle of extremes. Truth is always at both extremes...simultaneously." Charles Simeon

The Lust for Little Things

2010-05-27T08:47:00.000-07:00

There is a problem using the word "lust" in a piece like this. This problem lies in the fact that in the English language, "lust" almost always has dark, negative connotations. This is not true in other languages. In common Greek, the word for "lust" and "strong desire" is the same. Context means all. So, in my use of the word, I mean "strong desire" or "over-powering drive." Context means everything.

What I am urging is this: We must replace our lusts for those things that are most commonly the objects of our strong desires, sex, money, power, fame, etc.- things are are usually destructive- with a an over-powering desire for and appreciation of the little, common-home-and-garden blessings and gifts of our daily lives. These are things that enhance our lives and make us a blessing and gift to others.

In one way, all of this comes down to what visual artists call "seeing." The painter is engaged with the world as one who "sees" what is in front of her. She is aware that she comes to the world full of conceptions of it, that is, mental ideas. But, in order to depict the world before her, she must put aside her mental ideas and really and deeply observe. When she successfully moves from conception to perception (from the left brain to the right brain), the world and the objects that are the stuff of the world begin to show themselves in their wonder and mystery. Something similar takes place in the life and brain of the successful field-biologist.

We must learn to "see" in this way- though I use "see" to encompass all the senses. We must take the time to be quiet, to look, listen, smell, touch and taste the world we are in.

We must take time. We are too much in a hurry and those who rush through life pursuing a variety of goals very often achieve their goals while missing life. Think of that morning cup of coffee. We may gulp it down or pour it into the travel mug for the commute. But, what a difference there is to take the time to savor it, and, better, to savor it with a loved-one or friend.

We must engage all our senses, connecting with the morning light, the birdsong, the new growth in the garden, and the voice or fresh-showered smell of a lover.

The best things in life are free. They are also carefree. Nature, family, friends, books, music, food and drink, honest work, gardening, sports, play,the family dog or cat, and on and on... These are things available to us all. They are among the things that John Berryman calls "the quotidian miracle."

The more enamored of these little quotidian things we are, the more we shall see their compulsive power to eject from our lives those darker, destructive impulses.

And for the Christian believer there is more. The Giver of all these things is the God who has affectionately known us from all eternity. He has given himself to and for us in the bloody death of his Son, Jesus Christ. In Christ's resurrection, he has given us hope for a future that will return us to ourselves and the creation- in body, in mind, and in heart. Each facet of our beings at peace and each at peace with the others. And, each complete human being at peace with every other complete human being.

So, in a culture driven by lust let us cultivate this lust, a lust for little things.

Cousin "Shinbone" on Wisdom

2010-05-26T20:54:00.000-07:00

"I spend a lot of time studying on thangs, but a lot more jist lookin'."

"I always try to let the other feller talk more'n I do. That-a-way, I can be a'thankin'. It also helps me to avoid makin' a fool of myself, which is always a good thang."

"A man never was a fool for keepin' his mouth shut. I have tried the other way around too many times, and always regretted it."

"A windy man is like a windy day in March. Both of 'em tend to agitate and irritate me."

I Played God...But the Critics Panned Me!

2010-05-25T07:28:00.000-07:00

To control is human. From the moment that Adam set out to order the Garden, the human enterprise has been one of control. We try to control our lives, our personal environments, and hopefully ourselves. This is natural and good.

We live in a world that is, to all appearances, out of control. Think of the recent weather in Oklahoma. We are often in job-settings and even families that are chaotic and threatening. Children in unstable families are often noted for excessive tidiness, while children in secure homes are just as often human pigs. Such a world means we do not have to argue for a reasonable control and order of things.

It is when we move to the realm of human relationships that the issue of control becomes sticky.

Some people, for a variety of reasons and pathologies, are inclined to the excessive control of the people in their lives. Thus, the "Jewish mother" and the "control freak" have become idiomatic in our speech. "He has control issues," we are told; we are expected to understand this; we think we do.

The fact is, we are all inclined to this kind of control over others. We just express and enact it in different ways. The different ways are "Legion" and are just as demonic. Guilt, shame, fear, intimidation, deceit, manipulation of another's lusts and desires, superstition, God, heaven, hell, rewards, punishments, self-interest, self-preservation...and on, and on. Human beings employ all of these in our quest for mastery and control over other human beings.

To put it in another idiomatic phrase, we all "play God."

Now, this is a misnomer and an irreverence if truth be known. In a way that takes our breath away, God respects our freedom, our individuality, our uniqueness, and our humanity. He is not a control freak. This is, in part, because he does not share our fears and insecurities.

Religious people, because they think they have a special link to God, can be the very worst control freaks. Mark Twain excoriates a certain Buffalo, New York minister by saying "he acts as if he is awaiting a vacancy in the Trinity so that he can take the seat." Good old Mark!

This is one of the really ugly faces of religion. And this is why religion is so often taken captive by people who want to control their families, their communities, their cultures, even the world. This motivates both the Jihadists and the Christian Right. It can also motivate Tom Jones and Mary Smith. And, too often,does.

Christian control freaks are just that...freaks. This is a contradiction of terms. Christians are supposed to believe in the sovereignty of God, in his wise and loving providence, in his purpose that is being inexorably worked out, even in a world that looks out of control. But, of course, the fundamental Christian truth is the truth of human sinfulness and stupidity. We are sinful and stupid. I am sinful and stupid. This sinful stupidity shows up in my ongoing quest to control other people.

This thing shows it ugly face among Christians in a plethora of ways. It is seen in manipulative evangelism, where I make friends to make converts, where I play on people's vulnerabilities to get them to "come to Jesus," and when the churches use marketing tactics and strategies to "get people saved." It is seen when Christians abuse the trust of those in their care to get them to do things they themselves are uncomfortable with. This results in anything from control over another's time and finances to the sexual violation of boys and girls.

This last thing can be most dangerous in the way we give spiritual direction to others about Christian vocation or calling. For over a century, the American Evangelical churches have been enmeshed in a personality cult. We have had our "stars," from Billy Sunday to Billy Graham, from Lottie Moon to Sandi Patty. All of which has led us to believe that "everyone is special, but some people are "more special than others." Those who are "more special" are those in "full-time, professional Christian vocations," such as preachers, singers, missionaries, etc. And, among these "more special" people are the "Most Special." These are the "stars," those specially gifted people with charismatic personalities. I don't think I need to mention any names at this point; just let your remote control surf the channels on any Sunday morning and you'll see what I am talking about.

The message we, who are Evangelicals, are sending is this: This is the best place to serve God. These are the marks of God's blessing: Fame, wealth, influence, distinction. Some of these celebrities are brash enough to even say such things out loud.

Now, the only thing that is wrong with this picture is this: it is a lie. It is a complete fabrication. It not only has nothing to do with the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles, it is a demonic replica. It is like a blow-up doll as compared to a real woman.

We have come to this place because we wanted to play God. We did not trust him, we did not trust his Word, we did not trust in the gentle, subtle methods of integrity and love, and it has brought us to this weird, grotesque place. It is like a stage in the theater of the absurd, where a new polytheism reigns: all these little maimed and disfigured people trying to play gods, each writing his own script, each unaware of the babbler next to him, each lost in his or her own babblings.

The problem is we have had no real theology of spiritual direction and in inventing our own, we have been left prey to the cult of self. We end up being manipulated and manipulating others, controlled and controlling others.

There is a better way and I want to give you one example of this from the life of Saint Paul. I his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul speaks of his co-worker, Apollos, and says,

"Now, concerning our brother, Apollos, I strongly urged him to
visit you with the other brothers, but it was not at all his
desire to come now. He will come when he has opportunity." 16:12

Here is an apostle with apostolic authority from the Lord Jesus Christ. He "strongly urged" Apollos to go to Corinth to work among these troubled churches. Apollos, for whatever reason, said, "Sorry, but I don't want to go." Paul says, "OKAY..." and then writes, rather apologetically, to the church explaining why Apollos has not come.

No manipulation. No control games. No "pulling rank" as the Lord's apostle. There is here a staggering example of someone respecting the freedom, the uniqueness, and the individuality of another human being who is also a Christian brother. In granting Apollos his freedom, Paul finds his own and avoids playing God.

"Don't be a Person, be a Personality!"

2010-05-24T09:59:00.000-07:00

I saw the above words on a billboard on my way to St. Louis last week. It is a succinct expression of the American ethos. What matters is not "persons" with common-garden-variety lives and callings. What matters is "personalities" with fame, wealth, power, and all the toys these things can get.

It set me to thinking. It set me to thinking about persons and the "cult of personality."

A "person" is a human being of either sex with a particular name and history. Theologically, a person is a son or daughter of God, made in his likeness and image. Because of this theological content, every human being of either sex with a particular name and history is unique, significant, and valuable. They are persons, and no matter what their station, status, calling, limitations, or historical obscurity, they are wonderful. Nor, is this to say that all persons are morally good. Many are morally indifferent, blown by every wind. Some are morally evil and leave a legacy of suffering behind them. All of us are morally weak and vulnerable. But, despite these qualifications, persons are wonders. Even the capacity of the truly evil is the result of being persons, of being a composite of creative mind, emotions, and will. It is the wonder of "persons" that the Psalmist celebrates in the 8th Psalm, and, in a different way, Walt Whitman glorifies in "Leaves of Grass."

A "personality" is another thing altogether. A personality is a fictive creation of the market and the media. Here, talent is the main thing, the only thing. This is talent in terms of the ability to do something well, even extraordinarily well- say, like playing a five-string banjo with your feet, or preaching a "wow" sermon. And it is the talent of presenting oneself in a winning, impressive way, personality in the sense of "she has a great personality." Both of these things are necessary if one is to become a real "personality." Charisma without talent will soon lose its attraction, and talent without personality will usually be unable to get the attention necessary for success in the first place.

What is important for this discussion, however, is the realization that the cult of personality does not value personhood. What is valued is talent and charisma. I was struck by this recently while talking to a Tulsa firefighter who moonlights as a security guard at rock concerts in his city. He told me that he and the other security guards were prepped before each concert. Among other things, they are told "Never look the stars in the eyes." Such talent and personal magnetism must be treated like royalty in the high Renaissance! Persons must not presume to be on the same footing as Personalities!

Now, the making of a Personality does involve more than talent and charisma. It requires "handlers and improvers," or, as they are sometimes called, "star-makers." These are the experts who know what is necessary for a person to be morphed into a Personality. This may involve physical changes-the right makeup, wardrobe, even plastic surgery, voice and accent alterations. It will involve story changes- the writing, even the inventing of new histories, name changes, etc. It will compel even personality changes, the loquacious will be made into the silent type, the timid into the wild-boy-or-girl, the chaste into the slut, the temperate into the addict, or vice-versa.

When this happens, for whatever motive, the person is transgressed, invaded, violated. A dark playground of cognitive dissonance is created. A kind of practical schizophrenia is let loose. The real person is separated from the Personality. It is little wonder that such persons become alienated- from their histories, their families, their friends, and from themselves. It is also, unsurprising that such persons frequently fall prey to destructive addictions/behaviors, to chronic depression and other mental disorders, and, too often, to suicide. The human person is not made to live in dissonance with himself. When the dissonance becomes insanely cacophonous, relief must be found.

To be sure, there are a few people who seem to manage Personality without these destructive side-effects. I mention Jimmy Stewart and Tom Hanks, and on a different level, Wendell Berry. But what is immediately apparent in these people, and others like them is this: They have retained their personhood by solid relationships, connection with their own personal histories, faith (not necessarily religious faith) and family and friends.

I am especially concerned with and critical of the cult of personality in religious life, and within the Christian Church in particular. One does not have to go far- the television remote control will do just fine- to find the Personality Cult rife in American Evangelical Christianity.

The process is the same as that outlined above, but it is mixed with another, and more potent and toxic element. The cult of personality is fed in these circles by the motive of "the greater glory of God." We make and handle our Personalities in order to honor God and to impress the world with our talented and charismatic "stars." In this way, we hope to convert the duly impressed.

Little wonder that the result is often the same: scandal resulting from drugs, sex, financial fraud, etc. And why? Because we have created Personalities in conflict with their essential selves, their persons. I wonder how often it is the case that a famous Christian Personality who has destroyed himself and brought dishonor on the Name of Christ, really just wanted to have a little farm in the Ozarks and keep bees. But, the handlers had their way, and a life is lost and a person and his family are destroyed.

What is needed, perhaps, is "a lust for little things." The little things that make up our quotidian existence are replete with lush richness. The creation, family, honest work, friendships,the family dog... And for the Christian, the knowledge that, whether we are ever known outside the circle of these things, we have been known, are known, by the God who gave himself for us in a bloody death of love and ever lives to give our little lives meaning.

The Psalmist says it well: "O LORD,my heart is not lifted up;/ my eyes are not raised too high;/ I do not occupy myself with things/ too great and too marvelous for me./ But I have calmed and quieted my soul,/ like a weaned child with its mother;/ like a weaned child is my soul within me." Psalm 131: 1,2.

You see if you can tease out the Psalmist's meaning for yourself.

Rabbi Tbone

Prayer

2010-05-23T14:41:00.000-07:00

"Lord,

Keep me friendly to myself and gentle in my disappointments."

Kathleen Norris

2010-05-21T10:09:00.000-07:00

It's Only a Name

My parents named me "Thomas Nathan Smith." The "Thomas" was from my mother's father, Alfred Thomas Brown. The "Nathan" was from my father's father, "Nat Jacob Smith." Until her death, thirteen months after my birth, my mother called me "Tommy," as did mostly everybody else for the next twenty years. The diminutive is a very Southern and Southwestern thing, so that Thomases in Texas and Oklahoma are "Tommys" till they die. To this day, if my phone rings, and the voice on the other end says, "Tommy?" I know I am talking to family in Texas or California. During my childhood, I was called "Tommy Nat" in the community as a way to connect me with my family of Smiths. Occasionally, I was called "Tomcat" or "Little Tommy Tucker" by members of my family. My daddy called me "Tbone" or, just "T."

After several years with my father, I entered an adolescence in which I was uncontrollable and, in many ways, on my own. I became a Christian at age fifteen and began preaching before I was sixteen. I drew away from my family then because of their lack of enthusiasm for my over-zealous and fundamentalist faith. People began to regard me as a boy without a family, without a past. Because of my talents and personality, these same people regarded me as a boy with a great future.

So, because I lacked a past and had a great future, people with the best of intentions began to make me their "Project." They taught me how to dress, how to eat in public, how not to extend my hand to a lady until she extended hers, how to talk- in particular they went after my English grammar and Southwest "twang," they persuaded me to leave my grandparent's home and the little "podunk" of a town where I went to school, and on and on...

They were grooming me for greatness and my family could only stand by and wonder what the hell was going on. Of course, all of this was "for the greater glory of God and His kingdom." I went along with it all, in part, because I was driven by an insatiable ambition and by dark insecurities. Oh, occasionally, I rebelled. I once hitchhiked from Okemah, Oklahoma to Boise, Idaho with a wad of cash that would choke a catfish and a very expensive Gibson guitar. But, I came back, rededicated my life to Christ, and bowed once again to the yoke of the handlers and improvers.

When I got among Yankee handlers and improvers, they did not approve of my name. "Tommy" was too Southern or too much like a hick, so I became "Tom." During a year at the Moody Bible Institute, I became friends with its President, George Sweeting. He also had great expectations for me. It was Dr. Sweeting who began spelling "Tom" as "Thom." "Thom" would give me more distinction on the preaching circuit. So it has been "Thom" for almost forty years.

(By the way, the naming of people and things in the Bible is replete with theological significance. To name something or someone is to exercise sovereignty or ownership over it. This is still true. Just imagine trying to "rename" a neighbor's dog or child!)

I think about all the forms of my name by which I have been called. I now realize that so many of them were the result of other people making me their "Project." Of course, being human, all of them hoped to gain from my anticipated glory. Many of them are dead now. All who remain alive are old. Old age has begun to gather around me. I am too old to be bitter, but old enough to now understand what was going on.

In my mature years, I have reconnected with my families all over the country. They call me "Tommy" and I have begun to sign off as "Tommy" in my written communications with them. But the name I am fondest of is my Daddy's nickname for me as a child: "Tbone."

Thus have I come full circle to Home again... and to myself.

Rabbi Tbone

2010-05-19T20:37:00.000-07:00

I want to sow joy the way the ancients broadcast seed, with both hands and in every direction! Rabbi Tbone

2010-05-19T14:19:00.000-07:00

Address to the Lord

John Berryman

1

Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake,
inimitable contriver,
endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon,
thank you for such as it is my gift.

I have made up a morning prayer to you
containing with precision everything that most matters.
'According to Thy will' the thing begins.
It took me off & on two days. It does not aim at eloquence.

You have come to my rescue again and again
in my impassible, sometimes despairing years.
You have allowed my brilliant friends to destroy themselves
and I am still here, severely damaged, but functioning.

Unknowable, as I am unkown to my guinea pigs:
How can I 'love' you?
I only as far as gratitude and awe
confidently & absolutely go.

I have no idea whether we live again.
It doesn't seem likely
from either the scientific or the philosophical point of view
but certainly all things are possible to you,
and I believe as fixedly in the Resurrection-appearances to Peter
and
to Paul

as I believe I sit in this blue chair.
Only that may have been a special case
to establish their initiatory faith.

Whatever your end may be, accept my amazement.
May I stand until death forever at attention
for any your least instruction or enlightenment.
I even feel sure you will assist me again, Master of insight and beauty.

2010-05-18T21:05:00.000-07:00

"He is the dumbest kind of damn fool that ain't king in some little corner." E. D. "Shinbone" Smith, Bomar, Oklahoma, formerly Indian Territory, or "IT." (Shinbone is a second cousin on my Daddy's side of the family. Tbone)

The Night May Show Us Things

2010-05-18T08:31:00.000-07:00

We love the day
The sun's embracing light.
But, often sleep evades us
And tormenting thoughts
molest our peace,
Forcing us to welcome the night.

The night may show us things
Hidden from sun's glare,
Known only in the dark.

Orion marching
across the Southern sky,
Owls answering one another
from hill to hill.
The cool light of the moon,
And the smell of the earth,
never so rich in the light of day.

And the mockingbird-
Singing through the night-
Amusing, himself,
And making melody to the Lord.

2010-05-17T09:23:00.000-07:00

"Hammer and tongs. With great energy, as: 'They were fighting hammer and tongs.' The allusion is to a blacksmith energetically at work, hammering the metal he holds with the tongs."

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Sixteenth Edition