“Puleeeze…put that thing away til you learn how to play it!!”
“If I don’t inherit at least one Martin D-28,” my oldest son Arlo declared recently, “We’ve got serious relationship issues here.” We were both noting the irony. He had come along with me to pick out a new guitar for a birthday gift from my husband. Now, both of his parents own Martin D-28 guitars – beautiful, classic, what Arlo called the Porsche of the guitar world. This is in spite of the fact that Arlo is the best guitarist of us all, and if anyone deserves one, it’d be a kid named Arlo anyway, right? Seriously, I will never in my life be as good a player as he is, for sure.
That wasn’t the most ironic part of the story, though, we had to admit as we wandered around that candy store for musicians.
For twenty-plus years, while I was married to his father, Mick, I was the one who dropped the two of them off at the music store then wandered elsewhere killing time while they tried out guitar after guitar, both acoustic and electric, drum kits, steel drums, banjos and even the occasional glockenspiel. Now, though, I’m doing plenty of my own wandering around these stores trying percussion instruments and now guitars.
I sure didn’t see it coming, though, that I’d be part of the pack inside the music store, always searching, wondering, collecting. According to a plethora of guitarists I know, though, I am way behind though with only five guitars to my name. Don’t ask about the drums.
This past week, at the music store, I was trying out some of the models that were above the budget just to dream when one of the sales people walked by and asked if we’d seen that used Martin HD 28 that they’d just put out? And just like that, a Martin D-28 was within reach.
Let me say first of all that I do not feel at all deserving-in fact if I don’t work hard and improve noticeably before I get to play music with others besides my son, I may hide it “til I can play that thing!”
The real irony that amused us so much that day, though, is that Mick and I have a history with musical instruments, in general, and Martin guitars in particular.
Well before we were married, after he’d been in the military, he hitchhiked across country and halfway back, stopped in Missouri to use some of his GI bill at the college where we met in a poetry/song-writing class.
We became friends first, then started dating and eventually moved in together. For much of that time, he was traveling the midwest in a country band and we’ve got the pictures of him in a 10-gallon hat to prove it. It was difficult time trying to build a new relationship and we struggled a bit as new couples do, especially when he began touring for six or eight weeks at a time.
We lived in an old fourplex, on the second floor. It was actually pretty roomy with two big balconies and a claw-foot tub. The frig door sported a bottle opener. Meals as often as not were macaroni and cheese and beanie weenies. A local carryout provided a shared meal of cashew chicken with two egg rolls for under $5 at the time, a real treat. Dishes and lamps and blankets and, well, most of our furnishings, were hand-me-downs, except for glasses. Every time we bought jelly, we got a new glass.
The rent in 1980 was $100 a month and with him on the road barely making expenses and me in school full time and working part time, some months we barely scraped together that last $10.
We considered it a step up, though, from my first apartment where the kitchen was so tiny I could not open the oven door more than six inches. In his previous apartment, paid for largely by tips from waiting tables before he went on the road, the door wouldn’t unlock so the only way in and out was to climb through a window next to the door. When I rode anywhere with him in his car at the time, I had to put a piece of cardboard under my feet to cover the hole in the floor.
The idea of dating a musician seemed romantic at first, but the reality, especially the constant schedule changes, expenses and no income to speak of became wearying.
Because of the stress of being broke and apart much of the time, we ended up separating for several months. One reason in particular came to mind on my birthday this year as we stood in the music store: the day Mick came home to show me his new Martin D-28. At the time, forty-some years ago, it cost $1200, or one year’s rent for us. He was so proud of that admittedly gorgeous instrument; he played it well and still owns it. I was livid, though, in large part because there was no discussion, i.e., one of those red flags I am so adept at ignoring. Eventually, we did split up for several months, and the Martin was definitely still a sore point for me.
We did get back together, married, moved to California and then to Japan where we had two sons.
“You almost never happened because of a Martin D-28.” I reminded Arlo at the store, though.
We spent twenty-one years married, and Mick played that guitar often and well. I boast today I know almost every John Prine song-the lyrics, at least-because he played so many of them. For my own playing, knowing all those lyrics makes it easier to learn to play the songs I like by Prine – and there are many -except that when I learned them, I mostly learned by singing along on the harmony parts, so I’m working on learning the melodies.
We could not deny the irony, though, a few weeks ago, as we pulled up some stools and played the Martin HD28 that I eventually picked out. It is a gift from my amazing and generous husband, who is not a musician. I will tell you that he’s a much more generous person than I have ever been. He doesn’t necessarily understand why I hole up in another room every day to practice or lament any time I have to miss playing with others, but he feeds my addiction anyway. Two years ago, when I was just starting to be able to put together some chords and play a song or two, he asked me on a trip out west to think about what I’d like him to buy me something as a souvenir of the trip. I immediately took him to a pawn shop where we bought a used guitar so I could play while we were traveling. He never questioned that.
I certainly did NOT understand, though. None of my ex-husband’s and then my son’s desires to play and learn and practice and look at other instruments registered for me before, though I was curious and a bit jealous. I understood another guy who, a decade ago, asked me why on earth I might want to play drums. “Other than hitting things with sticks,” he asked, “what’s the draw?” I couldn’t explain it then but remember I considered hitting him with a stick….
Until I started making music with percussion, then picked up a guitar, though, I didn’t know much about the desire to play. I certainly had not anticipated that becoming a need, that there was a hunger I wasn’t feeding or that a part of my soul was being starved. Had you asked me even ten years ago if would I be allowed to play with other musicians as a group with no one telling me to put that instrument down until I learned how to play it, I would’ve laughed. Last month, after being part of a group at a house party, though, another musician told me when he looked at me during the evening, he could see so much joy. I always thought it’d be cool to play guitar; I never expected I could feel such joy though as I do when I get to be part of making the music.
Arlo certainly makes my new Martin sound prettier, but the Martin makes me sound a bit better, and I admit I could play it for hours.
The irony that we had to acknowledge, as we stood in the music store a couple of weeks ago, was how my life had led me to my own fabulous Martin HD 28. (Mine is prettier, too, which matters some, with Herringbone inlay, and abalone diamond and square inlays, prettier than the instrument that vexed me all those decades ago.)
I’ll never play as well as my son or my ex-husband, I know, and yes, when other musicians I know see me pull it out of its case at a jam, I will feel sheepish and even feel something of an imposter. Nevertheless, I cherish the joy fix I get even as I expect I will smile at the irony every time I take my Martin down and start to play.
And yes, absolutely, Arlo will inherit at least one Martin some day.
Individually, collectively, as a nation, there have been times when we’ve needed to draw a line. This is one of those times.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Benjamin Franklin
Much of the time when any of us need to draw a line in the sand, as they say, I suspect it is a surprise. I say that because we are often not expecting the person moving aggressively towards us; thus, we are not prepared to mark any line. When we do draw a boundary, when we insist that the next step the person in front of us takes will be too far and we will stand in their way, it can feel jarring and aggressive, like we are the ones being combative. We are simply not prepared to counter aggression or abuse, individually or collectively.
This is somewhat ironic, at least in the United States, though. Remember the Alamo? Legend has it that when Lieutenant-Colonel William “Buck” Travis, Texian Army officer and his fighters faced overwhelming forces at the famed fort, Travis drew a line in the sand with his sword and told his fighters to cross it if they were willing to stay and fight. Nearly all of them did. While that story is possibly more fiction than fact, it is nevertheless the lore many of us were inspired by, taught to emulate, part of the “GIve me liberty or give me death!” understanding of the cost of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from tyranny. We know what’s right. We know abuse when we see it. We know when someone is trying to frighten us into not fighting for those freedoms. We know and yet we are reticent, loathe to draw our line in the sand, whether personally, as a family or as a community and nation. We want it to all go away. But it won’t.
Years ago, an experience from the first church I served paved the way for an extended family finally to take a stance, to draw their line in the sand to stop the abuse that had been harming women in that family for at least a generation. In this case, what had been a family secret became quite public because the abuser got reckless and over-confident and, in some ways, that arrogance made taking a stand easier for the family.
“Herb” (name changed to protect his victims) wasn’t a regular attendee at the church I served, so my radar was not pinging when I greeted him that Sunday morning. He was a 60-something married man who always dressed in seersucker and bow ties and prided himself still sporting a full head of hair, even if it was graying. I’d brushed off his previous suggestions about how my congregation would like it, he was sure, if I wore more colorful outfits when I stood in the pulpit. I glared at him and walked away when he suggested I unbutton a button or two on my blouse, but nowhere was there any guidance on responding to such behavior from this man whose family members occupied nearly one-third of the pews. I wondered why his wife never attended with him and started avoiding him, thinking he would remember he was talking to the preacher. Turns out, I should have opted for outrage from the beginning. At least I might have been prepared for battle when I walked out of the little white building one Sunday afternoon to see him seated in his big old Buick in the parking lot across the road. I waited for two cars to speed by, then crossed the two-lane blacktop warily, my chest tightening. My arms were full with my Bible, sermon notes, my purse and some funeral home fans that I’d grabbed off the table in the back of the sanctuary. The cardboard fans helped you breathe on the days when the humidity was looking for an excuse to break into a summer shower.
Already sweaty, and looking forward to an afternoon of visiting the shut-ins, I moved cautiously across the road, hoping he would stay in his car. I had been headed to the fellowship hall to lock up before I started the afternoon’s visits. Herb exited his car and was next to me nearly as soon as I stepped off the highway onto the parking lot. I had to stop mid-stride to avoid running into him; I was off-balance as I tried to look behind me before stepping back because that would put me back onto the highway.
Turning towards him, I stumbled to my right just in time to miss him grabbing my arm. I looked at him in confusion as he reached out again and said, “Why don’t we go inside?”
In an uncharacteristic flash of assertiveness, I shoved him with my books. He stumbled back a bit, startled. I darted as quickly as I could around to the passenger side of his car. Did he really just grab at me? Herb started around the side of the car and reached for me again, so I threw my books at the ground near his feet to stop him long enough for me to move around the car until I was back on the driver’s side. I know my hands would have been shaking if I had not been clutching my black leather purse, instinctively wrapping the strap around my hand in case I needed to use it as a weapon.
I would never have expected a man from my church to be bold enough to try to grab me in the church parking lot in broad daylight. That simply was not something I expected. Worse, he acted with such confidence, as if he would face no opposition.
Herb laughed. “Don’t be so silly,” he said, putting one hand on the trunk of the car as he slowly headed back around towards me. He seemed quite amused, at first, that I managed to run around his car—a rather large late model car–but all I could think about was the fact that, thank God, he could not reach across. When he snatched his hand back quickly in pain because the metal was hot enough to sting his hand, I bolted.
He was moving around the car towards me again; I managed to dart into the fellowship hall, drop my purse and the ridiculous fans, and turn the lock on the wooden door. Maybe it was the sound of the door locking–maybe something else–but, apparently something brought Herb back to reality; he “came to himself,” like the prodigal son in Luke, and stopped grinning. Unlike the repentant son who asks forgiveness of the father, though, Herb stood before me, his fist raised, threatening to bust through the window of what seemed suddenly like a very flimsy door. I tried to breathe. Even though he was a member of my church with a large and influential family and now he was angry, I had clearly—finally—drawn a line in the sand.
When he finally got back into his car and drove away, I leaned against the wall and let out a scream, then frantically ran to the other door, grateful to find it was locked. He hadn’t tried opening it anyway. He’d just driven off.
I couldn’t catch my breath.
I gave myself the afternoon off from visiting parishioners. I did not let myself cry until I got home; navigating back roads is difficult enough when you’re watching the rearview mirror for a Buick the whole time.
The next Sunday, and for several Sundays after that, I was greatly relieved that Herb did not return to the church. For months, I would imagine his hand grabbing for me. While I was grateful not to see Herb for a while, I also felt quite alone and indulged in some hefty self-pity as I pondered how large a contingent his family was in our congregation. His wife, for example, was one of several sisters, many of whom attended the church. Herb had married the oldest sister when most of the sisters were still children. At least his wife was not attending our church. A few months later, though, his wife was scheduled for surgery and the prognosis was not good. A pastoral visit to the hospital was in order, if only to console her sisters.
I arrived at the hospital intentionally late. Even after the family was sent to the waiting room before surgery, nursing staff was willing to allow clergy in to pray. I smacked the oversized button to open the doors just in time to go back into the surgical prep area to see her alone. She was still awake and aware enough and thanked me for praying with her. Then I made my way through the winding hallways to the family waiting room.
Nearly every seat was taken by a sister, but I spotted Herb on a chair in the far corner. I took a breath, said a silent prayer, and walked over to him. I leaned down to offer him my hand in greeting but, before I knew it, he was laughing because he’d managed to pull me onto his lap and wrap his arms around me. Even now when I think about how shamelessly he seemed to operate, how little he feared anyone’s disapproval, how brazenly he disregarded the line I had drawn, I want to scream. I’d been pretty damn clear, I thought, that his behavior was not welcome.
I jumped up as quickly as I could and found a chair on the other side of the room, next to one of the sisters. I did not look at anyone for several minutes; I was afraid they would have seen how hot my cheeks were with anger and embarrassment. I was grateful, finally, to look up and notice that sister number two, one of my regular members, was sitting next to me. Voices soft, we chatted quietly about how long the surgery was expected to last. I was grateful she quickly offered to call me when the surgery was over. “We know you have other calls to make, Pastor,” she offered. I thanked her, chose the fastest way out of the room and made it to my car before the tears began.
I drove home discouraged. How could I keep being the pastor at that church? Even if they wanted me to continue, could I keep dealing with this man and his aggressive behavior? I could not shrug it off, and I did not find it amusing, like he did. Worse, I feared other congregation members might also find it amusing.
Everyone in that waiting room had seen Herb pull me onto his lap and me pushing his arms off of me and jumping up but no one had said a word. I’d not received help when I’d spoken to my mentor: “It’s part of the job,” I was told. I did not sleep well that night; I was drafting my letter of resignation from the ministry and imagining the sensation that would ensue within the church once it was made public.
The next morning, I was praying about the letter when sister number two called me, I assumed, to tell me how recovery was going. The conversation was so short I almost didn’t remember it.
“You need to know,” she said quietly but deliberately, “Bobby has spoken to Herb,” she said. “He won’t be bothering you anymore.” She paused. “He won’t be bothering anyone any more.” She paused again. “We’ll see you Sunday.”
Suddenly, I was not alone. One of the other men in the church had stood up to Herb. Sadly, though, slowly, I began to imagine several young women standing next to me with tears in their eyes. I had not considered how many others Herb probably had “bothered” over the years but they were suddenly standing next to me.
All those younger sisters and their daughters would have been easy targets. No one had stood up to him before then. Evidently, no one had even spoken in any voice louder than a whisper about his behavior for decades until that day in the waiting room when he accosted the preacher. The family finally found the line they would not let him cross.
Likely, in the past, the family had hoped Herb’s behavior, something most of them could not even fathom, would have just gone away on its own. Challenging one of the patriarchs of the family had been too painful and even frightening for them to consider. What would they do if he said “she” initiated it? Who might he go after next? What if he suddenly turned the tables and claimed he was a victim? How many of the neighbors might take his side because THEY were already victims and afraid or feared becoming targets?
Because they had never expected to even contemplate such abuse from one of their own, the family could not choose a line.
Because they were afraid to talk to one another about what was going on, no line was drawn.
Because no line was drawn, the abuse continued, unchecked.
Trouble is, this is a common pattern. Whether the abuse is of a person or a group of persons, though, not wanting to talk about it only aids and abets the abuser. Not wanting to talk about what we know is wrong because we are afraid or because it is not our family or because we’re not sure the child maybe “deserved” some punishment or worst of all because we simply don’t want to believe what is happening only emboldens and strengthens the aggressor.
Do not be fooled. These lessons apply to us—to our families and our nation.
We know in our guts how this goes. We know but we are hoping we won’t be asked to draw any lines ourselves.
We wish some people would stop constantly reminding us how more and more boundaries are being crossed every day, how free speech and due process, decency and respect for others are being blatantly, publicly disregarded, then even applauded. We are afraid and tired. Didn’t we move past this decades ago?
Are we waiting for another Colonel Travis to draw the lines for us? Have you admitted you need to think about those now, like it or not?
Are we waiting for another Colonel Travis to draw the lines for us? Have you admitted you need to think about those now, like it or not?
A public school teacher told me today she had decided she would obstruct any immigration authorities who tried to take her students – children – from their classroom. She has admitted to herself what is possible, even as horrific as it sounds, and she decided where to draw her line.
When I shared the following events with my writer’s group and asked them to put a timeline on them, most guessed the 1950’s. Learning this occurred in 2002 disturbed them. Truly disturbing, though, is that, sadly, no one in this country right now would be surprised to enter a town square in nearly any southern state in the US and see again today what I saw then.
Sacred Bears
“Some old lady got my buddy in trouble!” was what I heard another pastor declare as I sat down at the weekly lunch of local United Methodist pastors in the county. (“Local Pastors” do not attend seminary but rather several years’ worth of courses in order to be allowed to preach from United Methodist pulpits.) I was running late, but I knew immediately what he was complaining about and I was annoyed to realize quickly he had only heard part of the story. “He was at the weekend school…”
“Course of Study,” I offered.
“Yeah. The Course of Study. Anyway, there was this festival on the square down there in Pulaski….”
“They called it ‘White Christian Heritage Festival’ but they were handing out KKK literature,” I added. He frowned.
“Okay…. so, this old lady just took what my buddy said all wrong. Then…then, she told the guy in charge.”
“Grady?”
My colleague stared at me, determined to finish the story. “That old lady told Grady my buddy was part of the KKK!”
“Actually,” I said after I ordered my chicken salad with ranch on the side, “that‘old lady’ told Grady that your buddy confessed to her that he could see where their teachings made sense. He said they made sense.’ So, since he is allowed to preach at a United Methodist church and to teach children and youth….”
“She probably just misunderstood.”
Surely, I thought, this guy will catch on soon. I sighed. “So, I shoulda just let that slide?”
The others at our table were clearly amused that my colleague didn’t get why I knew the story so well. In his defense, he attended a different Course of Study, lasting four weeks, in Atlanta for full time pastors in the United Methodist Church. His buddy and I were part time, which meant only 60 hours a week of work. Our Course of Study classes met over eight weekends a year with reading and papers in between those weekends, sometimes in Jackson and other times at Martin Methodist College in Pulaski. Pulaski, if you aren’t aware, is known for being home to some members of the Mars candy family (think Milky Way) and is also generally credited with being the birthplace of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the KKK.
I especially hated the overnight stays at these weekend schools. That particular weekend, I do not remember another woman in attendance. Not only was I away from my sons, but I was alone. In a motel room. In a strange town. A single woman. Newly in recovery from trauma. In other words, someone who knew bad people did lurk in the shadows. Assuming all the men around were trustworthy was a luxury. So, I slept not at all. I took to wedging whatever chairs were in the room in front of the door in an effort to at least rest.
On one particular Saturday, several of us left class to make a lap around the nearby downtown square on our lunch break only to encounter what was that day touted as a “Celebration of Southern Culture.” Displayed on the assorted tables were handtooled leather goods, canned peaches, okra and pickles. A brochure I found had previously invited area residents to join in the “family fun,” including a cakewalk.
Pretty quickly, though, I was stopped, jolted a stuffed teddy bear sitting among the books and maps under the magnolia trees. I believe God created Teddy Bears to provide a tactile reminder of love and affection, of comfort.This bear, though, had, through no fault of his own, become aligned with pure evil: he wore a white cotton robe and a white pointed cap that covered his face. This child’s toy was disguised, as if he, too, needed to hide his collusion with evil, like the men who had donned those robes and hoods in the night for so long. I thought they were a thing of our past and yet there they were, not hiding their affiliation at all and they had brochures, newsletters, books and even maps, the texts and visual aids to present these “Southern” beliefs. The first murmurs from the other pastors with me were indignant: how did these folks get to determine the definition of what was “southern”?
Eager to share with us about how God meant to order society, one of the men began to carefully explain the rationale for hatred, including their understanding that God, of course, looked just like them. In that moment, the inference was that God most resembled a skinny, pasty middle-aged man in black slacks, a white shirt and a decades-old tie. A couple of pastors seemed interested in engaging. I was far from confident in my ability to face evil head on though; I, instead, focused on the contents of the tables.
Besides books and t-shirts, decals, key rings, watches, pins and flags, there were maps. I would not give them my money for books but I did consider buying one of the maps, a large laminated wall map designed to settle once and for all the mystery of the disappearance of the two “Lost Tribes” of Israel. Finally, I chuckled. They’d migrated, it seemed, from the Middle East and crossed over the Caucasus Mountains, stopping, of course, in Scotland before heading into North America. My ancestors were among those Scots who came through the Cumberland Gap and moved on into Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri. I hadn’t known, however, that we were either lost or a tribe of Israelites. This journey was credited with solving the mystery: the Lost Tribes were now known as “Caucasians,” according to the map, by virtue of having traversed the Caucasus Mountains. I kick myself now for not purchasing that map, but, at the time, I could not stomach giving these people my money.
I did try to offer them money for the Teddy Bear, for the sake of the children these men likely influenced, for the sake of the legacy of Teddy Bears the world over, and for the comfort and benevolence children had so long depended on them to provide, I wanted to scream, “How dare you?!”
Gotta hand it to the KKK, though. Aligning an innocent source of comfort and safety with the evil of the KKK, twisting what a child loves and trusts and using it to promote hatred and exclusion is socially and theologically powerful. Teddy Bears are bordering on sacred, as far as I’m concerned, objects that carry children through those times when the adults are absent or preoccupied or already asleep.
The Teddy Bear in the hood and robe makes more sense when you recognize how much of the most destructive theology through the ages has been born out of childhood pain. We may never know who was the child who’d been hurt enough that he grew up and somehow chose to cover himself and his head and face with a white hood so his grandmother or his neighbors or his children did not see him when he was cruel and ugly. I wanted so badly to rescue that child, or at least rescue the Teddy Bear, to allow God to do what God does best: redeem both that Teddy Bear and whomever it was who dressed him up.
I wanted so badly to rescue that child, or at least rescue the Teddy Bear, to allow God to do what God does best: redeem both that Teddy Bear and whomever it was who dressed him up.
“He is not for sale” was the response, though, and so I left behind that embodiment of evil and prayed for the trust and spirits of all the children these pasty white men were teaching or had taught so far.
I did pick up some brochures and printed newsletters and walked away before they realized I did not, in fact, agree with their understanding that our country was designed as a White Christian nation or that we ought to somehow respect men who hid behind masks to terrorize others. Later, I would discover the literature went so far as to advocate for internment facilities for those who had contracted AIDS, for example, or that we all were invited to a worship service that night, complete with “great white Christian fellowship” and a “brilliant cross-burning!”
I was no longer hungry, so I walked back with one of the younger pastors. After a few moments’ walk in silence, I said simply, “I was not expecting that.” I was feeling shaken that this evil was so openly displayed and discussed; I’d been blissfully ignorant, I realized. I had honestly thought these clowns in hoods were anachronisms, relics of a bygone era, that they were no longer active, like the sundown signs I would later learn sat as sentinels along the highways at the edges of the town where I preached. Those signs–simple painted sunsets on road signs–were nonverbal warnings: if you were a person of color, you’d best not be found in this town after sunset. The signs had been taken down, but the sentiments, fears and prejudices were not so deeply buried. I would later be disturbed to find out, for example, that two members of my congregation had been “card-carrying” KKK members while I was pastor there. As a white woman, I had been ignorant and thus, negligent.
As we walked back to classes that weekend, though, my companion, a pastor who was about 15 years my junior, pointed out that “southern culture” was his culture. Then he added, “They did make some valid points. Did you realize they’re Christian?”
The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
“If you listen to what they are saying,” he went on, “you will discover that they make a lot of sense.”
He was a pastor.
He taught a children’s Sunday School class, too, and he seemed interested, not disturbed, but interested in the Teddy Bear in the robe and hood.
“How,” I asked as calmly as I could while placing one foot in front of another, “would you go about teaching this to children?” I wanted him to clarify, to make me realize I’ve misunderstood, to tell me he wasn’t teaching ‘southern culture’ to the children, but he didn’t say any more. As we approached the classroom for our last afternoon that weekend, I wondered what the other pastors might say. Turns out, very little. I remember watching the others in the rest of the day’s lecture and discussion, wondering why no one mentioned what we’d seen. Had they debated at lunch? Had they discovered others open to these ideas? No one seemed angry, at least not that they’d admit. I felt like I was playing a game my sons liked where you had to pretend that the floor was lava, so don’t dare put your feet down; it was dangerous. I hoped that the overt racism we’d witnessed had shocked them too. I feared, though, they knew from experience not to admit out loud they “got” where these guys were coming from, that, like my walking companion, they knew to simply shut down the conversation if they thought they’d shown their own hood to the wrong person.
Once we’d finished for the day and each of the pastors was headed home to prepare to preach the next morning, I found Grady, the professor in charge. I explained I did not want to cause an issue for a colleague but I was disturbed about what this pastor might be teaching, especially in Sunday school for children. I wasn’t sure what to do and had not felt safe addressing him directly. Grady listened, got the particulars, then told me it was his place to address it.
I heard nothing else for a month until I received an email from Grady; he’d spoken to the younger pastor’s District Superintendent, who evidently had found “no reason to believe such reports” and had never even spoken to the guy. This information hit my inbox just before leaving for the next weekend class. Once there, I was dismayed to find that the young pastor was there before me, annoyed, and looking for me. He was pretty sure I was the one who had ratted him out. I was the only “old lady” there.
He greeted me with “I got called on the carpet by my DS,” which was a stark departure from what my professor had been told. “When can we talk about this alone?” he wanted to know.
“Excuse me,” I said, walking away; that was as much as he got for the rest of the weekend from me.
I still count that entire episode a disappointing failure, though I didn’t know how to do anything differently at the time. Not tossing my books and overnight bag in my car and leaving right away seemed the best I could manage for the time being. Clearly, I needed to learn how to counter this twisting of theology openly, to be prepared to teach the children and youth in the churches I served that Jesus really meant it when He said He loved every body. So I stayed. For the rest of that weekend, I kept my distance. I kept my guard up. I didn’t sleep.
I wasn’t surprised then a few weeks later at lunch, though, when this “old lady” was being castigated and labelled a busybody sticking her nose in other people’s business.
Just to be clear, I asked my angry colleague, “That old lady ought to have simply looked the other way?”
“Exactly!” he said. “It was none of her…your business.”
To read part one of this two-part essay, see Speak Up, Young Lady. Be warned, parts of that essay may trigger victims.
Wise ones tell us that we often have to “learn” the same lesson over and over until we get it right. My hint: once you figure out whatever lesson it is you seem doomed to repeat in your life, get on that. Study it. Dissect it. Get it right so you can get it done…or, at least, get good at it.
For me, evidently, one lesson that I have felt doomed to repeat is “Speak up.”
After being fired at age 17 from a fast food restaurant for daring to write a letter to corporate about requiring female workers to wear short skirts (this was in the late 70’s) I found work that fit my college schedule at the county juvenile detention facility. I was thrilled to get the job if only because I was considering a career in social work by that time. Never mind that there was little or no training for the position or that most of my co-workers and I were still teens ourselves; the county simply needed folks willing to work all hours, and willing to be locked into the facility with teens in trouble. College students fit that bill nicely. There were three shifts a day, each eight hours, round the clock, and we all pulled at least one midnight to eight a.m. shift a week. I’m grateful that the teens we supervised were “less criminal and more neglected” teens, picked up mostly for truancy or petty theft or vandalism, but mostly just guilty of being unsupervised. There were three pods of four teens each and our biggest struggle was keeping them from being bored and trying to ignore smartass remarks. I generally worked the 4 p.m. to midnight shift on three of my four shifts, always sharing supervision and feeding and fielding complaints alongside another college student, always a guy since we were locked in every night with boys and girls.
When the dog bites….
Only once did we realize how vulnerable we were, but some training we received came in really handy then and years later for me. During a self-defense training, we learned about getting out of holds and about using weak spots like the instep which is usually vulnerable when someone grabs you from behind. I would years later be grateful for another piece of that training: when we were taught how to react when someone bites you. An unarmed combatant might bite and, while the instinct is to pull away, the best move is to push into the open jaws. That movement will cause the assailant to open their jaw wider and allow you to then pull away. Years later, while out walking in my neighborhood, I would use that with a dog that jumped his fence and lunged for me. I am grateful I saw him coming, though, raised my arm (covered thankfully by a heavy jacket) and pushed back into his jaw as he lunged. He was unable to bite down. We repeated this two more times, him lunging and me pushing back while I yelled for help before another neighbor came out. I’d heard people say time seems to slow in life-threatening moments, and I remember calmly being focussed on my arm going into that dog’s jaw.
It was terrifying.
It was also empowering and would help me in so many ways.
I’d been given one way to stand my ground and I’d seen it work. This would not come in handy until years later, though. At that time, I am grateful to say we had little reason to be afraid of our detainees in the juvenile detention facility.
Again with the troublemaking.
After working there for nearly a year, though, as the juvenile detention facility (which seemed like a lifetime for me at eighteen, by the way) a new worker was hired. Without warning, my schedule was cut in half. It took a week or so to figure out what was happening, but, evidently, the new worker was dating the boss. Remember, this was the seventies. No one even thought of filing complaints then, at least not in Springfield, Missouri. I was angry, but was told at our monthly staff meeting this arrangement would be temporary. By that time, I was living in a tiny apartment. The kitchen was so small I could not open the oven door more than three inches because the refrigerator stood in the way. The bathroom had a claw foot tub with a skylight overhead, though, and a balcony, and I was thrilled to have it, but I would not be able to pay my rent on half a paycheck. Already, I had learned the art of “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” and relied as well on the four meals a week I shared with the detainees at work. This job had been my way out of working fast food; I knew I was far too clumsy to be a server at a restaurant. After nearly a month with my hours cut though, I found it difficult to be cordial when I went to pick up my diminished paycheck and encountered my replacement. I’d thus far received good evaluations, so I was frustrated about having to consider another job. That is perhaps why I figured I had little to lose when the next monthly staff meeting rolled around. After our boss offered updates and training information, he handed out new schedules for the month and, again, I was facing half of my regular paycheck. I raised my hand. My boss called on me. I was standing at the back of the room, aware that others were disgruntled at how things were working out but only two of us had lost significant portions of our paychecks. I simply asked, “What do I have to do to get my hours back?”
My boss looked at me, frowned, and asked me what I meant.
“You know what I mean.” I said, “What do I have to DO to get my hours back?” He definitely knew what I meant. He looked at his girlfriend who was seated next to him up front, then frowned at me. I guessed it was time to start searching for another job. I certainly had no intention of actually sleeping with the jerk. And, while a well-reasoned letter to my boss’s boss might have seemed more professional, as it happened, I got my hours back the next day. Troublemaker. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective. Noted.
Speaking up, asking people to do the right thing hasn’t always been as successful as I might wish, though. Over the years, the stakes became higher. Sometimes, it did not make me friends with those in charge, and sometimes those in charge used their power in ways that cost me lost opportunities and/or lost income. The best news for me was that often there were others standing with me, and, on occasion, I have been pleasantly surprised by someone speaking up for me.
Sometimes, feeling the need to speak up cost me more than a lost date. While in college, I was invited to apply for a scholarship through a local civic organization to study in France for a year because French was my minor. The opportunity to study abroad would no doubt have opened doors I could not imagine. I wrote my application essay and my resume in French and English, and, of course I listed Leadership opportunities, including some speaking engagements explaining the Equal Rights Amendment in town or on campus. I was told, though, that the scholarship was given to a young man. I would have received it had it not been for my work on women’s issues; evidently the group imagined me sailing across the sea to start riots, maybe even to burn my bra.
I had two ways to see that, I reasoned. I could stop speaking up and go along to get along, but I would have to agree to be like the people who had disappointed me which might lead to me being the reason someone else was disappointed. All these lessons in speaking up followed (or led?) me into teaching and ministry and, while it got some easier, I never really got used to people being angry when I speak up. Now, when I find out, though, that there’ll be consequences or someone is angry, I (eventually) shrug. There are people close to me who I am loathe to upset, but everyone else can just take a number. I might be surprised and disappointed but we’ve come too far now. People just expect it.
Who Knew? My Life Lessons Aren’t Just For Me.
Turns out, learning our life lessons isn’t just for us. What we learn can benefit others. In ministry, I have been called to speak up for my LGBTQ students, those behind bars, wounded soldiers. I was, honestly, as proud as I was distressed to be called “that woman” by some of the folks dealing with wounded warriors at Fort Campbell.
All of my lessons, it turned out, helped in these cases, as did the understanding that the folks who needed someone to stand with them or speak up for them were in far greater pain than any discomfort I felt at speaking up at this point in my life.
Personally, speaking up was easier, in fact, when I was no longer the only one affected. When I had children, I felt keenly the need to protect my boys or anyone else who was vulnerable. My first chance to act on that came when a neighborhood dog began getting out of his fenced-in yard.
Facing the Big Dogs
In this case, I thought the “Big Dog” in the small town where my husband and I had settled with our boys was the Collie living on the corner across the street from one of my son’s friends. He was so large he could put his front paws on the shoulders of an adult and look him in the eye. He started demonstrating this on folks in the neighborhood who were strolling around the small downtown area, knocking more than a few of them down. The owner, when informed, usually snarled and slammed the door. When I heard the dog had knocked down the elderly piano teacher around the corner, though, I resolved to call animal control. I discovered though there was only a part time animal control staff in our small town in spite of a growing number of dogs allowed to roam free. I decided to write a letter to the editor -again with the letters, right? – to encourage folks to speak up and perhaps convince our city government to make the animal control agent a full time position. The letter was also an “open letter” to my neighbors with dogs to encourage them to follow the leash law in town and inform them of what was then the local rule at least. According to that rule, a dog owner whose pet bit another person could be made to pay any doctor bills. A dog owner whose dog bit a second time could be sued and, after a third offense, an animal would be put down by the city. I encouraged dog owners to protect both their neighbors and their dogs. Once again, I believed I’d written a well-reasoned letter.
The Big Dogs Bark
The letter was published on a Wednesday. That evening, I received a phone call from the mayor. My anticipation of a good conversation was usurped almost immediately when our illustrious city leader, whom I had never met, began berating me angrily and basically telling me to mind my own business. The big dogs were barking.
I quickly gave up on an actual conversation when it became apparent this was not a dialog. I was honestly surprised that any adult would yell like that at any other adult who wasn’t in their family. He didn’t even know me. I was also confused about why he’d been so rude and aggressive and I began to worry about encountering him in public. I was still pretty unsure what to think about his behavior when, early the next morning, I answered my front door to find the animal control officer in uniform.
She was smiling, though, and, after introducing herself, asked if by any chance I’d received a call the night before from the city mayor. Turns out, the mayor had made a habit of nightly drunken calls to people who ticked him off, and this officer often was dispatched by the local sheriff to apologize to the recipients of those calls. No wonder the city couldn’t afford a full time Animal Control officer. We took notice that the understanding was they’d keep up this practice of apologizing for him until the next election. I began to worry about how angry our neighbor with the collie likely was, if he had read the paper.
We got the chance to face him fairly quickly when, a week or two later, I was walking with my eight-year-old to his friend’s house and the collie on the corner lunged out from behind a bush and bit me on the hip before we even knew what was happening. He only lunged once, thank God, and, fortunately, we were just a few feet from the friend’s house. The boy’s mother and I quickly decided I needed to see a doctor. The bite had punctured the skin and drawn blood, but he had not clamped down or torn the flesh. I had not needed to put my juvenile court training into action, I thought, since he only lunged once. The importance of the lesson about standing your ground, though, contained a much wider meaning, I would find out.
The bleeding was minimal but the bruising had already begun and I’d need a tetanus shot. As soon as I finished at our local clinic that day, I walked over to the police department and swore out a warrant. I was driven by the terrifying thought that, had my son been walking on the other side of me that morning, the dog would likely have bitten his face or neck. The thought made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and I knew this was a chance to begin the process to make our neighborhood safer. Though I feared we’d all still have to avoid that part of the neighborhood for a long while, we had put this bully and his dog on notice and try to find some official help.
Amusing detail: the officer who took my information was surprised to discover, through a congenial conversation, that I not only actually loved dogs, we had two big dogs; we just didn’t let them run free. She and her colleagues were under the impression I hated all dogs. She gave me a court date and I left, already afraid and realizing I’d need to warn my boys to watch out in case the neighbor decided to retaliate once he was served with the papers. We stayed close to home for the next few weeks.
When the morning came to face the dog’s owner in court, I will admit I was nauseous and more than a bit afraid not only of facing him but also of how the case would be treated. For all I knew, this dog owner played pool with the local judge. When the judge called us both up to his bench, the neighbor immediately started complaining, “Judge,” he said, “this crazy woman–” but the judge cut him off and asked me for the evidence I had of the bite, which meant both men would be viewing pictures of my butt and hip showing the puncture marks and bruising. A stellar start.
I was beginning to regret the warrant when the judge laid the pictures down, turned to the dog owner and asked, “You drunk, Sir?” My neighbor’s blustery and belligerent response was the judge’s answer.
“You, Sir,” the judge continued, “may or may not be aware that this bite is your dog’s first offense, his first strike.” He held up his hand when my neighbor began to protest.
“You will pay her for her medical bills before you leave. And because you disrespected this court by showing up drunk, your dog now has two strikes against him.” Once again, he held up his hand to stop any protests. “I understand you own some property outside of town; I’d suggest the dog move there. Today. Step back.”
Going through all of that was exhausting and literally gut-wrenching, but I had reached a point where NOT doing anything would have felt far worse.
I’d finally reached a point where NOT speaking up was more painful than swallowing what I needed to say. I did not want to end my life filled with regrets. I’ve hated learning to speak up but I hated not speaking up more.
…where I am today is light years better than where I began, represents so much distance from curling up in the backseat, sure no one would believe me if I spoke up.
This has been my journey and, while speaking up can still be tiring, today I have allies, I have freedom to walk away and I have lots of practice. The need to speak up is mostly easier to face.
This life lesson is no longer the big dog in my emotional neighborhood lunging at me until I fall down.
Maybe you never think twice about speaking up, but I know you have your own challenges, your own life lessons, and I hope you’re moving through them, growing, reaching, finding your freedom. I hope as you reflect on where you’ve been, that you give yourself the benefit of the doubt and that you recognize you likely did the best you could, the best you knew to do, at the time. If nothing else, you survived and learned to do things differently the next time.
My hope for you, then, is this:
May you figure out your life lessons swiftly and early in life.
May you accept help and welcome allies along the way.
May you not reach the end of your life wondering
Where you’d be or
What you’d be doing
If you had stared down your hounds,
If you had pushed back on the jaws that threatened you,
If you had felt strong enough…finally…, become fed up enough, worn out enough to say what you needed to say when you needed to say it.
How a delicatessen menu taught me how to understand how my son – and my church members – learn.
While I was writing this, I had several conversations, mostly with my oldest son, Arlo, a college instructor, about the third grade retention law in Tennessee and how students often do well in reading or math skills but not in testing even though it is through standardized testing that it is determined whether or not they will advance or be held back to repeat third grade. The teachers I know work so very hard to help each student and if we are going to have standardized learning (i.e., all students of an age studying the same thing at the same time) then we will have standardized testing is a necessary evil. Having taught the students who ended up in Study Skills classes in a community college because after high school they were still not ready for college-level work, though, I know that brilliant people may never learn to test well. Many among us will go through life believing they are not smart when in fact it is simply because they learn differently and do not have access to the learning environment that suits them. We certainly cannot expect our teachers to be able to teach to all learning styles, but all of us can learn from those around us how they – and we – learn better, i.e., we can figure this out together.
Always Learning
No one was more surprised than I was when my youngest son – the shy one, the one who barely spoke until he was three – agreed at around age nine to be the puppeteer for our children’s time in worship. Until that point, most of the church knew him only as the child peeking out from behind the pastor. Turns out, Spencer didn’t speak much until he was three for a couple of reasons: first, he couldn’t get a word in edgewise with three non-stop talkers also at the dinner table; and second, like his older brother, he was born when we lived in Japan where he heard less English than Japanese. We moved back to the states before he was one, so he was uprooted and plopped down in Tennessee just when he was learning to speak. Changing how his brain was wired likely took a minute. The first real words he uttered came as a full sentence, though, or actually, as a question from his favorite movie: “Who ya gonna call?”
The many faces of Spencer (now a lawyer, married, expecting his own child.)
Once he started talking, we would find out what a quick and dry wit he had developed. I had introduced a children’s time during worship early and I was reminded regularly I was not in control, often by my own children. The morning I told the children about Jonah being swallowed by a giant fish, then “thrown up” onto the beach, Spencer jumped in with his commentary.
“Could have been worse,” he said. “Could have come out the other end.”
He was eight when we got to the first church I served, just old enough to go to see his friend Charlie one town over for an overnight stay. Evidently, however, he could not sleep, he confessed when I picked him up the next day. Charlie’s mother was as surprised and concerned as I was; what had he done all night while everyone else slept?
“Watched infomercials,” he said.
I looked to Charlie’s mom who seemed worried I might be upset. “Well, you’ll get a nap in the car ride home,” I offered, shrugging.
My son said thanks and goodbye, then stopped at the back door long enough to tell Charlie’s mom, “Oh, your George Foreman grill will be here in three weeks.” Then he walked out the door, leaving both adults bewildered.
That dry sense of humor and sense of timing would serve him well as a puppeteer. I planned to use the Children’s Time to both entertain and teach. We had a large red dog puppet, whom we renamed Jeffrey and whom we decided would be allowed to ask questions no one else dared ask. In his debut, our puppet first told what would become my favorite joke.
“What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup?” he asked.
I shrugged and asked, “What?”
“Anyone can roast beef.”
It took a minute, but we both waited, expecting to hear the chuckles move across the room slowly; first, though, we heard the roar from the back pew. One of my church members, Ray, loved the joke apparently. A few months later, I would visit him in the hospital and laugh myself because nearly every person who helped me find him that day would ask, “You mean the guy with the pea soup joke?” A year later, he would succumb to the illness that had sent him to the hospital. Sitting in the visitation parlor of the funeral home, I would hear the joke enough to prompt me at the funeral service the next day to ask how many in that room knew the difference between roast beef and pea soup. Nearly everyone raised a hand.
On that first Sunday of the puppet’s debut, once the ripples of laughter had died down, Jeffrey asked me, the pastor, what I was wearing under that robe? I had not worn a robe before that, but frankly hoped the robe would solve the ever-challenging task of what to wear when preaching.
“Why, I’m glad you asked,” I said. Then, as I reached down to lift up the hem of my robe, I saw Jeffrey had covered his eyes and was exclaiming, “No, no, no…!” Jeffrey was a hit and became one of our most effective teaching tools. Using a puppet was in part a response to all I had been learning about how to help my people learn something about themselves and their God.
Lessons from the Deli
Opportunities to learn what worked for teaching and what didn’t flew at me from all directions at that church; the toughest part was catching all of them and seeing how they were related. A delicatessen menu, for example, taught me about my son, my sister, father and my church. I knew my son was smart; I just didn’t know why he was so often angry until we visited the new delicatessen in Gallatin. We met up with some friends for lunch and we were standing at the counter as a group, staring at the menu, which was written on the back wall of the restaurant behind the counter where the sandwiches, soups and salads were prepared. Usually, when we ate lunch at drive through restaurants, menus sported pictures and we all knew what they were called because we could all sing the jingles we heard during commercial breaks while we watched our favorite television shows. At the new deli, even I felt the pressure to peruse the menu quickly, so I turned to my youngest son and asked if he saw anything he might want for lunch. He looked at me, bewildered. It was a glorious moment of vulnerability; normally, he would have barked at me for singling him out for help. At that moment, though, I realized he did not see what I saw. I saw “Salads,” in larger, bold lettering, for example, then “Chicken,” “Tuna” and “Garden” salad categories in smaller lettering followed by even smaller paragraphs with descriptions for each salad. He saw lots and lots of jumbled letters.
“Want a ham sandwich?” I offered, knowing what he liked, and told him he could have it on white, wheat or rye bread and he chose rye just to be adventurous.
“Can I have mayonnaise on it?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I said, “and no tomatoes. Chips?” He agreed to chips and soda.
I made a note, though, to visit our local library and there I was grateful to find out about different learning styles and how those often mirror and/or drive the different ways we relate socially in the world. Some of us learn just fine the way most subjects are taught in school; others struggle. I personally learn by taking what is presented and being able to then restate it in my own words. In Chemistry in high school, for example, my teacher would walk me through the problem at hand and it always made sense to me in that moment. If I did not get a chance to retell within a short time the solution to the chemistry problem, though, it would be lost to me. I may have initially understood it but I would quickly lose grasp of the solution if I had not written it down and been able to explain it myself. Only if I wrote something down, then retold it in my own words, would I learn what had been presented. Fortunately, that was easy enough to do in most classes growing up. I personally kept great notes and studying for an exam was a matter of going over and over my notes until I could nearly recite them word for word and then recreate them for an exam. Just explain something to me orally, though, then exit and the understanding would leave the room with you.
My son, I realized, learned by watching and repeating what he’d seen as well, but by doing, not writing and reading. When he was five, we watched him recreate a rocket tower with his plastic building toys while watching one of his favorite movies about the Apollo 13 moon mission. When the rocket took off during the movie, we realized that our son’s rocket tower fell away in stages in exactly the same way the real tower did, something none of the rest of us had even noticed. I do believe that he would have been likely labeled with some sort of “learning disorder” had we not homeschooled our sons. As it was, what I read suggested he simply needed some understanding of his learning style and what might be getting in the way of his learning. He needed me to recognize, for example, that he found distracting those modern textbooks with their colorful pages and art interspersed with words. Simply placing a piece of colored plastic across a textbook page, though, rendered the colors and art less distracting. Turns out, he was among many who struggled because we as a culture had decided it was somehow helpful to readers to spice up the visuals in our textbooks and magazines. Some of us enjoyed the art; some of us were too distracted to be able to read. Different styles.
Some of us will find a page like this helpful. Others might be distracted by the art. Page from “The Way Life Works,” by Mahlon Hoagland and Bert Dodson, Times Books, 1995.
Spencer also needed information: when you read a textbook, a menu or a newspaper, you start with the largest letters. Might seem intuitive, but not everyone approaches the world in an intuitive manner and our world is richer precisely because we are not all the same. To read a newspaper, you look first at the headlines; on a menu, you choose categories like soup or sandwiches. Once you decide whether or not you want a sandwich or sports, you look to the next largest groups of letters and decide if you want a tuna sandwich or if you want to read the previous days’ scores. Smaller letters give you details about the avocado sandwich you chose, or where the baseball scores can be found. Even smaller lettering leads you to what else you could have on the sandwich or which team won the game or match.
Learning styles also affect our approach to the world and our relationships. Often, my son simply needed information to help him navigate.
Turns out, when it came to relationships, the same was true. Often, he simply needed information to help him navigate. He asked once what to do when someone was crying. Before, his tactic was to walk away and get someone to help. He wasn’t uncaring. Far from it. He was worried he’d hurt someone more by saying or doing the wrong thing when they were already vulnerable. I suggested a plan: stay close by, and, if you know them well enough, put a hand on their shoulder or arm and ask if there is anything you can do to help. He said thanks and that was that; I thought he’d forgotten about it really until a couple of years later when said he had tried that with a friend and had been relieved to find it had really worked.
What I had learned was that my son needs information while others learn visually or by hearing. Tragically, seldom do pastors learn how the people around them learn. My son taught me why so many of my family members and congregants might be frustrated. Suddenly, for example, my understanding of one member bragging that he’d finished college “without ever cracking a textbook,” changed. He’d turned that into a plus when it had actually been a hint to his learning style, one not often supported in schools then. Quickly, I understood why our children’s time was often the only part of the worship service people remembered in the beginning. The story or our puppet wasn’t teaching theology; it was just funny, but funny can be theological if you’ve let your guard down expecting a funny joke.
On one of the first Sundays using Children’s Time, I talked in the sermon about “schadenfreude,” the idea that we take some joy in others getting their due or at least not getting more than us. For the children’s time, I had brought wrapped pieces of hard candy and shared it with the children, but I only had three pieces, so the last child in line got none. When he protested, I explained, “I ran out but at least three of the children get some so we can be happy for them, right?”
“That’s not fair,” he wailed.
“Well, then, perhaps no one should have candy,” I suggested, snatching back the candies from the other children before they knew what was happening. They were, of course, bewildered by quickly changing fortunes. “Is that better?” I asked.
He grinned. “Yes!”
Of course, everyone laughed (but I immediately regretted the lesson we were all learning at his expense.) In that moment, the pastor learned to think through the children’s messages more carefully. The child felt better but the others were sad and bewildered until I said, “Wait. Look! There’s another piece of candy here after all.” All the children eagerly accepted their candy and went back to sit with their families. before their fortunes changed again.
Likely none of the children heard the sermon that day but the adults were primed to hear my sharing about my own schadenfreude.
Ironically, I admitted, I had seen this in myself that morning driving to church. I was sideswiped and nearly run off the road by a speeder. My reaction to that bit of driving aggression had been far from pastoral. To make matters worse, when I passed the same guy a little later getting a ticket just a few miles down the road, I gloated loudly! My schadenfreude, or joy, was that he was “getting his due.” The adults in the room understood the idea better and had it reinforced because of Children’s Time. They understood better then the prophet Jonah who was not happy to discover that God wanted to forgive all the sinners in Nineveh; Jonah wanted to see them “get their due.” We usually want others to get justice while we ourselves get mercy and forgiveness. That’ll preach, as they say.
Over the years, then, using all I learned, I not only used the Children’s Time and our snarky puppet, but also worked to craft sermons heavy with stories and illustrations because so many of us only remember the stories we hear or the “word pictures” we encounter. “Show. Don’t tell,” works. Maybe too well. After a couple of years of working to find and add stories to the sermons in hopes people would take something away from worship, I got one of what would feel like daily lessons in humility. At an Administrative Council meeting, a member offered the devotion before the meeting proper using a story I’d told three weeks earlier in my sermon. “Ah,” I thought, sitting back and smiling, “they DO listen.” But no. Once she’d finished her devotion, she handed me her notes.
“Feel free,” she said, “to use that in a sermon. It’s a great story.” Sigh.
Bonus free joke from the adult Spencer:
What is the difference between a tuna, a piano and a glue stick?
I don’t know. What is the difference between a tuna, a piano and a glue stick?
My paternal grandmother, Arbaleta (Grandma Leta), and maternal grandmother, Marie (Grandma Ree), could not have been more different creatures, and this was never more obvious than at Christmas. At first glance, it seemed to me that they were polar opposites when it came to wintry holidays especially; in retrospect, it is evident they were each on opposite points of the pendulum that has come to symbolize Christmas for me. Generation after generation on both sides of my family seemed to be unconsciously caught up by the wild swings of this holiday pendulum, a reactionary arc between a resounding “Yes!” to Christmas and its counterpart, an adamant “Hell, no!”
My Granddaughter’s depiction of our favorite activity: swinging. She is so wise….
Finding Healing Around Christmas
Maybe your family needs some healing around holidays as well. Sure, it seems strange to talk about Christmas amidst all the paper and ribbon and cookies and tinsel, but it is, in fact, the best time to step back, recognize struggles and disappointment and start our families on paths to peace with Christmas; maybe along the way we could even figure out what’s “enough” for joy. I offer this reflection then to all our families because we cannot find healing if we do not know our family’s wounds. Here’s hope for discussions about upcoming celebrations: may they be intentional, loving and truly joyful for all.
Marie as a young woman.Marie, George, & their three daughters, 1940’sArbaleta and husband, Freeman (Mac)
For me, it seems the best place to start is with the grandmothers. Both of my grandmothers were born around WWI; each married during the Great Depression. Neither had, as they say, “a pot to piss in,” not while they were growing up and not while they were young mothers. Both worked hard to support their families outside the home as well as in. Dad’s mom, Arbaleta, had two children, a boy and a girl, nine years apart. Mom’s mother, Marie, had three daughters all close in age.
Arbaleta’s husband, my Grandpa Mac, fell from an electric pole when he was young and wasn’t supposed to ever walk again, but did, in great part because Arbaleta would not let him not walk. She reportedly insisted he move his legs and even moved them for him for months as physical therapy until he could walk and work again. While I was never close to Grandma Leta, I have always admired the steely determination that these actions showed.
Marie had a husband who was always on the road as a truck driver, mostly because the bus or truck driver jobs close to town weren’t well-paying. He died of a massive heart attack at age 50; she lived another 30-plus years and married her high school sweetheart, then outlived him and married another kind man when she was eighty. At that wedding, the minister declared what we all knew, “Marie is a hopeful woman!” Grandma Ree, as we called her, was the quintessential kindergarten teacher when teachers still had time for nature walks, ironing leaves between sheets of waxed paper, and silly songs. Thus, she was the kind of grandmother I aspired to be: she played games with us, prayed for us, encouraged us and defended us when necessary. For most of her life, she modeled a love of learning: she earned a master’s degree, helped “plant” two churches, became an accomplished painter and was memorizing her favorite Bible verses in her seventies because she was losing her eyesight.
Marie as a teen.A painting by Marie for an art class while working on her Master’s. A local Spanish-American War vet sat for the class.
While I know little of Arbaleta’s childhood except poverty and hardship, I know Marie helped her mother run a boarding house after her chiropractor father divorced her mother, something which mortified both women.
That I’m aware of, Arbaleta seldom left her home after we were born. At least we never saw her leave her home, though, as far as we knew, she was perfectly capable. Our collective memory of her is of her seated on the sofa in her silk pajamas. Every time we visited her, we would wave to her from a few feet away as she perched on the sectional sofa in the corner, surrounded by shelves of various sizes and shapes of cacti. In one hand she held a lit cigarette, ashes threatening to crumble onto the silk, and the other hand held the ever-present bean bag ashtray (you know, the kind that has the bean bag on the bottom and the colorful aluminum tin bowl on the top.) That I can remember, she never once kissed, hugged or touched us in any way, shape or form. And, though she was pleasant, there were no memorable conversations, just the cloud of cigarette smoke that circled above her.
As for Christmas, well, I can’t remember there being much of it in their home at the edge of a Kansas golf course where she and Grandpa had retired. Ironically, I’m not aware Grandpa played golf, though my Dad did well into his eighties. As far as Christmas goes, Arbaleta represented the point in the arc where celebration was merely tolerated. Every few years, our parents would tote our gifts to their house to open on that rare occasion we woke up there on a Christmas morning, but the mood in the house was that Christmas decoration was, well, perfunctory. There was a tree and maybe a wreath, but evidently, for Grandpa and Arbaleta, a tree and some lights outside were “just enough,” though I suspect they were only put up to satisfy us. If overcoming poverty was Arbaleta’s life goal, she met it, thus the home on the golf course as well as the purchase of a new Lincoln every year. Secular or religious, it didn’t matter; Christmas was a formality, expected, tolerated for the children. Christmas dinner involved polished silver and store bought sweets, if any. “Please wait until you have permission to touch.”
Arbaleta died when I was seven and, suddenly, the focus of Christmas on my father’s side of the family shuddered and swung hard to the opposite extreme. Her daughter brought in Christmas every year from then on with a vengeance, lovingly, but with an overwhelming force. Every year, my aunt seemed to be competing for best Christmas ever, ostensibly in response to her own mother’s lackadaisical attempts.
While certain treasured and expensive statuary graced my aunt’s mantle for Christmas, for example, every year, the Christmas tree itself, usually the biggest tree I’d ever seen, sported a different theme with new, all handmade ornaments. I often asked when she started making them, sure she must have begun the previous New Year’s Day. She also made most of our gifts; they were always of Pinterest quality and I treasured several sweaters she knitted for me, for example.
As if it were necessary, she also became an amazing cook and thus, Christmas visits always involved impressing us with recipes for new dishes. Ironically, my mother didn’t want the recipes and my mother’s mother, Marie, didn’t need them; my mother was too busy leaning into that dysfunctional pendulum that was swinging back to the starker side, likely in reaction to her mother’s seasonal excess.
Marie, my mother’s mother, was on that same swing of the pendulum as my aunt, though I believe Grandma Ree went all out for her Christmas celebration for different reasons. Her husband, Grandpa George, also died when I was seven, but that did not slow Marie down in life or around the holidays. From the moment you opened the door into her home at Christmas, the scent of pine and wild berry candles carried you through room after room of greenery, holly, bells, poinsettias and new figurines or miniatures each year. Also new each year were the sweetbreads and cookies and homemade candies, all awaiting our discovery after hugs and kisses were exchanged and the coats and mittens and caps were piled onto a bed in the back of the house.
Grandma Ree with her brother, Mother and Sister, c. 1960’s.
A Family Nightmare
While Marie’s response seemed to me to somewhat resemble that of Arbaleta’s daughter, the driving force behind Marie’s likely unconscious Christmas reverie gone amuck was a well-kept secret, a family nightmare. On two separate Christmas Eves, during her childhood and youth, Grandma Ree had lost family members to suicide. I was, of course, an adult before I was made aware of that history or the details: one drank poisoned alcohol and one shot himself, both on separate Christmas Eves. Of course, the grief and shock of their actions was complicated by their (conscious or unconscious) efforts to ruin Christmas forever for some of their family.
How painful were their memories of the holidays?
Before we assume that Marie’s attempts to reclaim Christmas was the reason for the pendulum’s extreme movements, though, we need to recognize that some calamity in earlier generations drove those men to choose Christmas Eve to end their lives; we have to ask how painful were their memories of the holidays that drove them to risk also ruining the holiday for their spouses and children? How far back did the pain begin and what don’t we know about that?
In other words, it’s not likely either man, both of whom must have been suffering and feeling hopeless, started the family on that path.
The result, though, seems to have been an unconscious struggle to compensate. Those grand swings between holiday excess and hopelessness left subsequent generations still unconsciously at a loss to figure out what’s enough celebration. Further, while we can understand what might have spurred Marie’s need to excel at Christmas, I’ll likely never know what caused Arbaleta’s lack of enthusiasm for the holidays, and so I’m left simply to marvel at the overwhelming force of her daughter’s frenzied Christmas efforts. Sadly, or thankfully, no one now has picked up that mantle and the extended family is so fractured as to make these discussions nearly impossible.
I offer these reflections then to my nuclear family as the beginning of some discussions around conscious choices rather than wild reactions.
How does a family figure out what’s enough Christmas when the family’s history is, well, fractured? My own efforts were often emotionally unsatisfying; not only were my mother’s Christmas efforts headed for the stark extreme in reaction to her mother’s and her sister-in-law’s excesses, but they were complicated by my general lack of interest in cooking or baking except when absolutely necessary.
It was my ex-husband who started me thinking about some of our responses to holidays years ago: he protested the idea of Valentines’ Day for example, saying we could and should give one another cards or flowers or candy at anytime of the year and not just one day chosen by candy and card companies and florists. Yes, we can, I agreed wholeheartedly. But do we? Of course not, I pointed out. To his credit, he came by his dislike and struggle with holidays honestly and thus brought his own reactions to our holiday table: his birthday is the day after Christmas, and he was one of six children. His Christmas gift always came with a declaration that, “Oh-that’s your birthday gift too.”
Over the years, I certainly have struggled with holidays, whether it’s decorating or preparing a feast or just planning. Don’t get me started on birthdays for children; too many of those ended in my tears from exhaustion and a sense of failure. Did I tell you about all the “Pinterest Fails?”
All these things and more (all these things and more) that’s what Christmas means to me, my love….)
Stevie Wonder
Plenty of us struggle with the holidays, though, whether because of grieving a loss or knowing you’re the only one who can’t afford the gift exchange. I’ve tried over the years to make our gifts for Christmas but again, I know too many of my family members and friends were less than thrilled with the results. Mea culpa. We tried spreading the Christmas holiday over several days to lessen the wild two-minute frenzy of Christmas morning. We tried taking Christmas to the mountains; we tried staying home. We wondered what would happen if our family just gave up one Christmas and had lots of little ones? Could that not translate into lots of chances to do or give or be kind to one another? So many of our attempts at intentional Christmases revolved around not expecting one or two people to create a magical holiday that only left them in tears and exhausted.
We’ve finally begun to incorporate some activities intentionally. Instead of china and crystal, we copied someone else’s snowman place settings, something the granddaughter and I could share. Last year, we started some silly story telling. This year, we introduced Karaoke and I am trying to reclaim the joy of baking by helping my granddaughter learn; watching her “knead” the goop she bought at the store made me think. Lo and behold, she discovered the joy of yeast and how it rises and how the baker must punch down the dough, then knead it. Her eyes grew wide after she made a fist and punched away. “That is soooo satisfying,” she said. A keeper.
In case you’re wondering, religion did not seem to figure at all in the wild reactions to the holiday through the years for my extended family. While Arbaleta was, as far as I know, agnostic, and Marie was a strong Christian, neither of them addressed or seemed to include the religious holiday in their efforts to reclaim or dismiss Christmas. For our family, that’s a different pendulum altogether. I personally love a good candlelight Christmas eve service singing and the idea that God came to be with us as an infant. Nevertheless, culturally we continue to struggle with all that Christmas celebrations have become for generations and we cannot heal from pain we do not acknowledge.
For our family, the faith and religious rituals are different pendulum altogether. I will never know why my Grandma Ree did not incorporate more of her personal faith into the celebration. Personal experience suggests she was treading lightly with agnostic family members and, as is true for many families, also celebrated on different days with different parts of the family, balancing church events with home. Nevertheless, culturally, we continue to struggle with all that our secular celebrations of Christmas have become for generations, often leaving us to begin another year frustrated, sad, discouraged. That is where we can start, but we must look collectively at this because we cannot heal from pain we do not acknowledge.
The best time, I believe, to reflect on how we celebrate Christmas is when we are all together…and we’ll before Christmas comes around-unexamined-again.
For my family, I continue to try to reframe Christmas in light of the history I bring to the holiday. I guess I hope through reflections and questions to step completely back from that wild, reactionary swinging between excessive celebration to indifference and even disdain.
I think one key is that we focus on the children, but with respect for their needs and not our own needs to give them the best holiday ever!
They get tired; we pay attention. They want to dress up; they don’t want to dress up. Quiet time, dancing in the kitchen time, gifts that involve us engaging with them. I’m not saying we’re the best with children ever or that ours are happier than any other. What I am saying is that like in so much of life, the children around me ground me. What they need is so often what I need. Let’s sing Jingle Bells, yes, at a gathering, but we mustn’t forget the bells themselves and our need to jingle them to make the song come to life.
A little percussion goes a long way and when we sing “Jingle Bells” there need to be jingling bells….A five-year-old taught me that.
Music must also be a source of holiday joy for many families. I’m jealous of those who manage a musical gathering but hopeful that might be in our future as well. Certainly with percussion everyone can participate! The idea of introducing music brings us back, though, both to the need for sensory awareness and to the idea of joy and reverie throughout the year. In order for there to be music next year, we need to practice throughout the year – often and, by practicing, remember the things that do bring us joy without wearing us out. I write this and share it now, after the holiday blitz, planning to share it with my family, to start the conversation we can have in anticipation of next year. I am curious to hear from them, and find out if they are aware of, or experiencing their own pendulum of Christmases, maybe even unknowingly riding that pendulum right now. I’m hopeful that with some lowered expectations of ourselves and a little yeast, we just might be able to rescue the holidays from the extremes of that dysfunctional pendulum my family rode for far too long AND decide for ourselves what is “enough Christmas.”
When I was five, I ran away from home. Of course I didn’t get far. My world then revolved around a quarter-acre yard in Springfield, Missouri, on a corner lot, two blocks from my elementary school. We lived a short drive away from where I was attending kindergarten at our First Baptist Church and near enough to some train tracks that I knew it was bedtime by the train whistle every night. The little three-bedroom, one bath brick house on Marlin Street had a fenced-in backyard, a sand box, a metal clothesline and a weeping willow tree, all seemingly perfect for three children under six. Its feathery leaves hung to the ground, draping around the trunk with just enough room under the canopy for a five- year-old to hide and imagine different worlds than were to be found inside the little house on Marlin.
For the longest time, I couldn’t tell you why I ran away on that particular day. I often wondered if it hadn’t been that I didn’t want to go back to kindergarten. I went on the afternoon shift, so we basically had an hour or two of ABC’s, singing, and a snack in the gymnasium of First Baptist Church before we took a nap. I already could read and write some when I got to kindergarten, so there was no struggle for me there.
There had been a memorable first day spent on the vinyl chair in our kitchen trying to learn to tie my shoes. “Little boys and girls who can’t tie their own shoes are not big enough to go to kindergarten,” I’d been told again and again. “They’ll send you right home.” I had spent the morning of my first day of kindergarten tying and untying my red plaid tennis shoes, both my mother and me praying I’d avoid the shame of the teacher calling my mother to bring her little “baby” home. We needn’t have worried. Not once did I ever have to tie my shoes while at school.
Perhaps, on that morning, I simply didn’t want another perm.
My mother struggled daily with my full head of “straight as a pencil” “dirty-brown” hair because it was constantly tangled. Every day, we’d have the same conversation about brushing the underside of my hair, that thick mat next to my neck, and every day I would stare at her as if I were hearing the laments and reprisals for the first time. My hair may have been the bane of her existence but her brushing my hair is the only physical connection with her I remember. Her brushing it angrily. Her trimming errant bangs until the top of my head was nearly visible. Her trying to make it curl. Her finally chopping the hair off rudely, at a strange angle because she was done with it, as fed up as I was with trying to tame that mane.
Mom had been introduced that summer to the “home permanent.” I’d never been to a salon even to have my hair cut. Mom cut our hair herself with her sewing scissors, black handled shears that were never sharpened or oiled, as far as I could tell, so they’d pull when she hacked away at the thick bunch she’d grab in her left hand and chop with her right hand. I remember staring into the bathroom mirror blankly. I hadn’t cared that she cut it because of how horrid it looked, I realize now. I cared because she said, as she was sweeping up the hair from the floor, “Now you can just brush it yourself.” She would no longer brush it for me. I think I would even in that moment have agreed to another permanent like the one that had failed so miserably and sent her to her sewing basket for the shears.
I can still smell a home perm a mile away….
The day before, the permanent had required a couple of hours of me seated on that sticky vinyl chair in our kitchen while she rolled strand after strand in metal-curlers, the kind with bristles meant to grab and hold the hair long enough for the chemicals to alter the makeup of your hair and teach it to curl like those golden locks on Shirley Temple If the rolling of the curlers wasn’t bad enough, the chemicals made my nose burn and my eyes water and the bristles on the curlers pricked my scalp. Then, once the solution had been applied and wiped off my neck and back, I was told to take my daily nap. Whether we slept or not, we “napped” every day so Mom could have time to herself, a practice I appreciated when I had children. Only on this day, because of the perm, I was relegated to a rug on the floor by the washer in our laundry room. I could have no pillow for my head because we didn’t want to ruin a pillow. Were we worried about ruining my head? Also, no pillow meant any attempts to rest my head caused dozens of tiny needles to prick my scalp, but sitting up and trying to read sent rivulets of stinky solution dripping down my neck and back. I would not rest well that afternoon.
Sadly, the perm did not “take.” My hair rebelled. My mother was furious, disgusted, as she yanked curler after curler off only to watch the long brown strands defiantly continue to hang as straight as pencils. She was crying. I was crying. She’d been trying to prepare me to participate in a Girls’ Auxiliary ceremony at our church where her teenage cousin would be “crowned ” a princess. The Girls’ Auxiliary was the church’s alternative to the Girl Scouts, designed to encourage girls to learn Scripture, study the lives of missionaries and participate in ministries like collecting monies for children India and China. To the program’s credit, many of us certainly were inspired by godly women like Lottie Moon. My cousin had completed the requirements for attaining the “Princess” rank and there was to be a ceremony at church. I was tasked with carrying a paper gold crown on a pillow to be placed on her head. Mom wanted me to represent the family well, to look pretty and be a shining example of the next generation of princesses.
But my shock of brown hair refused to do its part. And mom was fed up. She’d gotten the shears out just as her aunt called and offered to come over and help. Her aunt had three daughters, all teens, and somehow managed to fashion a dainty pony tail for the ceremony.
The next day, however, the shears returned and that was all she wrote. My hair would not cover my neck again that year or the next. Not until I learned to brush it myself. I could not for my part, see the point. I didn’t care about my hair being pretty, which may seem ironic, since I was teased incessantly by my father. He was annoyed that I was so attached to my white straw hat, white gloves and white wicker purse, all gifts from grandparents the year before for Easter. He thought I wanted to be “a little lady” because I carried my purse with the gloves inside it and donned my little white straw hat with a yellow ribbon nearly every day for most of that year. I didn’t participate in outdoor activities anymore with my brother or sister that year. I preferred instead to go outside in my hat and carry my purse to sit under my tree and pretend I was somewhere else. It would be years later when I’d realize why I wanted to be anywhere else.
Of course, picture day came soon after the cut.
At the time, I just remember being grateful I could pull that straw hat over my crooked bangs. That afternoon then, while mom was sweeping my hair off of the bathroom floor, and I was supposed to be on my bed for naptime, I pulled the hat down over my ears, shoved my gloves into the purse and snuck out the screen door from the laundry room, careful not to let it creak or slam shut.
I had left a note on my bed that I expected her to find, a note that simply said, “I am running away. Jodi.” Then I went outside and sat under my tree, my back against the trunk, legs stretched out towards the backside of the house, the branches drooping and fingering the ground as the breeze tried to cool the afternoon. Then I waited. I waited for her to find my note and come running frantically out of the laundry room into the carport, searching. I waited for her to scoop me up and hug me and exclaim how relieved she was that I was safe. I waited for her to carry me inside proclaiming she would never let me go, maybe even to bake cookies for me. Just for me.
I waited, and, then, worried she wouldn’t be able to see me under the tree whose branches drooped to the ground, I moved to the sandbox. And waited some more. When the heat got to me, I moved to the back door that led to the laundry room and perched on the steps, clutching my purse, waiting to be found. I’ll never know how long I waited, but eventually I got tired and gave up. Then, slowly so as to not make the screen door squeak, I peered into the laundry room at the ugly rug that still stank of permanent solution. I crept past the opening to the kitchen and found no one, so I crept to the bedroom I shared at the time with my sister. She was asleep on her bed. My brother was asleep across the hall in his bedroom. Even my mother lay sleeping on her bed; drugged by the heat and disappointed by the day.
I guess I was sure Mom must have seen the note and ignored it, so, ever the quick thinker, I crossed my name off and penciled in my sister’s name on it instead, then fell asleep. It would be years before I’d wonder why I hadn’t just crumpled the note up, why it hadn’t dawned on me that my little sister couldn’t read or write at the time. As it turned out, the note was still on my bed when I awoke from the nap, so I folded it up and tucked in into my white wicker purse where I carried it for the rest of the summer.
When our two adventurous boys were toddlers, their father, Mick, the bearded, brown-eyed singer I’d fallen in love with a decade before, demanded I stop being constantly worried about the survival of our off-spring.
“They’ve made it just fine so far,” he said one warm evening outside Kroger, punctuating his point by, rather roughly, I thought, depositing our two-year-old, Spencer, into the basket of a creaky shopping cart.
In my defense, I countered silently, we had thus far prevented any plaster casts or spidery-black sutures on those precious cheeks because of the diligence and quick reflexes of their mother and the fact that the two-year-old, in particular, bounced well.
The first time I’d left my husband alone with Arlo, our first-born, to play at the park, I had not realized I needed to explain to him that the rubber, wraparound baby swings were for one-year-olds like our son or that he was nowhere near big enough to sit on a sagging rubber seat meant for an older child and hold onto a chain. Our beautiful brown-eyed boy got his first bloody nose that day. My husband read my mind.
“It’s not like he broke his nose when he fell from that swing,” Mick countered while helping the now four-year-old into the cart. Arlo wrapped his arms around his bent knees and lowered those eyes onto the patches on his jeans, happy he wasn’t going to be expected to walk but pouting because his father had said no toy aisle.
I frowned at the squeaking of the wheels as we pushed the cart towards the sliding glass doors. I pointed to the two-year-old, and commanded, “Sit.” He sat.
“We know better now than to leave them alone with anyone else,” he said, both of us remembering our last visit to his parents in this now well-worn argument. His mother had suggested a fifteen minute stroll down to the dry creek for some time alone only to discover on our return to the house that Spencer had burnt the palm of his chubby little hands because no adult was paying attention.
“I wasn’t there though,” my husband continued his line of argument. “Even when I’m here with them, you worry.” He pointed out to the busy parking lot. “I see,” he said, “cars and parents and grocery carts out there. You,” he said, sweeping his arm across the parking lot like Vanna White, “you see death everywhere!”
He wasn’t exaggerating.
I did see death everywhere, especially in parking lots. We had spent the past four years in a small Japanese town where there were few cars and the biggest danger for a child was being smothered by too much attention. Back home, however, new dangers lurked everywhere.
“You just go shop. Alone,” Mick suggested. “I’ve got them and we will get home a whole lot sooner if you just pick out the apples and chicken alone. Okay?”
He abruptly parked the cart by the magazine rack. “We’ll be right here. We’ll be fine. We can be home soon if you don’t come looking every time you hear a child crying.” I slunk away under the weight of his disdain, clutching a plastic hand cart and thankfully-short grocery list scribbled on the back of an envelope. He was right. I did not need to assume every crying child was yet another example of Mick being distracted at just the wrong moment.
I first heard the clatter of metal on the tile floor as I left the cereal aisle. Someone has knocked one of those end displays, I told myself, honing in on the bone-in chicken breasts at the meat counter. I chose a shrink-wrapped package whose price sticker showed it to be family-sized, then turned towards the milk display. I wrinkled my nose as a sour smell hit me: milk had been spilled at my end of the store. I skirted the spill, and reminded myself of my goal. I had focussed and was still going to focus, I told myself, pushing the cart away from the sound of a child crying at the other end of the store. “Not all crying children are mine, not all crying children are mine,” I sang to myself to the tune of the “Wheels on the bus.” Whoever they are, they are with their mother and my boys are fine, I reassured myself.
One gallon of two percent secured, I headed to the express lane. I set the items on the grocery belt and tried not to look towards the gathering crowd near the far end of the store and the self-checkout. I smiled to myself, proud of progress, then stopped the cart abruptly, and leaned back to look around the endcap filled with M & M’s and sugar-free gum to see my husband holding our two-year old. The four-year-old had a firm grip on his father’s thigh and a store clerk was dabbing Spencer’s face with a cloth. Leaving apples, chicken, milk where I had neatly organized them, I forced myself not to run. Mick looked up and apologetically. The four-year-old did run and I scooped him up without breaking stride. I looked at the overturned cart and then at my husband in horror.
The store clerk backed up to let me assess the two-year old; he would have a bloody and swollen lip but no teeth damaged, no need for stitches and neither had broken any bones, it appeared. A miracle.
“I was looking at the magazines,” Mick explained. “Arlo must have reached over for the children’s books and made the cart fall over. They’re okay, see?” Mick turned Spencer’s chubby, snotty cheeks towards me.
I set Arlo down, put the crying child on my right hip and sighed as he wiped his nose on my shirt. Arlo grabbed onto my left hand, then looked back at his father as we started for the door. Mick took the bags of groceries from the manager who apparently had followed me from the 10 Items or Less checkout. “Did you pay…?” Mick’s voice trailed off behind me and I heard the manager encourage him to take the bags and go, please.
I kept walking.
“Never.” I said, without breaking stride, not really caring if anyone heard me.
Rituals are meant to be the beginning of the healing process, not the end of it.
Rituals can be powerful for healing, and we need them to help us heal after loss and tragedy. That memorial service we hold when someone dies? It is for the living, not the person who died. Those impromptu memorials after shootings? They help us come together to start the healing.
Rituals are just the beginning, though. This is especially true when our own behavior is part of the problem, when we keep doing the same things and expecting different results. At that point, our rituals are pointless and empty. Visiting a shut-in about once a month for nearly a decade taught me this.
By the time I started preaching, James (I changed his name for this post.) and his wife of close to 60 years were both homebound shut-ins and so were on a rotation of homes for the pastor to visit after worship. Visiting their home was ever the adventure, though.
The entry of the home was a strange mix of antebellum and 70’s influences. A folding metal lawn chair leaned up against one of the original plaster columns that framed the ten-foot-high wooden doors, for example. Heavy enough to kill you if they fell on you, the doors were never allowed to completely close as long as I knew James; opening them would have required at least two grown men. A makeshift screen door was all that separated visitors from the cluttered yard and the porch strewn with more folded lawn chairs, some dead potted plants and a half-empty bag of mulch.
The first time I visited, after knocking several times, I gingerly pushed the screen door open and started towards the voice of a television newscaster beckoning me from the farthest end of the great entry hall. On my right, was a set of partially closed doors, and from them I could see Jame’s wife, whom I also had not met, but whom I was told was not interested in visitors. I later did manage to introduce myself and be admitted to her room but that was apparently only out of necessity: I was allowed in long enough to change the channel on her nearly-antebellum black and white television for her. I was only in her room long enough to realize that, though she was hooked up to an oxygen machine, sitting next to her on the bedside table was a pack of cigarettes and a full ashtray. I declined to empty the ashtray for her, and she waved me out of the room.
I passed two more sets of floor-to-ceiling wooden doors on either side of the great hall before arriving at what must have originally been the site of the grand staircase. Evidently, the top floor of the old home had been caving in, so James’ predecessors had lopped it off before moving it to the current site facing a four-lane highway. The opening to the old stairwell had been boarded up with thin, dark paneling, creating a wall for a now-enclosed back porch. From an opening on the far left I could see the shadows from the television news cast flickering. I peeked around the opening to see the now rather annoyingly loud black and white television, a tv tray lined with medicine bottles and half-opened packages of lemon cookies, and James in a recliner.
He looked up that first visit and asked, “You the lady preacher or are you here to check my sugar?”
“Lady Preacher,” I offered and he pointed to the ottoman next to his recliner, the only other piece of furniture I could see in the dark, enclosed porch under the stairwell. Sitting on the ottoman meant I was looking up at James as we chatted, as if I had been relegated to the children’s table at Thanksgiving.
In my eleven years serving that church, James sat in that recliner for every conversation. The trajectory of our conversations and our relationship, however, determined the seat I would be offered. My perch progressed over the years from the lowly ottoman to a metal and vinyl kitchen chair and eventually to a second recliner, the offer of which required clearing away a years’s worth of mass mailing ads and cookie wrappers. My own recliner. I though I had arrived.
Preaching “Scripturally”
Even after my graduation to adult seating, though, our struggle continued. Over the years James’ oldest son indicated that James did not believe I was preaching correctly. I was not, in James’ words, “preaching Scripturally.” Though James did not actually attend and only heard secondhand about my preaching from his son, evidently, when his son told him about my sermons, James’ complaint remained the same. “Not preaching Scripturally.”
Years would pass before I would be able to grasp the kind of preaching he would consider “Scriptural.”
Every sermon I preached began with a Scripture passage, intentionally allowing the text to speak for itself. I trust the Scripture to tell us something about God and ourselves. I didn’t always like what I learned but I respected it, so I knew James’ accusations either were incorrect or misinformed. His son had reassured me he was reporting my sermon Scripture choices and preaching points, so neither of us realized for some time exactly why James consistently was disappointed. It took me years to realize that, for James and likely for many others of his upbringing, church was supposed to “convict.”
Someone went to the mourner’s bench or church had not broken out.
From the moment you entered the sanctuary apparently, church was meant to be a frightening experience; God knew what you had done all week and before the sermon was over, an honest-to-God, bona fide pastor would have directed your miserable self to come forward and sit on the hardest bench, a single bench at the front of the sanctuary, the one without a back, the “Mourner’s Bench.” There you were expected to confess that you were a sinner – lower than a worm on really bad weeks in spite of being a baptized believer. You were directed then to confess, then you were forgiven and then the congregation would sing, “Shall We Gather at the River” or “Just As I Am” before heading home.
Take me to the real church. Find me a mourner’s bench. God knows what I did all week.
This process, I learned, what James would call “preaching Scripturally,” would render backsliding baptized members “Good-to-Go” for another week. Sadly, though, it was usually then a week of the same damn behavior that had made you feel so guilty the week before, but it was fine because you could count on the Preacher to help you confess and be forgiven all over again the next week. That was apparently how folks knew they’d been to church.
Sure, not everyone went to the mourner’s bench every week but someone did or preaching had not really broken out.
By the time I got there, it didn’t matter that there was no longer a mourner’s bench in the sanctuary; the expectation was still that sitting in the pew on a Sunday invited guilt and shame and the preacher must offer a chance to ask for forgiveness so folks could feel better about themselves for at least a few days.
Full disclaimer: this is not Methodist theology.
For James to feel like he’d “been to church,” he would need to go through the whole ritual, to confess and be forgiven before he was good to go. Then, though, he apparently felt that he would be free to live his life however he wanted…until he needed to come back and do it again.
Nothing in his life changed after that ritual. It was empty. This is the kind of empty ritual that God does not want, we are told in our Scriptures. As much as God loves a good ritual, even God does not seek or require ritual simply for ritual’s sake without any change in behavior.
In Isaiah 58, “God mocks people who seek God as if they were ‘a nation that acted righteously.’ God accuses them of saying they want to be close to God, but ‘you do whatever you want…oppress all your workers… quarrel and brawl…hit each other violently.’ In classic Hebrew style, [Isaiah makes God sound] like a Yiddish grandmother saying, ‘Oy vey! You call this a fast? Enough with the thoughts and prayers, already!’ (58:5)”
Isaiah 58 is tough to read. God rejects empty piety. God rejects our “lying down in the mourning clothing and ashes” while we still oppress, quarrel and brawl, rejects us going through the rituals but then continuing the behavior that caused us to need to mourn in the first place. More to the point today, God calls us to concrete actions, not simply thoughts and prayers:
“Isn’t this the fast I choose:
releasing wicked restraints, untying the ropes of a yoke,
setting free the mistreated, and breaking every yoke?
Isn’t it sharing your bread with the hungry
and bringing the homeless poor into your house,
covering the naked when you see them,
and not hiding from your own family?
With God’s command comes God’s promise:
Then your light will break out like the dawn,
and you will be healed quickly….
Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
you will cry for help, and God will say, I’m here.
Isaiah 58
God loves a good ritual, but even God does not seek ritual simply for ritual’s sake without any change in behavior.
A few weeks ago, a second-grader fell at a school in the Nashville area, less than an hour from the Covenant School. She stumbled and fell, sadly, during an active shooter drill, cutting her knee and scraping her elbows, after the teacher had screamed at the children to “Run!” A sweet gesture from another child helped ease the pain and panic in that moment: one of her classmates stopped, helped the distraught child get back up and ran with her to the safe gathering spot.
The good news: her friend didn’t leave her behind.
The horrible terrible very sad news: our response to people who take AR-15’s into schools is to step up active shooter drills.
For God, our rituals mourning all of these shootings are empty and meaningless if we continue to do what we do and wonder why things never get better. As a nation, we’ve gotten pretty good at this, though, acting as if our stint on the mourner’s bench is sufficient.
After the Covenant shooting, a large number of Nashville neighbors including many clergy colleagues participated in actions beyond candlelight vigils and prayers and leaving stuffed animals and flowers and balloons at an impromptu memorial. Thousands staged a sit-in and even marched on the state capitol. The overwhelming message to the politicians who would not consider bans on assault weapons was “Save your ‘thoughts and prayers.'”
With no apparent policy changes, though, the best efforts are still empty rituals, something we are sadly proficient at in this country.
We mourn, but we still can legally purchase an AR-15 and make up for it by telling our children to learn to run faster.
The horrible terrible very sad news is we still think the best response is teaching children to run faster and hide better.
Maybe you believe the problem is guns. Maybe you believe the problem is certain types of guns.
Maybe you support more police in school or arming teachers.
I know I want people to understand there can never be enough equipment for any SRO to combat an 18-year-old in a Kevlar vest and a helmet with an assault rifle.
Maybe you believe the problem is broken families, no prayer in schools, the lack of mental health care, or children who come to school having never sat down with an adult to read a story book. The truth is, it’s likely some of all of these but focussing only on mental health care without limiting access to the weapons that leave small bodies in shreds is mourners’ bench behavior. That renders our thoughts and prayers empty.
What is critical here is that we do not make our rituals empty, that we do not sit on the mourner’s bench and cry and pray and then go home and keep doing what we have been doing. Because that is making a mockery of our faith and rituals.
Whichever side you fall on, God asks what are you doing to help fix it? Are you just making more room on the bench?
To lament, to pray, to mourn, and then to change nothing is to miss the point. It is, in fact, to fail–to fail our children and to fail our God.
At the very least, educate yourself. And by that I don’t mean just read what people write who agree with you. Read what people write who don’t agree with you. Learn the actual issues in your area. Every state has different issues and different laws. More than anything, listen to people who disagree with you.
Everyone of us is afraid and sad and none of us has answers that will work for each situation, but God calls us to work together to keep our children safe. Look up your community’s Peace and Justice Center and join in. No Center? Look into starting one.
Grieve, pray, then do something that shows you have truly taken in the gravity of the situation; but for God’s sake, let us not keep acting as if nothing has happened.
Our children
need us to
figure it out.
Nancy Bradshaw
Challenging piece about an horrific plague on our land. What are our lawmakers thinking? They hear the voices of the people and yet do little to address the problem. I need to do more, I know. Letter writing is just not getting it either. Thanks for your focus on what’s going wrong in our world.
[…] a previous post, (“You Can Have My Seat on the Mourner’s Bench,”) I introduced James, (not his real name), who struggled mightily with ongoing guilt and grief […]
[…] a previous post, (“You Can Have My Seat on the Mourner’s Bench,”) I introduced James, (not his real name), who struggled mightily with ongoing guilt and grief […]
A favorite talisman from Pakistan. I loved how all the different sizes nested one inside the other. I’ve carried this painted wooden toy with me for nearly sixty years now. Cracked and repaired, broken but still beautiful, a cradle of memories.
When I was seven, my brother, who was eight, my sister, who was six, and I got dumped in our grandparents’ laps, a harsh ending to what had begun two years earlier as a grand adventure, meant to last a lifetime.
Once it was announced that Dad had secured a coveted engineering job overseas, we had all been celebrities at one festive send off after another from Springfield, to the unknown and mysterious West Pakistan, (now Pakistan). The biggest Bon Voyage event, where each of us had been presented with brand new suitcases to go with our brand new outfits for the journey to the other side of the earth, reflected how impressed friends, coworkers and neighbors had been when Dad had secured the contract.
That the way to Pakistan involved so many shots for so many illnesses was annoying, but, for me, the memories of those jabs are overshadowed by those of international flights on Pan Am where the pilots brought all the children on the flight into the cockpit and each of us received a souvenir Pan Am flight bag and our own set of pilot’s wings. I remember buying a doll in Tokyo, where I was convinced that I could speak Japanese because I could speak to the sales clerk. I remember arriving in Karachi to be served warm milk and runny eggs and that we slept twenty-four hours before driving to our new home in a walled compound in Northern Pakistan. I remember much about our time in Pakistan, but I do not remember the trip home.
Thoughout the two years we were there, Dad was likely excelling in his work, but, before the contract was completed and we could be posted at yet another overseas project on another continent, Dad was forced to break his contract and return to the states on short notice, with little or no money, no job and much anger.
So, just a few days after boarding a plane for home, the three of us children found ourselves seated in a row on the edge of the bed in a motel halfway between our grandparents’ home in the little town of Waynesville, Missouri, and wherever Dad had found a job. The motel bed was low to the ground; our toes just touched the linoleum and we were each individually toeing the floor and pushing the old bed up and down, causing the box springs to creak softly. Next door, we could hear our parents and grandparents arguing loudly. We did not know then the three of us would not be going to the tiny apartment Dad had managed to find.
I clutched my Chatty Cathy doll. Bless her heart, she’d stayed with me throughout our time overseas in spite of looking like she had mange because my little sister had taken a pair of scissors to her black hair. My sister clutched a stuffed monkey who had a permanent grip on a plastic banana. She had already given up the doll she’d been given, one who giggled when her arms were squeezed, and who likely ended up in another child’s arms, looking like she was just out of the box with that curly, blond hairdo intact. Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind, though, to experiment on her with scissors. Maybe my sister was just more angry at that time than I was.
New Clothes, a Bon Voyage Party, Poufy Hair? Pictures courtesy Jodi McCullah All Rights Reserved
“Say goodbye to your children!” my father had hissed moments before all three of us climbed in the back of our grandparents’ sedan. Mom’s eyes were already glazed over though; she wasn’t responding. She had said nothing while my father had been yelling for weeks, it seemed, most recently in the next motel room, in front of her parents, who also were silent. We couldn’t hear any of those angry words at all, only loud voices, then we each flinched as the door to our motel room had swung open and we saw our parents standing there. “Say goodbye!”
Grandma Ree and Grandpa George seemed just as dumbfounded as we were, I think, and were really in no financial position to take on more, but to their credit, they put the three of us into the back of their tiny dark blue sedan anyway. Driving away from that motel, each of us rode silently, wide-eyed, tacitly agreeing it was better not to ask.
His Adventure; Her Nightmare
On our way home from Pakistan, we’d each been wearing a new pair of leather shoes made from a cobbler in Pakistan. Even finding shoes while we were there became an adventure for my father who savored every side trip to a bazaar and whose shopping addiction devoured cameras and jewelry and handmade rugs and carved tables with ivory inlay for playing chess. Being there while the country was at war with India was a nightmare for our mother, though; after my parents ventured to the bazaars, she had nightmares about the children who had been purposely maimed in order to make their begging more lucrative. By the time we left Pakistan, Mom had begun obsessing about keeping the windows covered with foil for nighttime blackouts, long after it was necessary.
The civil engineering position Dad had secured with this company overseas was his dream and meant to last his whole career; he had not planned to have to return to southwest Missouri with his family at all, certainly not as a quitter. This contract was his chance to escape small towns and small minds, and that dream was not meant to die a quick death because his young wife discovered the balm of alcohol and realized that some men could be sweet. Mom, bless her heart, had been thrust into a world she had never contemplated and one she was vastly unprepared to engage, understand or master. Dad, on the other hand, had served overseas in the Air Force and, when he returned, he invested in National Geographic in order to know more about the world he had only tasted in his two years in Puerto Rico. This job had been his chance to immerse himself in adventure and travel.
A small-town girl who had never left Missouri before, Mom continued dutifully each day to don a crisply ironed dress and heels while struggling to learn to oversee servants, like the first one, a “Bearer.” The Pakistani manservant who did not speak any English was in the house all day, and ironed and cooked unrecognizable meals for us. He didn’t last long. A gardener, a “Mali,” was required, if only to keep up appearances in the European-style neighborhoods built by the company that had brought so many engineers and families from all over the world. We knew, though, that walking outside one morning to find the gardener, proudly holding up the cobra he’d caught in the yard where her children played was too much for Mom. She began to unravel. Our father held out, though, and doubled down on social activities, including starting a Boy Scout troop, in hopes Mom would adjust. Instead, she discovered the alcohol that had never been allowed in her home growing up. She found the mathematics of rum, to be precise. One drink made her feel good, two made the barbed wire on the compound walls fade, and four drinks made all the lizards and maimed children and strange men in the house just slip away for hours and hours.
A Church Wednesday Night Meal in Mangla, West Pakistan Pictures courtesy Jodi McCullah All Rights Reserved
We never saw Mom drink, though. We were in bed every night by seven p.m. We never saw her drink and we never saw our father much at all. For the two years we lived in Pakistan, our father kept twelve-hour work days and so our paths did not cross for two years, except on the occasional family shopping outing. During those two years was the only time we had allowances and every few weeks, the family would venture to the compound’s shopping area where we could find a Pakistani furniture store, a European-style restaurant complete with a dessert cart filled with petit-fours, and a toy store, where we were happy to spend our allowances, most often on comic books since there were no Saturday morning cartoons. We had no television at all in our home there, in fact, so by the time we left after two years, we had amassed more than three hundred Archie, Superman and Richie Rich comic books and often participated in a robust trading circle with other neighborhood children. Once, though, we all three saved our allowance to buy a pale blue scooter that we could see high up on a corner shelf in the toy store. We visited that store several times without buying any new toys or comics, simply to be sure no other children had purchased that little scooter high up in the corner. We were struggling not to run or pull on our father’s hand to get to the store when the day for purchase finally arrived. Together, the three of us proudly plunked down our rupees onto the counter and watched, holding our breath, as the store owner pulled the scooter down and dusted it off. When he rolled it around the corner of the counter, however, to present that blue beauty to us, my older brother and I realized that the scooter, heretofore only viewed from afar, was too small for either of us. Only our little sister would be able to enjoy it. There was no going back, however. The store owner was beaming at having sold the toy that had taken up his store’s top shelf for months and our father would have been too embarrassed to halt the purchase. Typical of our relationship, though, my brother and I did not commiserate; we were silent as our feet dragged on the dusty road going home. Our sister stayed on the sidewalks with the scooter but I do not remember her using it very often after that, which only added to our disappointment.
Other than the occasional shopping trip, church and the bowling alley, we did not see our father. Even at those venues, we did not interact with him. Our understanding was that, like the other engineers who worked long hours building that dam, our father was excused from many family activities. When we did participate as a family, like at the bowling alley, the children went off unsupervised mostly, so we still didn’t see our parents unless we were causing a problem. Dad was apparently a minor celebrity at the bowling alley, though, often bowling perfect or near perfect games. Our time there consisted of ordering tuna fish sandwiches and zombies to drink at the adjacent grill and watching, fascinated, as the Pakistani workers reset the pins after each throw of the ball. No automated pin replacement there.
Though I was very young, I remember a lot about when my Father was helping in the beginning years to build Mangla Dam in West Pakistan, now Pakistan (as opposed to East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.) Most of our old photos from that time, however, are lost. I do remember that strange juxtaposition of Western and Pakistani. We attended a British school where I learned some Urdu and to add an “e” in the middle of judgment, (i.e., British spelling) a bowling alley and we enjoyed a wonderful series of public pools. We also explored some historic sites and went to school with children from all over the world, including Pakistan. (See Wikipedia, Mangla Dam and Mangla Dam Memories on Facebook.)
Otherwise, the three of us were on our own outside of school hours. The compound was large with an American side and a European side and a bus that drove around both sides all day. On any particularly boring day, the three of us would simply climb onto the old, repainted school bus and ride down all the streets of both sides of the compound, cooled by the hot wind coming through the open windows and fascinated by what our neighbors might be up to that day. I am still amazed that we were simply allowed to wander at five, six and seven years old. In Pakistan.
The entire adventure seemed a contradiction in terms, characterized for me by the fact that we lived in a compound surrounded by a stone wall with barbed wire and cut glass on the top but where the gates were always open and unguarded.
There was an open gate at the back of our own yard, in fact, and from it, we could see a small village where, we were told, women slapped cow dung onto the walls of the homes to dry to be later used as fuel for the fire. Every day, we could hear the calls to worship; they were haunting and beautiful, a call to an Islamic understanding of God that serenaded us as we walked to our Christian church potluck supper. For some of the year, the dust on the side of the road was a fine and deep silt and we would slide our feet through it as if it were snow; other times, during monsoon season, there seemed to be nothing that was dry.
Unsupervised. In Pakistan. At age 7.
That we were largely unsupervised outside of school hours made sense to someone I guess. Until the injuries began. First, my five-year-old sister got stitches trying to climb up a ladder to dive off of the high dive at the crowded community pool. Then, I nearly drowned just a few feet from my mother in the same pool; another mother noticed me struggling to keep my head above water and grabbed me. Mom was busy chatting. There was a broken arm, then stitches for me. Twice. This time, however, neglect was not the problem. I had become the target of choice for my older brother who gleefully ran his bicycle into mine, causing the pedal to tear into the fleshy part of my lower right leg, leaving white tissue oozing down my shin. He later threw a cutting board at me, just missing my eye socket but also requiring stitches. We may never know if another parent intervened or if our father walking into the living room to see our mother kissing the neighbor, but there came a day when Dad sat all three of us down on the edge of a bed in our shared bedroom to tell us our mother was ill and would be “going away” for six months or more. It had been decided we three would wait for her there, in Pakistan.
That’s when the wailing began. Paid mourners could not have been louder or more dramatic. At the time, we were terrified, but we were also resolute, huddled together eyeing that dark and dangerous chasm that seemed to open up before us. We did not know this man. No way were we letting Mom go quietly. We did not stop crying until Dad returned to the room hours later to tell us we were all going home.
Our relief was short-lived, though; once my father dragged Mom away from that motel, we did not see or hear from our parents for months and months. The timeline is vague for me but I remember attending three schools in second grade. So, once we were settled in my grandparents’ two-bedroom duplex in Waynesville, I took to running away, searching for her. From school, from my grandparents’ home, even from church services, I escaped, watching for unsupervised moments and unlocked doors, taking advantage of crowds and distracted adults, always looking for my mother.
Grandma Ree and Grandpa George. Good people who loved fiercely. Pictures courtesy of Jodi McCullah All Rights Reserved.
More than once, because Grandma Ree was exasperated, I was simply allowed to stay home from school on my grandfather’s day off and we watched cartoons and ate Oreos while he ironed the work shirts he wore driving trucks. Grandpa George seemed to me to be the only adult who was not angry with me; I remain convinced that was because he understood my quest.
Once, after I’d run away from school, the school principal found me. He and a teacher picked me up in a car after they’d driven all over that little town looking for this wayward seven-year-old.
“There, there,” he said, offering me a piece of gum in a green wrapper folded around shiny foil, very much a treat then. Defeated for the moment, I cooperated and got into the old car, only because I’d been wandering for hours and it was getting dark. Offering me a stick of gum, though? Did the adults around me really think that would fix this? I remember looking at him as if he were clueless. It would be years later, though, before I could be proud of that seven-year-old slapping that piece of gum from the principal’s hand in the back of that car, and even longer before I could appreciate the courage it had taken for the three of us to stand up to our father.
We all paid a price, though; we would never have back the mother we had known. When we saw her again, she was subdued, defeated. She had endured shame, therapy, even, we were told later, shock treatments, all because her dream was not his dream. She was not unlike many women of her day, praised for obedience like a child. For the rest of his life, though, my father was on notice. I’m not certain to this day that we accomplished much, but our little rebellion was uncharacteristic of us and I am proud to be able to look back and say that those three little souls refused to go quietly into the darkness.
Emptying The Backpack 
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