An Uneven Path

The Road Not Taken

By Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.[i]

Each person begins life travelling in open country. We are carried at first, and the Way forward is chosen by those who have come before. But eventually, we are each set down, to walk on our own. And although near the end of our journey, we may each, once again, be carried along by others, this time by those who have come after; the Way we walk is our own. No path has been broken, as Frost infers, whether leaf covered or swept clean from constant passage. The Way is always new.

Influencing our Way are those who carried us before. They set us down in a country through which their journey was progressing. That may have been in a good country…

…a lush meadow with plenty of resources…

…secure from Hunger or Thirst…

…with multiple options for shelter in times of difficulty…

But it may have been in a hard country…

…a desert with few discernable resources, with extreme heat during the day and cold at night…

…in constant threat from both Hunger and Thirst…

…with limited options for shelter, so that we are lashed by the winds of every storm…

The real Path laid out by those travelling before us, is a Path of Expectations. We learn how to travel by our ancestors. They teach us how to read the landscape. And though their intentions may be generous, the country is always changing as we move along. It is always New. And each person is different, too. Each person views the country differently. We each bring a unique skillset and particular set of weaknesses which provide focus and perspective as we travel. The Journey our parents experienced…what they learned…and their view of what is ahead is as limited as our own. What they expected and prepared us for, may be insufficient now.

That is OK.

It is always that way.

We are each capable of adapting to failed or unmet expectations once we acknowledge their existence. Those of our ancestors and our own. The responsibility given to each of us, is the same our parents had: We each must bushwhack our Way into new country.

It is with those thoughts in mind that I begin to tell the story of my own journey thus far. To continue using the metaphor of open country, I would be remiss to expect that I am now able to look backward over the country through which I have already passed and see it clearly. Perspective always governs clarity. The way I see and explain the landscape of the past—and I use the word “see” intentionally because my memories of time and place are usually visual ones, like clips of a movie separated from the roll of film—is determined by the perspective I had when I experienced the events originally, but also by the meaning I infuse them with now.

Memories are tied to and defined by emotions. Memories and the emotions connected to them are the food and water we take with us for the Journey. Even if the food is rancid and the water is tainted, we create and define the Self—our perceived personal identity—by the energy of memories and emotions.

However, it is possible to learn to feel differently about past events, change the way we define them, understand our response at the time, and then re-imagine them in healthier and redemptive forms. To use a Christian, Easter template: events that we formerly identified with death on Friday—missing an opportunity which might have given us potentially better options along the way, for instance (The Road Not Taken)—on Sunday can be resurrected into something new and redemptive. In between Friday and Sunday, however, is Saturday: The Day of Grief. And it has been my experience of Christian culture that we frequently try to rush from Friday directly to Sunday without giving Saturday its place in the redemptive process. Saturday is needed to identify our unrealized expectations and unchosen, unbroken paths; then grieve the loss of them.

Using a Christian template to view the world and human experience, including my own, is natural to me…my native language. It is the overarching template given me by my parents through which I “view the landscape” and learned “how to travel”. Although I have come to question large parts of that template, there abides with me a Presence I continue to trust. The Presence has surrounded me and whispered to me throughout my journey.

The Quaker tradition of one of my ancestral lines gave the Presence a name: The Inner Light. That tradition assumed the Inner Light is present in every person and illuminates for us the Way forward as we search. The Holiness Evangelical tradition of my parents named Presence the Holy Spirit that moves as a wind; its movements governed by the mysterious intentions of God. In the second tradition, our necessary response is to listen and follow. Both traditions emphasize the bible as a living Word, capable of speaking to every person as each of us seeks to discern its wisdom; both ancient and current. But the former tradition recognized the Word also speaking through other sources: the natural world, personal focused silence, the community of Seekers…

Each of these traditions influenced my parents’ journeys together and apart. The traditions guided their methods of decision-making and lead them into rough country. Although I was affected by that country, I no longer blame them for it. They each travelled the country laid out before them with courage and tenacity, limited by their individual weaknesses, aided by their individual strengths, but bolstered…and sometimes battered… by their commitment to each other and to Presence.

The country in which they set me down to walk was ever-changing and moving. Temporary. Confusing. Awkward.

I had to walk before I could learn to stand.

Yet with me all the way has been Presence…

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[i] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken

Journeys

All journeys begin from a point of origin.

The windows of our Pontiac Catalina were open as it floated through the darkness of a Southwest Kansas night. The Catalina’s headlights were on high beam, revealing a road that was flat, straight, and empty. The country felt empty, too, especially at night. Scattered lights from farms and towns speckled the horizon on all sides, but they provided little argument to the overwhelming speech of the stars. If the moon had been full on that night, we could have travelled without headlights at all. It was the end of summer in 1968, but the night sky likely was the same as in 1768. At night, especially, that part of the earth feels timeless, and the immensity of the night sky gives a sense of adventure and humility. I imagine that feeling would be the same whether the mode of travel is a Pontiac or a Conestoga wagon pulled by a team of oxen.

I have always felt a connection to that land. Partially because, as a child, we often returned to the High-Plains region which encompasses Southwest Kansas, Southeastern Colorado, and the Oklahoma Panhandle.

We held revival meetings in many churches there.

I ran, played, and worked on ranchlands and farmlands there.

I rode my first horse there and learned just how mean and wily a Shetland pony can be as he rubbed against a fence to get me off his back.

That land was where I would learn to drive when I was ten years old during wheat harvest.

I fell in love for the first time in that country, and forty years later, I married her.

I rebelled against the church for the first time in that country; smoked my first cigarette and had my first taste of alcohol.

It was there that I learned the value of neighborliness during and after a crisis. In that country, a person helps their neighbor round up drifting cattle that push through a fence during a blizzard, or they gather to clean up following a tornado. There is no need for a request for help. It is just given.  Survival in that land during hard times requires teamwork.

Living on the Hi-Plains also taught me the value of hard work and how it is needed from everyone. A person’s work ethic goes a long way in establishing their reputation in the community. It is the heartbeat of rural life.

The main reason, however, for my feelings of connection to that region was my father.

He grew up there.

He is buried there, beneath the buffalo grass. Mom is there, too, as are his parents, sister and her husband.

His family rode out the Dirty Thirties and Great Depression there. They huddled in a series of small houses as the wind screamed outside, sandblasting the paint off the exterior walls, ripping the topsoil away and driving it half a continent to the Atlantic Ocean. That wind tried to blow his family off the land, too, or suffocate them with dust so fine that a multitude of wet towels crammed into the cracks around the windows and doors could not keep it out.

It was there that they learned to pray while his father had “one of his spells” when his heartbeat was erratic, trying to decide whether it would keep working or just quit and take their Daddy away.

It was there that the ten-year drip, drip, drip of dust and Depression left their family and most families on the High Plains with no way to feed themselves aside from Roosevelt’s WPA and government commodities. Some people mocked WPA, calling it, “We Piddle Around”, but their mockery didn’t stop them from grabbing a shovel and joining the piddling. Years later, my aunt would say that their family would not have survived without those government programs. Rugged individualism be damned.

And it was on that flat land, walking in the short grass prairie that Dad first felt God calling him to preach and where he left in 1939 at the age of 16 to pursue an education to follow the inner voice.

I now realize our life of travelling began there.

All journeys begin from a point of origin. Mine was the High Plains of Kansas. Not because it was where I was born, but because it was where Dad was born, and he was the driving force for our journeys.

Eventually, my journey with my father brought me back to that country, and while we would stay there for seven years, it would not be the end of either my journeys nor those with my father; it would provide me with a better understanding of the forces which shaped him and his character. Remembering the profound quietness of the short grass prairie with tumbleweeds bouncing across the landscape at the command of an unseen wind remind me of my father’s quietness at home, and how our constant movement felt to me as a child. It reminds me of my own quietness and restlessness.

Our personal journeys are at least influenced by those people that lived before us and with whom we first lived. We are influenced by place, too. We are tied to the land. It owns us, and we forget that to our detriment. The scripture says we are made of ashes and dust. Those elements are our origin and eventual destination. If that is the case, then my ashes contain Russian thistle tumbleweeds, and my dust is that blown by the relentless wind.

B. Ivan Williams

Campo…

The Williams and Humphrey clans in Campo, Colorado.

While Dad was attending college in Michigan, Grandma Williams accepted the call to be the pastor in a tiny farming community in southeast Colorado. Campo, Colorado is described by Wickipedia like this:

“Campo is a statutory town located in Baca County, Colorado, United States, with a population of 109 in the 2010 United States Census. The town is situated in the Great Plains, straddling U.S. Route 287/385. Campo is a name derived from Spanish meaning ‘field’.”[i]

“Field” is a good description of Campo. It is surrounded by the Commanche National Grasslands and the town was tiny every time we visited my aunt and uncle when they lived there almost 50 years ago. I am always surprised how tenacious the residents have been to keep the doors open. The past decade has not been good for the city, since a more current population count is about 36-40 people, give or take the truckers at Clarence’s Truck Stop on the south edge of town. Actually, Clarence is Voni’s uncle and one of those tenacious residents. The truck stop may be a major reason why Campo still exists due to the truck traffic that travels U.S. 287, which stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border.

It wasn’t always this way though. Before the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, Campo was known as “The Broom Corn Capital of the World”. The now vacant square miles of grassland surrounding Campo were once dotted with small family farms growing dry land wheat, broom corn, and grazing cattle. I am told that during its heyday, there were several stores in town, a couple gas stations, a hardware store, 1 or 2 cafes, a school that educated kids from elementary through high school, and at least 7 churches.

Campo is one of the few places we visited frequently in my early childhood, and even more so for my siblings. Bill and Connie, my brother and sister, are quite a bit older than me. Their early lives were in motion even more than mine. They were educated at home, mostly, which was typically a car sometimes pulling a travel trailer from one revival to another. But my Aunt Phyllis’ and Uncle Melvin’s home in Campo was always a place to which we would return.

Uncle Melvin’s parents were farmers that attended church at the Pilgrim Holiness congregation in Campo when Grandma Williams became the pastor. He and Aunt Phyllis eventually fell in love, married, and continued to live and farm outside of town.

Campo became an important place for my family. Recently, Connie told me that Campo felt like home to her while she was growing up. I know Dad felt that way, too. After 4 years as pastor in Campo, Grandma spent over a decade pastoring churches in Nebraska and Oklahoma. However, Phyllis and Melvin stayed put. While I have heard stories of my family visiting Grandma and Grandpa in Oklahoma, it was before I was born, and the times I remember that we spent with them were usually at Aunt Phyllis’ and Uncle Melvin’s farm. In my childhood memories, a trip to Campo meant a joyful reunion with my father’s family.

Phyllis and Melvin Humphrey lived on the outskirts of town on a narrow dirt road that ran past the house of the city’s lone policeman, whose dog always chased every car travelling the road. The road dead-ended in a large parking area between the house and large, metal round-top barn. As you parked near the house, there was usually at least one more dog to greet each vehicle.  When we visited, I never considered the house to be small, but it was. They had three kids. Two boys, Leon and Verle, and a girl, Velda, who was almost as much younger in relation to her brothers as I was to my siblings. The house only had two bedrooms, as I recall, and an indoor bathroom, which was a new addition, but the original outhouse was still on the property if you craved adventure.

The kitchen is the most memorable room for me in that house. It was the first room you entered from outside. There were two other exterior entrances to the house, but the kitchen was so welcoming, with wonderful smells from whatever Aunt Phyllis was cooking; it made no sense to use any other door. A 1950’s era kitchen table with a metal frame and a Formica top surrounded by metal chairs with vinyl-covered seats and backs sat with one end against a wall in the room. Although it must have occupied a sizable amount of floor space, the kitchen never felt crowded, at least to a young boy. The table was not large, but there always seemed to be room for at least one more person. Just inside the exterior door against the wall on the right was an old separator used for separating milk from cream each morning after the Guernsey milk cow was milked. I remember a pantry…maybe I remember it…within which was an electric freezer which was needed to hold the packages of meat when they butchered a pig or steer. The freezer was also needed to store several half-gallon cardboard milk cartons filled with water which froze into ice. The extra ice was important to a hard-working person, especially on the few summer days when there was not a whisper of wind other than that stirred up by the pickup as they drove home from the field. Aunt Phyllis had the solution for their thirst. About mid-morning, she would get one of the half-gallon milk cartons from the freezer, peel the cardboard off the ice, place the whole chunk into an extra-large cooking pot, and fill it with water. She would then set it on the counter near the door and the water in that pot would stay the perfect temperature all day. (Every  time I take a long drink of water that quenches my thirst perfectly, I think of Aunt Phyllis’ pot of water with the big chunk of ice in it, and I smile.)

Those milk cartons filled with ice were also memorable because they were paired with my other favorite thing stored in the pantry: The hand cranked ice cream freezer. Invariably, when we visited, Dad would request his favorite homemade ice cream: Peach. (Mom’s and my favorite flavor was strawberry, which Aunt Phyllis often grew in her huge garden.) In the early evening, after supper, Aunt Phyllis would dig out the ice cream freezer from the pantry, get two or three milk cartons from the freezer, and the rock salt. Someone would get a hammer and break the ice in the milk cartons, pour the chunks in the ice cream freezer around the sides of the metal cannister, and then add the salt on top of the ice. The kids would then take our turns cranking, beginning with the youngest and then turning the chore over to the next one in line when it became too hard for the younger to crank. Once the ice cream was ready, we would gather in the yard in the shade of the trees and feast until we got headaches.

Every morning…and it was EVERY morning because Uncle Melvin always wanted the same breakfast… the smell of frying bacon, fresh scrambled eggs, and coffee would invite even the most reluctant person to rouse from their slumber, pull back the covers, slide their legs over the side of the bed, and shuffle towards the kitchen responding to the most wonderful fragrant alarm clock. It would not take long for a person to become fully awake once you entered the kitchen, because it was filled with a noisy symphony of clanking pans, dishes set on the table, all the while accompanied by teasing voices and laughter. To be honest, since this was a working farm, most of the household had been up for an hour or two before breakfast, so maybe the only ones needing a breakfast alarm were the youngest of the respective families. It didn’t matter, though, because those family breakfasts were filled with love and delight in being together again.

As with the kitchen table, no matter how small the house at the end of the road, there was always room for at least one more person. At night, our family often slept in the travel trailer Uncle Melvin used in the summer when they travelled for wheat harvest which had become Uncle Melvin’s major source of income. There were some evenings that Dad and I would pull a mattress out of the trailer and sleep outside, not because the trailer was too small, but because it was fun. I remember slowly falling asleep to the sound of the wind blowing through the trees and looking up into the night sky scattered with stars.

I especially remember the land surrounding the house. Aunt Phyllis always had a large vegetable garden which she tended rigorously until it could be harvested and canned or sold. They had two different kinds of cherry trees upon which I climbed and grazed frequently. Next to the barn was the chicken coop where the eggs for breakfast were gathered. On the side of the barn opposite the house stood a stable where the cow was milked, and stalls were located for a horse or two. Sometimes Uncle Melvin would temporarily fence some land and buy young pigs to raise and eventually sell. And then there was the pasture… The pasture was a young, imaginative boy’s dream. Scattered in an orderly fashion on the nearest end of the pasture were:

a collection of farm implements…

an old truck that didn’t run and two wheat trucks used for harvest that did…

two railroad boxcars miraculously parked on the bare ground next to each other, with no tracks to be seen anywhere, that he used for storage…

a dune buggy made by my cousins…

and…

somewhere in the far reaches of the pasture…

one or two saddle horses…

a Guernsey milk cow…

several head of cattle grazing on the short, prairie grass common to the region…

Buffalo grass, they called it…

The pasture was my playground…

I spent hours in imaginative play in that field…

There were rabbits and mice to be chased, and snakes to be avoided…

We flew kites in that pasture that were driven by the wind to the entire length of our 1000 feet of twine and then broke free to fly through the sky unencumbered…

I climbed the box cars to watch B-52 bombers fly lower than my kite flew making bombing training runs before returning to their base in North Dakota…

As a kid, Campo meant adventure!

However, it takes work to live on a farm and although we were often not there long enough to join in, there were times we were involved with normal chores. I would get blisters on my hands from weeding Aunt Phyllis’ garden with a hoe taller than me. If sweet corn on the cob was on the menu from the garden, then I helped shuck it. There were green beans to snap, and potatoes to be dug up. It was in helping Uncle Melvin move his combine from one field to another that I learned how to drive a pickup at age 10.

But I wasn’t the only one to help on the farm. There were a couple summers during wheat harvest that we traveled with Uncle Melvin and Aunt Phyllis. Dad drove the grain trucks, or rummaged the countryside for new customers that needed their wheat cut, while Bill drove the trucks, and Mom helped Aunt Phyllis cook the meals and bring them to the field. Connie was married by then and I was too young to do anything but drive the pickup when they needed to move to another field. When we visited Campo, we kept busy, and it was a nice change from travelling and going to church almost every night.

When I got older, I came to understand another reason we visited Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Melvin as frequently as we did: money. Revivals were usually held in the spring and fall by many churches. Summer was camp meeting season, and if Dad wasn’t scheduled to speak at a few camps during the summer, we needed income. Uncle Melvin was a custom harvester during the summer. His family would follow the ripening grain from south to north. He would cut wheat for landowners in Texas and then work his way through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and sometimes all the way into South and North Dakota. Once my older cousins grew up, got married, and lived in other communities, Uncle Melvin needed help each summer. There could be three or four vehicles that needed drivers when the crew changed locations. Some summers, Melvin would hire a couple local college students to go with the family during harvest. In other summers, our family would accompany them, and Dad would earn money working alongside Uncle Melvin.

Uncle Melvin’s approach to life is best described by a statement he made about driving. “No matter what the speed limit sign says before a curve, you can always take it 20 MPH faster.” Melvin was full go. He never stayed in bed past 7 AM. Ever. Always had to have bacon and eggs for breakfast. I never remember him without hearing aids. The interaction between him and Aunt Phyllis with his hearing issues was funny. She would say something to him, he would look at her with a lost look on his face, and she would repeat what she’d said slower and with a little more emphasis, but not appreciably louder. He would then say, “Oh”, and tuck his chin in with the slightest of smiles on his face. She would then cock her head to one side, appear a little put-out, then chuckle after she realized he was teasing her.

Melvin had a great laugh. He would throw back his head and erupt in full-hearted joy that seemed to come from his toes. There were many times I watched Dad, Melvin, Phyllis, and Mom sit around the table after breakfast; Dad and Melvin nursing the last of their coffee, telling stories, and laughter erupting from time to time. The four got along well. They worked together well. While Melvin worked like a live wire, Dad steadily kept up. Their individual styles complimented each other. Melvin wasn’t as comfortable going to the house of a farmer he didn’t know to drum up work. Dad, however, because he met so many new people as an evangelist, didn’t mind, so as Melvin drove the combine and my brother drove the trucks, Dad would comb the countryside looking for customers.

While Dad and Uncle Melvin worked, Mom and Aunt Phyllis worked. They talked, too. One interest Mom and Phyllis shared in the later years of their lives was the theology of the 1970’s Charismatic movement. Both liked to read, and they would share thoughts about the bible or some new book either one was reading. While both were kind of serious minded, Aunt Phyllis was quite playful with her kids and grandkids. There was a lot of teasing that went on in the Humphrey clan, and I often joined in the fun. It was always good-hearted, and every member of the family knew that if you teased Aunt Phyllis successfully, you would need to duck, because she had a wicked punch which would land on your arm with great effect. She was quick, too. Afterward, she would usually sigh and say, “Crazy…” She was fun!

I’m sure Bill and Connie have fond memories of Campo. It was a place we kids could drop the Preacher’s Kid veneer and be ourselves. I could tell that dad could be himself there, too. Farm life was a natural fit for him. The same was true for my mother. As I have written on this blog before, her family lived on a farm when she was a child. She had grown up working hard and seemed to enjoy it.

That rural life seemed idyllic to me as a child, but I now know how difficult it must have been. The fuel costs for a custom harvester must have been a killer, even when the price of gas and diesel were much lower than today. Maintaining insurance on so many vehicles…dang. Tires…maintenance…food costs for a harvest crew… And then there is the weather. What happens in a drought? Or when one of your customers gets hailed out? It would seem to be a financial thin line. One or two problems could be financially catastrophic. I bet the financial pressure was one reason Uncle Melvin stayed so thin, and so aggressive with his time management. Understanding that pressure may have been a reason he was so generous with my family. Uncle Melvin knew my dad well. He trusted dad’s work ethic. So, when things were rough for my family, Phyllis and Melvin were there for us…no questions asked.

But Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Melvin also knew how to have fun and enjoy life. I saw that in both my parents when the four of them got together. Being in Campo helped me see my parents in a different light. Their spirit seemed lighter somehow, even when the days were long. I have come to appreciate and envy that attitude. I wish I would have recognized and learned from it earlier in my life. There probably would have been just as many hard times, but I may not have been surprised by them. Maybe I would have sought out closer friendships. I wouldn’t have felt so alone in making decisions and felt solely responsible to solve all the problems.

Maybe…

Dad’s death when I was in college hindered that growth process that can happen between adults from generation to generation. It does seem like my kids have learned some of the lessons I wish I would have as a young adult.

Maybe my experience was helpful to them…

If that is true, then my struggles were worth what I learned through them.

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[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campo,_Colorado

Me at Aunt Phyllis’ and Uncle Melvin’s farm near the door to the kitchen…

Front (l to r): Eli Conrad Williams (Grandpa), Dad, Uncle Melvin. Back (l to r): Velda, Verle, Bill, Connie holding me.

Cousins

Campo Pilgrim Holiness Church

Dad and Uncle Melvin at the farm in Campo.

B. Ivan Williams…Part 3

In the fall of 1939, Dad became not only a student at Colorado Springs Bible School, but also travelled across the region in a men’s quartet singing in churches and recruiting new students. He would do the same a couple years later when he attended college in Owasso, Michigan at Bible Holiness Seminary, which was also associated with the Pilgrim Holiness Church. When he left home for college, things would change with his parents, too, as his mother, Mary Williams, became pastor of the Pilgrim Holiness Church in Campo, Colorado. With Great-Grandpa Maris, Mary’s father, also a pastor, three generations of the family were eventually employed in full-time ministry.

There were two paths for theological education in the Pilgrim Holiness Church that people could pursue for eventual ordination as a minister. The first was to attend a college or university. This path took a commitment of both time and money, which was often an impediment to many people, especially following the Depression. Using the collegiate pathway would allow the student to earn an academic degree if the college chosen was accredited by the state or region. In the Pilgrim Holiness denomination, Bible schools and colleges often offered high school programs, as well. Both schools Dad attended offered high school and college courses, so he was able to finish high school at Colorado Springs Bible school, and then a Bachelor of Arts degree in theology and Master of Divinity degree at Owasso Bible Holiness Seminary in Michigan. Since his parents were unable to help financially with his education, Dad had to piece together a patchwork of odd jobs in Colorado Springs and Owasso to pay for his education. The jobs in which he worked ranged from feeding animals at the Cheyanne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs to working for a roofing contractor in Owasso, Michigan. I suspect he worked summers when he returned home from Colorado Springs by either helping with the broom corn harvest in southeast Colorado or working for a farmer in the area. Once he left Colorado for college in Michigan, however I doubt he returned home between school years. He worked, travelled in quartets on the weekends for the college, which may have earned him some tuition money, or did both. Dad’s education was definitely “Work/Study”.

The second path to ordination, which was pursued by both Grandma Williams and Great-Grandpa Maris, was a program offered by the denomination at the district level that organized a course of study. It was comprised of three years of courses mandated by the denomination and taken by the student in their home through written correspondence with teachers and using study materials chosen by the denomination’s educators. Older students that felt a call to preach would often pursue ordination in this way, since it was less expensive, and they were able to adapt their studies to everyday life. Another benefit to both the denomination and student was that if the student continually made progress in their coursework, they were granted a local license to preach. This process of non-traditional theological education created a larger pool of potential ministerial candidates for both organizing new church congregations and fill pastoral vacancies in the district.

After looking through several of Dad’s type-written sermons in my possession, I now realize that he valued academic study. His sermons are littered with statistical and historical information he used to further his points, and place some of the stories from scripture in historical context. He may have wanted to learn from the best minds in his denomination, but also about other Christian traditions. Sadly, that value wasn’t shared by some in his denomination. There were many lay and ministerial leaders in the Holiness tradition[i] who seemed to be more concerned with pursuing a doctrinal purity that excluded other Christians and non-Christians. Privately, Dad would bemoan this attitude. In a short diary of his I found, written during the year of my birth, he described the following regarding a congregation he held a couple revivals for:

“January 21, 1961:

Had a pretty good revival here but not nearly as good as our first meeting 9 or 10 months ago. Five new families were saved in the first meeting and because of extreme radicalism on externals, not one of the converts has been taken into the church. Some of the new converts are very discouraged. The church—some of them and pastor—seem to think more of preserving hollow traditions than in saving souls for the Kingdom. The church here seems to be losing her field unless they accept the challenge of trying to help people rather than abide by legalism. Only eternity will reveal the irreparable damage done by even conscientious people who have been wrongly taught. The church in __________ should have taken in 25 or 30 members following the last meeting but think more of sticking to the ‘old ways’ than helping people. God help straighten our thinking out.

Had an ex-convict saved tonight among others.

We have some choice friends in ________ church.”

The “externals” Dad was writing about were often related to style of dress, hair, and jewelry. These issues weren’t unique to just the Pilgrim Holiness denomination, though. There were other conservative denominations, especially in the Holiness doctrinal tradition, that stressed a particular style of outward appearance that the adherents considered essential to reflect a “right” relationship with God. People holding to that doctrinal tradition could be very demanding, too. Even to the point of willfully excluding from their number anyone unwilling to follow the written or unwritten rules. The fact that most of the restrictions affected women more than men, is not a surprise to me, and is also a common component in ultra-conservative religious practices in religions other than Christianity.

There seems to have been a dichotomy between the atmosphere surrounding the Alter, about which I have written and that I was so drawn to as a child, and the everyday process of bringing new converts into a local church community, especially in conservative Holiness congregations, which were to share the responsibility of helping them live as a Christian. Maybe the dichotomy is as simple as the difference between the optimistic idealism about changing direction in one’s life, and the realistic, long term process of actual change. A process that enables real change requires responsibilities from both the individual and community. Resistance from either, or both, at best slows an already slow process and at worst brings it to a screeching halt, leaving mistrust and pessimism in its wake. My father, in 1961, seems to have laid a great deal of the responsibility for a demanding, exclusionary congregational environment on the pastoral leadership of the local church who have “wrongly taught” even “conscientious people” about the nature of being Christian and following Jesus. While I don’t necessarily disagree with his assessment, I also understand that organizations develop relationship systems, similar to families, which are based on power structures and interpersonal influence.  In an unhealthy family or organizational system, the person or persons that are most unhealthy often wield the most emotional and organizational power and influence. (I was to witness the messiness of this kind of organizational and family fight for power shortly after my own conversion in a church in which my father was pastor during the last two years in high school. That is a story in itself, but I originally said I am trying to write about positive aspects of my experience with Christianity, so maybe I will write about that episode in the future.)

I shouldn’t be surprised by power struggles in the church, but I always am. The history of Christianity reminds me of a midwestern thunderstorm. The storm usually begins with a “rushing mighty wind,”[ii] that can begin a day or two before the storm system appears. Eventually, a few clouds appear in the sky moving and expanding quickly. If you watch the clouds, you will often see them moving in different directions, convulsing into and through each other, driven by winds that seem to have their own wills and objectives. The energy within the storm builds and clouds pile up into a gigantic heap. There is often violence in the storm systems. Lightning, tornadoes, hail, and flooding can produce horrendous damage to the landscape and to the lives of people living through the storm.

Christianity began with a blowing wind that had a Mind of its own and steadily produced small communities of believers scattered across the landscape. Some of the earliest communities convulsed in internal conflict regarding theology and religious practices. Other communities struggled with trying to parse through the cultural values of the larger community that conflicted with the values of Jesus. Eventually, most of the communities of Jesus would be subjected to violent oppression by external forces such as the Roman Empire, or resident religious and political despots. However, not only did the energy within the Christian storm not dissipate, it continued to grow stronger. Christianity continued to grow in influence until the Roman emperor Constantine made it the official religion of the empire. It is this infusion of political and military energy that changed the nature of the storm. That event, in my view, began a change in Christianity that introduced forces threatening the value system of Jesus. Joining church and state would become an historical trend that mainly benefited those in political power. Doing so made religion a coercive tool in the hands of the powerful while treating the wild God and those seeking God honestly with disrespect. It also unleashed government sanctioned violence to impede free religious discussion and alternative religious practices. (Humanity still struggles with this issue, including my own country.)

But the nature of the Christian storm has always contained several varieties of theological DNA. While it is true that some of them use violence as a means to attain influence and power in both the political and economic spheres, others live quietly, working in their communities and acting as “salt” and “light”. Christianity is neither alone nor unique in being used as a religious, ideological conduit through which is poured coercive, often violent human attempts to gain and maintain political and economic control. All religious systems are often used in a similar fashion. “God is on our side” has been a common clarion call used to influence the faithful to actions which aren’t always in the best interest of the bulk of humanity, yet benefit a select few.

What can be lost in the above, is that storms bring water needed for life to occur. Although a thunderstorm can dump so much water in one place that it can cause flooding, natural processes carry the water to where it is needed. Excess water flows into rivers that feed communities downstream. The same is true about the church. In the gospel of Matthew chapter 5, Jesus teaches that his followers are to respond to others in the world, including enemies, like God who, “causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”[iii] God’s goodness is freely given to all of Creation, and those that desire to know and reflect God will partner with God in that reality, usually without fanfare.

Further, Jesus’ words leave me with the understanding that although I have seen and heard a lot about how often throughout history “the Church” as an institution has failed to live up to the values of Jesus, his call is to those choosing to follow him. An institution is made up of people, and history is also spattered with the stories of people that chose to live counter to a Church run wild with power in their time and location. That type of person exists today, too, although their stories may not get the headlines. They may not even be Christian.[iv]

What I remember about my father is foremost that he deeply loved Jesus. He believed that there was something so beautiful and mystical about loving and being loved by Jesus that a person’s life was changed by the experience. Loving Jesus changed a person on the inside and provided a foundation upon which to build new relationships and perspectives about life in this world. He did believe that people either went to heaven or hell after they died, and his focus on evangelism was based on that belief because he also loved people. Dad was willing to give people room to develop and grow through their relationship with the living Christ without demanding the outward expression of that relationship look a particular way. He treated people and God with respect and was concerned that God’s grace be exemplified by people claiming to follow Jesus. By his statement above, it is clear to me that my father believed a local church’s function was to aid people in their individual and collective quest to learn and live by the values of Jesus, and to act as a witness to the larger community in a way that communicated with their attitudes and actions that following Jesus makes all of life fuller and richer.

The theme of the sermon he preached repeatedly that contained the “Truck Driver” story I repeated in the post which began this current series was that Christians were to be ambassadors for Christ. He believed each follower of Jesus would share the value system of Jesus. When he observed a local congregation get side-tracked from that function, for whatever reason, he was saddened by the failure. People who say they believe in Jesus are examples to the surrounding community of what the believer purports Jesus to stand for. That can either be a good or poor reflection of Jesus and his teachings, but it is all some of their neighbors will ever know about Jesus.

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[i] If you are interested in learning more about the Holiness tradition, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holiness_movement

[ii] Acts 2:2- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+2&version=NKJV

[iii] Matthew 5:45- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5&version=NIV

[iv] Jesus told a parable that illustrates how God can use  people that may surprise us when doing God’s work: Luke 10:25-37- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2010&version=NIV

B. Ivan Williams…Part 2

My father used to preach about his own conversion. He remembered the events very clearly. The name of the preacher was Charlie Stalker. It was a name that would make me smile when I was older, because it seemed perfect for an evangelistic preacher who was “stalking the lost sinner.” “Stalker” was indicative of how Charlie got my dad’s attention during the service, too.

The service progressed normally as evangelistic services go. They usually begin with congregational singing followed by passing the plates for an offering, then some special music by the song evangelist. After the music was over, someone would be called on to pray, and then the preacher would come to the podium to preach. As the preacher began to wind down his or her sermon, there would be a transition to an Alter Call, which was a prolonged invitation for members in the crowd who wanted to become Christian to walk forward to pray. In my family’s faith tradition, there is a long bench between the front row of seating for the crowd and the platform, where the preacher and musicians are located. In our tradition, the bench was called “the Alter”, while other traditions called it “the Mourner’s Bench.” The Alter was used as a special place to kneel and pray to God about your life, or whatever concerned you. People praying at the Alter would be given space to pray by themselves at first, and then be approached by a mature Christian who would offer to pray with them or act as a spiritual counselor and answer any questions the seeker might have.

Alter Calls were dramatic events. Our tradition considered them to be a time when personal decisions about eternity were being made, so they were taken very seriously. It was a time in the service when music was used to set a reflective mood. The song evangelist would choose a particular hymn for the congregation to sing together which was written for this exact purpose, such as:

Just As I Am

Just as I am, without one plea

But that Thy blood was shed for me

And that Thou bid’st me come to Thee

O Lamb of God, I come! I come

Just as I am, though tossed about

With many a conflict, many a doubt

Fighting and fears within without

O Lamb of God, I come, I come

Just as I am, and waiting not

to rid my soul of one dark blot

to thee whose blood can cleanse each spot

O Lamb of God, I come, I come

Just as I am, poor, wretched, blind

Sight, riches, healing of the mind

Yea, all I need, in Thee to find

O Lamb of God, I come, I come!

Just as I am, Thou wilt receive

Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve

Because Thy promise I believe

O Lamb of God, I come, I come

Because Thy promise I believe

O Lamb of God, I come, I come[i]

Usually, between verses with the musicians still playing the tune, the preacher would ask probing questions about the lives of those attending. For instance:

Do you feel empty inside?

Aren’t you tired of running?

Wouldn’t you like to walk through life with Someone to walk with you? Someone who will be “closer than a brother.”

Did you know that Jesus is that Someone?

Do you know that Jesus can be the Light in the darkness you are looking for?

Then the song evangelist would begin to sing the next verse as, one by one, people would begin to step out of the crowd and walk up the aisle to the Alter, kneel, and begin to pray. Sometimes they would cry as they prayed. They may have even been crying as they walked up the aisle.

There might be other people, however, that would fight the urge to step out in such a public forum, and their emotional fight was often written on their countenance.

Dad was the second kind of person on that night. He sat near the front of the crowd because, as a pianist, he wanted to watch the talented pianist playing during the service. Throughout the service, Dad felt moved by the words of the preacher to examine his life. When the Alter Call began, and the song evangelist invited the crowd to turn in their song books to the chosen song, Dad found the song and turned his eyes downward towards the book. At the end of a verse, he looked up towards the preacher, and he found him to be looking over his glasses directly at him. Immediately embarrassed, Dad raised his song book to hide from Charlie Stalker’s gaze. The singing began again and suddenly, Dad felt movement next to him and a hand on his shoulder. Looking up from his book, Dad found himself staring directly into the intense gaze of Charlie Stalker, the preacher, standing next to him. “Young man,” the preacher said, “wouldn’t you like to give your heart to Jesus?” Dad’s reservations crumbled and the two walked together to the Alter where my father knelt and gave his future to Jesus.

As the service started winding down, and there were fewer people coming to the Alter to pray, the preacher would invite anyone that wanted to pray in support of those seeking for God at the Alter to either kneel with them or be seated in the first two rows. After this group of supporters came forward, the preacher would give the Benediction or ending prayer, and dismiss the rest of the crowd with a request that they leave quietly.

I’d like to say something about the atmosphere surrounding the Alter. When I was a child, I enjoyed staying near the front both while people were praying and then as they, one by one, stopped praying and the hugging began. Emotions were tender there. A feeling of new beginnings, too, as if a weight had been removed from their shoulders. But the best…was when the stories began. Each person that had come forward to seek God would tell how their life had been, and how they knew the way they were living before wasn’t how they really wanted to live, but they didn’t know how to do something different.

And…

With each story…

The responses from the crowd would come…

“Well, bless him Lord!”

“I hear you…”

“Amen”

“Let God carry the burden…”

“Bless her Lord!”

It was as if the people surrounding the Alter all shared the experience of being human…

Of falling short in some way…

Looking back, I recognize that the Alter was a place of shared, communal humility where people were encouraged to face God, others, and themselves with honesty while being treated with grace and respect. A place where a person who felt lost and outside the community could be accepted, forgiven, and given a fresh start. It was a place where everyone could acknowledge their need for God, but also for each other. A place where the generations gathered on level ground, without criticism of those coming before or after in the family line.

Sadly, through the years, I found fewer and fewer places in the church with those affirming qualities. Although I said originally that I would not be overly critical of Christianity or Christians, I must say that in my experience of church, much of the shared humility has evaporated. Especially in the public voices of the Evangelical Church. I hate that. Because the atmosphere around the Alter was one of the most potentially healing aspects of the Church I experienced growing up, and one in which I felt the presence of God. A place Jesus would feel welcomed.

While there is nothing special about the wooden bench, we called an Alter, I have come to believe it symbolizes a first step in an ongoing process of living out a healthy connection with God, others, and ourselves: Confession and Repentance.

Confession:

Honesty with God, a trusted person, and our self about our personal strengths and weaknesses with an acknowledgement of our responsibility for our actions and intentions towards God and others. Confession removes the power of the secrets we hold and protect, which are usually tied to feelings of personal shame rather than guilt. I used to think of shame as a feeling that was a consequence of guilt. Now, I understand that shame and guilt are two different experiences, even if they feel similar. Guilt is about action, while shame is about Being or identity. When we feel guilty, we are saying, “I screwed up!” When we feel shame, we are saying, “I’m a screw-up!”

Feelings of guilt warn us that our actions have violated the personal boundaries of God, another person, or even our self. They lead us to in some way make restitution with the violated party and pursue some form of reconciliation. A healthy response to feelings of guilt accepts responsibility for our own actions and allows us to become better known to others, which may lead to greater interpersonal trust and respect. Feelings of guilt are a valuable utilitarian tool for establishing and maintaining a sustainable, respectful community that acknowledges personal responsibility to God and others, where people are valued, seen, and treated with mercy and forgiveness.

Feelings of shame entice us to hide rather than become more deeply known. Personal secrets are developed and defended because of living in the fear that shame ignites. Our ability to see ourselves and others as beings with innate worth and value is hindered. Rather than being honest about our actions, good and bad, we may inflate the good while trying to hide and deny the bad or deflate the good while feeling powerless to change the bad. Shame leads to communities built on suspicion characterized by an increased demand for greater security and blaming others for our personal fear. A person living in shame may deride unnamed other people for not being personally responsible for their lives, and yet also demand the right to live without regard to the needs of others, all the while naming their actions “personal freedom.”

Confession removes the power of Shame by telling the secrets it protects while empowering Guilt to help us achieve our best intentions and ignite the power of forgiveness between each other and God.

Repentance:

To change personally and be a facilitator of communal, positive change. Repentance is connected to Confession by grace and love and a commitment to positive action which leads to growth. It is the ongoing process of changing our direction and intentions through personal deep interaction with the Creator of all things, and all things that are created. I have found that I often cannot explain nor understand how Repentance does its work and yet, with time, I am aware that work has been going on. But only as I am open to it! I would say that while Confession contains an invitation to hear the music, it is Repentance that is the dance. The Alter of Confession opens the door and provides the atmosphere for the Church of Repentance, which is the totality of our interactions to all of Creation.

Maybe the feeling surrounding the Alter was why Dad would make the next decisions he would make. Maybe it provided a glimpse into what life could be while connected to God, other people, his value as a person, and the rest of Creation. Maybe the vision was so powerful that he felt a strong need to tell other people about it. I am not sure how long it took for Dad to live with the inward changes he felt before he believed that God was calling him to preach. It must have been soon after returning home from camp, though, because with his parents’ blessing, he left home at the end of the summer to finish high school in Colorado Springs at Colorado Springs Bible School.

For an idealistic young man, it must have seemed that if people could just hear about his new vision of the world…

If they could hear that life could be better…

If they could believe that the problems they had with their neighbors could be resolved for the good of everyone…

If they could know that God loved them and cared about them…

Then life could be different…

Communities could be different…

The world could be different…

But…

While Confession could at least begin in the space of one service or moment, the process of Repentance takes time. It takes interaction with other people, sometimes the most difficult of which are the people closest to us, such as our family. Repentance takes a community…like the local church or of others committed to the process of ongoing personal growth and change. And the process of continual Confession followed by Repentance is especially aided by a patient mentor, like a pastor or counselor. It can be hard, grueling work and the results are out of the control of a preacher. Change is often slow and always uneven. Growth isn’t a straight line and progress can be difficult to see for a while. And, sadly, some people refuse to change. All of it depends on God, and the commitment of people.

However, Dad’s life had already been filled with obstacles and hard work, so he would not have let future difficulty deter him. He leaned into it.

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[i] Just As I Am; Willie Nelson

Buell Ivan Williams…Part 1

My father was naturally a quiet man. He would even say shy, although you might be surprised by that assessment watching him greet people at the front door of the church as they filed out after the service was over. Dad said he was so shy as a boy that he “couldn’t look a boy in the face, let alone a girl.” Maybe he took after his father somewhat, who was quiet and slow in his movements, although I would never have considered Dad slow moving. I would instead describe him as steady—not too fast, but not too slow. When obstacles were in his path, even if they were self-made, he continued to move forward. His life began with a myriad of obstacles that he was able somehow to navigate through.

Dad was born in February of 1923 while the winds of the Hi-Plains region of Southwest Kansas threatened to bury in snow the sod house his parents and two-year-old sister lived in. With Grandma Williams in labor, Grandpa decided to drive to town through the blizzard to get a doctor. Despite Grandpa’s best effort, Dad was born before the doctor arrived.

I have never been able to determine exactly when nor why Grandpa and Grandma Williams moved to the Hi-Plains region from Coldwater, Kansas which was in the south-central part of the state. Both had extended family in Coldwater that could have provided social and economic support during the hard years that were to come, especially in the 1930’s. As I grew older, knowing why they moved would become particularly important to me because I wanted to better understand how their decisions might have influenced my dad’s approach to life. But I am looking backward through time and now know how difficult life would be for them on the Hi-Plains which was especially hard hit by both the Great Depression and what became known as “The Dirty 30’s”. I tried to piece together what I remembered from stories I’d heard through the years from Dad, Aunt Phyllis (his sister), as well as my own memories from living in that area of the country when I was young.

I knew Dad’s family lived in and through the worst of the Dust Bowl. He remembered that when he was a child the landscape was mostly unfenced grassland with just a few patches of cultivated land. Through his early years, he saw their neighbors initially put fences up, and then eventually plow the grass under to plant row crops. He even participated with the plowing as he earned money for his family by driving a tractor for landowners in the area and then help with whatever harvest there was. Dad’s family needed him to work to help them survive, because Grandpa Williams had a heart condition that I think was exacerbated by the blowing dirt.

He told of watching the edge of the horizon grow dark, knowing what would come, then seeing the darkness grow black until it covered the sky and caused them to run for shelter.

He told of how the dust would seep into their house despite their best efforts to keep it out, until they could see the air they were trying to breathe, and how they then had to remove the dirt from the house with a grain scoop shovel after each storm.

He told of being awakened by his sister in the middle of the night with the admonition to “pray, because Daddy is having one of his heart spells.”

He told of when he was on the track team in high school, and they held practice when the blowing dirt was so thick, they couldn’t see across the infield to the other side of the track.

He told of roaming the pasture with a bucket to gather “cow chips”, which were piles of dried cow manure, to take to the house where they would be burned for fuel because there was no more wood.

He told of burning the spines off cacti so they could be fed to the cattle, and of how eventually the cattle became standing skeletons because there was nothing more to feed them, and how finally the government paid farmers to put down their own stock and then bury the carcasses in long trenches dug by caterpillar tractors.

He told of how the jackrabbit population exploded in numbers so large that they were stripping away the land of whatever green vegetation there was left; and how whole communities of people would encircle a field and slowly walk toward the center, driving rabbits in front of them, and then, when the rabbits were enclosed in the human pen near the center of the field, people with clubs would kill as many rabbits as possible.

He told of eating beans and cornbread, and milk poured over bread; both of which he loved for the rest of his life.

I didn’t understand the full significance of these stories when I was young. They were just…stories. It wasn’t until we moved to Elkhart, Kansas when I was in fourth grade to be near my aging grandparents, that I began to put his stories in context. We lived in or around the town for seven years. Elkhart is in the heart of what was the Dust Bowl and living there allowed me to feel the incessant winds and the wide-open countryside. I saw the tumbleweeds pile against a fence, a ready-made framework for the drifts of sand that the wind would invariably supply, like the iconic pictures in a history book on the Dust Bowl. I also was able to put faces to the stories I’d heard. I met people that lived through the same experiences my father lived through. I also experienced a dust storm at track practice. However, as soon as we felt the wind begin to gust and saw the dark cloud billowing in the horizon to the north, our coach called off practice. Unlike Dad, we didn’t have to run in that dirt. But I did have to drive home in it, which was an adventure, and I began to imagine what it must have been like for my father to live that way for years rather than just one afternoon.

Later in life, after having lived for seven years in and around a small Kansas town, and visiting the original plot of land Grandpa and Grandma had moved to; I wondered why anyone would move from one small Kansas town to another small Kansas town. It seemed redundant. Why would they expend all that physical and financial effort to re-locate to a place so like the one they left? Plus, as I pieced together Dad’s stories about his childhood, I saw a trend of frequent movement from one rented property to another. Why would they move so often? I began to assume they lacked economic stability before the Great Depression, let alone during it. Unfortunately, my grandparents, dad and aunt died before it became important to me to hear answers for the many questions I now wanted to ask them.

I developed two separate hypotheses for why they moved. My first hypothesis was that they moved to Southwest Kansas to gain economic independence. Aunt Phyllis was born in Coldwater in 1921, and Dad was born in 1923 near Manter, Kansas, so Grandma and Grandpa moved sometime between their respective births. The Homestead Act of 1862[i] was still in place during this time. It gave people the right to register a claim for a small filing fee on a piece of public land of up to 160 acres for a period of five years, if they built a home on the land, lived continuously on it, farmed it and made improvements to the property. Wheat prices were up in the early 1920’s due to food shortages in Europe after World War I, and annual rainfall amounts in that area during the period were higher than normal which resulted in bumper wheat crops.  Many new homesteaders made claims in the area at the time, so maybe, I thought, they followed a trend. I could understand how my grandparents might be optimistic about gaining a solid financial footing for their young family if they were to make such a move.

However, I could find no documentation that my grandparents had ever filed such a claim. Also, it turns out that many of the people moving into Kansas for the same purpose would find neither financial stability nor independence.[ii]I was left, therefore, with trying to decipher the thought process of my grandparents from the distance of 100 years.

My second hypothesis involved the church. I knew from the way my father described his family that being loving followers of Jesus was a priority for his family and that they were committed to the church. Their value system was built on the teachings of Jesus and the theology and doctrines of their church tradition. I often heard Aunt Phyllis and Dad say their family attended church “whenever the doors were open.” Secondly, I knew that Grandma Williams became a pastor in the Pilgrim Holiness Church after Dad left home. I also knew that her father, Oscar M. Maris, had also been a pastor in the same denomination. I wondered if these items were clues to why they moved.

I found another possible clue in a conversation with my brother when he told me that Great-Grandpa Maris was the founding pastor of the Pilgrim Holiness Church (now Wesleyan Church) in Johnson City, Kansas; a city about 10-15 miles from the location of Dad’s birth. Another clue popped up when I was doing research in the online archives of the Wesleyan Church. Oscar M. Maris was listed as the first pastor for the Johnson City, Kansas, Pilgrim Holiness Church in 1927. Although that was 4 years after Dad’s birth, I began to wonder if Grandma and Grandpa Williams moved from Coldwater to help Great-Grandpa Maris organize and plant a new church congregation. All this made sense and helped explain my father’s lifelong commitment to the church. It also could explain why he left home at 16, and why his parents supported his decision, even though they needed his help supporting the family financially.

During the summer of 1939, after he turned 16, Dad was asked by Aunt Phyllis and her friend if he would go with them to the Pilgrim Holiness camp meeting in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Aunt Phyllis’ friend had just received a new car from her parents, and the two girls wanted Dad to do the driving. Given the opportunity to drive a new car, go to the mountains, and have a week off from driving a tractor in the incessant wind and dirt, Dad excitedly agreed.

People living in an urban or suburban setting today might think it risky to have a 16-year-old male as your chauffeur for a four-hour trip. We might question his driving experience and his judgement. But children learn how to drive at a young age in a rural, agrarian culture. It’s considered normal for children as young as 10 or 11 to drive tractors or trucks as part of life in a farming community. And as I mentioned before, Dad had been earning money driving tractors for farmers in the area for at least a couple years by that time, so Aunt Phyllis and her friend trusted him to get them there safely.

It might also be hard for us also to understand why going to camp meeting was so exciting for young people. Camp meetings are a long-held tradition in Evangelical denominations. As a denomination grew in the number of congregations in a geographical area, they were sectioned off into administrative districts which aided the national headquarters in the orderly dissemination of information, stewardship of money, educating ministers, planning potential locations for planting new churches, continued vigilance in doctrinal focus, and overall governance of the denomination. The geographical size of a district would depend on the number of congregations, so sometimes a district could include several states if the congregations were sparse. Many districts would buy property specifically designed and built for yearly camp meetings with the intention of aiding local churches in providing attenders with an opportunity for spiritual renewal and gaining new converts. Each year, district leaders would hire preachers, that often were well known in the denomination for their talent to preach challenging evangelistic sermons, to preach for a week-long schedule of services at the district camp. Musicians and singers would also be hired to provide special music for camp. (A Christian mini “Lollapalooza” with only a center stage.) Young people especially enjoyed camp because it gave them an opportunity to meet and socialize with other young people from across the district.

So, for Dad, Aunt Phyllis and her friend it was…

Bright lights…

Big city…

Good music…

Handsome boys…

Pretty girls…

What’s not to love?

In Colorado Springs, the camp meeting was held on the campus of Colorado Springs Bible School, which was affiliated with the Pilgrim Holiness Church denomination. Services were held in either an auditorium or large tent pitched on the grounds of the school and the space was called either the Tabernacle or Sanctuary. People attending from out of town would have slept in the student dorms. Meals were served in the school dining hall. Using the school facilities for camp meeting was a financial benefit for the district and a benefit for the school in recruiting future students. A daily schedule of events might look something like this:

6:00-6:30 AM: Early morning prayer in the Tabernacle.

7:00-8:30 AM: Breakfast in the Dining Hall.

10:00-11:30 AM: Worship service in the Tabernacle.

12:00-1:30 PM: Lunch in the Dining Hall.

2:30-4:00 PM: Youth activities in either the Tabernacle or on athletic fields.

5:00-6:30 PM: Dinner in the Dining Hall.

7:00-8:30 PM: Evening Worship service in the Tabernacle.

9:00-9:30 PM: Snack Shack open. (Possibly in the Dining Hall or in another site on campus.)

10:30: Lights out!

(I don’t have an actual schedule from the camp Dad visited at 16, but I remember the camp meetings we went to when Dad was a speaker and the above is similar to what I remember. Leaders often find a schedule that works for what they want to accomplish and continue it year after year.)

Time was structured, but also allowed a more leisurely pace during meals so families could mingle socially and re-connect with friends living in communities scattered across the district. Although the schedule appears to be full, it must be remembered that many people attending camp were hard working folks, often in blue-collar, labor intensive jobs or on farms. They also often either lived in small towns or lived in the country and the church they attended was in a small town, with few entertainment options. The preaching, music, activities, and social contact at camp was more than they experienced at home. While there certainly were people who attended camp who lived in cities, the structure still acted as a social and spiritual oasis in the middle of their yearly lives.

This particular camp meeting would be of major significance for my father, however. Dad would make life decisions following that week in 1939 that would affect not only his life, and that of his family, but eventually also my mother, siblings and me. Dad chose to follow Jesus at that camp meeting.

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[i] https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/homestead-act

[ii] For more reading about the agricultural history of Kansas: Hurt, R. Douglas; The Agricultural and Rural History of Kansas; https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/2004autumn_hurt.pdf

Also: Egan, Timothy; The Worst Hard Times: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Truck Driver…

I heard the story so many times that if I close my eyes, I can still hear my father’s voice re-telling it although he has been gone for over forty years. The story was part of a sermon preached over decades in churches and camp meetings across the continent. Dad was an evangelist and our family travelled with him from community to community throughout the United States and Canada. The setting was a forest in Canada. The two of us were walking together through the woods, and he decided to tell four-year-old me a humorous story he had recently heard. He picked me up, set me on a rock, and told this story:

“A family came home after attending a church for the first time, and the mother asked her pre-school son if he liked the Sunday School class he attended. The son responded, ‘No, I don’t like the class and I’m not going back!’

‘But why don’t you like the class?’ Mom asked.

The little boy sternly repeated the same thing. The mother implored the boy repeatedly as to why he didn’t like the class until he blurted out, ‘I don’t like the teacher and I’m not going back!’

‘But whyyy don’t you like the teacher? She’s a nice lady. She’s very kind. She tells good stories…’, and she continued to try to explain to her son why he should go back.

Finally, out of exasperation, the boy said, ‘Well…the teacher says that Jesus wants me to be a Sunbeam[i], but I wants to be a twuck dwiver!’”

Dad would wait for the laughter in the crowd to subside, and then say:

“After telling the story, I watched little Larry to see how he would respond and he didn’t crack a smile. He said, ‘You know…that little boy didn’t know he could be both!’”

Dad would use the story to emphasize how important it is for people that say they know and love Jesus to act like Jesus in their daily life. “Now admittedly,” he would say, “not all truck drivers are Sunbeams, but nevertheless; that is how Jesus wants us to live.”

When I remember Dad telling that story, I think of at least three things:

1. I was a really serious kid…
2. Ironically, Dad was killed driving a truck and spent several years at the end of his life as both a Sunbeam and a twuck dwiver.
3. The fact I can still hear my dad’s voice telling that story explains how often I heard the story in his sermons.

(Oh, and I relate to the boy in the story because I hated…H.A.T.E.D. going to new Sunday School classes.)

It’s a pretty safe assumption that at an early age I understood that anyone could be a Sunbeam: a person that follows and loves Jesus. However, that assumption does not necessarily mean that I understood what being a Sunbeam looked like in everyday life for most folks. My father’s occupation as an evangelistic preacher, and our family’s role in it, isolated me from a lot of life that other folks would consider normal. My parents never owned a house, but that doesn’t mean Dad was considered incompetent as a worker or flighty. Quite the opposite. Both my parents grew up in the Depression and were needed by their families to contribute their share of labor to survive. So, a poor work ethic was not the issue.

The cause of our geographic and economic instability was that both Dad and Mom felt called by God to the ministry, especially as evangelists. There were stretches of time when we lived in a community, such as when Dad was a pastor in a local church, or when my grandparents were in declining health and Dad felt he needed to be near them, but the focus of our family’s life was telling people about Jesus through the structure of the local church. This was true whether we travelled in Evangelism or when Dad was a pastor. Church was our life. And I thought the Church was the only conduit for knowing and relating personally to Jesus. Most significantly, I believed that knowing Jesus was directly connected to what happened to a person after they died. It was the lens through which I saw and understood the world. Knowing Jesus meant going to heaven after we die. Not knowing Jesus meant going to hell. So, for the 4-year-old me, it made sense that the little boy in the story could be both a Sunbeam and a truck driver. What a person did in the world wasn’t as important as knowing Jesus, and it didn’t occur to me that anyone would think differently. I assumed that knowing and loving Jesus was connected to the Church. I had yet to learn how the Church could be a deterrent for some people that liked Jesus but had no desire to associate with the Church as an institution, or many of the people that attend Church. I had no idea that there were people who didn’t think that what happens to us after death was related to either Jesus or the Church. As a child, I naively put Jesus and the Church together.

It would be years before I began to question whether the values of God expressed in and through the life of Jesus as described in the Gospels were the values of either the institutional priorities of the Church, it’s leadership, or a majority of attenders. It also never occurred to me that there were Christian traditions other than ours with differing perspectives about Jesus, the afterlife, and interpreting the bible. Also, during my childhood, I had no interaction with religious traditions other than the type of Christianity in our tradition. I lived in the bubble of the white, conservative, Evangelical church. Our theological tradition and the fact we moved so much isolated me. (We didn’t have a television until I was in kindergarten.) I never got a feel for the cycle of living in one geographic location for multiple years until I was in fourth grade.

What I eventually began to understand through years spent in American Evangelicalism was that although the phrases “being a Christian” and “being a follower of Jesus” may be used interchangeably, there is a great deal of ambiguity in what they mean. I saw a growing disparity between the Jesus of the New Testament and the Jesus of American Christianity. The former was characterized by “the Golden Rule” while the latter seemed to increasingly be characterized by “the Rule of Gold.” As the years progressed, I became increasingly disillusioned with the institutional church, especially with the way it was portrayed by public Christian leaders in their political statements that seemed to me antithetical to the Jesus I had come to know. My task, especially later in life, was to peel back the layers of doctrine and theological perspectives I found particularly unhelpful in relating to God, the World, and my life. I read books that examined history from perspectives different than those I heard growing up. It became apparent to me how Christianity changed when it was connected to political power.

However, the years of theological and historical deconstruction did not leave me in a better emotional place. I was frustrated and confused. And my emotional state would not get better quickly. In fact, as I approached 50, my personal life also underwent deconstruction. My marriage of 23 years failed, and we divorced. Although I did not want the divorce initially, it became apparent to me as I worked through the process that divorce was the healthiest thing for both of us. Our relationship had never really worked for either one of us. Divorce was just the acknowledgement that life could be better without the drama associated with two people headed in different directions with differing value systems. Eventually, I decided that the best part of our marriage was the two children we brought into the world. Baird and Hannah have since grown into intelligent, remarkably adaptive adults, and my continued relationship with them is a source of love and grace for all of us, including Baird’s wife, Ryann.

At 50, there was a growing realization that I had unconscious expectations about my life that had not materialized. Further, I saw how my expectations were attached to an equation of personal value:

Church + Family + Performance = Worth.

It became apparent to me that I had been living as if the equation was how God judged me and my value as a person. I’m pretty sure I would not have come to this understanding unless and until all parts of the left side of the equation crashed and burned. It was a life crisis, but also a faith crisis.

Was the equation really how God saw me?

Was that fair?

Was it loving?

Was the problem my life or my perception of God?

What was surprising during the turmoil surrounding my divorce, was how close I felt to God, and how open God was to hearing my honest emotions even when I deemed them to be unacceptable. I came to believe that God was bigger than the equation, and I was more resilient than I expected. At 50, I found an opportunity to re-focus my life, and it became apparent that I would do that through reconciliation. Not reconciliation with my former wife, but with the memories of all facets of my former life.

Although I grew up in church, I seldom attend church now. I am not alone. It’s a phrase commonly heard these days. My intention of writing this, is not to develop an ongoing diatribe against Christians or even Christianity in general; rather I want to reconcile my current life with some of the positive memories I have from all the years spent with people that loved Jesus, and some of the faith practices I found there that lead to a fuller life.

Reconciliation has been a theme over the past ten years or so in my life. After spending most of my adult life living in the Kansas City metro area, I moved to St. Petersburg, Florida following the divorce to live near my rapidly aging mother and work with my sister and brother-in-law in their pest control business. My relationship with Mom was difficult through the years, and I realized living near her would give me the last opportunity I likely would receive for it to heal and for us to grow closer. It seemed like a tall order, because Mom’s mental condition was fading fast as age-related dementia and bi-polar disorder ravaged her brain. I eventually realized that almost all the relational work would be mine since the change of which she was capable was that of losing the memories of much of her life. The unexpected benefit of that loss of memory, however, was how it opened a door for enjoying the present together without the baggage of our past relationship difficulties. My work, I realized over time, was to reconcile what I had needed from her as I grew up with what I received from her, the disparity between those qualities, and what Mom had been capable of giving me. God gave us six years living near each other before she died, and I needed every minute of it to eventually feel love for and from my mother. We reconciled, or more honestly: I had reconciled with her.

During the final year of my mother’s life, I reconnected with a woman (Voni) I first fell in love with over forty years ago. I likely would not have been ready for the relationship with Voni without the years spent reconciling with Mom.  Our families have been friends over multiple generations, beginning when my paternal grandmother became pastor in the small, village church attended by Voni’s father when he was a child. Eventually Voni’s father would also become a preacher, so Voni and I share the experience of being preacher’s kids. Although Voni continues to attend church, we have both experienced how twisted Evangelical Christian culture can be. We also share the experience of divorce, and that of recovery from divorce through personal resilience and growth. We married in September of 2019 and I moved to Oklahoma, where she lives, from Florida in January of 2020. Together now after so many years spent apart, we enjoy a relationship that is better and healthier than those we both left. Although life isn’t easy in light of Covid 19, it is better with each other.

It is in this environment that I have begun again to write. It occurred to me that I have an opportunity to do with my life what I did with my Mom: to reconcile to it.

This is my attempt to do just that.

---

[i] Some explanation may be needed for the “Sunbeam” reference. “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” was a children’s song often used in churches when I was growing up. You can hear it hear:

I’ll Be Home…

It’s been three years since I began listening to Christmas music again. Before then, for years I treated Christmas and most holidays as if they were just another day. Doing that was mostly a defense mechanism against loneliness and disappointment following divorce, the empty nest, and living so far from my children. Denial was easier than falling into a holiday funk. Although I would spend the “important” holidays…Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc…with my sister, her family, and Mom; I was always aware of the vacant seats near me that I felt should have been filled with Baird, Ryann, and Hannah.

 

The pain of separation was especially poignant at Christmas time due to how much I loved that time of year for most of my life. The romance of the Christmas season always filled me with hope and a desire to connect with the entirety of Creation surrounding me. But then I ran face first into the disappointment of so many life expectations that were unmet, and the realization that I hadn’t even known they existed.

Hope met Loss…

…and it was just easier to push all of it away, both the feelings of Hope and the feelings of Loss.

Until it all felt, if not dead, then at least paralyzed.

The conscious choice of emotional paralysis.

But…

…three years ago, I felt a spark of Hope in my heart. Maybe it was the joy I felt when I saw a young family together walking in the neighborhood looking at Christmas lights. Or an older couple holding hands in a restaurant with Christmas music softly playing in the background. Or the Christmas my children and I spent in a cabin in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, watching the snow blown by the wind outside, and listening to the crackle of the fire in the stove in the corner.

As I recall, it was all those events that gently warmed my heart, and renewed my love for Christmas…

…and Christmas music.

I began to understand that each of those events were beautiful in themselves and that Beauty did not depend on nor was it affected by the loss I perceived in my life. Furthermore, the fact that I could perceive the Beauty reminded me that I was connected to it.

 

Fast forward to three days ago…

I was driving in my work truck between appointments listening to Christmas music on the radio and the song, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” came on…

…and I began to cry…

There was a deep longing to go Home.

Where my mother and father were.

But Mom and Dad are both gone. Dad was killed in a truck accident when I was in college, and Mom died in her sleep last year a couple days after Christmas.

I was surprised by the depth of my emotion, and my mind began to wander.

…I remembered a story the father of my sister-in-law, Margaret, used to tell about that song. Tom was a soldier in World War II, and his unit was in some town in Europe. He remembered hearing that song in the evening and wandering the city “crying like a baby.”

…I remembered how frequently my family moved as I was growing up, and that Christmas would often find us in a different place from the previous year.

…I remembered the Christmas in Michigan, when I was in kindergarten, and how much it snowed, and the toys I got (a great haul!), and the old two-story house on the corner in which we lived.

…I remembered the next two Christmases about which I could remember nothing.

…I remembered how my dad always received chocolate covered cherries every year.

…I remembered how, when I got older, we would drive through the town in which we were living at the time and look at the lights on the houses before coming home to open presents on Christmas Eve.

And then…

I remembered something I never realized before…

…I remembered what I most valued about my parents and the home they created for us.

…I remembered how peaceful and calm our home was.

I do remember there being drama. Especially between my mother and I when I was a teen.

However, looking back in time, I realize just how much my father provided balance for my mother. After living near her for the last seven years of her life, I have learned just how much her bi-polar disorder affected the way she approached life. Through these recent years, it became clearer to me that the way her brain worked affected all the emotional options available to her, and that many possible responses to life weren’t available to her! Therefore, in so many of the issues between us, she was limited in the way she could act towards me. Because of her brain. But, at the time, I didn’t understand that.

I now suspect Dad did and would act as a counterbalance for her limitations when he could. He did so calmly, and often with great emotional restraint in ways that to some people might appear weak. But I now know that his response showed patience, courage, and love.

Eventually…

Peace and Calm were the result.

Peace and Calm are such a contrast from much of my first marriage. The two of us just could not find a way to a mutually affirming relationship. Even when the house was quiet, there was often tension, disapproval, and mutual disappointment. I found that just because you aren’t yelling at each other, it doesn’t mean there is peace.

I have also come to know people that grew up in families in which yelling and physical violence were common. I can’t imagine living in such volatility and stress. It was not my experience growing up. My parents gave us a relatively calm and peaceful home, so my concept of Home is defined by those qualities. I now know that I would not trade geographic stability for them.

That was the reason for my tears. It was one of the greatest gifts my parents gave to us and I am thankful!

Helen Irene Young Williams

The following is a piece I wrote for my mother’s memorial service in Elkhart, KS:

 

How do you tell another person’s story?

How do you condense 94 years into 2 hours?

Ok….maybe not 2 hours, but a few minutes…

It would make sense to begin with Mom’s birth. She was born in Huntington, West Virginia on March 26^th, 1925. Or was it the 24^th…or the 25^th? Our family always celebrated it on March 26, but a few years ago, Connie had to send for Mom’s birth certificate due to some legal reason, and we found that we had been wrong for all those years. The birth certificate and our memories were different.

Speaking personally, this makes perfect sense to me now, because many of my memories of my mother were, if not wrong, at least made clearer after spending the last 7 years of her life close to her. I began to understand just how difficult Mom’s life was and how so much of the way she lived her life was governed by the way her brain worked. I told her that, too, when she grew frustrated with the effects that creeping dementia had on her verbal abilities and her increasing unsteadiness in walking or getting up from sitting. She would get frustrated when trying to remember a word or event, and I would say, “Its OK. That’s just how your brain works right now.” She seemed to feel comfort from this thought…sometimes.

Mom’s brain always worked differently, though. That’s not surprising, right? All of us have brains that act uniquely. It is what makes each of us unique and distinctive. However, Mom suffered with bi-polar disorder, which was untreated for most of her life. This condition presented both challenges and gifts, honestly, and in these past few years the way I began to understand her fluctuated between recognizing both the challenges and the gifts.

Mom was stubborn.

Let me say it again…MOM WAS STUBBORN!

And this stubbornness was supported by a high level of energy and an obsessiveness. When Helen Williams got something in her mind, she was going to follow through with it, sometimes to the point of physical and mental exhaustion. She would lock on to a course of action or thought like a pit bull locks on to a log. Sometimes there was a positive reason to lock on to it. Especially when it came to loving people.

Like when she was a mother raising two children while in itinerant evangelism travelling from city to city and staying in the homes of other people or in a travel trailer. Can you imagine riding herd on two energetic toddlers while being a guest in another person’s home?

Crayons on walls…

Washing diapers out by hand…

Cleaning up vomit from someone’s carpet or couch…

Or keeping them busy while riding countless hours from one city to another.

Or feeding them in a car.

 

How about figuring out WHAT to feed your family when the check at the end of the revival is small, and you must pay for gas to the next revival?

Mom had to be creative.

Connie once said, “I have gone into the kitchen and figured I needed to go to the store because there was no food, but Mom would go into the same kitchen and make a MEAL!”

Mom was stubbornly convinced that these difficulties were acceptable because her family was telling other people about Jesus and that was more important than the hardship.

 

Or…

How about teaching a Sunday School class of 5^th and 6^th grade boys like she did down in the parsonage basement right here in this very location?

Sometimes being stubborn and being patient look the same!

I was in that class. I remember she kept us interested using a program called Jet Cadets in which we became potential jet pilots. She would bring boxes to class and we would create imaginary computers out of them to help us with our missions.

She also took us outside the class on Saturday excursions. We travelled to the Cimarron river, which at the time was better named the Cimarron sand, and we began to dig in the dry river bed until the water underground seeped in. We then stepped into the watery sand and felt it suck our feet down like quicksand. I’m sure she used the experience as a spiritual metaphor, explaining how quickly habits can become quicksand, or how even a dry place can have the water we need due to God’s grace.

 

During revivals, she would tell bible stories using a Flannel Graph. Remember those? Although these stories were especially for kids, I bet she understood that all of us are still kids.

 

She was especially stubborn when it came to telling other people about Jesus. It sometimes got her into trouble, too. Especially in the Assisted Living Facility in which she lived for several years towards the end of her life. Her growing dementia robbed her of her civility, but not her stubborn will. Often, at meal time, when everyone in the facility was in the dining room, she would take her bible and begin to read aloud…really loud. She either could not understand that everyone didn’t want to hear Leviticus at meal time, or she did not care if they wanted to hear it. “They need to know Jesus!” she would exclaim, and it did not matter that they either already knew Jesus, knew about Jesus, or that there was nothing in Leviticus ABOUT Jesus. THEY NEED TO KNOW!

 

Mom loved working in the yard. She could be obsessive about it, too. While living in the ALF, for years Mom would constantly be outside working in the yard, even in the heat of the Florida summer. She would be so focused on what she was doing she would forget to drink or eat. Sometimes, she would pull up plants that were part of the landscape plan, and either try to transplant them, or throw them away. While pulling at a small tree root, she would lose her grip and fall, sometimes hitting her head, and nobody would know about it until she came inside with a black eye or bruise. Her clothes were often dirty. She always had cuts on her legs. But she would not stop! It became a problem…

Despite many warnings, she persisted. Even when the owner locked away her tools and put a lock on the water faucet. She would make do with other objects as tools and put a container under the AC condensation spout for water. Once, before they locked the water faucet, she attached the hose, and walked in front of the smokers on the porch with the water on full to water the plants. One of the smokers…a woman…confronted her, kindly reminding her she wasn’t supposed to use the hose and telling her she was spattering water all over the smokers. Mom turned the hose on her. In the resulting struggle for the hose, the faucet was damaged so that water was spraying from it. The water had to be shut off, and the faucet fixed. Everyone said it was Mom’s fault. She wasn’t popular for a while after that incident. (When I heard the story, I was extremely doubtful that she had the strength to break that faucet. Now, I think it at least possible…)

Her gardening obsession didn’t really manifest itself until later in her life, although I do remember instances of it. I remember when the Youth Center here was nearing completion, Mom decided that the landscape near the entrance needed some help. Janet Kelly agreed with her. They came up with a design, recruited a few people (I was one) and travelled to Carrizo Canyon in Colorado to get needed materials. We loaded rocks, cacti, dead wood, and quite honestly, I can’t remember what all else, into pickups to be transported to Elkhart. We then unloaded everything while Mom and Janet put them in place. It was a LOT of work, but Mom was right in the middle of it all and seemed to love the whole process.

 

I’m sure many of you have stories about my mother, and you will be given a chance to tell them. However, the way I will remember my mother is symbolized by strawberry milk shakes and drives in the park.

My relationship with my mother wasn’t easy nor positive, honestly. And the first couple of years living near her reflected that history. However, as her dementia got worse, our relationship got better. I never knew preceding each visit, who I would be to her.

Sometimes, I was her brother.

 

Sometimes, I was her father.

 

Sometimes, I was my father.

 

Sometimes, I was her boyfriend.

 

Sometimes, I was her son.

 

Sometimes, I am not sure she knew who I was, but there was a feeling of familiarity of someone she trusted. I liked that. The trusting part, because it was so different and new. Eventually, it occurred to me that I was becoming a pseudo-father to my mother. I love being a father and believe I am a pretty good one.

She once said something that I found both profound and beautiful. I had just walked in the door for a visit with her, and we were standing in the hall with a woman that worked at the ALF.

The woman referred to me and asked Mom, “Do you know who he is?”

Mom responded, “He is my brother.”

“No,” the woman corrected her, “he is your son.”

Mom said, “He is my son, but he is also my brother!”

I like that…

 

It is profound…

 

…and it reminds me of how I feel about my own children. The thought describes both a genetic connection, but also a relationship on even ground, with none of the struggles for power that often characterize parent-child relationships. Unconditional, mutual love and respect, without attempts to manipulate the actions of each other.

 

So…

 

…a relationship completely different than the one she and I had throughout many of my 57 years with and away from her.

 

My memories of Mom will be ones surrounding a place: School House Holler. It is the place to which her mind seemed to return when I would take out for our weekly trip to Culver’s for a strawberry milkshake and a drive through a county park nearby. I wrote about it on my blog last year, and I will finish with a portion of it:

 

“Now, her mental state often leaves her in a place before I was born. Before my brother and sister were born. Before she married my father, and all the years driving across the country from church service to church service. Back to when she was young. Either when she was a college student, or when she was a child. To be honest, her behavior is often that of a two-year-old. She can become so confused that her childhood memories invade the present. Not the memories themselves, but her view of the world then. The trees and plants around her ALF were planted by her father, she says. There is no reason to argue the point with her. No reason to try and pull her 85 years into the present. In those times, it is all she is capable of understanding. I think it is a way for her to survive the confusion. To make sense of not knowing or liking where she is. It may be comforting to be Home, if only in the deep recesses of her mind.

 

That is why she loves trees, I think.

 

The place she is remembering, is School House Holler. I have been there once. It is in the hills of Southeastern Ohio, up-river from Huntington, WV, where she was born, and where her family moved when she was older. It is the place where her earliest memories lie. Her fondest childhood memories. Where her mother fed her cornbread and milk and flap-jacks and green beans with ham hocks and biscuits with milk-gravy. Where she worked with her brother pulling caterpillars off the tobacco plants and plopping them into a tin Hills Brother’s coffee can with kerosene in it to kill them. Where she and her brother got sick when they rolled a tobacco leaf into a homemade stogie, hid and smoked it, then got a spanking when her mother found out. Where her daddy worked all week in an industrial job along the river, then came home to work all weekend in their large garden with multiple fruit trees and then hauled the garden harvest to the farmer’s market in town on Sunday to sell to city folks for extra money during the depression. Where her daddy had to park his pickup miles away when it rained and then walked home because the roads were too muddy. Where their single milk cow and mule and pigs were. Where her crazy grandfather lived with them and would frequently disappear and have to be searched for in the woods. Where all her sisters and brother walked down the same path, being joined by neighboring kids intermittently along the path to the one-room school in the valley. Where the house was small, but the country was big and beautiful and full of adventure.

 

THAT place!

 

Once, when I first moved here, she drew maps of the farm, and the layout of the kitchen, and showed them to me. I didn’t realize at the time the significance of the maps. I was still living with my own memories of her, I guess, so I was less receptive to her remembrances. I was amazed by her memory, then. Now I understand it was her attempt to go Home again. Just like her love of the trees in the park every Saturday.

 

She was born fourth among six children, three years younger than her brother, Harold, and three years older than her sister, Betty. She seems to have been closest to Harold, although it may just seem that way, because the stories she told me about School House Holler usually include him. The two of them either busy working or getting into minor mischief together. There were always chores to do. The house had neither running water, nor an indoor bathroom, so there was always water to fetch, a cow to milk, or eggs to gather from the chicken coop. It was at School House Holler that her work ethic was born and honed.”

I will remember her as a little girl with skinned knees, bare feet, and a thin dress dirtied by the tree she’d just climbed. I will see her running through the tall grass with her brother Harold to the creek where they will flip over rocks looking for crawdads, after which they will lie down in the tall grass and look up in the sky to watch the clouds gather for a storm. They will run through the rain to meet their father as he walks up the lane to a house alive with the clamber of her siblings’ voices, and the smell of bacon and corn bread cooking.

 

In the months preceding my mother’s death, I began to understand at least two things:

1. In moving to Florida, God gave me the gift of reconciling with both my mother and my life.
2. That my overwhelming desire for my mother would be that she find Peace.

I also understood better that she would not find peace in her body when her brain acted the way it always had, so…

On Thursday evening, December 27, 2018, Helen Irene Young Williams finally found the peace I had hoped she would find.

Place…

“…I knew I had not escaped Kentucky and had never really wanted to. I was still writing about it and had recognized that I would probably need to write about it for the rest of my life. Kentucky was my fate- not an altogether pleasant fate, though it had much that was pleasing in it, but one that I could not leave behind simply by going to another place, and that I therefore felt more and more obligated to meet directly and to understand. Perhaps even more important, I still had a deep love for the place I had been born in and liked the idea of going back to be part of it again. And that, too, I felt obligated to try to understand. Why should I love one place so much more than any other? What could be the meaning or use of such love?”

 

“I knew as well as Wolfe that there is a certain metaphorical sense in which you can’t go home again- that is, the past is lost to the extent that it cannot be lived in again. I knew perfectly well that I could not return home and be a child, or recover the secure pleasures of childhood. But I knew also that as the sentence was spoken to me it bore a self-dramatizing sentimentality that was absurd. Home- the place, the countryside- was still there, still pretty much as I left it, and there was no reason I could not go back to it if I wanted to.”

 

“But what I had in my mind that made the greatest difference was the knowledge of the few square miles in Kentucky that were mine by inheritance and by birth and by the intimacy the mind makes with the place it awakens in.”

 

“I came to see myself as growing out of the earth like the other native animals and plants. I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place, which would fall back into it like leaves in the autumn.”

 

Wendell Berry[i]

 

 

My mother loves trees… and strawberry shakes.

I know this, because she tells me every Saturday. I pick her up at the ALF she lives in, and we go to Culver’s to get a small strawberry shake, a medium caramel shake for me (after all, I am bigger than she is…and growing bigger with each shake!). I used to also get onion rings, originally at her request, but the onion rings have stopped because she now refuses, or forgets, to put in her dentures, so they would be left for me to eat and I do not need them. Her absent dentures are a result of the fog of dementia which has deepened over the past 6 years through which I have lived near her. One reason I moved near her on the Central Gulf coast of Florida, was to help my sister and brother-in-law care for her. She is 94, and they have born the brunt of keeping watch over her slow deterioration. Dementia would be enough of a battle, but what makes the struggle worse, is my family’s life-long battle with her bi-polar disorder.

My brother, sister, and their spouses tell me I interact with mom the best of our family, which has been surprising to me considering how difficult our relationship was throughout my life. They also tell me that she says I am her favorite child. In the past, when they would say this, I would roll my eyes, and ask if they would like to trade me positions in the family hierarchy. They then assure me that neither of them will compete with me for the distinction. It is also surprising because with each visit, I never know who she will understand me to be.

Sometimes, I am her brother.

Sometimes, I am her father.

Sometimes, I am my father.

Sometimes, I am her boyfriend.

Sometimes, I am her son.

Sometimes, I am not sure she knows who I am, but there is a feeling of familiarity of someone she trusts. I like that. The trusting part, because it is so different and new.

After we receive our shakes through the drive-through, we go to a large park nearby. I drive slowly through the park, and she says…every time…that she loves the beautiful trees, which are a tangle of short palms, young oaks, and the occasional coastal pine. I usually point out the various shelters which protect picnic tables, and the gatherings of people underneath. Sometimes there are balloons and banners on the shelters which identify birthday parties or other gatherings. I mention them, because the gatherings warm my heart, and I hope the sight will warm her heart, too. Sometimes she will look at the gathering. Other times she can’t seem to tear her gaze away from the trees.

As we are approaching Culver’s, or the park, she will say, “This is where Larry brings me.”

I say, “Yep. That’s me.”

She will often respond, “Oh, yeah.” In her voice, I detect both embarrassment and humor, as if her mind still remembers how to be self-deprecating. I share in the humor with her. No reproach. “It is just how your brain works right now,” I tell her. She seems comforted by that sometimes.

One of the things she has recently repeated several times is, “You are my son, but also my brother.”

I like that…

It is profound…

…and it reminds me of how I feel about my own children. The thought describes both a genetic connection, but also a relationship on even ground, with none of the struggles for power that often characterize parent-child relationships. Unconditional, mutual love and respect, without attempts to manipulate the actions of each other.

So…

…a relationship completely different than the one she and I had throughout many of my 57 years with and away from her.

Now, her mental state often leaves her in a place before I was born. Before my brother and sister were born. Before she married my father, and all the years driving across the country from church service to church service. Back to when she was young. Either when she was a college student, or when she was a child. To be honest, her behavior is often that of a two-year-old. She can become so confused that her childhood memories invade the present. Not the memories themselves, but her view of the world then. The trees and plants around her ALF were planted by her father, she says. There is no reason to argue the point with her. No reason to try and pull her 85 years into the present. In those times, it is all she is capable of understanding. I think it is a way for her to survive the confusion. To make sense of not knowing or liking where she is. It may be comforting to be Home, if only in the deep recesses of her mind.

That is why she loves trees, I think.

The place she is remembering, is School House Holler. I have been there once. It is in the hills of Southeastern Ohio, up-river from Huntington, WV, where she was born, and where her family moved when she was older. It is the place where her earliest memories lie. Her fondest childhood memories. Where her mother fed her cornbread and milk and flap-jacks and green beans with ham hocks and biscuits with milk-gravy. Where she worked with her brother pulling caterpillars off the tobacco plants and plopping them into a tin Hillsbrother’s coffee can with kerosene in it to kill them. Where she and her brother got sick when they rolled a tobacco leaf into a homemade stogie, hid and smoked it, then got a spanking when her mother found out. Where her daddy worked all week in an industrial job along the river, then came home to work all weekend in their large garden with multiple fruit trees and then hauled the garden harvest to the farmer’s market in town on Sunday to sell to city folks for extra money during the depression. Where her daddy had to park his pickup miles away when it rained and then walked home because the roads were too muddy. Where their single milk cow and mule and pigs were. Where her crazy grandfather lived with them and would frequently disappear and have to be searched for in the woods. Where all her sisters and brother walked down the same path, being joined by neighboring kids intermittently along the path to the one-room school in the valley. Where the house was small, but the country was big and beautiful and full of adventure.

THAT place!

Once, when I first moved here, she drew maps of the farm, and the layout of the kitchen, and showed them to me. I didn’t realize at the time the significance of the maps. I was still living with my own memories of her, I guess, so I was less receptive to her remembrances. I was amazed by her memory, then. Now I understand it was her attempt to go Home again. Just like her love of the trees in the park every Saturday.

She was born fourth among six children, three years younger than her brother, Harold, and three years older than her sister, Betty. She seems to have been closest to Harold, although it may just seem that way, because the stories she told me about School House Holler usually include him. The two of them either busy working or getting into minor mischief together. There were always chores to do. The house had neither running water, nor an indoor bathroom, so there was always water to fetch, a cow to milk, or eggs to gather from the chicken coop. It was at School House Holler that her work ethic was born and honed.

I think her bi-polar disorder also contributed to her need to be up and moving. Even now, when she falls into a nap in some chair, unexpectedly she will awaken and begin to immediately get up, which is not as easy a task as it was even one year ago. When I am with her and she does this, I ask, “Where are you going?” Her response to me is a blank stare, then maybe, “Connie is coming…” or some imagined task. I will say, “No…it’s ok. There is no reason for you to have to get up.” It seems to be the way her brain works. It does not stop, as if there is a perpetual thumb in her back pushing her to go and do. She obsesses about things. When she was younger it was religion and reading the bible, to herself, or to whomever was nearby. At the ALF, she added working in the yard, planting and trans-planting plants, pulling weeds, or wanted plants masquerading as weeds in her mind.

These two activities often got her into trouble in her ALF.

 

 

Meal time bible reading…

 

Often, at meal time, when everyone in the facility was in the dining room, she would take her bible (one of five she has) and begin to read aloud…really loud. She either could not understand that everyone didn’t want to hear Leviticus at meal time, or she did not care if they wanted to hear it. “They need to know Jesus!” she would exclaim, and it did not matter that they either already knew Jesus, knew about Jesus, or that there was nothing in Leviticus ABOUT Jesus. THEY NEED TO KNOW! Eventually, I began to think the bible readings were less about Jesus and either more about her need to be seen and heard or that she perceived God to demand it.

In years past, I would have said that Mom loved God above trees or strawberry milk shakes. Now…I’m not so sure…

When I consider my mother’s relationship to God currently, I must be honest that I do NOT know what disjointed thoughts go through my mother’s mind, nor can I trace the lines of difference between who she was and who she now is. First, because we didn’t know about bi-polar disorder when we were growing up, so all we knew of Mom was how she acted, and what she said. Second, because I must overcome my own inner issues with who I knew her to be, and the way I interpreted her thoughts and feelings towards me as a child, adolescent, and man. Third, because my expectations of her have not been met.

Now, her actions regarding God seem to go between two spiritual poles:

Jesus, lover of her soul…

Or

God, demander of perfection…

Both these perceptions seem to be held within a brain that is rapidly deteriorating, so there is no logic holding them together. Instead, she flips between the two when she relates to other people. She is sweet as French Silk pie until she gets angry, then she is mean as a rattle snake. She does not like to be bossed, especially by women, and she can be quick to strike out with her fists when someone is directly confronting her in an action she is taking, no matter how dangerous or non-sensical the action. The part of her brain within which civility was constructed is broken and has given way to the part of her brain that runs the survival program.

I often wonder if Mom retreats to School House Holler because it was a time before there was a dissonance in her perception of God. While I have learned that the memories of childhood are clearer for a person disappearing into the fog of dementia than more recent ones, possibly due to where they are stored within the brain; I also wonder if the complexity of theological messages she received through the years are harder for her to integrate. It is also possible that she never did integrate them. I have come to understand that throughout her life, Mom did not think critically about differing interpretations in the theology with which she came in contact. Once she heard something she understood as true, she held on. I think she believed theological doctrines for reasons even she wasn’t aware. This is a facet of her personality directly attributed to bi-polar disorder. When she latches on to a thought, she is like a pit bull holding on to a log. Even though pit bulls to not eat logs, and it makes no sense to hold on, it seems to be the principle of the thing: “You WILL NOT take this log from me! It is mine, and I want it!”

She can be stubborn like that.

Although I am not completely clear on this, I don’t believe she encountered church and an orderly, theological belief system until after her family moved from School House Holler. I believe they moved to a house along the river when she was in junior high. She came to faith at a revival meeting in a small, very conservative church when she was 15 or 16. She must have been quite popular with the elders of the church, because they offered to pay for her tuition in God’s Bible School, a religious boarding school in Cincinnati, Ohio, approximately 150 miles from home. Mom accepted the offer, leaving home to attend GBS 150 miles away at 16.

From what I have learned, God’s Bible School was known for two things: a legalistic, conservative theology and evangelistic fervor. If it was like what I saw in the tradition when I was a child, there was a strict dress code. Especially for women. They always had to wear dresses with hemlines below the knees, and sleeves stretching below the elbow. (I guess I never realized how sexy elbows and knees are…) There was to be no make-up worn or jewelry of any kind, including wedding rings. The women also could not cut their hair, nor wear it down. It had to be piled up on top of their head or wound into a tight bun which seems to have been preferred. Interaction between men and women would have been limited to classes, church, and evangelistic activities. Evangelism was a strong priority, defined as telling other people about Jesus, and warning them that they were headed to hell after they died if they didn’t believe certain things and then adhere to a strict life-style which emphasized self-denial and obedience to the church hierarchy. The organized evangelistic activities included teams of people that would stand on street corners, sing, and proclaim the gospel of Jesus through bible reading, preaching, giving out tracts, and talking with people. Mom was an enthusiastic participant in street corner evangelism, even to the point of going by herself when necessary. It is from these experiences that her ALF, meal-time bible reading comes. It’s how she was raised to be and do in her earliest experiences with God, minus the dress code….

 

 

Yard work…

 

I moved to Florida in January of 2012. My son helped me, and we took our time on the trip, spending the night in Memphis. We listened to the blues on Beal Street, toured Sun Studio, and visited the Lorraine Motel, site of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and now remade into a civil rights museum. Our arrival in St. Petersburg was sometime in the early morning hours. Later that morning, after a late breakfast of biscuits and gravy…my favorite… made by my sister, Connie, the three of us went to see Mom at her ALF. Connie asked Mom to take us on a tour of the grounds. While we walked, Connie explained to us how many of the plants we saw had been planted by Mom. Baird and I were amazed by the number of them, and how much work it must have taken by my then 88-year-old mother. During the tour, I don’t remember my mother saying very much, unless it was to explain the plans she had yet to complete. Although I might have described my mother at the time as being active, I didn’t realize just how physically strong she has been and still is. Within the past year, that strength has considerably lessened, and she needs a walker to help her keep from falling, but that strength is still there, especially when she gets mad.

Eventually, gardening became an issue. Mom would constantly be outside working in the yard, even in the heat of the Florida summer. She would be so focused on what she was doing, she would forget to drink or eat. Sometimes, she would pull up plants that were part of the landscape plan, and either try to transplant them, or throw them away. While pulling at a small tree root, she would lose her grip and fall, sometimes hitting her head, and nobody would know about it until she came inside with a black eye or bruise. Her clothes were often dirty. She always had cuts on her legs. But she would not stop! It became a problem…

Despite many warnings, she persisted. Even when the owner locked away her tools and put a lock on the water faucet. She would make do with other objects as tools and put a container under the AC condensation spout for water. Once, before they locked the water faucet, she attached the hose, and walked in front of the smokers on the porch with the water on full to water the plants. One of the smokers…a woman…confronted her, kindly reminding her she wasn’t supposed to use the hose and telling her she was spattering water all over the smokers. Mom turned the hose on her. In the resulting struggle for the hose, the faucet was damaged so that water was spraying from it. The water had to be shut off, and the faucet fixed. Everyone said it was Mom’s fault. She wasn’t popular for awhile after that incident. (When I heard the story, I was extremely doubtful that she had the strength to break that faucet. That was four years ago. Now, I think it at least possible…)

One good thing about her yard work was that she would at least sleep through the night. Or, at least until 4:30-5 in the morning. She would then get up and begin the day by reading her bible, which could often be a problem if she had a roommate. It is a behavior of which I am both profoundly aware and to which I shake my head with feelings of embarrassment and dark humor. She COULD have gone into the dining room with her bible, and allowed her roomie to sleep, but…no. It is an action that can be defined as one of devotion to God, but also as passively aggressive. Everyone SHOULD be up reading their bible at 5 in the morning, right?

As my mother’s physical ability has diminished, the issues with her working in the yard have ended. Instead, her brain continues to push her to do…something…she just doesn’t know what that something is. Two Christmases ago, I gave her a large pack of colored pencils and several adult coloring books. I chose books that had floral arrangements bordering scripture passages or historic prayers. My hope was that she would become obsessed with them instead of working in the yard. I also thought they would allow her to still express her creativity, and then she would have art she could hang on her walls or give away to family and friends. It worked. For about a year and a half. She would sit for extended periods of time meticulously coloring those pages. She especially loved the book filled with prayers.

I am not surprised she loves the prayer book. Prayer has always been important to her. She has spent countless hours through the years praying for her kids. She will then tell us about it, too. In years past, she would sometimes call and eventually ask, “Is everything ok with you? I woke up last night and the Lord brought you to my mind, so I prayed for you.” Nice story, right? God and my mother have my back, right? Well, sometimes it was. Other times…

My mother was seriously aggressive and judgmental and controlling and discouraging…passively. She would often send letters which explained “what she was learning in scripture…” It soon became apparent that what she was “learning” was what she thought I should know or do. If she were to be asked why she would write such letters, I am sure her eventual answer would be that God wanted her to. They were “The Epistles of Helen.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I took from these letters, what they communicated to me, was that there was always something wrong with me. I wasn’t good enough. It did not matter that I had a strong spiritual life and was struggling to unearth much needed grace from a theological belief system that I was increasingly finding inadequate to explain a loving God. It did not matter that I was trying to live in and by that unearthed grace, all the while being distracted by money issues, raising children and living in a difficult marriage. It also did not matter that I was an intelligent adult.

She still had to write…

Or send me books…

Or send cassette tapes…

Or call me…

I found out later, that my former wife eventually would open the letter before I got home, and when she found the letter to be unhelpful, she would throw it away. I appreciate that. After our divorce, I would do the same. I would read the first lines, and when I saw the tone headed in a particular direction, it would go into the trash. To some, this practice might sound harsh, or even rebellious. And it was rebellious. But it was a rebellion that was necessary. It was born out of a need for self-protection and a process of redefining myself, and God. It is never a good idea to try to form your understanding of Self and God from the template built by a mentally ill mind.

What I find interesting, though, is that Mom doesn’t seem to carry that destructive, ungracious morality when she is centered in the world of her memories of School House Holler. When she is Home, all is orderly, and in balance.

For her sake, I wish she could have lived in that place longer…

For my sake, I wish I had a similar place…

 

 

 

[i]The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry; Paul Kingsnorth; Counterpoint; Berkley, CA; 2017; Pg. 6,7,8.