Monthly Archives: September 2015

Waste of a good mind

28 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by in Caring, Events, Faith, Growing up, Gullibility, People, Small town life

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3 Owls

A new teacher but already a middle-aged man, Mr. Vickers introduced himself to his first chemistry class at Paxton Community High School, “My first name is Mister.” He was always quite formal, organized, and meticulous, and he proved to be an excellent instructor in chemistry and physics. His instructions were orderly and systematic. If we did our part, we had no excuse not to learn in his classes. I was pleased when he offered me an opportunity to take part in a special summer class for prospective science majors at Northwestern University after my junior year in high school. That was the summer I also took advantage of an opportunity to acquire a Methodist License to Preach though the Illinois Wesleyan University licensing school.

Mr. Vickers did not have much use for religion. He did not reveal this through disparaging words, and we as students never heard him say what experiences had led him away from the involvements in religious organizations that typified many of his teaching colleagues in that community. He did not know that my thoughts about the future were divided between pursuing studies in science or religion. At the end of that summer someone must have told him of my divided interests.

Not long after the beginning of school that fall, Mr. Vickers interrupted class to invite me into the hallway. I was apprehensive that I had done something wrong. His manner was usually sober and severe, so there were no clues that his interest was paternal. He explained that he had been disappointed to learn that I was thinking about a career in Christian ministry. “That would be a waste of a good mind,” he said. He had several other things to say about it that I have forgotten, but that sentence stuck in my thoughts.

My pastor at the time, Glen Sims, was a learned and compassionate man. Without his example of an intelligent person serving courageously and usefully in that community, Mr. Vickers might have been more persuasive. As it was, I knew that Mr. Vickers sincerely cared about me and my future, and he gave me a preview of challenges to come.

Mr. Jones, the speech teacher, soon added another viewpoint. Public speaking was a much more uncomfortable subject for me than chemistry or physics. You have to be able to cry on cue, if you’re going to be a preacher, Mr. Jones said in words to that effect. Preachers appeal to the emotions, not to the intelligence, according to Mr. Jones. Mr. Barth, the English teacher, also added his advice. His brother was a Lutheran minister, he said, and it’s not an easy life. You have too rosy a picture of it as a career. You have to be prepared to be lonely. People have many unrealistic expectations of the clergy.

The advice began to accumulate. Most other career choices were not subject to such interest. Just about everyone had an opinion about religious vocations. Mr. Vicker’s advice stood out among the rest. I heard him say to me that I had a good mind. That was a source of pride. I also heard him issue the challenge, “Do not waste such a gift. It would be easy to waste it, going in the direction that he thought I was going.”

Living in an Ecumenical Family

22 Tuesday Sep 2015

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Bridge in Autumn

Many years ago, when I learned that my first cousin had become a Muslim, I was surprised. Central Illinois is not the environment in which I expected Muslim conversion to occur. My cousin, however, met her husband at the University of Illinois, where many students and teachers represent the wider world. He was from Iraq, and they fell in love. She found enough affirmation of her Christian beliefs within Islam to convert, which was easier for her than for him, considering his strong Muslim family ties. Their marriage occurred in the years in which Saddam Hussein and the United States’ administration were on friendly terms, and she went with him to live in Iraq for several years, while his work in agriculture—teaching and government administration—proved rewarding. Then life began to change for everyone concerned, and they found their way back to Illinois and the university. Meanwhile their family grew, and soon I had many Muslim cousins. We were an ecumenical family, with Jews, Christians—both Catholic and Protestant, Muslims, and Buddhists, all related to one another by close family ties.

By the time I had learned of her conversion, I had read a few books on Islam and its practices and history, as well as other faiths. That was an interest of mine, which I pursued in college as well, majoring in philosophy and religion at Illinois Wesleyan University. My instructors were not advocates of Islam; most of them were professing Christians, but they were for the most part fair in their presentations of other faiths, and they encouraged our open-minded communication and visits to the worship and study centers of other faiths, which I did enthusiastically.

Although I was secure in my own faith traditions, aspects of Judaism and of Islam were still attractive enough for me to develop both sympathy and admiration for the faithful people I met from those backgrounds. Clearly a spectrum of beliefs, from hardline and literalistic to permeable and metaphoric, existed in the three branches of the children of Abraham. We were cousins, both in fact and in faith, not always friendly and loving cousins, but potentially so.

A biography of Moses ben Maimon—Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher—fascinated me. Like many of our ancestors of all three faiths he had to flee Spain at one of the historic points of intolerance and expulsion. His refugee journey ended in Egypt under Islamic rule, and he soon found his way into the medical service for the ruling family. His dilemma was whether he could declare himself a Muslim. It would ease his entrance into Egyptian society. Was there a sense in which he could accept the faith of Islam?

As far as the meaning of the word ‘Islam’ was concerned, there was no problem. Being subservient or obedient to the One God was what their faith was about, and so was his faith. That they called him Allah presented no problem, for he understood that ‘Allah” was an Arabic word for God, much as the English people had adopted the old English word ‘God.’ Hebrew had adopted many Semitic words from their cultural environment as names for ‘YHWH’ as well. The practices of Islam—profession of faith, daily prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Medina and Mecca—presented no insurmountable obstacles; those practices were familiar and admirable.

The main question for Maimonides was whether he could affirm that Mohammed was a prophet of God. He didn’t have to declare that Mohammed was the only prophet, since their writings affirmed the prophetic gifts in Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, and even Jesus and his mother Mary. Certainly in practice Islamic attention was fixed on Mohammed, but they accepted the prophetic roles of the others as well. Finally, after much thought, Maimonides decided that Mohammed had at least as much prophetic spirit as some of the earlier prophets of Israel. Mohammed had repudiated and replaced the idolatry and polytheism of Arabia with a clear monotheism, he had accepted the validity of the faith of other People of the Book (Jews and Christians), and he had stressed the many attributes of God that Maimonides praised as well—mercy, justice, wisdom, compassion, and patience, among others. Therefore he could affirm the name of Muslim as long as he could continue to practice his Jewish faith as well. That seemed to me a fair and understandable position for a wise man to take.

If I were to live in a world where we were required to affirm a single faith in order to be accepted, I wondered and still wonder what I would do. If the required faith was a form of literalistic and fundamentalist Christianity, I would be as hard-pressed to affirm it as I would be to affirm the same kind of Islam, or Mormonism, or Lutheranism for that matter. As long as our attention is fixed on God and human need, whether I try to live under the title of Jew, Christian, or Muslim, I still have a long way to go to learn how to do it well.

The Family in Worship Together

18 Friday Sep 2015

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I usually sat next to my father in worship. After my early years my mother worked two out of three Sundays as the head cook at the Ford County Nursing Home. “Families that pray together stay together” was too simple a slogan but it applied to us. There were drawbacks to sitting next to my father. He was tone deaf when he sang the hymns, or at least I thought he was. It seemed like we sang “Holy, Holy, Holy,” page 1 of the Methodist Hymnal, almost every Sunday, and it did not sound good in a drone. In front of us sat Rev. John Killip, a retired minister, who was sometimes called upon to pray in the service, and who, I was certain, could easily pray aloud for many hours straight. (But such a tall, affable, white-haired gentleman he was, teaching me to do a proper ‘Methodist handshake.) My father, who worked regularly sixteen hour days on the farm, would often succumb to the warm, quiet, restful atmosphere, and I would have to be alert to nudge him before “The Snore” began. We always stayed until the last people left the building as we talked with friends. I do not recall ever wanting to be anywhere else on Sunday mornings.

I was amazed in my father’s last years, when I again had the occasional privilege of sitting next to him in worship, how much his singing had improved, how beautifully tonal it was, and how alert he had become. He was always an intelligent man, so I wasn’t surprised by how intelligent he became after I left home, but I was moved by how his potential for embarrassing conduct had diminished.

God blessed me with children who were not only independent thinkers, who often resented the constant pressures of churchery , but who also respected my wishes that they take part in worship, even though they often had to sit by themselves. Alicia gave me fair warning when, as an infant, she burped some milk down the back of my suit coat just before I walked down the aisle, though I didn’t know it at the time. Nathan found that the pulpit made a good hiding place and pews provided a good racetrack for imaginary race cars, complete with quiet sound effects. As they grew they showed me that the presence of the Ineffable had taken root in their lives, the same One who was present for the dunkards, quakers, methodists, various anabaptists and separatists, Lutherans, Catholics, and Jews who were our family ancestors.

Parents learn most of their parenting skills from their parents, for better or worse. Teachers learn most of their teaching skills from their teachers. Where do preachers learn? I learned in an environment that seems much different from the prevailing values today that I began to wonder how many opportunities I lost along the way to nurture that mutually accepting family environment. Why did I not contribute more to an enriching spiritual life for other families? Some parents and young people accept the challenge of worshipping together, but they are a minority. They will find a center for their lives that will hold them steadily and graciously.

As I listen to other ministers, active or retired as I am, I realize that I am not alone in this sense of missing many chances to nurture varied families and their young people in the worship of God. There is no comfort in this commiseration. There is only comfort in the prospect of communities of faith doing better, and the awareness that some are.

“I know you believe in some kind of god.”

17 Thursday Sep 2015

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Monkeys see, hear, speak no evil, Bangra.com

The boyfriend, about to become an ex-boyfriend, said it. He had not broached the topic before. It was clear that he did not want to now. His own faith was complete, as his minister told him so. He belonged to a true church, unlike so many around us in the world today. He liked his girlfriend, but she belonged to one of those other pseudo-churches, and one that was so liberal that it no longer preached The Bible, or at least that is what his church said.

He doesn’t know what made him say it. Maybe he could begin to change her step by step until finally she would be completely acceptable. Maybe he could win her over. You can do that sometimes, his minister had said. You can pave the way for an unbeliever by showing them the right way, but you must beware of being yoked to one who will draw you away.

The words clarified the situation for her. She had thought long and hard about her faith, and she knew she was not done thinking or believing. The God she would trust was not just “some kind of God” but one who encouraged such pondering and wondering, one who did not provide just a set of simple answers, and one who did not reside in a few authoritarian leaders or absolute positions.

He didn’t know how much he had blown it until he saw her face. She was hurt and disappointed that he thought so little of her, that she might be satisfied with just “some kind of god,” as if she were as pagan as the polytheists in the ancient world. As if she would settle for something less than he would, and he had to take her by the hand and lead her. As if he thought he knew something special but could not trust himself to share it. She would never be his equal, and she would defend herself and “her kind of god” against him. Her resistance showed in her stubborn, hardening expression.

He wished he hadn’t said it. He could have let things go on as they had been, going their own way, each to the church of their choice. They wouldn’t have to talk about it for a long time. He could have been comfortable with that, because they enjoyed each other when they were together, which was not all of the time.

Meeting the Seventh Sister

16 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Growing up, Nature, People

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Milky Way over natural rock arch

I was a little boy when I met my Great Aunt Junia. She had travelled to Illinois from far away Texas to visit her relatives. Past eighty years, her angular features and voice of ancient authority made a lasting impression. She spoke to me about her love of creation, especially the beauty and mystery of the heavens, so that, whenever I read Psalm 8, I think of her.

She knew the constellations and their legends, and on that early winter evening, she spun stories about the Big and Little Bear, the Dragon, Orion the Hunter, the Great Dog, Sagittarius the Archer, and the Seven Sisters. I wondered if she was one of the seven sisters incarnate, and when I learned of her death a few years later, I imagined that she simply ascended to reclaim her position among that cluster of stars.

On countless evenings since then, in every season, I have looked at the stars and studied their patterns and thought of her and her wisdom and her stories. How can one chance meeting make such an impact? Matching an impressionable child with an octagenarian makes part of the answer. The rest of the answer lies in the mystery of meeting and the amazing possibilities of the moment.

Sometimes we become discouraged that our weekly hours in work, study, and worship seem to mean so little and make so little impact. Months of confirmation classes can leave some young adults seemingly unaffected. Then again, even one brief moment can bring to life an insight and a relationship that will make all the difference between faith and despair. Treasure the moment and its possibilities.

Lama, O lama, O lama….sabachthani?

13 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in Caring, Faith, Suffering

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dock at sunset

“My, O my, O my….” Mother cries, not wanting to mimic sacred words if she remembered them. She was always modest and self-effacing, though you might not know that in her dementia, when all self-restraint and impulse control have disappeared with short-term memory. Family remember that her grandmother or grandfather Doane, depending on who is telling the story, used to rock in his rocking chair and moan those same words.

The endurance of the sufferer is rarely exceeded by the endurance of the commiserator. Who can stand by and watch for long when a person is in pain? If there is even the slightest indication that the person in pain craves the attention of the watcher, there is even less tolerance. While this is true of good people, is it true of a good God? If the book of Job provides an indication, who has more patience with a self-pitying sufferer than God? Certainly not Job’s “friends” who in various ways try to persuade Job that his suffering is his own fault.

Mother’s fall and broken neck, while she made her daily trip to the restaurant for a noon meal (and saved half of the food for her evening meal), would by Job’s friends’ accounting be her own fault. Surely no compassionate person would agree, even if they knew the likelihood that a damaging fall would occur sometime. The voice out of the whirlwind might not sound compassionate, but it did not tolerate the victim blamers either. It just voiced the impossibility of understanding the whole picture of life and death, disease and accident and suffering in this world. We do not know the ‘why’ of damaging events, nor of the diseases that rob a highly intelligent, generous, and faithful person of her mind. We must continue to seek healing solutions.

Forgetfulness is not one of the attributes that most people ascribe to the divine. For good reason we hope that there is a storehouse of the memories that human beings often lose, whether that loss is purposeful or not. How many injustices and innocent people disappear under the rugs of history? At the same time we hope that our own errors and failures do disappear in the mercy of divine forgetfulness. Patience and forgetfulness are qualities that God must possess in infinite amounts, even if they are exercised judiciously. They are qualities that belong to a long-suffering God, who listens to the cries and does not turn away out of exhaustion or intolerance.

We pray to that God, just as Aunt Mary Kleinlein urged us to pray, as she remembered many other times that she and her former sister-in-law Mary Alice have done. Even though she also passed the age of 90, she provided a meal for the fellow-sufferers who had not sat down together for a meal in all of the days since Mother fell, while she and her son sat bedside with Mother.

We pray to that God who could remember the cry of the sufferer and speak those words from the mouth of the suffering Christ. Have you forsaken? Will you? Will you leave? No way. Never.

Where the chickens cross the road

12 Saturday Sep 2015

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Monkeys see, hear, speak no evil, Bangra.com

Staying close to the Wildlife Loop at Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota, we frequently went to see particular animals—the elk that roam the southeastern part of the park, the prairie dogs research area in the south, the wild turkeys and horses in the Bluebell area, the pronghorn, deer and bison wherever they happened to roam, the mountain goats and bighorn sheep in the steep mountains, and, of course, the burros in the southeast. We didn’t always want to travel the whole loop, so we found the shortcuts that took us in and out of the park. Our most frequent visit was to the southeast section, and Lame Johnny Road provided the seven mile shortcut.

Lame Johnny was a former sheriff who wound up hanging from a nearby tree. His road provided more than a shortcut and a sad story. Along its winding way a half mile from the park, it intersects a barnyard with a house and a couple of outbuildings on one side, and a barn and chicken house on the other. On our luckier evenings we got to see a sight that is among the rarest. Not only did we see a chicken cross the road, but we saw a flock of chickens cross the road, in single file, followed by the farmer. We did not think to ask him why the chickens were crossing the road, because we were so amazed to see him herding his chickens. On some occasions the farmer did not appear, but his chickens still crossed the road in single file.

On one occasion a guinea hen and cock provided an additional entertainment, chasing each other in loops around and under the car we were driving. We came to a quick stop, of course, but the guineas continued their chase for several minutes. It was a hold-up. We could have used Lame Johnny’s help in his sheriffing days.

You will know how to vote.

12 Saturday Sep 2015

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3 Owls

Grandpa Warfel talked politics. It was not a rule in his house to avoid the topic. Abraham Lincoln was his all-time hero, though Dwight Eisenhower came onto the list somewhere not terribly far below him. When the time came for any of his forty-odd grandchildren to be eligible to vote, Grandpa would make a visit to each one shortly before the time ran out for voter registration to make sure his kids were registered, and when the time for the election came he would visit to make sure his kids were planning to vote.

He never told us how to vote. He just said, “You’ll know how to vote.” Did we know how to vote because we had listened to so many family conversations over the years, or was he simply expressing his confidence in us? I do not know for sure, but I do know that he wanted us to vote. He wanted his family to participate in the franchise, both young men and young women, as he and Grandma had done, though she was not eligible to vote until the 19th Amendment made her vote possible. Thereafter she most certainly did, whether they canceled each other’s vote or not.

I think about Grandpa whenever I hear that so many first opportunity voters do not become first time voters. I was persuaded from the first that 18 year olds, able to die for their country, and continuing to do so through the years in ample numbers, should be able to vote. Is the franchise really meaningless?

Why have so many died for that right if it means nothing? All of those who worked to secure and implement the Voting Rights Act surely believed that we should do all we could to use it, including the young adults Werner, Chaney and Goodman who died for it. Should we forego that right and responsibility here when we fight for it elsewhere?

The spiritual resources from our ancient history longed for equality and mutuality among people, but of necessity endured governments where tyrants ruled and abused their citizens. Do we really want to return to that kind of state?

We have a year until the next major national election, and several voting and citizen participation opportunities in the meantime. Can we play the role that my Grandpa undertook for the young adults in our community? How can we persuade each other that each vote can make a difference and that all who have the right also have the responsibility to cast votes?

Can we remind each other that a handful of voters in each precinct have decided recent national elections? War and peace, jobs and benefits, air and water, schools and hospitals, roads and parks, jails and courts, animals and plants, faiths and freedoms all feel an impact from voters’ decisions. Nonvoters have as much impact as voters, but not necessarily in the direction they would choose.

It is time for more exercise! It is time for a movement for exercise of the vote in a country in which fewer than half usually vote. It won’t do much good to have a well-exercised body or an educated mind if we have given away the freedom to use them.

Wait for me, Mary Alice.

10 Thursday Sep 2015

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farm windmill

Of the stories Mary Alice (our Mother) loves to tell, some of her most familiar tell of moving to the farm northeast of New Salem, Illinois. Glen Hillmann moved his family from Quincy, Illinois, to New Salem in 1935, leaving his job as a life insurance salesman, when life insurance was a lower priority than putting food on the table for most people, to become a farmer, with help from his father-in-law, Ezra Doane. Ezra was preparing to move into town, leaving his farms and houses to his daughters’ husbands.

The Hillmanns, Glenn and Dollie Leigh and their four daughters, moved in January, to be ready to do the field work when spring came. Mary Alice had just completed sixth grade in a program that made it possible for students to work at their own accelerated pace. That meant that seventh grade in nearby Tennariff School had already been in session for four months. She came into that grade mid-year in a one-room school, and she faced major changes from the separately graded city schools in Quincy. She wondered whether she could make it in such a strange setting, starting months behind her classmates, with all the grades in one room, and a one-eyed man named Hugh Kerr as her teacher, the first male teacher that she had. She didn’t have to worry. She excelled in her work and fit right in. When Hugh Kerr sent her out with a pail to fetch water, after she had also used the girls’ fancy outhouse, and she returned to the classroom without the pail, then was embarrassed to remember and she slipped out to return with the full pail a few minutes later, and the teacher didn’t say a word to her about it, no punishment or anything, she decided it was going to turn out all right.

Tennariff School sat just around the corner of the section from their farmhouse, an easy quarter mile walk for her and little sister Rosalyn except on the coldest of days. Barbara was still at home, too young for school. In another year Mary Alice joined her older sister Aileen in New Salem High School. That was a long two mile walk up and down the steep Rutman and Quinney Hills. Aileen was taller and her stride longer, but Mary Alice was faster, and she liked to run up the hills, much to the consternation of her less athletic sister. Aileen would whine from behind, “Wait for me, Mary Alice! Wait for me!”

Mary Alice had little patience for her older sister, who didn’t like the farm and didn’t adjust to farm life. Having no boys to help, Mary Alice was happy to become her father’s helping hand around the farm. She did chores with the animals and hitched the horse to the plow, and learned to work in the field. It wasn’t long before a tractor replaced the horses, but she didn’t mind working with either one. Aileen, on the other hand, had no interest and missed the city life.

The old memories and the feelings that came with them persist long into the dementia of aging. Aileen died nearly twenty years ago, and Rosalyn was too young to do field work until after Mary Alice had moved on to study and work at Western Illinois College and obtain her teaching certificate there, which she used for years to teach in a one room country school. Now, when she can neither farm nor teach nor run, she often tells us of the times when she could. She pictures that sister yelling “Wait for me,” every time she has to get up out of bed, use that walker, and head down the hall.

I’m trying to do my best.

08 Tuesday Sep 2015

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dock at sunset

“Use your hands!” . . . “Use your hands!” . . . “Use your hands!” . . . the therapist said. (He wanted her to stretch out behind her and grab the arms of the chair before sitting down, but he did not say that.)

I am using my hands. I’m holding onto my walker to steady myself. What do you mean? What are you telling me to do? See my hands. Let me show them to you. You can see I’m used to using my hands. See how the fingers are misshapen. The ends of my fingers go every which way. I played the piano and organ for years and years. I took care of children, hundreds of children in the country school, and then first grade at South Grade, then North Grade School. Do you think I’m stupid? I’m using my hands, a lot longer than you’ve used yours.

If I could stretch out my hands and grab your neck, I’d do it! Don’t think I wouldn’t.

Last night I went to see Mama and Daddy. They said things had changed, just as a matter of fact. They didn’t say how they felt about it. Things have changed. I can’t figure out why. What has happened to me? I don’t like it. I saw the baby you would have had if he had lived. He had to grow up there when he couldn’t live here. He said he liked it there. (I think—Jan did have a miscarriage at three months, but Mother can’t be talking about that.)

My souls have tried to fly away. One is staying there with Mama. She died when I was 33, just when I needed her most, trying to raise four children; my husband not staying by my side. Daddy knew what I needed. His mama died when he was four, but then he had his grandma. I never got to know my grandma. Then she died when he was seven, but he had his older sister, then she died of typhoid. Daddy had to stay with neighbors, Bill and Bess Wireman, who were good people. His daddy had to work the mail route around New Salem, and he couldn’t watch the two little ones all day. Then he married Mary Jane Seaborn, and they all got to live together. My happy soul is there with him, my stubborn soul stays in my body, and my cranky soul goes wandering around this place, wherever this is.

You’re supposed know about these things. Who are you? Why don’t you do something? (I’m your son-in-law. You know me. I’m Gary. You’ve known me for 48 years, over half your life.)

I’m not where I’m supposed to be. You can do something. Take care of it. Or are you still a turtle? Slow to move. (I am a turtle. You are a wolf, and we’re both a little crazy.)

Our souls are flying all over the place.