Category Archives: Faith

I’m Not Done Yet!

07 Wednesday Oct 2015

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dock at sunset

When I came to Burlington, Ann Parks was a member of the Zion Church Consistory and a member of the Burlington City Council. Ann had built a reputation for community service and interest in progressive causes; chief among them was her campaign to open a refuge for the victims of domestic violence, which came to fruition as the Battered Women’s Shelter. She and a woman of similar energy, Marcia Walker, also on both Consistory and Council, and several other church members active in community life formed a powerful team for public good, the likes of which I had seldom seen.

Within a few months Ann received the troubling news that she had cancer, and she entered into treatment with the same determination that she exercised in other matters. She had a family—a husband, two sons who were nearing adulthood, and a daughter who was nearing adolescence. She had public responsibilities and goals that were notable, and she had a strong desire to overcome the disease that was threatening her life.

Months of treatment passed with signs of hopefulness. Then came the finding that the treatment had ceased to be effective, and something else would be needed. I met Ann in the hospital shortly after that discouraging news. I don’t remember exactly what I said, probably something to the effect that I was sorry to hear that the cancer was spreading again. I do remember her immediate response, “I’m not done yet!”

She definitely put me in my place. She was not ready to accept bad news and yield to it. Plenty of people needed her, and she had plenty of things to motivate her to keep going.

Unfortunately the cancer overcame her within a few weeks in spite of her determination. Her memorial service was held at the large central United Methodist Church, which had more space than Zion for the crowd that would attend, and its pastor was a better-known public figure to host the service. He did invite me to speak a few words as her pastor, and Ann herself had provided the theme.

Ann had been right, after all, to say, “I’m not done yet!” She knew that many things remained to be done in the agendas she had chosen to serve, or that had chosen her. Even though she was no longer there to do the work, anyone who counted themselves among her family, her friends and her associates, knew that they needed to carry on with the same heart and determination that Ann had shown.

If we have a calling at all, it is a calling to do something larger than we are by ourselves, and it is often a calling to be engaged in something that is larger than one lifetime can accomplish. It was Ann’s, and it is ours.

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.

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.

Watching in the Night

01 Tuesday Sep 2015

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dock at sunset

My mother died suddenly at age 75 after a brief period of intense illness early one morning. No one else was there except my father. When he was nearly 94 my father died when my brother and I were far away, hiking on the Appalachian Trail, and we were unaware of his several hours of declining life signs. He was living in a nursing home, and the staff called my son, who was able to be present with him. He died, as his death certificate so elegantly phrased it, of “a failure to thrive.” I never spent a night with either of them, when they were seriously ill, although I have spent many nights with other seriously ill people, many of whom were dear to me.

I was not especially close to my father-in-law, although I had plenty of cause to respect him, but Jan and I were with him the hour that he died, after his year dealing with colon cancer in treatments of diminishing effectiveness. He appeared to be comatose when we arrived, but in the last moments of his illness he became alert and agitated. I said to him, “It’s all right, Lyle. You can let go now. We’ll soon be coming after you,” and whether it was the meaning or the tone or something inside himself, he relaxed and soon stopped breathing

Now Jan and I sit with my 92 year old mother-in-law through the second of two nights, staying at her bedside. We no longer fear that she may die at any moment, even though that can happen of course. She fell three days ago, where she had walked hundreds of times before, tripping into her walker and landing hard on her face. She broke a neck vertebra and two more farther down her back. The doctors’ advice ruled out surgery, and they put her in a neck brace that she will probably wear the rest of her days. The vertebra remains in alignment, but a bump or slip or twist could change that without the brace.

She is “banged up” with cuts, bruises, and swelling around her face and broken nose, but she is mostly comfortable until she tries to move, which, naturally, she has to do now and then. We supposed that sooner or later she would fall, possibly breaking the increasingly fragile bones in her legs or hips. She always finds ways to surprise us. What broke was her neck. Somehow she survived it, breaking it just enough to keep living. She doesn’t understand it. She doesn’t like the collar and wants to remove it. How she will keep going, doing what she has to do, and learn how to live with that brace, we do not know.

She has been my mother for 47 years, doing what mothers do, and doing it well. It must be my turn to watch, feel the pain with her when she hurts, and understand more deeply what it means to suffer with someone I love.

The Different Dogs of Chicago Politics

22 Saturday Aug 2015

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Chicago skyline 1970Dick Simpson, a political science professor at University of Illinois Circle Campus in Chicago, called Chicago “the most corrupt city in the country, and Illinois the third most corrupt state” in a February 2012 report for the Chicago Journal. “The truth is that the governor’s mansion and the city council chambers have a far worse crime rate than the worst ghetto in Chicago.” http://chicagoist.com/2012/02/17/dick_simpson_study_says_chicago_is.php

I met Professor Simpson in January of 1969, when he was instrumental in organizing the Independent Precinct Organization, and I was a student at Chicago Theological Seminary. The seminary encouraged students to get involved in churches , community and political organizations, and to engage in cycles of action and reflection (theological and ethical) with other students. I had worked, successively but not successfully, with the Eugene McCarthy and the Hubert Humphrey campaigns in 1968. The Chicago democratic machine held no attraction for me, but independent community-based politics was a different matter. Many local churches were involved in our own 5th Ward and in the 43rd Ward on Chicago’s North side, and it was easy to volunteer.

The first campaign for the IPO backed Bill Singer for Chicago Alderman for the 43rd Ward against the democratic machine. Singer had been a protege of Senator Paul Douglas and a friend of 5th Ward Alderman Leon Despres. I admired both of them, so I signed up to help with the Singer campaign, door to door canvassing and poll watching. Against odds, Singer was successful. The most inspiration, however, came from Dick Simpson, and his encouragement of young people and community residents to take part in the political process, in spite of the cynicism and despair that had gripped most reform efforts during those years. When other organizations gave up (the University Christian Movement among them), and others went underground (Students for a Democratic Society), the IPO offered hope to those of us who were inclined to believe that change would eventually come if we just kept working, even if it was only on a small local scale. Where else would it begin?

Change came, and it didn’t. Dick Simpson ran for alderman and joined the City Council for several years. Other independent candidates for mayor succeeded after Mayor Richard J. Daley’s death, and positive results followed, but corruption has continued to dog Chicago and Illinois politics. I and many others can take inspiration from the dogged determination of people like Dick Simpson, who are still involved and working.

Growing Catnip

22 Saturday Aug 2015

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park bench in spring

Catnip is one of those weeds that I enjoy having around. I planted some in my herb harden. At former homes in Paxton and Minonk, catnip grew all over the place, and I pulled it out except where I wanted it to grow. Once before, when I lived at Tilton, and tried to grow catnip, the same thing happened. It got a good start and was growing beautifully. One morning I looked out and it had disappeared. In its place was a well-satisfied tabby, new to the neighborhood. She had eaten every particle of the catnip.

Some things are just too good to pass up. Some things attract would-be connoisseurs from a distance. I have dreamt about being that kind of preacher and leading the kind of congregation that would be one of those attractive entities. Some characteristics of ours would simply attract without our having to do the work of listening, relating, interpreting, and living out the faith. Like catnip.

In the real world we must sow seeds with such abandon and in such abundance that there will be plenty to take hold, survive, and grow regardless of who shows up to take voracious advantage of the crop. We cannot hope to grow it in one small space and have it flourish.

I know I could have catnip if I fenced it in, protected it, and really tried to preserve it from contact with the cats who really seemed to need it. Instead I have decided that catnip does better as a weed growing all over the place than as a protected herb, confined to one small garden spot. Even so, most things faithful.

No Waiting

05 Wednesday Aug 2015

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After college I swore that I would never stand in a waiting line again. Cafeteria lines, registration lines, textbookstore lines all had eaten up more time than the studies themselves, it seemed. It was a vain resolution.

Lines and waiting rooms became a prominent feature of my career as a minister. Hospital waiting rooms, court house lobbies, city council chambers, and jailhouse waiting rooms took the place of earlier lines. In retirement, road and traffic delays and outer office sitting areas have continued to devour time.

Early line training introduced me to the art of starting conversations with strangers, if they were amenable, or preparing sermons, letters, or work outlines without the benefit of notepaper. Thinking through concerns in empty spaces of time also helped with the daily exercise of running. Regardless of work being accomplished and acquaintances being made, waiting is still waiting.

“Those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength.” It is a running mantra that I used sometimes. I would say that waiting saps strength and waiting rooms are more tiring exercise chambers than gymnasiums and running tracks. What makes “waiting on the Lord” any different? While most waiting involves anxiety, is there at least the possibility that waiting on the Lord can involve faith, trust, confidence, and some assurance that all things work for good for those who love the Lord? Perhaps waiting on the Lord involves more serving time than leisure time.

Practicing patience and endurance is good for you, my significant other says. Where do these gifts fall in the series of spiritual gifts? Between suffering and hope, with one experience making possible the next, according to Romans 5.

“No waiting” is a good advertising ploy, but I have not found a commercial establishment that yet lives up to that claim. No waiting will be heaven.