Tag Archives: Memories

I’m Not Done Yet!

07 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Caring, Church, Death, Faith, People

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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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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.”

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.

Meeting the Seventh Sister

16 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Growing up, Nature, People

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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.

You will know how to vote.

12 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by in Citizenship, Growing up

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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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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.

The springs that fed the villages

30 Sunday Aug 2015

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I was one of those boys who spent a lot of my time roaming around the farm. When I wasn’t in school or doing chores, I was usually in the woods or along (or in) the streams, or examining the earth to see what I could find. Since there was evidence of the human occupation of that land for at least 3,000 years or so, there was plenty to find. Rocks of all kinds sat in the landscape, many on the surface, especially around the streams, mostly because the land had been covered by glaciers that had deposited that variety of rocks from a vast distance.

Rocks with special shapes captured my attention. From sandstone to granite, heavy large rocks that had bowls shaped into their surface often served as grinding stones for grains and nuts that were gathered or grown. Hand-sized round rocks with grooves or indentations had a useful life as anything from hammers to shaft-sharpeners. Worked flint came in the form of knives, projectile points, and hide scrapers. Broken shards of pottery showed the workmanship that had once shaped a vessel or an ornament. Rarely did I walk across the land and not find something that had been used by someone long ago.

Where clusters of tools showed up in one place the earth itself often showed the marks of human occupation with berms of soil shaped into circles and rectangles where lodgings had once stood. These remains clustered in three areas, each where a spring still kept the soil moist through summer seasons, even though farmers had for eighty years stripped the land of trees, cultivated, and shaped grass waterways into the middle of those fields, where once those springs had bubbled to the surface.

It impressed me that where my parents, two brothers, and I lived, many hundreds of people had lived for uncounted generations, leaving their marks. Where had they all gone? For only a few years heavy machinery had plowed and prepared those fields, and large barns, cribs, and a house or two had stood, providing a livelihood for a handful of people. For hundreds of years that same land had fed, sheltered, and provided for hundreds, using only what they found there, living simply “off the land.” They had to understand a lot in order to accomplish what they did.

Modern civilization depends on a complexity of specialized and diversified tasks, with a comparatively small number of people providing food for a multitude. Living off the land now means leaving the land behind, but by doing that, we know less and less about what sustains our lives, and more and more about the tiny components of our own specializations. Where is the progress in that?

Too Many Teasets, Never Enough Tea

28 Friday Aug 2015

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The first tea set came from Italy, a poignant reminder from Jan’s brother Rod that he could not come to our wedding because he was serving the U S Navy on a destroyer tender in the Mediterranean that year. He thought of his sister when he shopped on shore leave, and found a white china tea set elaborately decorated with silver vines and flowers. His taste was exquisite, and the set was too pretty to use every day, so it has been prominently displayed wherever we lived, and used for special occasions.

The second tea set came from our seminary neighbors and friends; he had grown up in Thailand and India while his father had served as a missionary. The china teapot was a rich, mottled blue, and the cups small and with no handles, with the white and black figures of pussy willow branches climbing their sides—broadly Asian in inspiration—they easily served us every day and got a lot of use while we thought of ourselves as distant from the world around us but alive in our private garden.

The third tea set was plastic pink and white and a child’s plaything as our daughter went through the terrible two’s, but somehow she settled down to play with her future set before her, among her friends or by herself. The set itself hung around our house for more than two decades until it was replaced by a small, miniature, plain china set that our three granddaughters could use when they held elaborate tea parties, as they dressed to the nines while their grandparents served them as their butler and maid.

We inherited the fourth tea set when my parents died, first my mother, then my father. It came to my house with Father, when he had to leave his own farm home and come to live with us. My mother had chosen the silver tea service as they celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and it served many neighborhood and church group teas from then until they passed their fifty-sixth anniversary and she died unexpectedly.

Now those tea sets sit in their various places, while we enjoy our morning tea, without caffeine, steeped in cups that come from none of the tea sets, but they each have their own history, too. Each marks a special time in our lives that is fondly remembered. When we finally put them away, delivering them to someone else to use, the memories will remain with us, tucked away somewhere inside our brains. Tea and those we love.

Instead of going to the 1968 Democratic National Convention

27 Thursday Aug 2015

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cropped-chicago-skyline-1970.jpgI made a life-changing choice for the end of August, 1968. When I proposed to Jan in November, 1967, my proposal was not a romantic winner, even though we went to Bloomington’s Miller Park and sat at the edge of the lake. I had almost run into a tree driving through Miller Park, so Jan knew something was on my mind. (She said later she thought I might be breaking up with her.) I ruminated with Jan about the uncertainties of the future. I had just finished several months serving a small rural town congregation, but I had no other job prospects. My own anti-war choices that had placed me in some jeopardy with the Selective Service System and some administrators of Illinois Wesleyan University, but I still resolved to continue in my plan to go to seminary and pursue a career as a minister. At that point I had nothing to offer Jan except the impoverished life of a graduate student with the possibility of a study fellowship and stipend. If the fellowship materialized, we might have a small studio apartment near the University of Chicago, but she would have to find a job to support her own needs.

Whether I could stay out of trouble was not certain, having just had my first interview with an FBI agent, concerning my work with the Students for a Democratic Society, organizing an IWU Symposium on the Vietnam War, and inviting Staughton Lynd, a vigorous opponent of the war, to the campus to speak. At first I didn’t take the veiled threats of the agent and the Dean of Students seriously, but “the times…they were a’changin’.” Who knew what the future held? I just knew my own situation had begun to appear precarious after I had returned my draft card to my local draft office. (Nothing ever came of that action. The members of the local draft board knew me, my seminary plans, and my health disqualification already. ) Would Jan want to marry me when she really considered what she might face in the early days of our marriage, or the later days for that matter?

She said ‘yes.’ Would I want to marry her when she was able to make such a foolish decision? I said ‘yes, definitely.’ We proceeded to make plans to be married toward the end of the next summer, allowing time for Jan to finish her work at the Waterloo, Iowa, YWCA, and for me to make as much money as I could during the summer, painting barns, cribs, and other farm buildings, and working at Arby’s.

Many invitations arrived to come to Chicago to join in demonstrations against the war during the Democratic National Convention. The event promised to mark a momentous turning point in our nation’s history. Our own event promised to make a momentous turning point in our personal history, and who knew how much influence upon others might follow?

We arrived at our apartment in Chicago just a couple of days after the convention and the demonstrations concluded their tormented run.