Tag Archives: Serendipity

He Said ‘Yes’

27 Saturday Feb 2016

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When I asked him to continue working with the children in a puppet theater project, he said yes.

When I asked him to use some of his precious vacation time to accompany the youth on a canoeing and service week to Shannondale Community Center, he said yes, and I said, of course, his wife Jeri could accompany us. This happened several years in a row.

When I asked him to help raise funds for the youth trips with carwashes, suppers, and garage sales, he said yes.

When I asked him to help clean up, paint, and refurbish the old stage at Zion (that hadn’t been used for many years), and help direct stage plays for dinner theaters, with the youth as actors and servers, to again raise funds for youth activities, he said yes.

When I asked him to work on preparations for peace-themed worship services at Zion he said yes.

When I asked him to dress in a Roman toga and serve as the master of ceremonies at a “Latin Banquet” addressing the theme of Zion’s participation in programs and projects of civic responsibility in the community, he said yes.

When I asked him to serve as the chair of audio-visual service at Zion, working with and replacing our equipment, videotaping services and weddings, and training others to serve in that way also, he said yes.

When I asked him to serve as chair of the social action committee for Southeastern Association of the United Church of Christ, he said yes, and he continued thereafter to say yes, serving in many other leadership roles in the association.

When I asked him to substitute for me in preaching and leading worship at Zion, he said yes.

When I asked him to engage in dialogue sermons, interrupting my sermon-in-progress with key questions and observations, or in other ways providing an unexpected and interesting sermon event, he said yes.

When I asked him to help teach a nine month confirmation class he said yes.

When St John UCC north of Burlington had a pastoral vacancy and asked him to serve them he said yes.

When a new program for training lay ministers, CENTER/LEARN, became available, and he had a chance to deepen his understanding of ministry, even though he was working full time for the railroad and serving a church “on the side,” and hundreds more hours would be required over a three year period, he said yes.

When his ministry at St John came to an end and he was seeking another way to serve the church and use his talents, I asked him to lead a third worship service at Zion aimed primarily at young couples with children attending concurrent church school classes, with a minimal honorarium for his services, and he said yes.

When I asked him to renew his license to minister, signing a contract with the association, even though he no longer had a call to one church but was willing to serve any church in pulpit supply or other needs, and even though he faced opposition from some of the ministers who did not think that request was appropriate, he said yes.

When there was a pastoral vacancy at St Paul Church, West Burlington, and I proposed that he, Jim Ritters, and I form a team to serve as their interim ministry for a year, he said yes.

When West Burlington St Paul invited him to return to their ministry part-time when their pulpit was again vacant he said yes, and when St Paul UCC in Donnellson invited him to serve there he said yes.

And when Dean Moberg said yes, he followed through and did what he said he would do, and did not only what was expected, but much more and as well if not better than just about anyone could do it.

So, when asked a few days ago if he would continue to serve as a messenger, and whisper in people’s ears that need encouragement that every day is a gift from God, and every person you meet is a potential friend, and patience is indeed a virtue, and a sense of humor is a requirement not an option, and other essential truths, he said yes, and when asked to appear in people’s dreams and talk about nearly everything up to and including the steadfast loving-kindness of our God, he said yes, of course. He would and he did, and he will keep doing it.

To Hide from Storms at Shannondale

05 Friday Feb 2016

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We were camping at Shannondale, and I made arrangements for our group to take an evening tour of Round Spring Cave, courtesy of the National Park Service staff. The only problem was that the number of tour participants was limited, and we had one more person with us than the available slots for the tour. Art Klein had stayed at camp, and another youth or two, who were not fond of caves, had stayed with him. Dean Moberg volunteered to stay above ground and let the rest of us go on this spelunking adventure. He had gone before, and, although there is always more to see in such a dynamic and complex cave, he was willing for the rest of us to enjoy it this time. There would be another trip and another opportunity to tour the cave.

As the time for the tour approached we gathered near the cave entrance, and Ranger Ruth entertained us with some colorful stories from the area lore about sinkholes, caves, and Ozark culture, and we were glad to be in the cave overhang area when the rain began. Still, Dean dutifully stayed outside when the rest of us followed our guide into the cave. Some of our group were a bit jealous of Dean’s choice during our squeeze through the narrow channel of the first hundred yards, as uncountable numbers of bats flew past our ears on their way outside for the evening’s mosquito harvest.

Dean, meanwhile, returned to the parking lot and our cars and observed the onset of a powerful windstorm, maybe even a tornado, wondering whether the wind would do more than scatter tree limbs and branches and rock the car that was his only available shelter.

An hour or so later our group emerged to a different environment, with evidence of the storm all around us. Dean greeted us and assured us that everything was all right, although he had wondered for a while whether he would be blown away. We returned to our campsite and found the tents in various degrees of collapse and disarray, which Art and his crew had tried unsuccessfully to remedy. We decided to take advantage of Shannondale’s more dependable shelter for another night, grateful that most of us had been able to spend the time of the storm oblivious to the world outside and enjoying the amazing and utterly quiet world below.

We were grateful, too, to those who had braved the elements on our behalf. We could always count on Dean and Art.

One More ‘Stupidest Things I Have Ever Done’

04 Thursday Feb 2016

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Rock Creek Wilderness, Oregon

Returning to Shannondale along the Current River in Missouri was one of my fond dreams when I came to Zion Church in Burlington. Dean Moberg said that he also was eager to return, with his pleasant memories of getting to court his wife-to-be at that camp. Therefore, we planned a trip with Dean and Jeri, Art Klein, and several fine high school young people. We camped at Peaceful Point at Shannondale the first couple of days, did a service project—cleaning up and painting some camp facilities, and proceeded to canoe the river, putting in at Cedar Grove, canoeing to Pulltite in the morning, and reaching Round Spring in the late afternoon, a  twenty-mile trip  on the first day.

That year I had suggested  that we  do what I had done with other groups earlier, which was to carry food and gear with us in canoes, stay overnight on the river at one of the campgrounds or gravel bars, and canoe the next day another twenty miles to Two Rivers. The Current River’s… well…fast current, of course, had enabled this ambitious agenda with groups that were largely novices, as well as heavy rains on the days prior to previous trips. On this year of return, the river was quick, but not so quick, and the rains that came, came on the second day of our planned canoeing.

The second day opened gray and overcast, but seemingly warm enough, so “we” decided to go ahead with our planned trip, all the way to Two Rivers. (I don’t know if my enthusiasm was operative in the “we” or whether it was really a consensus.) We hadn’t been on the river more than ten minutes when the rain began, and, at first, it was gentle and warm. Not very long afterwards, it ceased to feel warm . Most of our group did not bring raingear. We stopped at a rock overhang and brought out the box of large garbage bags (along with duct tape, the other requirement for any trip we planned). At least everyone had an improvised raincoat for the rest of the trip. In addition to the dampness, the temperature began to fall.

Finding another rock overhang with just enough space for all of our group, and everyone beginning to be both tired and cold, we stopped for lunch.  We needed a break from paddling, the energy from the food and drink we had packed for the trip, and also warmth from somewhere. My matches were wet, but, fortunately we had smokers with us. Art used his lighter and the few items that were still dry to get a smoky fire going, providing just enough warmth to thaw us out a little, when we took turns standing near it.

We had no choice but to continue downriver. There was no place to pull out of this section of the river until we had paddled ten more miles to Two Rivers, where there was a store and a phone to reach our Shannondale driver, who would pick us up and save us from ourselves.

Our only hope to avoid hypothermia was to paddle like the devil and avoid the usual tipping of the canoes. Since these seemed too much to hope for, our only hope really was to pray like the…saints, even if we weren’t.

Never was I happier to have three determined adult helpers and a mostly good-natured and forgiving group of high school young adults. Together, urging each other on, we made it. When we finally reached Two Rivers and our Shannondale helper picked us up, I hurried to rent the Goat Barn for our overnight accommodations, instead of setting up our wet tents. We made liberal use of the hot showers and established the custom of closing our canoe trip with a visit to Salem’s Pizza Hut.

(Some readers may offer corrections to this memory and life-lesson; they are welcome!)

 

The Youth Trip of a Lifetime

14 Thursday Jan 2016

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Last night I dreamed about a youth trip that didn’t turn out so well, but often I think about the scores of trips that I led (with the assistance of many helpers!!) that went better than I had any right to expect, and the first trip (led by others when I was seventeen) that set the stage for all of the rest. It was 1963, and a couple of Methodist minsters had a brainstorm that the Central Illinois Conference would send a bus-full of high school juniors and seniors to New York City and Washington, D.C., in January of 1964, to experience a seminar on religion and current events.  With their plan, they were braver than I ever became, but I was privileged to be on the bus. This was entirely due to the benevolence of my pastor at the time, Rev. Glen Sims, and a generous older member of my congregation at Paxton Methodist Church, Gladys White.  All of my expenses were paid.

Many of the teenagers on board that week knew each other from camps and youth fellowships, but we all got to know each other, and at least one became a friend for life. The bus travelled all day and night, and those couples who knew each other found not-so-quiet corners of the bus to expose their raging hormones during the long dark hours, but that was not me (or the aforementioned friend). I just noted the consternation of some of the adults who didn’t foresee this aspect of packing so many teens so closely together for so many hours.

We arrived in New York in time to attend worship and the site chosen was Marble Collegiate Church where Norman Vincent Peale was continuing to share his “power of positive thinking.” Peale’s center-stage style and the white-gloved, tuxedoed ushers made an impression.  There, too, some of the adults had preferences in other directions that were fulfilled when we visited Riverside Church and the Interchurch Center, headquarters at the time of the National Council of Churches and several denominational offices, and a Methodist Church in Manhattan that sponsored many outreach services to needy people.

The next two days saw us spending time at the United Nations and the Church Center for the United Nations, where we heard presentations and engaged in discussions about current affairs involving church interests, especially the Conventions on Human Rights that were in the process of development. We stayed in small crowded rooms in a hotel just off Broadway, and we must have eaten somewhere, but, surprisingly for me and my appetite, I do not remember any food. I do remember our exposure to Charles Wells, a Pennsylvania Quaker who posted a newsletter to which I promptly subscribed until he retired years later and my subscription transferred to his compatriot , I. F. Stone.

We again boarded the bus for the shorter trip to Washington, D.C., where our itinerary took us on a tour of the White House and several sights—the Lincoln Memorial, of course—and we listened to church lobbyists at the Methodist center across the street from both Capitol and the Supreme Court. Desegregation, plans for the war on poverty under the new president, Lyndon Johnson, and international affairs in the Cold War were high on the agenda. We went across the street for a meaningful discussion with Illinois Senator Paul Douglass, who supported the U.N. Conventions, but did not see a path for their early approval, and another but less meaningful meeting with Senator Everett Dirksen, whose memorable words focused on his sympathy for us being there in winter and missing the cherry blossoms in bloom. The Soviet Embassy provided an interesting stop, and I was impressed with the many publications in English and the ambassador’s efforts to impress us with how friendly and progressive Russians could be. In the light snow of a gray afternoon, we visited Arlington Cemetery, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers, and freshly turned earth and eternal flame of President John F. Kennedy, whose efforts I had just begun to appreciate when he was assassinated.

I did not realize at the time how much of my world shifted during that week, how much larger it became, how many of my thoughts about church, state, national and international concerns began. We talked for a while as the bus turned toward Illinois, but mostly we slept. We were very tired.

[C1]

The Tale of the Peddlin’ Parson

21 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by in Caring, Faith, People, Seasons, Small town life, Vehicles

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It’s not much of a tale, but it’s about one Christmas that stood out for this preacher. I had lived in Tilton only a few months, serving my first “called’’ and full-time pastorate at the United Church of Tilton. The start of work was not auspicious. The new church building had been completed the year before, with a lot of volunteer work from the congregation. There were only thirty-some members, and the Sunday School participation continued to be much larger than the worship attendance, as it had been for years, for worship began at 8 A.M., when families wanted to sleep in, and the people were accustomed to having a part-time pastor who served a larger church somewhere else, so the early hour was the only time that their pastor had been available. The new parsonage had finally been finished so my family—my wife and two small children—could move in. Our second car, “Sam,” had burned up with an engine fire, so we were back to having one car to share between my wife and myself. The youth group, built around the sports enthusiasms of the previous part-time youth worker, had fallen apart.

The leaders of the congregation were eager to encourage me, and they somehow had faith that we could make this new organization self-sustaining with a truly community-serving and Christ-centered purpose. There were few traditions, although we built on some that had begun in each of the fore-runner congregations that merged and began anew with their thirty combined members. We observed Advent with the lighting of Advent candles, collected gifts for the Delmo Community Organization, went caroling at nursing facilities and the homes of shut-ins, and prepared a children’s musical program for the Sunday School. In worship, the Sunday before Christmas, when all the singing, preaching, and praying was over, the congregation presented me with a gift.

Don Dunavan was one of the sturdy deacons, chief at the fire department, busy creating equipment at one of the local machine shops, raising four children, caring for his elderly mother, always available at church for  jobs that needed doing. He came riding down the aisle on a bright red Schwinn bicycle. “We understood that you needed some transportation to do your visiting around town, so we bought you this bicycle. From now on, you will be known in Tilton as the peddlin’ parson.”

Visiting with people in the town, finding needs and filling them, had become my primary occupation. The bicycle became my main mode of transportation. I did a lot of cold calling, getting to know people and what they were interested in, talking about the church’s new start and hopes to serve the needs of the community. For the most part people were receptive. When I heard of someone wanting to talk, or a problem that had arisen for anyone, I made a contact and arranged a visit.

One man, Albert Cox, lived by himself, had no family, and had never had a relationship with any church. He didn’t have any interest in taking part in any group either, but he did like the idea of a church that would respond to people’s needs and try to serve the town. He hadn’t known any preachers before, he said, but he welcomed me into his home, and we talked about ways things could be improved for people’s lives. He was concerned about the town cemetery, which had fallen into disuse and decay, without a supervisory board to take care of it, and about the youth not having Scouting or recreational organizations to channel their energies. He had a lot of good ideas, though he wasn’t ever comfortable joining with other people in trying to implement them. Still we were able to find ways to work on them.

Years later, when Albert died and I was long gone from the community, his will designated his estate (a half-million dollars) in equal parts to a historical museum for the town and to the United Church of Tilton to be used for a community fellowship hall and gym. When I returned to the church thirty-five years later, I learned that I was remembered for three things—being a peddlin’ parson who visited people in the community, running a school-outside -the-walls activity program for youth, and visiting Albert Cox.

An Incident on the High Road

23 Friday Oct 2015

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Gold Camp RoadWe were driving the high road from Cripple Creek to Colorado Springs, named the Gold Camp Road, nine miles following an old narrow gauge railroad bed. Actually Jan was driving, since she didn’t trust me to drive and sight-see at the same time. I do love the scenery, and it doesn’t get any better than the Gold Camp Road. It was a one way, one lane road beginning at Cripple Creek until a tunnel collapsed in 1988, and now it is a hiker and biker trail, so this event occurred before 1988.

The Alpine flowers were in multi-colored full bloom in mid-summer, the clouds were high and sparse for a rare rain-free July day, and the views of the mountain terrain and the distant foothills and high plains were forever. No one else was ahead or behind us for miles, and Jan was driving about 10 to 20 miles per hour on the loose gravel, since one side of the road was cut from the mountain rock, and other was a steep fall that had no visible bottom. Once in a while she would stop so that she could enjoy the scenery, take a break from a nervous hold on the steering wheel, and we could walk through the flowers.

In a few places the mountain rock was cut so that the single lane ran through a narrow canyon with rock on both sides. That would seem to be a secure place, but as we were driving through one of the longest of these narrow one –way passages, we saw a large dump truck barreling toward us at high speed. You could see the gravel dust billowing out behind the truck. It was not slowing down, although it was plain that there was not room for both the truck and our little Dodge Colt station wagon inside the defile at the same time. There was not time for Jan to back up, nor was there room on the shelf behind  us for two vehicles side-by-side.

Jan didn’t even have time to brake to a complete stop. The truck just kept coming at full speed.

This was one of those moments that seem to last a long time, because you know you’re going to die. You have time to review your whole pathetic  life in an instant.

Jan pulled the car against the right side until you could hear the panels scrape against the rock, and we both let out a loud groan in our prayers—not to become a can of sardines squished against the rocks by a truck that was large and heavy enough to destroy us without leaving so much as a dent on its bumper.

I don’t know how the truck managed to squeeze past us with just a scratch on our rear view mirror. I think it was divine intervention. We had some time left to mend our ways.

“We thought we heard a siren…”

14 Wednesday Oct 2015

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

Making our home in Iroquois, Illinois, during my final year of graduate school provided a challenge to Jan and me and to the people of that rural village. Jan was pregnant with our second child and in charge of three year old Alicia without a support system other than the new friends we were making. I was serving a temporary appointment as a “student pastor” of the only church in town. They had broken away from a yoke arrangement with a church ten miles away. They were getting used to having their own pastor, but one who had no more time to give them than their previous “shared” pastor. In addition I was working on a doctoral project which turned our life together into research on how they responded to historical critical approaches to the scripture and how they were coming to grips with the social and political changes in the world around them. (That was the year that the U. S. involvement in Vietnam came to a formal end with a negotiated settlement. Racial politics and sexual roles were in widespread transition.) I traveled back and forth to Chicago every week to keep up with my doctoral work. We packed a lot into that year. Somehow both they and we survived it.

While we had lived in Chicago, Jan had studied with a fine vocal coach, Elsa Charleston, and regained the wonderful voice she had developed in high school and her first year of college, before she traded her vocal performance major for a Christian education major. In Iroquois she was on her own. Almost every day she crossed the street from the little house they had rented for us to the church, and used the piano to practice. She did the vocal exercises she had learned to do, and she worked on songs that stretched her abilities. The exercises included the “Tarzan yells” that Elsa had incorporated to increase Jan’s volume, support, and range.

One fine fall afternoon, two of the church members were in the yard taking care of the mowing and shrub trimming when they heard a sound that they had never heard before. Henry Easter stopped his lawnmower, and Tom the barber stopped his electric hedge trimmer and listened. It was coming from inside the church! They checked with each other as the sound continued, and they decided that they would have to investigate. They entered the building cautiously and stood in amazement at the back of the meeting room. They were listening to Jan’s practicing. Finally she glimpsed them standing in the back.

“Do you need something?” she asked.

“We thought we were hearing a siren,” Henry answered.

They obviously didn’t know what to think, not only about Jan’s practicing, but about our presence in their community. When the year came to an end, I received my degree, Nathan was born, and our interim appointment to serve that congregation ended also. Many shed tears at our leaving. Were they tears of sadness, or joy, or both? I’m not sure.

The Excitement and Fascination of Large Population Die-offs

12 Monday Oct 2015

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

As Granddaughter Willow has spent several summers in recent years working at The Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, South Dakota, we have joined for many weeks in exploring the fascinating deposit of bones left by scores of mammoths and hundreds of other animals of many species about twenty-six thousand years ago in a warm water sinkhole. Few other specimens of the giant short-face bear have been discovered, and the skeleton found here is impressive. New finds occur regularly, and the excitement that accompanies the discoveries grows with the potential new information about life in another era. The mammoths are almost entirely young adult males who have wandered away from the herd and sought the late winter, early spring abundance of plant food at the edge of the sinkhole, only to slide in the mud into the water and be unable to get a footing to climb out.

Another fascinating location, directed by a former member of The Mammoth Site staff and friend of Willow, is near Waco, Texas, which the President recently designated as Waco Mammoth National Monument. There a natural disaster, presumably a flash flood, destroyed a large herd of mammoths and several other animals, including a camel and a saber-tooth cat, all at one time, 65,000 years ago. As excavators remove tons of earth from that site, even more information comes to light about animals, plants, and climate during that era.

The Gray Fossil Site in East Tennessee, whose vertebrate curator also serves as the new director of The Mammoth Site, provides a deposit of animal and plant fossils in a marshy area, as-yet-undated millions of years ago. So much information lies buried there, along with unusual species, like an extinct red panda, giant tortoise, tapir, peccary, alligator, and rhinoceros, that excavation is expected to continue for over a hundred years.

As a graduate student Willow now works in the collections of the University of Nebraska, including thousands of specimens from the Ashfall Site in northeastern Nebraska, where a plume of volcanic ash from a mega-volcano in Idaho killed animals, birds, and plants at a watering hole twelve million years ago, and left populations of rhinoceros, horses, camels, and many other species in the region extinct, and the land became barren for hundreds of years. Other discoveries in Nebraska and Wyoming continue to add specimens to a collection that will help to identify a long pre-history of information on interactions of climate and conditions with plant and animal life.

These locations join with others popularly known, like the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles or Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, in providing extraordinary locations for exciting discoveries that can change our perceptions of the world and its development through aeons.

The dark side of all of this excitement is the fact that each site is the remnant of the suffering and death of thousands of creatures. Without such tragic events we would know much less about the world around us. In the future, perhaps, we will care enough for our own human species to study and discover why tens of thousands of human beings kill each other with guns every year, with no personal or social benefits as a result. That should be of interest and fascinating, too, though it appears to be harder for us to get excited about understanding that tragic and unending story in our own era.

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.

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.