I
Russell Baker begins Growing Up, his 1982 Pulitzer Prize winning memoir, not with himself but, unforgettably, with his mother:
At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind wandered free though time. Some days she went to weddings and funerals that had taken place half a century earlier. On others she presided over family dinners cooked on Sunday afternoon for children who are now gray with age. Through all this she lay in bed, but moved across time, traveling among the dead decades with a speed and ease beyond the gift of physical science.
Let me state for the record that already I am praying for that same kind of unhinderedness should I myself ever have and survive a “last bad fall.” Further, I hope that my family and friends will agree with me in that prayer—and that that my grown children will find themselves rejoicing for prayers answered, even if it means I evermore see them as well I might: my pig-tailed daughter in Oshkosh B’gosh overalls, and my son in a Disney Cruises Captain’s hat.
If I don’t survive my last bad fall…well, rejoice with me in that, too: to find that I have been “fitted for heaven” would be the answer to so many of my prayers (which I used to pray for fear; which I now pray for love.)
But if I do survive the fall, I hereby leave instructions that my friends and kids be all the happier should they realize if ever they visit that I am on a baking sandlot, playing the hot corner on a sweltering afternoon, swallowing-up a short-hop screamer down the line and making a good throw to first to get a fast runner by a half-step. That, or striking out the side in the bottom of the ninth to complete the no-hitter. Either way, they are in the bleachers if they are present to me at all.
And let those with ears hear: everyone around the world, c’mon! Celebrate the good times if we have gotten the band back together and I am playing the base line of “Stuck in the Middle with You.”
I will go further and say I would pray Godspeed on the same kinds of journeys for my own friends and loved ones—if ever and however their present reality is too difficult or painful to inhabit; likewise the folk I serve and their loved ones, and in truth anyone who is bed-ridden, on narcotics for constant pain, or trapped under the weight and ruin of a gradual or sudden cognitive collapse.
My bon voyage assumes, of course, that every one of them has good places to go, grace spots in their memories where they can flee as one would to a city of refuge, as the Bible calls them. If they do not, may they soon be unhindered completely.
I have counseled my congregants accordingly: do not be surprised or unsettled when you discover your “trapped” loved one has escaped and found passage to elsewhere—a safe place or time that protects and in that way liberates them. In fact, rejoice with them! And if they are running on the beach with good legs, kicking up water, checking out the suits and drowning in sunshine, run on the beach with them. Find some shells. Don’t try to get them back into the house or bed; just go with it. And them.
There is no harm in nostalgia, only relief, for folk in such a condition.
While for folks like us there is no healing there, though we might hope for it; instead, just a brief respite or palliation.
Practicing what I preach, I just went with it when, not at the bedside of a stricken individual but at a Worship Committee meeting of a dying church, I realized they were...elsewhere.
II
It was our monthly meeting, which almost no one wanted to attend, especially the pastor (me). But there was business to be considered. Our withering congregation was determined to have itself celebrate our sesquicentennial, this when we had no money, no real engagement and little more interest. Tired, sad faces all around until someone (not me) suggested we let the anniversary be our last service as a congregation—to turn out the lights on our way out the door, as it were, do it ourselves, preserving a few scraps of dignity with which to cover ourselves as with fig leaves. After all, we had had a rich and populous history.
The other half-dozen said “no” around our circle like a stadium wave, and when their voices softened, to a person, it seemed as if their eyes were looking beyond the western horizon.
I too quickly concluded they were scanning their memories of the “old sanctuary” when the place was full enough to make them think they needed to build new and bigger; only now the “new sanctuary” was old and, worse, a mostly empty shell. Beautiful—like a fake Faberge egg—but as cold anymore as the marble-floored quire or the brass cross and candlesticks. Cobwebs at the tops of wall-length stained glass testified to the changing seasons of a church’s life. And barely enough people left anymore—each of which had only a piece or two of the church’s jigsawed story—to make anything like a whole picture.
They may have glanced in that direction as they moved, as they would have the chapels of Mary, Joseph and the Lady at St. Patrick’s, but in a trice I could actually feel the room warming up. Sweat popped on my forehead, and I would have sworn that, yes, I smelled sawdust.
They were not in the hard, cold and virtually abandoned, at all! Instead, the ground was soft, the air was hot and the place was packed.
It was a hot August night at the brush arbor—no, at camp meeting—no, at the arbor at the camp meeting when funeral home fans proved no match for the stifling breezelessness. In fact they might have fanned hell’s fire in each repentant soul, or acted as bellows for the flickers sparking a faithful heart’s tinder. When the preacher was bringing the fire, in hopes of saving sinners and torching the Saloon, the sinner’s refuge.
“Those people over in the saloon—your husbands, a lot of them—smoking, drinking, chawin,’ playing cards and pool, looking at the girls, or worse...woe be to them. Woe! Young people, don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t chew, and don’t associate with those who do!”
Having walked that trail, in a few moments they came back to the circle and in the blink of an eye came up with a plan: a homecoming worship service “like it used to be. We’ll get the preacher to come in on a horse!” Amen’s and Hallelujah’s all around. “We’ll have guest singers and dinner on the ground!” Wild affirmations. “We’ll set aside a mourners’ bench.” Not everyone knew what that was, and I couldn’t find a seam in the conversation to explain. “We’ll have to sing ‘Church in the Wildwood!’” said another, at which point someone began singing (me) the first chorus. “Of course, we’ll sing that song,” I interjected. “How could you not?”
Nothing, it would seem—up to and including the promise of Jesus’s coming—can intoxicate the soul of a struggling congregation (or its individual members) quite like the revisionist nostalgia that latches onto the angst associated with the present day and its circumstance. Churches and The Church are in palliative care. Either that, or they have broken away. Church today is nothing we recognize, which is just so painful, we get nostalgic (which is not a fruit of the spirit for individuals or congregations). No matter that sentimentality has buffed the scratches and bondoed the dents of those days, they are like Doc Brown’s DeLorean, taking us back in time.
Better: that one song: “Church in the Wildwood,” is like the door of the Professor’s wardrobe, through which we enter into the kind of ephemeral euphoria that fuels, and temporarily validates our manifold critiques of the present, and simultaneously “honors” our fathers and mothers.
And lets us be little children again.
They were like children, in fact, and as they discussed it all, another image came to my mind. A branch of wood, burned to charcoal but holding form, when a spark, a surprising drop of fire, flared-up from the cinders to dance for a brief moment.
I was the lone detractor—Sunday at 4 is my nap-time—but I wasn’t about to try to bring them back to the present moment. Instead, I just...went with it, and made a note to myself to call around about renting a horse.
When the time came for the service, we racked-away the United Methodist Hymnal and sang from “the ‘Cokesbury,’” as it is called, a little brown songbook that remains so precious to the righteous remnant of every little brown church in the vale.
Which our church was, kinda, only it’s brick instead of brown and more properly rural than pastoral, and we are in no vale at all—in fact there are no vales anywhere around us—but the church is surely dear to the shrinking, aging and arthritic bodies whose souls remember how their great-grandmothers telling them the story—how at the turn of the 19th Century, not long after the Revolutionary War on this side of the pond and not that far removed from Aldersgate Street on that side of the pond, Methodists pitched their tent here, near the several acres where these days handsome markers and simpler stones testify to the lives and deaths of generations of people who called this church their church.
There are unmarked graves, too, we suspect: generations of slaves whose bodies may undergird the foundation of the new church. Scattered among the rest and also clustered here and there are graves of soldiers who died in the Revolutionary war, of soldiers who defended the Lost Cause, and a tall marker that was raised relatively recently in honor of the Unknown (CSA) Soldier.
For the remnant who are holding onto that which remains by the bleeding fingernails of their hearts, the mere mention of such a service—at “a time when people, even some our own former members, can come back” was the balm of Gilead.
So, we racked the new hymnals and sang old, familiar songs, picked not by the preacher but this time, by the folk, the first of them: Amazing Grace, of course. How could you not?
The Old Rugged Cross, too, about which Frederick Buechner writes that, when he was a child, his caregiver, Mrs. Taylor, would put him to bed singing the hymn before, as he says, he knew “what a hymn was, or what a cross was, or why it was something to sing about in the dark” (The Sacred Journey, p. 13).
(As an aside, I get annoyed when people do not realize that many “old” hymns are in the “new” hymnal—which, by the night of that meeting was 20 years old already—but they had never noticed, nor had they credited me with including one old hymn every Sunday. Instead, to them, The United Methodist Hymnal signified how “out of touch” the denomination’s leaders are “with regard to churches like ours.”)
And, of course, The Church in the Wildwood—
Come to the church in the wild wood,
Oh, come to the church in the vale;
No spot is so dear to my childhood
As the little brown church in the vale.
From the church in the valley by the wild wood,
then day fades away into night,
I would fain from this spot of my childhood
Wing my way to the mansions of light.
What interested me, and does, is the “childhood” part of it. Twice in two verses. What interested me, and does, are the beatified looks on most of the 25 folk in attendance. As they sang the hymn, it carried them back through time, much as the “vision” of a little brown church (as opposed to an actual church) prompted William S. Pitts to write the song… in 1857!
He, Pitts, was a Puritan, a group that was fading fast. He was on his way to see his fiance, stopped to water his horse, and saw a thicket of woods by the Cedar River in IA. A hymn was born. There was no church there then—except in his mind—but he could not get the imagined “church” out of his mind. He wrote (and published) a poem about the experience, which helped his O/C brain calm down, but for years he kept seeing that place, where a church needed to be built.
And later, it was. But only after the poem became the hymn that inspired a small group of men to turn Pitts’s vision into an actual building.
Oh, to live in such a time, right? But what was going on in 1857? Slavery, the death of his denomination, political polarization, the looming possibility and, soon, reality of the Civil War. Not to count whatever personal struggles he may have been going through…
The song made its public debut in 1864. What was going on in 1864?
The irony is rich: Pitts himself was from the first longing for elsewhere—pre-1857, just as those who were singing it in 1864 surely had in their heart an easier time than that awful time. The point being, the hymn was conceived in a time we, without thinking, might imagine to be simpler and easier, but for Pitts was the time he wanted escape and return to his childhood. Sounds like a script for Midnight in Paris: The Church Edition.
(Next: Nostalgia ain’t prophesy)