A Very Small Thing

[The Great G Minor Symphony, No. 40, by Mozart] was written in the final years of Mozart's life, when things were not going well. An infant daughter had died a few weeks earlier, he had moved into a cheaper apartment, and he was begging friends and acquaintances for loans. But in the summer of 1788, he wrote his last three symphonies: Symphony Number 39 in E-Flat, Symphony in G Minor, and the Jupiter symphony. It is not known for sure whether Mozart ever heard any of these symphonies performed.

                            The Writer’s Almanac for July 25, 2014

I sat with my sponsor for ordination, T. Hartley Hall IV, at a table in the church hall of First Presbyterian Church, Nashville and listened to the Rev. Fred P. Zitzmann tell me that he didn’t think I was called to ministry. I have asked myself from time to time in the more than 35 years since whether he was right.

In my tradition of faith, people never tire of explaining the nature of a call to ministry. A call, the boilerplate explanation goes, is composed of three parts:  personal conviction, the possession of the requisite gifts and aptitudes and, finally, the confirmation of the community of faith as represented by members of a presbytery committee. On that day many years ago, Fred was saying to me and Hartley that, as a member of the presbytery committee with the power to say yea or nay, he was reluctant to concede the third part.

Like most terms and phrases the church uses when it presumes to describe the ways of God with human beings, call, calling or vocation is a notoriously ambiguous and politically malleable idea. Eventually, the Presbytery of Middle Tennessee formally confirmed that I had a call. When I think of it now in retrospect, this seems like no big whoop, but then it seemed to represent the validation of my whole life. The bureaucratic way was finally clear for the Presbytery of Western Kentucky to ordain me to the ministry of word and sacrament, and so it did on Friday evening, July 25, 1980 at First Presbyterian Church of Auburn, Kentucky. For those who mark such things, July 25 is the feast of St. James on the church calendar. Hartley preached the sermon that evening from the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, chapter four.

With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.

Just so.

Saying what a calling or vocation is not is easier than saying what it is.  It is not a successful career in the church or anywhere else.  It is not being paid well or, more often, poorly for performing certain services. It is not identifiable by clothing or uniform or social status or public opinion or whether one summers in Maine, Montreat or Kanuga.  It is not measurable according to any list of goals and objectives that can, at the end of a funding term, be ticked off as completed in the final report to an imagined cosmic grant maker.

What is it, then? Having a call implies a certain awareness of a caller, an inchoate sense of that caller’s summons and a feeling of being haunted by some mysterious sense of accountability when one does not respond to that summons.

A calling is not, I say, an experience for any institution to define or own or evaluate. It is more commonplace than religious people would have you believe. It is simply finding – giving in and allowing oneself to be guided to – and doing the thing or combination of things that a person enjoys, is suited for or can’t not do. Just as Mozart found and did musical composition, Hemingway found and did the writing of stories or my friend Sandy Lynch found and does the building, repair and maintenance of anything heavy, wet or broken.

So Fred, wherever you are, my memory of your pious pronouncement on me still stings a bit, and reminds me that it is not for you or anyone else to pass judgment. On this anniversary, it's only for me to ask whether I'm still listening. Just in case I get a call.

We Make Our Buildings and Our Buildings Make Us

Driving to work one day recently I was listening to the choir of King’s College, Cambridge under the direction of Sir David Willcocks singing the sixteenth-century English composer William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus.  I have sung this piece, and from personal experience can testify how difficult Byrd’s polyphony can be to perform well a capella.  At cuius latus, I was struck by how gentle and caressing Byrd’s phrases are.  The music conjured late medieval images of the grieving women observing the taking down of the body of Jesus from the cross. 

From my earliest memories, art, and particularly music, has been the gateway to the deepest religious feeling, the door to what Friedrich Schleiermacher famously identified as a sense of utter dependence on the source of all.

In his Dawn and Decadence, Columbia historian Jacques Barzun confirms that my experience has been shared by many through the ages.  Most medieval people didn’t think about theology or philosophy.  But the socially-constructed world of medieval Christendom, with its theological grid, simply was reality, and the reality was reinforced by art and story. What medieval Cathedrals, for example, communicated to average people about God, the soul and the nature and destiny of human beings was portrayed vividly in a space that virtually everyone shared. Depth of meaning within this shared world was accessible through art – plastic, musical and literary – and architecture.

Something like this deepening was vouchsafed to me as a child through pictures, books that were read to me and that I read, poetry my grandfather recited from memory, music, movies, buildings and the language of great public orators like FDR, Churchill, JFK, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan and Senator Everett Dirksen.

Not long ago I attended a dedication service in one of Charlotte’s spotless new Protestant church sanctuaries.  As I settled into my pew, I wondered how much soul-deepening is being conveyed to parishioners by this building and its contents.  The design of the structure is an apt expression of H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ of culture paradigm.  It is a shiny, high-tech, pre-fab, industrially manufactured facility.  It was planned for American suburbanites and their idea of what a place to worship should be.  Although the pastor spoke about the holy that day, and referred to the interior space as set apart for an experience of the numinous, I did not sense anything of the sort. God seemed not to be home. As I tried to identify what exactly was awry, two things came to mind:  the omnipresence of factory-manufactured metallic fixtures and electronic conveniences of every kind, and the relative absence of natural woods and fibers. 

The processional cross, for example, was a factory-made, metallic Christus Rex.  Synthetic carpet throughout the room – it covered both the aisles and the floor under the pews and chairs – said these good people believe in practicality and economy – but, and this is important, not simplicity – above all. Both the pastor and the head usher cautioned worshippers against bringing substances into the space that might mar or stain. Praise bands featured well-amplified electronic instrumentation.  What was absent were natural materials, acoustic instrumentation, simplicity of appointment, silence experienced communally as preparation for being addressed by the transcendent through scripture and sacrament and the spirit of human kindness. These things might have invited a sense of the numinous, might have provided context for the possibility of such an experience. But they were absent. And I missed them.

Interior of Third Haven Friends Meeting House in Easton, Maryland, circa 1684.

Taking the Lord's Name in Vain

My father died suddenly 26 years ago today at the age of 61.

My age now is 61. My father was born in 1926.  He was 26 in 1952, the year I was born.  My daughter, who was born just two months before my father died, turned 26 in February of this year. A curious generational chord sounds here. It resonates faintly, but distinctly, in a minor key. I suspect a significance in this that I have so far not been able to plumb. 

As I ponder these interconnections, another generational resonance occurs to me.  In the suddenness of his passing – he worked a full day that Friday in Dallas before dying of a heart attack late that night – my father joined his father and his father’s father in making an abrupt, unexpected exit.  Three consecutive generations in a patriarchal line slipped quickly and without preparation or farewell through a narrow slit in the thin diaphragmatic tissue that separates this world from the other side.  William James in January 1919, William Franklin in April 1988, and, out of generational order, my grandfather, John Lawrence, in February 1989. I would seem to be next in following this family tradition of leaving the party by way of a side door. This prompts a certain amount of sober reflection.

My father loved font design.  This sounds strange as I write it, but he was a typographer. He knew and appreciated the history and design of fonts as they are in themselves and as they are combined on a printed page to produce a desired effect. Recently watching a film documentary on the font Helvetica made me homesick for my father and the shop he and his partners founded, Tradetype of Dallas, Inc. When I try, I can still smell type cases, lead, ink and cleaning fluid, and hear the tinkling of individual brass fonts as a cigar-chewing typesetter released them from the magazine of a Linotype machine to create a molded lead line of type. Working for my father in that shop in the 1960s, I witnessed the last years of hot-metal typesetting for ink presses and the dawn of a new age of electronic, computerized printing. To this day, I am nostalgic for the feel and smell of a page of copy printed from a galley of inked metal type.

I could, and probably should, write much more about ways my father was a blessing to me. The long, bonding silences we shared when we worked together on a yard or a building project. His love of mountain landscapes, seascapes and sailboats. His grace and elegance on the dance floor. The way he loved a good joke. An enthusiastic, uncritical embrace of everything about New Orleans, including, most especially, its cuisine and music. And, not least, his rejection of religion.

The religion my father passionately rejected was the fundamentalism of his upbringing in south-central Oklahoma Churches of Christ. Fundamentalism's unique combination of provincialism, anti-intellectualism, exclusivity, flinty mean-spiritedness and denial of most forms of fun and pleasure became the great hatred of his life. From the day he boarded a train for Navy boot camp, he never willingly attended worship, prayed at meals or contributed money to religious organizations. This caused no little tension between him and my devout, fundamentalist mother.

Understanding my father’s animus toward religion was a formative, compelling, ongoing project – perhaps the formative, ongoing intellectual and emotional project – of my adolescence and young adulthood. In this sense, my father contributed more than he ever knew to his son’s academic work and pastoral ministry.

Irony abounds here. One of the more blatant ironies made its appearance at my father’s funeral. The service in a funeral home was conducted by my mother’s minister, who used his privileged position behind the podium to spend  half an hour preaching my father into hell. Let William Boone be an object lesson to us all, he said. He never accepted Christ and “obeyed the gospel” – a noxious and oxymoronic phrase, as if the apostles intended the Christian euangelion to be a taskmaster instead of a liberation. No, Bill was never baptized. He never joined his parents, sister, wife and children in becoming a member of the Lord's church. And therefore, ask not where his soul is today.  It is in torment, writhing in a lake of fire that will never be extinguished.

I had written this minister an honorarium check for $150 before the funeral service began and after the funeral I didn’t stop payment on it. I wish I had, for I deplored and still deplore what he did. In fact, the service he conducted has for me become emblematic of what the Hebrew Bible means by “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” The Ten Commandments prohibit taking or using the Lord’s name in vain, meaning the use of religion to abuse or harm others.  My family and my father's friends were subjected to a minister intentionally and systematically taking the Lord's name in vain. Which only validated what my father had been saying about religion all along.