Anatomy of a Decision

Dale Arthur Johnson (1936-2014), emeritus professor of church history at Vanderbilt Divinity School, died August 10, 2014 in Nashville after a long struggle with lymphoma and colon cancer. I knew Dale first as a teacher, dissertation advisor and housemate in Oxford during a period of sabbatical research for him and of dissertation research for me. After I emerged from Vanderbilt’s graduate program in 1987, Dale remained an interested and welcoming colleague and friend. This, my first venturing on what I anticipate may be a number of reflections about this good man and his influence concerns my initial encounter with him in the pages of the 1975 edition of the Vanderbilt Divinity School catalog.

The course of a life can turn on small incidents. Funny that I never told him about this. But seeing the photograph of Professor Dale A. Johnson in the Vanderbilt Divinity School catalog in the summer of 1975 triggered the internal motion that resulted in my enrollment at VDS later that same summer.

To be sure, other factors contributed to this choice. Encouraged by a Church of Christ mentor in whom I had developed an uncritical trust, I had cobbled together a complicated arrangement for funding my divinity school career abroad. It involved a group of Church of Christ congregations in Texas. I am pretty sure this “arrangement” had reality only in my own wishful dreamscape. Nothing was ever signed or even verbally agreed to. No memorandum of understanding between me and these congregations was ever drafted.

Amazingly, I had never even met the good people of the plains whom I nevertheless expected to make it possible for me and my young wife to travel to Scotland, where a bursary – the Scottish word for scholarship – was being held for me by New College, Edinburgh. There I would add to my stellar academic work labor as assistant to the previously mentioned mentor, a Church of Christ “missionary” from my home town in Texas who was being supported by churches in the States to persuade the working class Scots of Glasgow’s Castlemilk housing project to “obey the Gospel” and become members of the True Church. As Jack Paar would say, I kiddeth thou not.

That this ill-advised funding scheme fell through in mid-summer I regard now as great good fortune. But in the event I felt pressure to come up with plan B. At the eleventh hour – just two weeks before classes were to begin – Frank Gulley, then associate dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, called to say that VDS wanted me as a student and could provide me with a partial scholarship that I could supplement with a job in the school’s work/study program.

I had applied to Vanderbilt Divinity School just before I got married in July, thinking it might be a good idea to have a backup plan in case the funding scheme for Scotland evaporated. It was just about the only prudential thing I managed to do that summer. A college professor I respected and admired – after four years toeing the ideological line at Abilene Christian College I was willing to say that about very few of my teachers – a teacher I admired who was a widely respected scholar of the Hebrew Bible had graduated from Vanderbilt’s Graduate Department of Religion with a Ph.D. When I encountered him one morning in the college bookstore, I asked him whether he would advise me to go to Vanderbilt Divinity School. Professor John T. Willis said yes, but added that I would need to be strong lest Vanderbilt cause me to lose my faith.

Hard upon Willis’s qualified endorsement, the scholarship offer from Dean Gulley was a major incentive. My parents had been clear that they would not provide financial support beyond my college graduation. At the time, this seemed reasonable enough. Besides, I was eager for the freedom and the challenges of being on my own in the world. Newly married at 22, I was – we were – now to sit on our own bottom financially. And we did. We both found jobs soon after unpacking our modest assemblage of belongings in a Nashville apartment.

Our friends Michael and Marceline had graduated, married and moved from Texas to Nashville earlier that same summer, both with intentions to go to Vanderbilt, he for divinity, she for law. It helped that college friends we knew and liked had already blazed a trail to the Athens of the South. We were callow, exuberant, curious and full of the sort of rebellious intellectual piss and vinegar that an upbringing in the Churches of Christ can create in some people. We drank a fair amount and tried exotic recipes on each other. Marceline smoked Gitanes, stopped shaving her armpits and discarded her bra. We went to foreign films at VU’s Sarratt Center and deconstructed them long into the night before turning our analytical prowess to post-Watergate politics. We went together – to a drive-in, of all unlikely venues – to witness the first porn movie any of us had ever seen, which, as far as I can remember, was Debbie Does Dallas.

But the photograph was before all that. Before John Willis’s endorsement, before the scholarship offer and before Michael and Marceline had moved to Nashville ahead of us, a 22-year-old with dreams of academic adventure (and maybe even glory) sat in the Abilene Christian College library thumbing through the faculty section of Vanderbilt’s divinity school catalog. And there was the fateful image, an unremarkable sidewise profile of Dale A. Johnson, B.A., M.A., Oxon. in the classroom.

My response to that photo and the copy paired with it was not irrational, but it was, I think, nonrational, intuitive and emotional. I did not make lists of pros and cons, using deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion about the best American seminary or divinity school for me. Prior to my enrollment, I had never visited Vanderbilt, nor, except for John Willis, had I ever known anyone who had graduated from the place. No, simply put, I saw the photo and the Latin abbreviation Oxon. – Oxoniensis, “of Oxford” – and knew that Vanderbilt was the place I wanted. Since I couldn’t have an Edinburgh University education, I later rationalized, I would go one better. I’d place myself under the tutelage of this young, earnest Vanderbilt professor who taught the religious history of modern Europe, America and nineteenth-century England and was Oxoniensis.

I resolved that Dale Johnson was going to become my ideal academic, my new hero.

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.