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.