AWAY FROM HOME
ROBERT MEYERS

Every close relationship benefits from brief separations. Husbands and wives who truly love each other find that being apart occasionally makes them more fully aware of how much they mean to one another. They find it delicious to recite to each Other what has happened during their separation, uniting by their excited talk the briefly divergent stream of their life.

It is the same with churches and those who serve them. When I was away recently for a month from my beloved Riverside, I found myself stimulated to constant planning in behalf of those I had left behind. And although I enjoyed my California visit greatly, I found that at each meeting time on Sunday or Wednesday I was conscious of the miles between us. I wondered what and how my friends were doing across the time zones.

My family worshipped in three different religious denominations while we were away, a stimulating privilege we have not often had in our lives. I found myself in a veritable maelstrom of intellectual and spiritual excitement as the new environment and the different approaches stirred my mind. I scribbled furiously on the back of visitor’s cards as I thought of things I wanted to do when I returned to those who so graciously grant me a base for speaking and writing.

On the first Sunday we attended a little Presbyterian church on Point Loma. We arrived about five minutes before time for the service and I was reminded at once of home, since hardly anyone else had yet appeared. Presently there were some eighty persons gathered in the lovely little chapel to worship. They patiently explained to us later that their regular minister was gone and they apologized because the guest speaker was, they thought, long-winded. He talked twenty-five minutes.

Still retaining traces of his north German accent, the speaker told us something of his work in the urban mission center for San Diego churches. His opening prayer moved my family more than any other single experience in the three church visits. I asked for a copy of it and he wrote it out as, he said, “God gave it to me.” I brought it back to Wichita and made it a part of my first sermon. Riverside disciples responded to it as I had. I enjoyed also on that first Sunday an edifying and beautiful vocal solo and resolved, upon my return, to beg Bob Scott, our own fabulously talented singer, to make a similar dedication of his talents to God in our Sunday devotions.

On the next Sunday we drove to a Church of Christ some fifteen miles distant on the freeways, mainly because I had heard the minister speak when I was in college in Tennessee twenty-seven years ago. Once extremely prominent in the Church of Christ, he had passed through some stormy years. I frankly wanted to know what he would say and how much life had deepened and enriched his spiritual views, and I wanted also to experience this familiar pattern of worship after the visit to the little Presbyterian chapel.

I was acutely aware of noises in the audience, noises I had not heard the week before. One child cried noisily throughout the prayer. Other children kicked the seats innocently and happily, but noisily. It is often said by indulgent parents that children should nor distract us if we are properly devoted, but I noticed as always that there were many improperly devoted persons present—all being distracted. I put myself in the place of those who had grown up in another religious background, where quiet was cherished, and I realized how difficult it must be for them when they first come to our noisy, casual services.

The minister said few things that were offensive, but he failed to lift our spirits. I tried to analyze this as we drove home through the desert canyons of San Diego, and came to this conclusion: he was too abstract, and he was too predictable. When I call him abstract, I mean that he told us to love men but never spelled out for us what that might mean in the suburb where we were at that moment. And, of course, so long as he did not spell it Out, make it concrete, it was perfectly all right with everybody. No one ever minds being told that he ought to love people—until you tell him which people he ought to love that he is not now loving, and how he ought to love them. I made a mental note for myself: resolve, old friend, with greater firmness than ever to be concrete, to be specific, to avoid those glittering generalities to which everybody will say a happy Amen! and about which nobody will do a single blessed thing.

I said also that the minister that morning was too predictable. I meant only that in his thirty-five minute address he never said one thing I had not expected him to say. Nor did he say anything old in a new way, which is no mean accomplishment in itself. This was the profoundest disappointment of all, for I had thought that any man who had lived as long as he, and had passed through such a checkered career, would have some moments of insight that would strike lightning in my head and heart and make me go away thinking, “I am something more than when I came to this place.” But there was no blaze, even for a happy moment. Only the hoary party phrases and the dull, safe, generalized platitudes.

On the last Sunday we went to a little church we had passed often on our trips to the ocean beach. The name appealed to us: St. Peter’s by the Sea. In this Lutheran church, once again we found quiet. A note in the church program for the day informed us that a professional baby sitting service was provided. It seemed to me that this was a good thing for a church to do, so that mothers of young children could find an hour of quiet and enter wholly into worship. Who more than mothers needs the healing touch of God without distraction on this day?

Two young boys served as acolytes, taking a taper up the aisle to light the candles before a lovely cross. Like young boys everywhere they were a bit overcome by the unusual solemnity of what they were doing and they relieved their nervous tension by shooting flickering grins at one another. I reflected on the centrality of the cross in almost all churches except some which make the baptismal tank central It is a great help for me to see the cross in tangible form and to think what that Man was like who had to die on it for giving men truth. If the sermon is poor, one can find in this symbol a launching pad for meditation.

On this day a strong conviction of mine was reaffirmed. I like organ music very much, when no one is singing with it. It can help me be in the proper mood for meditation and reverence. My soul fills with beauty and I am led to the throne of Him who is responsible for all beauty. But I do not like the organ at all when the congregation sings with it. We could not hear the words clearly. It seemed there was a competition between organ and audience to see who could finish first. The audience lost.

One has to consider how his rearing influenced him, of course, but my preference for good a capella music is unequivocal. I agree with that old Renaissance musician William Byrd, who wrote in 1588: “There is not any music of instruments whatsoever comparable to that which is made of the voices of men where the voices are good and the same well-sorted and ordered.”

Byrd admits that a good voice is so rare that not one among a thousand has it, but in my home congregation his percentage has been riddled. Ten years of singing under the direction of our outstanding musician have created a skilled set of “well-sorted and ordered” voices. Besides its beauty, if we can believe Byrd, singing “doth strengthen all parts of the breast, and doth open the pipes.” I found when I returned home to Riverside that nothing inspires me more than a lovely hymn sung by devoted Christians who believe that they should make their gift to God as beautiful and perfect as humanly possible.

I like the congregational confession of sin which I heard in both the Lutheran and Presbyterian churches. There must be some mornings when that confession comes from individual hearts with passionate sincerity. I also enjoyed a comment written at the bottom of the program note. It said: “Informal attire is always acceptable at this church for worship services. Do not let the change of clothing for a family outing keep you from attending services. God looks on the inner man.”

I have thought a great deal since about another printed comment in that same program note. “An appeal for food for the striking farm workers in Delano, California has been made by the San Diego County Council of Churches. Canned goods of all kinds (except pork and beans). Packaged (dried) pinto beans are desired. All donations should be brought to our church kitchen for delivery.”

This kind of appeal is highly unlikely in most Churches of Christ. It is our contention, generally, that this is an affair between management and labor and no business of ours. In a now-classic case, a Texas minister lost his financial support when he tried to get fair treatment for exploited Mexican workers. So I asked myself that morning, Is this a proper action for united Christians to take? Has Christ any concern with whether some small segment of our population is treated justly in the matter of wages? Does He care? If He does, then we have to care too, of course, because we are His body to do His work on this earth.

But does He care? Do Christians have any responsibility for encouraging workers who are not paid fairly nor given the protections most of us enjoy? Most of the workers in this case were probably Mexican-Americans. Some of the employers were undoubtedly prominent in some San Diego churches. What do you suppose the latter thought of the San Diego County Council of Churches? I suppose there must have been some fireworks over that action, but then aren’t things dull only when the church is droning its platitudes and mumbling its drowsy generalities?

When I went home from church on that last Sunday I looked for a long time at the church and entertainment sections of the newspaper. They were conveniently close together. The variety of church listings was staggering. Among the more exotic brands were the Christadelphians, the spiritualists, the Swedenborgians, and the Self-Realization Fellowship founded by Paramahansa Yogananda. The Christadelphians were trying to lure folk to their place by sensational sermon topics, a device few ministers can resist if there is much pressure on them to prove their worth by the crowds they pull. The morning topic for the Christadelphians was: Casket Designed For Topside Stacking. Three Biblical texts were cited to support this bizarre offering, but I never was quite sure what the point was. The evening topic was: Israel Awaits Syrian Decision: Today’s Headlines Scooped by the Bible!

I sat there thinking how much more exciting that would be than a sermon on how Christians should respond to economic injustices, or social discriminations, or racial prejudice; or sermons on how individual Christians may battle greed, malice, envy, or loveless lust. That evening’s sermon could, I thought, serve two needs many churchgoers have: first, the need to turn the Bible into some kind of strange, remote, mysterious magic which can anticipate today’s headlines by thousands of years, and which even though we do not study it systematically can at least be handled with reverence and kept in our houses as charms; and second, the need we have to look far away at remote problems so that we can take our minds off the ones under our feet. It is obviously more exciting to wonder about what Israel and Syria will do than it is to decide what we will do in San Diego at our work, with our neighbors, to our friends.

What a hunger we have for sensationalism. “Show us a sign,” the disciples pleaded with Jesus. He taught them instead how the kingdom of right relationships was like a seed slowly unfolding, pushing up through the soil, unfurling its blades, nourishing its tender fruit buds, coming quietly and slowly to fruit time and harvest. But they preferred quick magic.

“When will the end of things come?” they asked; when will the great final catastrophe engulf the wicked and the dramatic rescue of the good be effected? “I do not know the times and hours for such things,” He replied; “this is in God’s hands; do your work while it is day. Go on with the daily business of living and make a good job of it.” But he lost some of their attention when he talked of such quiet, simple things.

It really is hard, isn’t it, to believe in the value of quiet, motionless moments? Perhaps this is why we downgrade the immense significance of the worship hour on Sunday morning. That time of quiet, of waiting, of opening up to the deep tides of the sea of God is neither so highly valued nor so diligently prepared for as it ought to be. In our frenziedly busy times, when activism is praised by many as the chief or only good, it is hard to think that worship is worth the time spent in it. Our problem, as Pat Harrell has pointed out in a splendid bulletin from Houston, is that we do not realize how importantly men may be moving ahead when they are quite still and rapt in awed discoveries.

Finally, I received on that last Sunday morning a powerful shock as it dawned on me for the first time how many places offered spectacle and entertainment and how few notices there were of opportunities to serve. It seemed suddenly amazing to me that there was not, on the church page at least, a list of OPPORTUNITIES TO SERVE, a catalog of specific things that needed to be done by Christian volunteers that very day. A telephone number to call where someone needed help; an institution which would be grateful for two hours of your work in the name of the Lord. I got to dreaming of some church page editor on a large daily whose duty it would be to collect and sort out the cries for help and the opportunities to do something with ears, or tongue, or hands.

Then, on a Sunday morning, I could say to myself: “After my worship experience, where will I go today to put my emotion to work, to do some useful thing in the name of my God?” I would consult the list, make a call, be accepted, and hurry off to join others who like myself had volunteered in the name of our common Master. I might ask, out of some idle interest, what the fellow with the shovel or scrub brush on my left was, and learn he was a Baptist or a Quaker or a Congregationalist, but our peripheral differences would not matter much as we painted or lifted or scraped. Another dream, true enough, but the world has ever and again been saved by dreams. Especially God’s.—Wichita State U., Wichita, Kan.