VIGNETTES
ROBERT MEYERS

Touch and Learn

It is Sunday morning. My little son Devon sits in church beside Winfred, a black boy his own age. Each is quietly busy with whatever tiny distractions will let them ignore me, a perfectly reasonable response to words not aimed at them.

Suddenly Devon looks over at Winfred’s head with its wiry, tightly-curled hair. Passive speculation lasts only a few seconds before he reaches his hand up and touches it down gently on top of the black boy’s head. His fingers rub the wiry little whorls, feeding on this strange difference. Then, without a word, he brings his hand back to himself.

Winfred accepts instantly the simple, warm curiosity that began this game. His small black hand goes up to my son’s straight silky-blond hair. With visible delight he tastes with his fingers this peculiarity of his friend’s and then, without a word, he too returns his hand to its former business.

Neither says a word then or later. The incident is closed, each has found what he sought, and for them there was nothing strange about their candid need to touch and learn. But for those of us who saw it that day it seemed a minuscule parable of the way we might reach out in trusting honesty to bridge the gaps that separate us.

Living Death

I read somewhere of a discreet female crab named the Hapalocarcinus marsupialis who counters the hazards of sea life by taking up residence when very young in the fork of two coral branches. These gradually form a cage around her so that nothing predatory can get at her. She comes to be completely enclosed, absolutely safe, with only the total loss of freedom ever to move again as the price she pays.

This young crab symbolizes the philosophy some have in their religious life. They cooperate with others to build slowly and patiently a rock-hard prison around their minds, excluding sympathetic consideration of any ideas which contradict those they have decided are true. They boast of being protected from the dangerous “world”, never realizing that they have condemned themselves to a kind of living death.

New Source of Power

One Wednesday evening we had a young woman talk to us of her baptism in the Holy Spirit and her experiences with speaking in tongues. A former student of mine, her manner was poised and gracious. She talked calmly of having spoken in tongues once or more each day for over a year and seemed radiantly certain that the experience had brought new power into her life.

When one of our ladies asked if she would pray in tongues she replied that although she did not wish to do so as a “parlor trick”, she would do so if we had a definite request. Another lady asked for prayer for a black girl we had tried futilely to help, and the young woman consented to pray.

She began in English and spoke a lovely prayer in behalf of the girl named. Then she began, without perceptible change in voice modulation or emotion, to speak sounds which were not comprehensible to us although they were both melodious and rhythmical. There was nothing in the least theatrical about her prayer. It continued to have dignity.

She claimed that her first tongue-speaking was in Latin, a language she had not learned. A college teacher, she had been translated by Latin teachers who heard her. She did not know what language she was now speaking, but she claimed to understand in her own heart what she was saying.

She claimed some extraordinary cures were being wrought through the power of the Holy Spirit, adding that some were even being raised from the dead in “foreign lands, where people are less prejudiced.”

I felt that a skeptic could reply: “And where people are more superstitious, less scientifically oriented, and less easily checked out by adequate methods of verification.” But a skeptic also would have had to deal with her confidence and her winning humility as she told us joyously of the power that had come into her life.

Our guest was neither stupid nor hypocritical. Whether she had simply looked for something new and helpful until she half-created it, I do not know. I came away from the evening with great sympathy for her, but with the persistent conviction that my mind is one with Paul’s who, though he would not have forbidden her, preferred to speak five words with his understanding than ten thousand in an unknown tongue. What perhaps remained longest in our minds about the evening was the radiant joy this young woman felt about her devotion to the Lord. If we were not sure that her specific experience was the way for us, we were at least convinced anew of the drabness of much that passes for Christian commitment. Churches are full of people who are not satisfied and who want to find some new source of power. That is a fact which no single one of us can dare to forget.

To Young Preachers

I sometimes remember, with a slight shudder, the early age at which I began to preach. Fifteen years old, armed with some two hundred memorized proof texts and a half-dozen sermon outline books, I assaulted my elders each Sunday morning with perfect confidence that while I might be young the Truth was eternal, and I had it.

My transportation was a Model A Ford with maroon body and orange wheels (I had exquisite color sense). It must have been some sight, it and I, traveling down the graveled, wash-boardy road to the small schoolhouse in Ryal, Oklahoma. And when I got there, how had I nerve enough to speak? What had I to say except second-hand messages and untested truths? Nothing, really, but I was blissfully ignorant of the fact.

Remembering those days, I dedicate to all young preachers this passage from Anthony Trollope’s fine nineteenth century novel, Barchester Towers:

“It often surprises us that very young men can muster courage to preach for the first time to a strange congregation. Men who are as yet but little more than boys, who have but just left, what indeed we may not call a school, but a seminary intended for their tuition as scholars, whose thoughts have been mostly of boating, cricketing, and wine parties, ascend a rostrum high above the heads of the submissive crowd, not that they may read God’s word to those below, but that they may preach their own word for the edification of their hearers.

“It seems strange to us that they are not stricken dumb by the new and awful solemnity of their position. ‘How am I, just turned twenty-three, who have never yet passed ten thoughtful days since the power of thought first came to me, how am I to instruct these grey beards, who with the weary thinking of so many years have approached so near the grave? Can I teach them their duty? Can I explain to them that which I so imperfectly understand, that which years of study may have made so plain to them? Has my newly acquired privilege, as one of God’s ministers, imparted to me as yet any fitness for the wonderful work of a preacher’?”

Trollope thinks twenty-three too early! Many of my friends began at sixteen and eighteen. How insouciant and sure we were as we went to our “appointments”. I suspect that these friends of the past, wherever they are now, join me in hoping that the gracious Lord will forgive us for all the times we were so confidently ignorant, and for the loud noises we made in the mistaken notion that we were speaking something profound.

The “Pure Church”

In a recent Christian Chronicle note Dow Merritt, a marvelous old Christian gentleman who has sacrificed much in order to live our his convictions, says something interesting about the church in Africa as contrasted with the church in America (he means the Church of Christ). He says that he and his wife “have decided that you may have to go to Africa to find the pure church after a while.”

This “pure church” idea has been a will-o’-the-wisp for several generations, leading churchmen through some mighty boggy ground. There never was a “pure church”, except in the mind of God. The moment the idea gets embodied in men it stops being pure. Mr. Merritt finds the church in America too materialistic and unsociable, so it isn’t hard to see why the church in Africa is superior to it. His wife believes that the Lord has taken his church to Africa and that the Africans will have to come over here and evangelize America by and by.

We shall probably all be happier if we accept the conditions under which churches must exist. Composed of human beings, they will always be. Instead of concentrating on “purifying” the church (which inevitably takes the form of concern with its music, its hierarchy, its interpretations), it might be preferable to learn how to love its widely varied individuals into greater maturity, recognizing all the while that none of us ever escape entirely the limiting matrixes in which we were born and reared.

Middle East at Last

And while the Chronicle is still in mind, how is this lead sentence from a news story printed there: “Thirty-seven people were baptized in the first gospel meeting held in the Middle East since the time of the Apostles?”

The Middle East is a pretty big chunk of real estate. Nineteen hundred years is a pretty long time. The Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians have been preaching in various parts of the Middle East for the last couple of hundred years. Before them, at various times, there were others who claimed to be Christians and who told the story of Christ on Middle East soil.

But no matter. The Church of Christ had never been on that territory with a gospel meeting until a few months ago, so the gospel had not been preached there since the Apostles went out from the Fifth and Main Street Church of Christ in Jerusalem. Let us hope that the people of the Middle East are properly appreciative of our having gotten, at long last, to them.