Monthly Musing . . .
THEN
AND NOW
Robert
Meyers
One of the most delightful and poignant books a person with a Church of Christ background can read is Edmund Gosse's 19th century Father and Son, the true story of a boy's strict religious training by a father who clung tenaciously to extreme literalism in interpretation of the Bible.
Young Gosse's father and mother were in almost total agreement religiously. He explains it in words that will ring a familiar bell for some who read this: "So far as the sects agreed with my Father and my Mother, the sects were walking in the light; wherever they differed from them, they had slipped more or less definitely into a penumbra of their own making, a darkness into which neither of my parents would follow them.
"Hence, by a process of selection, my Father and my Mother alike had gradually, without violence, found themselves shut outside all Protestant communions, and at last they met only with a few extreme Calvinists like themselves, on terms of what may almost be called negation — with no priest, no ritual, no festivals, no ornament of any kind, nothing but the Lord's Supper and the exposition of Holy Scripture drawing these austere spirits into any sort of cohesion. They called themselves 'the Brethren,' simply: a title enlarged by the world outside into 'Plymouth Brethren.'"
How like the childhood of many of us this is. If the other religious folk agreed with us in any matter, on that point they walked in the light. If they differed, they were in darkness. By such a process, the walls contract upon a mighty small Brotherhood at last. To one within it, of course, it seems large, just as one's little home town seems a place of infinite space until he goes away into the wide world and then returns one day to discover how cramped and narrow it is.
To make the analogy between Gosse's world and my own even closer, I recall that we were always annoyed when the naughty unknowing chose to enlarge our simple designation of ourselves as 'Christians' to 'Church of Christ Christians' or, worse, 'Campbellites.'
But we had that same marvelous assurance that young Gosse's parents had. No matter that the Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians might number some of the "finest" people in town. No matter that they had in their numbers doctors, teachers, lawyers and bankers — all with more formal education than even our elders had — they were still in hopeless error and doomed to flames.
Why we should have been the Elect, the only Chosen of God to read the Word infallibly, we did not bother to ponder. We just accepted that happy fact and felt, some of us at least, more than a little smug as we walked past those handsome edifices of error.
Like young Gosse, I learned that my elders did not always speak the truth to me. He once asked his father very carefully about what God would do if he bowed down to an idol. His father assured him that God would be very angry, and would signify that anger, if one in a Christian country bowed down to wood and stone. Inevitably, young Gosse decided to put that to the test. He prayed to a chair as if it were God, and he waited.
"God would certainly exhibit his anger is some terrible form, and would chastise my impious and wilful action. I was very much alarmed, but still more excited; I breathed the high, sharp air of defiance. But nothing happened; there was not a cloud in the sky, not an unusual sound in the street. Presently I was quite sure that nothing would happen. I had committed idolatry, flagrantly, and deliberately, and God did not care.
"The result of this ridiculous act was not to make me question the existence and power of God; those were forces which I did not dream of ignoring. But what it did was to lessen still further my confidence in my Father's knowledge of the Divine mind. My Father had said, positively, that if I worshipped a thing made of wood, God would manifest his anger. I had then worshipped a chair, made (or partly made) of wood, and God had made no sign whatever. My father, therefore, was not really acquainted with the Divine practice in cases of idolatry."
It is hardly necessary to remind ourselves how often our Sunday School teachers, our pulpiteers, and our parents made casual, extravagant statements to children about what God would do in certain circumstances, only to be found out by those same sharp-witted children when they discovered that God does not operate at all in the ways claimed for Him. When a child asks about God, and about the will and practices of God, adults had best take time to make a careful and exceedingly honest answer. If they don't, faith in God may go swooshing down the drain along with faith in Papa.
Gosse writes tenderly of his father's faith, though it ceased to nourish him when he became himself an adult. He recalls certain old hymns which he could not repeat in his adult years without the most poignant emotions, even though he had come to disbelieve and even dislike their imagery and melody.
I suppose many who read this have felt the same. There are moments when I hear some group singing one of the old "Invitation" songs like "Why Not Tonight?" or "Jesus is Calling" or "Just As I Am," and find that my heart has grown full and my eyes cloudy with the memories of those far-off times when I stood beside my mother and father, my hand in one of theirs, singing lustily away.
I know quite as well as Thomas Wolfe that one cannot go home again, that there is no turning back on the long, long adventure of the human spirit. But occasionally a snatch of some old melody, a phrase floating by out of my past, a memory of all the patterns that shaped my childhood years — and I am undone by nostalgia.