People Who Matter

On this Christmas morning I happened to pick up the end-of-year issue of Newsweek (December 28, 2009), which bears this headline on its cover: "People who Matter on What Matters Most." The "people who matter" are leaders in business, government, and entertainment. They talk with interviewers about the issues of the day as they view them.

My thoughts immediately turned to the Christmas story. The people who mattered were a group of shepherds and a young family spending a night away from home. The person who mattered most was a helpless baby resting in a feed trough in a stable. What matters most, in this story, is the coming of God into the world and the resulting life characterized by love, peace, forgiveness, and healing.

Just before picking up the magazine, I read the morning paper. A front-page feature story describes Danny Stone, unemployed and homeless, staying with his wife and their five-year old daughter in a cheap motel in Nashville while he looks for work. ( http://www.tennessean.com/article/20091225/NEWS01/912250343/Family+that+lost+home+finds+hope+in+Nashville+ )

According to the story, the Otter Creek Church of Christ is helping the Stone family to get through this crisis. For this group of Jesus worshippers, the Stones are people who matter. For the Stones, Associate Minister Doug Sanders and his fellow church members are people who matter. And the thing that matters most is that God has come to them all in the person of Jesus to bring love, peace, forgiveness, and healing.

All of us, then, are people who matter. And what matters most is the life-changing presence of God in the person of Jesus Christ.

Since I retired in 2006 I have been culling out my library to reduce 4000 volumes to 1000. It's an arduous task, but enlightening, as I examine each book and decide which is the most valuable. I came across an essay by F. W. Boreham on "The Supremacies of Life," in which he says all our experiences can rise to a point where we see what is most desirable. Reflecting on Paul's request to Timothy to bring him his books, but especially the parchments (Scriptures), here's what he says about books:

"The same is, of course, true of our libraries. Like the apostle, we are all fond of books; but our book-shelves dwindle in intensity as they grow in extensity. As life goes on we accumulate more and more volumes, but we set more and more store on a few selected classics of the soul. The number of those favourites diminishes as the hair bleaches. We have a score; a dozen; and at length three. And if the hair gets very white, we find the three too many by two. 'Especially the parchments'!

"Sir H. M. Stanley set out upon his great African exploration with quite a formidable library. One cannot march eighteen hours a day under an equatorial sun, and he gave a prudent thought to the long encampments, and armed himself with books. But books are often heavy—in a literal as well as in a literary sense. And one by one his native servants deserted him (the pyramid towering towards its apex). And, as a consequence, Stanley was compelled to leave one treasured set of volumes at this African village, and another at that, until at last he had but two books left—Shakespeare and the Bible. And we have no doubt that, had Africa been a still broader continent than it actually is, even Shakespeare would have been abandoned to gratify the curiosity of some astonished Hottentots or pigmies.

"It all comes back to that pathetic entry in Lockhart's diary at Abbotsford: 'He [Sir Walter Scott] then desired to be wheeled through his rooms in the bath-chair. We moved him leisurely for an hour or more up and down the hall and the great library. "I have seen much," he kept saying, "but nothing like my ain hoose—give me one turn more!"

"Next morning he desired to be drawn into the library and placed by the central window, that he might look down upon the Tweed. Here he expressed a wish that I should read to him. I asked, from what book. He said, "Need you ask? There is but one!" I chose the fourteenth chapter of St. John's Gospel.' He listened with mild devotion, and, when Lockhart had finished reading of the Father's house and the many mansions, he said, 'That is a great comfort!' The juxtaposition of phrases is arresting: `In the great library'—'there is but one book!' The pyramid stood squarely upon its solid foundation, but it towered grandly and tapered finely towards its narrow but majestic summit."

Billy Graham and Politics

My summer reading has included a new book about Billy Graham. I discovered it is also about my life and the life of all us Christians in the South.

Billy Graham And The Rise Of The Republican South
By Steven P. Miller
Illustrated. 304 pp. University of Pennsylvania Press. $29.95

Steven P. Miller has given us a political biography of Billy Graham that will help us remember the last half of the twentieth century in America and will open our eyes to the interplay of religion and politics that has shaped us, especially in the South.

As a Baptist who came of age in the fifties and lived to see a new century, I have always been keenly aware of Billy Graham. He put our people on the map and in the media. He preached the simple Gospel and conducted himself with integrity when many television preachers did not.

As a southerner living through the end of segregation, I found encouragement in Graham’s stand for accepting all people in his crusades. I had some second thoughts after Watergate because of his close association with President Nixon. These increased in recent years when the Nixon tapes revealed the two men engaged in anti-Semitic conversation. Still, Graham stood tall, apologizing when he was wrong and continuing his mission to preach to the world.

Now the Billy Graham era is at an end, and we can look back and evaluate. Steven Miller has done this. Based on extensive research and documented with copious end notes, the book portrays Graham not only as a major religious leader of the twentieth century but also as a major player in American politics, especially the Southern Strategy begun by Nixon that ended Democratic control of the South and delivered Dixie into the ranks of the Republicans.

Miller is a historian, teacher, and writer with a Ph. D. from Vanderbilt University. He writes from a Christian (Mennonite) background and understands Graham’s religious basis. He affirms Graham’s accomplishments but gives a multi-layered analysis of his involvement in politics and culture, sometimes explaining the evangelist’s actions as motivated by ambition and sometimes questioning the accuracy of his memory of events.

Graham came to national attention with his 1949 Los Angeles crusade. He was always primarily a preacher, but he welcomed the attention of the media and the politicians. He wanted to present the Christian message to the whole world. Presidents welcomed him to the White House, beginning with Dwight Eisenhower, and he was friend and counselor to every president up to and including George W. Bush, though he was not close to Jimmy Carter, a fellow Baptist. He was closest of all, too close he later realized, to Nixon. Graham has been a registered Democrat, but he actively supported Nixon and other Republicans to a degree most people won’t be aware of until they read Miller’s book.

Graham’s theology and his global strategy led him early on to distance himself from the racial segregation of his native South and insist that crusade attendance be open to all. He knew he could not be tied to the segregated institutions of the South if he was to preach to the whole world. But his belief in divine sanction for the authority of government caused him to resist the demonstrations and civil disobedience of the desegregation movement. Southern segregationists found comfort in his insistence that the only a change of heart, not law, could bring about change in race relations. Instead of supporting Martin Luther King, Jr., Graham counseled patience and caution and continued to keep friendly relations with segregationist politicians.

The reader will sympathize with Graham as she or he learns of the pressures that were put on him by the politicians, and many of us Baptists in the South will have to confess that we did not do enough either to end segregation sooner. But Miller leaves room to conclude that Graham sometimes helped to calm the conflict that raged during the sixties and to keep the country together while slow progress was being made.

This is a book that will help all of us understand what has happened to us these last sixty years. It will especially help us keep our balance between religion and politics, church and state. It is an academic book, published by University of Pennsylvania Press, and therefore will not gain wide readership. But for those of us who lived through these events and tried to maintain integrity in Christian ministry it can be a page-turner.

Recognizing Those Who Defend Us

As Memorial Day approaches I want to share a recent experience. On Monday, May 4, Peggy and I went to Clarksville, Tennessee, about fifty miles northwest of Nashville to meet Stephanie Butler Shorey and her family. Stephanie grew up in our church and is a friend of our daughter, Jennifer. Stephanie is married to Lt. Col. Alan Shorey of the U. S. Army, 101st Airborne Division, stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on the edge of Clarksville.

I performed the marriage ceremony for Al and Stephanie thirteen years ago, when he was a young officer recently graduated from West Point. Stephanie graduated from Middle Tennessee State University with a degree in landscaping. He grew up in Maine. They have two boys, Charlie, eleven, and Alan Patrick, a few years younger. They have lived in five places, including Japan, in thirteen years. Al has served three tours of duty in Iraq and has three times been in vehicles struck by roadside bombs. When he returned last fall he was promoted to Lt. Col., and on May 4, he became commanding officer of the 326th Engineer Battalion, the unit in which he began at Fort Campbell.

The 326th has two of its companies, about 200 troops, in Iraq at present and another company preparing to go back soon. It is also likely that Al and his battalion will be deployed to Afghanistan at some point. As engineers they build roads, bridges, airfields, buildings, and whatever else is needed. They also clear the roads of IEDs (improvised explosive devices).

The occasion for our trip was the change of command ceremony at which Al took command of the battalion. Stephanie led us, along with Al’s parents and his brothers, onto the post, and we gathered at ten in the morning on the Division Parade Ground. The invocation was led by the battalion chaplain, a Baptist, who attended Golden Gate Seminary. The troops stood in formation, an army band played, the parade passed in review, and the colors were passed from the outgoing commander to the incoming one. The history of the battalion was read, including D-day at Normandy and the years in Vietnam, and a colonel from Fort Bragg, who is over the engineers, made a speech as did the outgoing battalion commander. Al spoke briefly to point the way forward.

It was an impressive ceremony, especially when the American flag was saluted. At that point I realized that most of these troops had served in Iraq, many more than once, and would do so again. Some of their comrades died there, or came home wounded. The two absent companies were represented by small contingents that stayed behind at the home headquarters. Instead of company colors, their flag bearers carried bare staffs topped with simple camouflage sheaths. Their banners are on the battlefield. Al told me before the ceremony that it is hard to rest easy when two hundred of your people are in harms way and you may get a call at any time saying someone has been killed.

Stephanie was introduced at the ceremony as part of the leadership team. The army expects the commander’s wife to work for the good of the battalion by helping to support and counsel the families. They sent her to Fort Leonard Wood for a week of training to prepare for her new duties. She received a bouquet of roses at the ceremony and Charlie and Alan Patrick were given 101st Airborne coins with their names engraved on the back.

As a civilian, I have never been much exposed to the military. I was impressed. The officers I met were sharp, polite, well-educated, and highly-trained. I had a new understanding of where our defense dollars go. I was glad to know these people are there when we need them. As a Christian, I wish we did not have to go to war, and I don’t always agree with the military actions of our politicians. But I have great respect for the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who defend us. I will pray for them with renewed insight and intent. Two young men who grew up in our church and have parents there aree going to Afghanistan with the Army and the Marine Corps. May God keep them safe and return them to us. And may all of us seek peace, work for peace, and pray for peace.

An Eye-Opening Experience

Tuesday morning, April 7, at two-thirty in the morning, I got up to go to the bathroom. I made my way in the dark with the aid of the dim light coming through the windows. I immediately noticed that something was wrong with my vision. There was a dark area in the visual field of my right eye. When I turned on the bathroom light, it looked like a dark curtain was hanging across the upper left corner of my personal window. I had talked to enough people suffering eye problems to realize that something must be wrong with my retina, the little screen on the back wall of the eye that receives images.

I first thought I should go to the emergency room. Then I decided to call my internist for advice. He suggested I see an ophthalmologist first thing in the morning, since the ER would have to call one and it would probably be several hours before I would be seen.

My next step was to boot up the computer and consult the internet. I confirmed my initial diagnosis of a detached retina. The indications were pretty clear, including the fact that I had done a lot of heavy lifting, moving boxes of books during the previous day. I also realized I had had two symptoms of retina trouble I had not recognized. For a couple of weeks I had noticed a prominent speck floating in my eye. I thought floaters were harmless distractions and ignored it. In fact, a new, dark floater can be an early sign of detachment. I had also had a little blurring of vision in my right eye for two days, but thought it was watering of the eye due to some irritation or allergy and did not consider it serious. It was actually another sign of a retina problem. The heavy lifting just brought the problem to a head.

Retinal detachment occurs when the vitreous substance that fills the eye shrinks and pulls away from the retina. This is normal with aging, but in some cases the vitreous adheres to the retina, pulling it loose. The retina then tears, and the vitreous fluid seeps behind and pulls the retina loose. Unless this is repaired quickly, it will cause permanent loss of sight.

I did not have an ophthalmologist, having relied on an optometrist for my glasses. I did, however, know a church member, Dale Pilkinton, who is one of the leading eye surgeons in Nashville. I called Dale at seven-thirty and was lucky enough to catch him just leaving the house. He said it sounded like a detached retina and told me to come to his office at eight-thirty. He examined my eyes and said I had a very large tear and detachment that would require surgery. He specializes in the front of the eye, cornea and lens, so he called a friend in the building who specializes in the back of the eye, retina and vitreous. Dr. Trent Wallace saw me immediately and scheduled surgery for Thursday, two days away. He also said the tear was large, unusually placed, and would require a pretty serious operation to repair.

I went home to wait and get ready. I applied for an extension for the tax return I was working on, paid my bills, and showed up at Baptist Hospital on Thursday afternoon. I was prepped and anesthetized and didn’t know a thing for several hours. They started with local anesthetic and light sleep but had to resort to a general anesthetic before it was over.

Dr. Wallace made two small incisions in my eye, inserted his instruments, and removed the vitreous. He used a laser to tack down the retina and injected silicone oil to press against it, keep it dry, and hold it in place. We had thought he would use a gas bubble, but the location of the tear called for a different approach. With the oil I did not have to maintain a prolonged face down position, but I did have to do that for periods during the first four days. A gas bubble would have dissipated in a few weeks, but the oil stays in for two months and will have to be surgically removed in June. Until then, my vision in that eye will be blurry. Dr. Wallace also placed a scleral buckle on the outside of the eye. This is a strip of silicone that is attached to the eyeball with stitches. It will be permanent providing a firm surface to hold the retina.

I went home that evening with four kinds of drops for my eye and pills for pain. Dr. Wallace said the procedure went very well, and follow-up exams confirmed that we have a good result. He does not guarantee perfect vision, but thinks it will be good. I will have to get new glasses to compensate for changes in the eye. I had some dull pain for about three weeks, and took a little Percoset and a lot of Tylenol, but it wasn’t too bad, and I now have no pain except for occasional headaches from the blurred vision. The doctor limited my physical activity for a couple of weeks but then released me to do whatever I need to do. There is some chance of detachment in the future, but we will keep a close watch on both eyes. I also have a slight cataract that will be made worse by the silicone. The doctor says that operation will be easy compared to the first one.

Any significant health problem is a crisis that produces many results. You suddenly appreciate the good health, in my case, the good vision, you had taken for granted. You re-evaluate the normal activities that have been interrupted. You realize how much you depend on other people: professional health care providers, family, friends, ministers, fellow church members. You experience your adult children as people who help you rather than people you help. You are forced to take a Sabbath break from regular activities and you have a lot of time to rest, think, and pray. You become frustrated by your limits and by the interruption of normal life. You deal with pain and learn some of its many lessons. You contemplate your future as an aging person, and ultimately as a dying person. You look to God for strength, for healing, and for hope. For all these things, I am grateful. It has been an eye-opening experience.

Freedom and Limits

My grandson, age two and a half, is in a very important stage of development. He is no longer just taking what comes, as an infant must. He is now interacting with the world and with people to shape his experience in ways that he chooses. We adults take that for granted, but for a two year old it is an exciting and frightening challenge. He is wondering, how far can I go? Are there limits to my power? What do I do when I cannot make things go the way I want? What about what other people want? The way he, and others, answer these questions will shape his personality and his life in profound ways.

He stays at our house one day a week, and I spend most of the time playing with him. He has developed a little ritual in our play. He picks up two similar toys, a red truck and a blue truck, for example. He holds them out to me and says, “Papa, which one do you want?” I pick one and say, “The blue one.” He then looks carefully at both of them and says, “I’m going to play with the blue one, you play with the red one.”

With this little game he has exerted his will. He has exercised control over another person, one who is bigger and stronger than he is. He has shaped our experience in the way that he wants. He has learned that he has power to influence the course of events, something we all need to have.

Of course, he does not yet realize that that things are much more complicated than this. I am his grandfather. I am a pushover. I let him win. But actually, I determine which truck he will get by choosing it for myself. Like an omnipotent and omniscient deity, I allow him free will, but I know how he will choose. I am bigger. I could countermand his decision and take the blue truck—or both trucks. But I figure he needs the experience of choosing and winning to encourage him and support him in his development. His parents, his teachers, and the other two year olds at day care will teach him what it means to be the loser and to fail to get his way.

We are all engaged in the process of sorting out freedom and limits, of establishing our competence and self-understanding in a complex world. We need to exercise power and accomplish goals. We also need to understand our limits and the rights of others. Above all, we need to know that we are creatures of a wise and loving creator who gives us great potential and great freedom within rightful limits and asks us to submit everything to the one who made us.

Facebook

Last week I joined the world of Facebook, an internet social networking site. I was moved to do this by meeting a 29 year-old minister who, like most of his age group, is very much tuned in to electronic media—blog, twitter, e-mail, Blackberry, as well as Facebook. I Googled his church website and found a link to Facebook. So now, for better or for worse, I’m in.

I say “for better or for worse” because Facebook exerts a strong pull to get more and more involved. It is what web analysts call “sticky.” You start by joining as a friend of one person. Then you see others you know on their “Wall,” and you link up with them. Then other people see you there and they link up with you, if you grant them permission. Facebook also suggests potential friends based on those you already have. And you can search for people you know by various means and add them to your list if they are already on Facebook. (175,000,000 people are.) It tends to mushroom. I now have thirty-two friends, but some of them have as many as 700. The typical Facebook user spends 169 minutes a week on the site—almost three hours. (See the article “How Facebook Is Taking Over Our Lives,” Fortune, March 2, 2009, p. 49, at http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/16/technology/hempel_facebook.fortune/index.htm )

Facebook was started in 2004 by Mark Zukerberg, a Harvard student who dropped out and spent his college money to build the site. He is now 24 and CEO of a company that is valued at between 3 billion and 15 billion dollars. The site was originally aimed at his friends in the 18 to 24 age group, but today the fastest growing group of users is women 55 and up. I have found a dozen of my high-school classmates from the class of ’56. The site is also very popular with teenagers. When my sixteen-year-old granddaughter saw I was on Facebook she wrote on my wall, “Now you are a hip and happenin’ grandpa.” Seventy percent of users are outside the U.S. and many use the site in languages other than English.

All of this can be very valuable. It can keep you in touch with people you might otherwise neglect or lose from awareness. It provides contact and information about them, including photos and videos, though most Facebook postings are brief and tend to be trivial. It can have a spiritual dimension, if you are moved to pray for your friends and give thanks for them as you come across their postings. On the other hand, it is hard to control—where do you stop? It can be addictive. A TV feature this week told of people who have had to kick the Facebook habit because it was damaging their lives. I have also heard of people giving it up for Lent as a spiritual discipline.

Regardless of the dangers, I'm in. I think it’s great, and it will be especially valuable when I go to the old folks home. If you don’t come to visit me, I’ll see you on Facebook.

The Family at Christmas

On Christmas Day, after we opened our gifts, we sat down to eat. All ten of us gathered around our dining room table. Our daughter and son-in-law came from Texas with their two teenage daughters. Our two sons, who live near us in Nashville were here. One of them is married, and his wife and two-year-old son were with him.

The two-year-old was the center of attention, of course, drawing us together and warming the emotional atmosphere. It was a very happy time.

I sat in my chair at one end of the table, my wife at the other end. As I looked at my family on Christmas Day my heart was full. This kind of fullness or completeness is a religious experience. In fact religion can be defined as that which enables us to experience fullness in life (See the Introduction and first chapter of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age). Jesus said, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly (John 14:10, NRSV).

This fullness is also, for a man of seventy, the hoped-for goal of the late adult stage of life. Erik Erikson characterizes it as integrity, the sense that our life has has meaning and we have made a contribution. It enables us, at the latter stage of life, to look over all of life with happiness and contentment and see that it holds together and is good. The alternatives to this are despair or dogmatic insistence that we were right in spite of our apparent failures.

One of my thoughts that day was of the nature of marriage. Before I married, I tried to imagine what it would be like. I could not visualize what it would be like to be a married person. I certainly could not imagine what it would be like to be a parent. If you had given me a list at that time of all the things we would do through the years, I would have been overwhelmed. But now I look back and review all that has happened and am amazed. I looked at my two-year-old grandson and my teenage granddaughters and recalled the infancy and childhood of our three children. They grew up healthy, finished college with no debts, married, in the case of two of them, and began their own families. They are all employed in useful occupations. I am proud of all of them.

I am aware that some people do not marry, or, if they do, they do not have children. Some marry, and the marriage does not work or is interrupted by illness or death. Marriage and parenthood are not the only ways of experiencing completeness and fullness. Jesus proved that you do not have to have spouse or children to be fully included in the family of God, but you do have to recognize and embrace your inclusion in God's family.

I am also aware that I cannot take credit for all that has happened these seventy years of life or these forty-eight years of marriage. Many others--parents, spouse, friends, teachers, church, school, and community, have all contributed. Above all, God has given us life and the ability to live. Some people in our secular world live full and meaningful lives with no reference to God, but for me there cannot be fullness or completion without transcendence.

As I look at my family and at my life, I find myself thanking God who is the source of it all. I find myself seeking God, who redeems us and forgives our many sins and failures (there are no perfect families or perfect parents or perfect children). I find myself relying on God to support me and my family in the face of all the uncertainties and contingencies of life and death. I find myself trusting God to preserve this great treasure of life and love that we enjoy.

The meaning of Christmas is that God has shown himself trustworthy and faithful by sending his Son, entrusting him in infancy to a human family and creating through him God's family on earth.