Me of Little Faith
Sometimes it seemed as if all we ever did in Wichita Falls was go to church twice on Sundays and once on Wednesdays. But even though my Church of Christ upbringing never really took, somehow Mother and I eventually found common ground.
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The end of my childhood was marked by “the age of accountability.” Church elders knew that if the message didn’t get through to us in the emotional topsy-turvy of our teens, they would likely lose us. The pressure was orchestrated and skillful. And after we were baptized, the compulsory hours increased. Tacked on now was Young People’s Meeting, on Sunday afternoon. The father of one of my friends volunteered to teach those sessions. He declared one day that not only was there just one true faith, there was only one true Bible: the King James translation. Smart alecks set in reminding him that Jesus spoke Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. The English we read was that of scholars who’d translated the Bible at the direction of King James I of England in 1611. Growing agitated, he brandished his Bible and raised his voice. “This is how people in the Lord’s time talked.”
These people read, studied, and reflected on the Bible all the time. But the church in those years maintained a persistent bias against too much formal education. One Sunday afternoon we watched a filmstrip that the church had bought as a teaching aid. The narrative stated matter-of-factly that God created the world in 4004 B.C. I blinked in amazement. I knew about the dispute between those who embraced the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and those who accepted Genesis as a literal account of creation. I thought there was room in my belief for both evolution and God. But in school I was learning about carbon 14 and other radioisotopes that dated earthly matter as far back as 4.5 billion years. Here was an argument endorsed by my church that dinosaurs, ice ages, and saber-toothed tigers had come and gone over a course of 6,000 years. The strange precision of that date, 4004 B.C., stuck with me. Years later I would learn that it was a chronology proposed by an Anglo-Irish archbishop named James Ussher in 1650. More than 300 years later, it was still offered as gospel in my church.
An oft-stated verity in our church held that Christians should be in this world but not of it. As Jesus said to the Pharisees about paying taxes to the Romans: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” The church of my rearing seemed almost apolitical. Then came the presidential election of 1960. John F. Kennedy was Catholic, and the Vatican was given to rhetoric that the papacy had divine authority over governments. Our preacher was a volatile Italian American and a convert from Catholicism. He swore that if Kennedy won, the pope was going to take over America. He scheduled a Sunday night sermon and urged the faithful to fill up the church with family, friends, and neighbors and let them hear why they had to vote for the Protestant Richard Nixon. At fifteen I was moving toward Kennedy’s politics, but more than that, I thought that hauling the church into the fray was just wrong, in Mother’s words. I had a big row with her and refused to go hear the preacher’s sermon. She clenched her jaw in the face of my defiance and went without me, and she never brought it up again. My dad, a union Democrat, wanted no part of Nixon. Mother often said that 1960 was the only time they ever canceled each other’s votes. It was the only time she ever voted for a Republican.
THE SERMONS AND INVITATION hymns didn’t summon us only to baptism. If you were feeling exceptionally sinful, you went down front to be restored. The preacher handed you a pencil and a card, and you were supposed to write down why guilt was consuming you. After reading your confession aloud, the preacher would lead a prayer. When I was in high school, the frequency of my journeys down the aisle began to embarrass me. One Sunday night, two hours after being restored, I was tussling in the back of somebody’s old Mercury, trying to wriggle my hand inside a girl’s pantyhose. Rejected, I threw my head against the back of the seat and thought: I am a hypocrite. This is not working.
When I wasn’t in school or church and all attempts at athletics had failed, my adolescence was consumed by riding around: nights spent drag racing in somebody’s fast Chevrolet, dinners on the greasy mush of a chili cheeseburger, my first drunk on an especially nauseous spirit, cherry sloe gin. I stepped carefully around my dad, who was large and had a hot temper, but with Mother I could be such a jerk. I bullied, manipulated, and lied, thinking I could make her believe anything. As graduation approached, Mother told me that if I’d go to college at Abilene Christian—the intellectual point central of the Church of Christ—they would somehow find the money to send me. I declined. Then they told me my only other choice was Midwestern, the small state college in Wichita Falls. They really didn’t have the money to send me away to school. Self-centered and resentful, still living at home, killing time between classes playing Ping-Pong at the college’s Church of Christ Bible Chair, I bolted after a year and followed a friend’s lead into the Marine Reserves. I admired his tan and uniform and the way he’d filled out when he came to church one Sunday. I soon learned that Marine boot camp was as brutal and hellish as advertised. I moaned and groaned in my letters. The last few months, when I was assigned to an artillery unit at Camp Pendleton, in California, Mother would send me cans of her moist, cellophane-wrapped cakes. A sergeant and my fellow privates raised a hooting jeer when these packages arrived at mail call, but many crowded around to share the goodies. I went back to Wichita Falls thirty pounds heavier and, for the first time, possessed of a violent temper.
One of the strongest memories I have of my dad is the slammed door of resentment when he had to leave the house late at night and take a hated turn on the graveyard shift. But it was his job, and a good one. Not long after I came back from California, the refinery shut down. He had to take a big pay cut, a loss of seniority, and a transfer to another plant in an East Texas town, Mount Pleasant. For several months he lived alone in a garage apartment while my mother worked in a dime store and managed the sale of their home, required by a notorious attempt to widen a nearby expressway. Lonesome for company, he started going to the Baptist church again. Eventually, she was able to join him in Mount Pleasant. In their marriage and standard of living, they were almost back where they started, in 1940. That was a wrenching time for them, and my burst of wildness couldn’t have helped. But they shed old routines and fell back in love.
While they pinched pennies in the pine forest, I went to college and lived in our condemned house, which the city had not yet scraped off the foundation. Mother sent me her paychecks from another variety store where she worked in Mount Pleasant; I had a series of part-time jobs from which I was fired with cause. I hosted loud parties. One night I watched a stoned twerp grind out a cigarette in their carpet as if it was a chore she just had to finish. One weekend at my reserve meeting, we were given immunization shots; some friends and I killed time playing darts with unused hypodermic needles. At home I was putting my fatigues in the laundry bin when I noticed I had a couple of the plastic-cased syringes in my shirt pocket. Without thinking, I stuck them in the medicine cabinet. The next time Mother came to visit, she confronted me, quivering with anger. She had put up with a lot, but had I sunk to shooting drugs in my veins? For once my preposterous explanation was true.
I eventually came out of my sorry years as a pool-hall lout, but not through prayer and faith. I took an interest in reading and writing—and I just grew up. For a while I continued to go to church, changing my membership to a suburban congregation that was less charged with personal history. My mother was hurt; in cutting my ties with our neighborhood church, I’d insulted her in some way. “I’m going, Mother,” I told her. But more and more, that was another lie. One day a member of the new church came by to see if anything was the matter. That was probably the end of it. I went to the door shirtless, a beer in one hand and a bowl of chili in the other. All either one of us could do was smile.
WHEN I WAS AN ADULT, Mother left me to my own beliefs, and I respected hers. She pressed too hard with me when I was a child, but she never imposed her opinions on her neighbors. I am so weary of the anger and browbeating that pervades much religion now. Mother’s was a quiet and very private faith that sustained her in a life that never got much easier than when she was living in unplumbed farm shacks in the Depression. Daddy was baptized into her Mount Pleasant church when he was about seventy. He said he was playing golf with a group of men that included her preacher, and they started talking. He knew by then he was staring down the black hole of Alzheimer’s; I’m certain his long-resisted conversion was in part a gesture of love for her.
She made up her mind she was going to care for him at home. She managed that almost to the end, and it broke her own health. From Austin I drove up to see them as often as I could, and I started taking a coat and tie with me. After my dad got so ill, he stayed with a caregiver who was Mother’s last best friend while I took her to church. I didn’t feel comfortable singing the songs, but she and I held the hymnal, and I enjoyed hearing her. When she sang, she sounded young again. As always, I drifted off during the sermons. After the invitation hymn, men offered prayers and passed the Communion trays. Though my faith was gone, I took Communion with her, breaking off nibbles of the unleavened wafer that in the sacrament symbolizes Christ’s flesh. Then we took sips of the grape juice symbolizing his blood from the jiggers in another tray handed down the pew. I didn’t do that to make some promises to her I couldn’t keep. It was just a way of honoring the way she raised me.
Afterward people would come up to her to say hello and ask about my father. “This is our son,” she introduced me proudly. The little woman who once sped along the sidewalks was hobbled now by osteoporosis and the onset of Parkinson’s. It wouldn’t be long before I walked with a cane myself. We made our way slowly, with her holding onto my arm. For a moment the world was again as she wanted it to be. The sun was high up and gleaming. It was a Sunday morning, and we were on our way home from church.
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