When I sat down to write my Easter sermon that next week, I chose as my Old Testament text the story from 2 Samuel about King David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant. This had been no Hebrew sock hop, but an unrehearsed, spontaneous dance of joy, done, so says Scripture, in the raw, in the presence of God. The king of Israel leaped about as the Law, tucked away its box, was carried in procession to the Temple. David’s princess wife watched all this and, like our Session, disapproved of dancing in church, at least without your clothes.
I titled the sermon “The Lord of the Dance.” It was Easter and the topic was resurrection, which I said was God’s dance of life. I referred to the story of David’s dance, but confess that I spiritualized that narrative by disclaiming any notions that we ought literally to imitate David. I speculated that “in the heart of God there is a profound, vibrant, dancing joy, and if there’s a dancing joy in our God, so there should be in us.” I could not resist ending the sermon with a few lines from the folk hymn that lent me the sermon’s title: “They cut me down and I leap up high; I am the life that will never, never die.… Dance then, wherever you may be; I am the Lord of the Dance said He, And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be, And I’ll lead you all in the dance said He.”
In the prayers after the sermon, I dared to pray “that we, Your people, might be filled with Your joy, that our hearts might dance as David danced before the Ark, that we might dance for the goodness of life.” During silent prayer, I asked that God might deepen in me the joy of faith, touch me often with the joy of laughter, and fill me with the spirit of dance.
They say that you should be careful about what you pray for, because you’re liable to get it. I hardly dreamed that my prayer would be answered so soon. I said, “Amen,” and “let us now receive the offering.” I sat down, and the four ushers soberly passed the plates while the organist played a somber and tuneless little ditty. When the offering had been collected, she modulated jerkily into the Doxology, and the ushers marched down the aisle, wooden plates in their hands.
They stopped at the foot of the five carpeted steps that lead up to our very elevated chancel where the communion table sits and where the offering plates are to be placed when full. I always offer a Prayer of Dedication from the top of the steps and, because it’s too far to reach, then walk down to get the plates.
All went as usual until I turned, a plate in each hand, to mount the steps to the chancel and place the offering on the communion table. The hem of my robe had come loose and as I took the first step, my toe caught it. But I didn’t fall. I should have backed down then and there, but years of liturgical habit kept me aimed onward and upward. With my next step, I was further inside the garment. By the time I was to the third step, I realized that I was walking up the inside of my black Geneva pulpit robe. I was nearly on my knees; I could have turned around and sat down on the steps, freed my feet, and started over. It would have been a small indignity, but it is what I should have done.
But I decided to stay the course. I straightened up with all my might. My robe gave way and ripped right at the bottom button. The force of this sudden freedom sent my arms jerking upward. I managed to hold on to the offering plates, but all their contents flew up and back over my head. Offering envelopes, dollar bills, five-dollar bills, quarters, dimes, and nickels rained down upon the heads of four stunned ushers.
Well, my feet were free, but pride still bound my will. I should have turned around to the congregation, bowed theatrically, and accepted the humorous and humbling grace of the moment. But I marched on up the steps as though nothing had happened, and laid the four empty offering plates on the table. The ushers marched back down the aisle through all the offertory debris.
I turned around to return to the pulpit and dared a glance at the larger than usual Easter Sunday congregation. What I saw were the tops of one hundred twenty heads, bowed deeply in prayer so they would not have to look at me. There was not a hint of hilarity, not a giggle or a titter, although I believe that I saw the silk flowers on Ardis Wilcox’s Easter bonnet shaking as though she were stifling laughter. We sang the closing hymn without looking at each other. Angus MacDowell and Jimmy Wilcox used the hymn as cover to deftly gather up the offering scattered over the front third of the church. As I stood in the greeting line after the sermon, two elderly ladies offered to repair my robe, and Arnie Peterson asked with a wink if I’d had a nice trip. Then he slapped me on the arm and said, “Well, see ya next fall.” That stale joke was the nearest anybody came, myself included, to laughing aloud at the accidental offertory dance before the altar of God.
In the sermon I had soberly pronounced that “in the heart of God there is a profound, vibrant, dancing joy.” I had prayed, “Lord, teach me to dance.” Perhaps that prayer was answered and I was presented with a first dancing lesson. To dance, I guess you must be willing to play the fool a bit. In some eyes, all dancing, gratuitous movement that it is, will look foolish. To dance, you must step away from that burdensome consciousness of self. Faith is a dance with divinity, a mad polka done on the grave, kicking your legs back, and shouting out polka “whoops” like the fool you are. And maybe we should even throw money in the air. We should certainly laugh at ourselves when we trip.
I guess that I had not really heard my own Easter sermon. Insecurity stiffened my pride, and I dared not dance when I was asked. Perhaps I will be able to when invited next time.
– 8 –
A Strange Providence
We have weathered another Easter. It always leaves me tired and full of hope—the same kind of tired and full of hope that comes after a long spring day in your vegetable garden. Hard work, no tomatoes yet, but good reason for hope. The Easter Sunday service was packed with the usual holiday contingent of visiting relatives—mostly children and grandchildren come back from assorted suburbs of Minneapolis and Chicago to what some still call home. Then there were a number of locals who surface in church twice a year, drawn up from the murky depths of backsliding by some ancestral memory of poinsettias or lilies and perhaps faith.
Annie and I took a few days off the week after Easter and went up to the Cities. We stayed two nights at the Radisson, saw Cats, and ate in a Northern Italian restaurant we couldn’t afford. Like most tourists, we did our very best not to look like tourists. You do this by walking very fast and being careful not to look up at the IDS Tower or say “excuse me” to people you bump into. You also have to pretend that you’re quite accustomed to paying $21.95 for Veal Marsala that doesn’t include the salad, and that you’re used to seeing people sleeping on the sidewalk and relieving themselves from a curb.
But the hardest part of pretending not to be a tourist from the sticks is resisting the sore temptation to say hi to people you really don’t know, in those careless words revealing the painful truth that you come from somewhere small and in two days you’ll be sent back to where you belong. We had the same waiter three times at the restaurant at the Radisson, twice for breakfast and once for lunch. He was sternly efficient and said “eggs Sardou” as if he maybe could speak French. But his name tag said he was “Andrew.”
The second time he waited on us, it was all we could do to resist the habit of four years in a small town and say: “Well, Andy, good morning, good morning, how about this! How are ya today? Doesn’t seem quite so busy as yesterday, does it?” Instead, I offered a crisp “good morning,” and asked for two coffees. No way he could guess from that we were anything but a couple of sophisticates catching a bite before heading for our offices.
We drove home Thursday afternoon. It had been ages since either of us had been anywhere more exotic than Mankato. Four years had passed since I took the call to go to North Haven. In our minds, it had always been a first solo pastorate, a place to get a start on a mercurial career in the ministry, a place to pass through. Pastors of Second Presbyterian have seldom stayed longer than three or four years.
So it was strange to feel, as we have these last months, that ours was one road show
that might stay in town for a while. Driving home on Highway 169 that afternoon, we found a common intuition becoming words. There was a rightness about us in that little town: Annie comfortable, the kids barely remembering anywhere else, and my work at church accepted, sometimes indulged, but always graciously received. So we said what had been hanging in our thoughts: “Let’s go home and think of it as home, and make it home for a while.” For the first time in my four years in North Haven, I felt I understood what it meant to be called to be a pastor someplace.
We stopped and picked up the kids at the sitter’s and went home to find a note tucked in the screen door. It was from Maureen, our eight-hour-a-week volunteer church secretary. It read: “Minnie MacDowell is pretty sick, thinks she’s dying again, better get over there when you get back.” Minnie is eighty-six and married to Angus. For the last ten years, she has been very organized about dying. She plans to do it “just so” because she has always done everything “just so.” This means she’ll do it at home, in bed, with a fresh nightgown on and the pastor present. There have been two false alarms in the last three years. As the doctor explained to me: “The only problem with Minnie’s plans is that she’s not sick.”
So I climbed right back in the car and headed over to the MacDowells’. Angus greeted me at the door with a grave look, but then Angus has had a grave look since he was twenty-two, or so they tell me. “Thanks for coming, David.” He put his hand on my back just below my neck and gently shepherded me toward the staircase of their old Victorian house. Minnie was upstairs in bed, in a lacy nightgown, her hair newly done, the bedcovers neatly folded just above her waist. She languidly raised her arm for me to take her hand, smiled theatrically, and said, “I’m so glad you made it back in time, Pastor.”
Angus pushed a chair at me from the rear. I sat down, let a moment pass, and asked Minnie if she were comfortable. She nodded slowly and said that the doctor had just left but had been no help. I was getting up nerve to inquire about what the doctor had said, when Minnie, perhaps sensing what I was thinking, said, “Ask me the question, Pastor.”
The question, I had come to know on my last two visits to Minnie’s deathbed, was an essential part of her very precise plans for the day. It was a question that she had been raised to believe was absolutely necessary for a tasteful death. The pastor was to ask: “Are you prepared to die?” The die-ee was to answer: “Yes, Pastor, I am.” Then the pastor read the Twenty-third Psalm and prayed briefly, concluding with the Lord’s Prayer. Then the die-ee died. That was how it was properly done. We had done it twice before, all except for the last part.
I looked helplessly over my shoulder at Angus, who knit his brow and nodded imperceptibly, which I took to mean “Do your job, kid.” So I smiled pastorally at Minnie and said, “Are you prepared to die?”
I almost slid off my chair when she said, “No.” Her lower lip started to quiver, and she looked away from me at the wall.
I squeezed her hand as Angus patted me on the back and said, “Minnie’s got something she’s got to get off her chest.”
At which Minnie choked out the words: “No, Angus, you tell him.”
“David,” Angus began, “you’ll remember that I was the chairman of the Pulpit Nominating Committee that called you to be our pastor four years ago.” I remembered. It had been a committee of only three. They had been through the pastor search process so often as to wink at some of the rules and not take the whole matter with the customary gravity. But as Angus began the tale, he was grave, even for Angus.
“We received twenty-eight dossiers from ministers. We read them all and narrowed the choice down to two, you and the Reverend Mr. Hartwick Benson of Indianapolis. We invited both you and Mr. Benson to visit North Haven. We listened to the both of you preach up in Willmar.” It came back to me as though it were yesterday: a hot day in June, a brand-new pulpit robe fresh from Bentley and Simon, my champion fitsall sermon, my voice cracking during what was meant to be a thunderous conclusion. After it was over, I made my peace with the prospect of settling for a position even less desirable than North Haven, Minnesota. What elation, what affirmation, when a simple handwritten note came four days later postmarked “N. Haven, Minn.” There was no heading, only a date, and then “Dear Sir: We are most pleased to inform you.…”
“David,” Angus went on as his eyes shifted from me to his wife, “Minnie was secretary to our committee. She typed up all the letters. She typed up one to Reverend Benson and one to you. Somehow they got into the wrong envelopes. Mr. Benson got your letter and you got Mr. Benson’s letter.”
At this, Minnie started dabbing her eyes with her hanky and then wrapping it tightly around her index finger in a sort of penitential self-mortification. “We never realized the mistake until you called on the phone to say yes, you’d come. You were so eager, we just decided, well, what the heck, and let it go. A few weeks later, I heard Mr. Hartwick Benson got a call to a church in Hawaii.” Angus put his hand on my shoulder and gave a squeeze (a gush of empathy for Angus). Minnie was slowly shaking her head. She said, “I just couldn’t die with such a thing on my conscience.”
But all of a sudden, it wasn’t Minnie who was dying. It was me. Noting my stunned silence, she pushed herself up to a sitting position, ordered Angus to make hot tea, and resolved to postpone her death. They served me tea with shortbread, and Angus commented how amazingly helpful my visit was to the state of Minnie’s health. Looking sideways at her, he said to me, “A person always feels better when they get something off their chest.” Their souls may have been unburdened, but mine was loaded. I got in the car and headed home, wherever that was.
This near-deathbed revelation derailed the sense of rightness about being in North Haven that Annie and I had felt just a few hours ago. That wave of acceptance that had washed over us as we drove home was receding to the sea. My “call” was nothing but Minnie mixing up two letters.
I drove north on Main toward the bridge and pulled over to the side of the road on the northeast edge of town. The slough that lies alongside the road is an elbow-shaped marsh that used to be a bend in the river until the river changed course some eighty years ago. North Haven, built on the river, suddenly found itself a half mile away, astride a languid stretch of shallow water and marshland that went nowhere. “Stranded water, the river not where it was supposed to be,” I said to myself. It was very quiet. I heard a blue heron call and then saw it take to wing. There are no herons on the river itself. The water moves too fast and there are too many boats. There was a rightness about this marsh that should have been the river. The heron, the cattails, the evening breeze just troubling the shallow water. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, but it was.
A memory came to me from my seminary days. A strident old Calvinist professor of theology was lecturing on the will of God. He had argued hard for a high view of providence. To make the point perfectly clear, he ambled over to the classroom window and said, “Do you see that man leaning on that lamppost by the bus stop down there?” I could see him then and I can see him in my mind’s eye now. He was wearing a business suit and a hat and was fumbling in his pocket for something. After we had all had a look, the professor paused dramatically, and said slowly, “From the very beginning of time, God has intended that man to be standing there at this very moment.”
We didn’t like the idea. It rankled all our notions of free will and human independence. I remember some pundit in the class asking, “But what if he just got off at the wrong bus stop?”
The professor raised his eyebrows and replied, “The wrong bus stop from whose point of view?”
I know that so much that has come upon me in life I did not search out and choose, but rather found by chance and accepted as grace. The will of God is an infinitely intricate weaving of incidents and accidents, plans and providence. Sometimes it works through us, sometimes in spite of us, but in all things, it can work for good. The rightness Annie and I had felt about North Haven that afternoon was not diminished by a deci
sion made four years ago to call Hartwick Benson as pastor. It was probably a good choice. He was older and more experienced than I.
This is home because Minnie and a few hundred other people trust me to hold their hands should they die. It is home because Angus and Minnie dared to tell me the truth. It is home because old ladies reach out to touch our children as they pass by in church as if they were their own. It is home because the checker in the market calls me by my name. It is home because I don’t want to go anywhere else. What I know now is that how this came to be home is a stranger story than I had thought. But the story usually is stranger than we first thought. I drove home to tell Annie that Minnie MacDowell had lived to die another day and that I thought I knew where home was.
– 9 –
Reunion
This past week Annie and I made it back to my old hometown, Peeksborough, Pennsylvania. Our trip was fairly big news here in North Haven, making lead story in the North Haven Herald’s “Out and About” column. Other people’s business, especially their travels, dinner guests, and hospitalizations, constitute hard news in a town like this. When Angus and Minnie took their big trip to England and Scotland two years ago, the Herald did a four-week series with pictures.
Our trip to Peeksborough was occasioned by an invitation I got in the mail back in March to attend my high school class reunion. “The Class of ’68, Peeksborough High School, cordially invites You to Attend a Reunion Gala.” Enclosed was a schedule listing precisely what constitutes a “gala” in suburban Philadelphia, all of which sounded singularly tame, even by the standards we’ve become accustomed to here. Also enclosed was a listing of the eighty-three members of the class of ’68, where they were living and what they were doing, more or less.
I scanned the list and immediately decided that I would not be going. Under the address column, I saw places like San Jose, Dallas, Chicago, and Stamford, Connecticut. And then there was me: “Battles, Rev. David, Northaven, Minnesota.” They didn’t even get the place spelled right.
Good News from North Haven Page 6
