Fathers and Sons

“You’re not so different from me,” the father said to the son.

The son furrowed his brow, looking puzzled.

“Not so different from you?” he said. “You don’t know that.”

The father looked down, studying his calloused hands. He patted his son’s knee—his pant leg caked with mud—and scooted closer. They were sitting on the front step of the house’s wraparound porch.

A spring breeze rustled the maple trees. A cloud of dust kicked up on the gravel road, which wound from the highway down a lane to the farmhouse.

The father turned to his son and smiled, slightly, shaking his head in a knowing way, the way fathers do sometimes.

A year earlier, the father had said goodbye to his son. In that time, he hadn’t heard from him, didn’t know what had happened to him, whether he were alive or dead. That was the hardest thing—the not knowing.

Now, the father sat with him, looking out onto the road. His boy was a man now.

“I’ll tell you a little story, Son,” he said to him. They sat in the breeze, which carried the smell of fresh-tilled earth. Soon, it would be planting time.

“If you’re granddaddy Pete was here he’d tell you himself.”

The father told the story of a boy who didn’t like the words, “No, “You can’t,” “You shouldn’t,” “You mustn’t.” “That boy,” his father said, “was like a horse without bit or bridle. Just wanting to run free.”

He told how the boy’s parents had done everything to try “to rein him in,” to keep him from hurting himself or others, but the boy just wouldn’t listen.

All other options exhausted, the father decided to send his “wild” son off to a special boarding school, which promised in its glossy brochure “to turn a reckless young man into a responsible one.” The father believed it. He didn’t have another option.

So, off the boy went to the school. He spent a year there.

What a year that had been, the father told his son. One of Fs in the boy’s subjects, of bad conduct reports, of long-distance phone calls to and from the headmaster—until the boy reached his year of “emancipation.”

At seventeen, as he frequently had told his father, he would be free. The father almost looked forward to it. He was weary of the conflicts, the uncertainties. The father, usually on edge, wondered what the boy would do next.

Emancipated, the boy would be on his own. “I can’t wait,” the father told himself.



“Wait, Daddy,” the son said, turning to his father on that front porch. “This isn’t just a story, is it?”

The father shook his head. “No, it’s not just a story. That day I came home from boarding school was some day. Granddaddy Pete was madder than a swarm of wasps.”

“The way you can get mad, Daddy?” the son said.

“Worse. My daddy told he how disappointed he was in me, how he’d tried everything, done everything for me, and he just didn’t know what to do anymore. He’d run out of ideas.

“But I didn’t care. I was tired of being told that, ‘He was just looking out for my own good.’ I’d had years of that—of him nagging me, ‘Get an education. Make something of yourself.’

He said his father didn’t understand that he just wanted to be his own man.

There had been a lot of shouting that day, his father said. He told how his father had grabbed him by the collar of his flannel shirt. He shook him with his big hands.

“I thought he’d shake my head right off my shoulders. ’Let me go,’ I yelled. I tried to break away.

“’Let you go,” he said to me.”’I’ll let you go. I’ve tried to hang onto you too long. Go, if you want. I can’t stop you. Just go.’”

He went to his little room and packed his hand-me-down suitcase—scratched and scuffed by the years, fastened shut by straps, the lock broken long ago.

“I needed to travel light. I’d be hitching highways, hopping freight trains, until I got to the city. Then, I’d be free. I’d live.”

He went downstairs with his suitcase in hand. His mother sat on the couch in the front room. Her lap held a mound of crumbled tissues. She was crying. He’d never seen her so upset.

His father hulked before the front door. He thought his father would use his giant hands to try to stop him from going.

The father thrust a brown paper bag toward him. “’Take it. It’s yours,’ he said to me. ‘It’s what you’ve wanted. Asked for. It’s yours now.’

“My daddy gave me a bag of money. He’d been saving for me since I was a baby. For college. For my future.’

“I took it,” the father said. “I hugged Mama and said goodbye to Daddy, and off I went. I didn’t walk down that road there. I ran to the highway. Caught a ride from a trucker. My first ride to freedom. I thought.”

The father paused, remembering those days.

He went on, telling his son that he’d traveled highways and rails until he finally got to the city. What a great time he had. He ate steak and lobster, not the ham and potatoes of the farm; drank with his new-found friends, played poker, frequented the jazz clubs.

“I’d drink myself drunk,” the father said, “and then pass out. I’d wake up beside a different girl every morning. It was the same thing day to day, month to month. Until, one day, Son, that bag of cash was empty—and so was I.

“I’d spent everything and didn’t have anything to show for it. The friends I thought I had? The minute my money ran out, so did they.

“I begged food. Couldn’t afford a room, a bath, to wash my clothes. And the things I did just to survive? Waiting on the street corners ‘til somebody took pity on me. Or picked me up. Shameful things.”

The father shook his head in disbelief. He still felt regret, even shame. But that was in the past, he reminded himself.

As he told his son the story, he began to tremble. He took out a red-and-white checked hanky from his overalls. He dried his eyes, blew his nose.

What a sound he made—like the honk of a duck as it leaped from the lake into the air just before the hunter fired.

Father and son smiled at one another and, at the same time, remembered the good times and how they used to sit in that freezing duck blind, waiting, whispering, drinking black coffee out of an old thermos.

As they sat together on the porch, the father reached his arm around the son’s thin waist—he’d lost weight, the father thought—and pulled him closer, just the way he had as a child.

Quiet now, the two of them stared up the gravel road. They could hear the rumble of the big trucks on the highway as they hauled coal from the mountains of eastern Kentucky up to the railroad in Ashland.

“We’re not so different, Son,” the father said again.

The son shook his head in agreement.

They were silent for awhile on the front porch, sitting side by side, letting the sunlight fall upon their faces, the breeze play in their hair, the father’s just a few gray wisps now, the son’s thick brown hair tied back in a ponytail.

They both breathed deeply, as if drawing the moment deep inside themselves to keep forever.

The father spoke first. “So, when I saw you walking down that road right there—filthy, stinking, that suitcase of mine in your hand—I did what your granddaddy Pete did when he saw me on that road there. 

“I ran to you, threw my arms around you, and kissed you like you were a newborn. I couldn’t help myself. You'd come back to your Mama and me. This was the moment we'd prayed for."

“Oh, Daddy. You know. You understand."

“We’re not so different, Son," the father said, shaking his head. 'Yep, I do. We both were lost, but now we’re found. Dead, but now we’re alive.”

Release

You've probably seen plenty of films in which a prisoner--his sentence served, a cheap suitcase in hand, and $20 in his pocket--steps through the prison gate and into a new life of freedom.

In the gospel today from Morning Prayer, Mark 7.24-27, Jesus sets a prisoner free. The prisoner in question is unable to hear or to speak.

And Jesus says to him, "Be opened." The man can hear. He can speak. And now, because of this encounter with the Living God, the man is released to a new life--one of sound and one with the Son of God, his Savior or Life-Giver.

How are you a prisoner? How is your life limited? From what do you need to be released?

Hear Jesus' words to you, "Be opened. Be released." Step through the gates of your prison to freedom and new life, that fullness of being in Him.

God bless you this week.

All are other

This Monday Americas will commemorate civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King championed civil rights for African-Americans and for other excluded people and advocated for full membership in society of all people.

I celebrate Dr. King's commitment to this cause, which is still awaiting fulfillment. I know that we are a better country because of his faithful and courageous witness, which cost him his life. (Of course, countless other people of color--well-known and anonymous, excepting to God--also paid for freedom with their lives.)

In white America, historically, people of color have been treated by many whites as "the Other." And many white Americans have treated the Other--be he or she an African-American or a Spanish-speaker or an Asian person, or a gay or lesbian or transgendered person,  or a woman--as wholly different from white, English-speaking, heterosexual men. Discrimination, prejudice, violence--and more--have been inflicted on the Other, including by written and unwritten laws.

Not to diminish the pain and suffering, the injustice and oppression of the Other in this and every culture, I believe that every one of us is the Other in some way--and here I want to be careful and, I hope, to be sensitive to Others.

I know that my experience of otherness is nothing--nothing--in comparison to Others' experiences.

But I know a little about otherness. In my own way, I am the Other and will always be. In Roman Catholic elementary and high-school, for instance, I was smaller than many of the other boys and was bullied.

My teachers and schools labeled me "slow," and consigned me to the math and reading groups for slow students. We worked in a separate part of the classroom.  In a Roman Catholic boys' high-school, stuck in the second of three tracks, I took "bonehead" English, math, business, and other subjects, while my classmates did Latin, calculus, chemistry, and college preparatory courses. (Thank God, a few kind nuns and priests and adults over the years encouraged me to excel.)

I was the son of an alcoholic father. I dreaded his coming home from work. Many evenings, unless he were on the road because of his sales job, he drank at the kitchen table. Some nights, my sister and I slept with my mother, while my father drank. When he threatened my mother, I took up for her, standing between her and my father, who stood with a drawn fist ready to pummel her. My classmates surely enjoyed different, happier families, I used to imagine.

And then one day, I became the boy from a "broken family," when my mother left my father and divorced him. All of my friends enjoyed whole families. But I was the Other.

Again, my experience of otherness is nothing compared to that of all the millions of African-Americans who suffered and bled and died because of racism--and nothing in comparison of all the Others today who still suffer, bleed, and die.

But my experience of otherness, however comparatively small, has proved valuable to me, if only in making me a little more sensitive to people who suffer because of who they are, how they are made, what they believe.

My Christian faith reminds me daily that God has made every one of us.  Each of us is an original. There will never be another Ken Chumbley; never another you.

And each of us is precious in the eyes of our Divine Creator. When I renew my Baptismal promises, I pledge myself to "respect the dignity of every human being." And I rejoice that I belong to the Episcopal Church, which makes that statement--and acts upon it daily.

Dr. King, a devout follower of Jesus Christ, understood that, with God as our Heavenly Father, we are all brothers and sisters. Each of us is the Other, and in our otherness resides our essential togetherness as members of God's one family.

If, then, God is our Father, and we are His beloved, how can we treat anyone "Otherwise?"

Thanksgiving for three hundred

In the Gospels Jesus says, and here I paraphrase,  Come, the banquet is prepared for you.

Last night at Christ Episcopal Church, we hosted our annual Community Thanksgiving Meal: turkey, dressing, mashed and sweet potatoes, green beans, rolls and butter, and pies of all kinds, including pumpkin, apple, and pecan. Yummers!

For days we'd issued invitations, including to hungry patrons at Well of Life, the downtown food pantry that is now a Jubilee Ministry of the Episcopal Church. We got the word out through our newsletter, on the church web site, through announcements at church. We spread the word in the neighborhood.

And yesterday afternoon at 3.15pm, people started arriving for the meal. By 5.45pm the cloisters outside the parish hall were full of guests.

One man came in his wheelchair. Some were homeless. Most were poor. Some hadn't had a good meal in a while. Our guests comprised elderly people, teenagers, young parents with their babies. Some of our guests had come last year, others were new to us this year.

Once the doors of the parish hall opened at about 5.45 pm, so many people crowded in that our youth minister and chief meal organizer, Donya Ross, whispered to me, "Say a prayer that we have enough food."

I did. Miraculously, we had enough food,  just barely. (Note for next year: get more turkeys.)

We served more than three-hundred people, including a comparatively small number of parishioners, most of whom had come primarily to help. Other parishioners prepared pans of food and dropped them off all week long.

Virtually the whole youth group turned out to serve food and drinks and to clean and reset tables. I am proud of our young people, who have huge servant hearts.

It was a Christ Church community effort for the good of the larger community.

I enjoyed going from table to table, sometimes with my grand daughter Christa in my arms, welcoming peopleto the church. I did as much visiting as I could, aided in this ministry of hospitality by the parishioners who sat at the tables with our guests.

Many of the guests came up to me and said, "Thank you, pastor. And thanks to your church."

I heard one of our struggling members from the neighborhood say to a friend of his, "This is my church." He beamed with pride.( I did, too.)

In the Gospels, Jesus also says, "Well done good and faithful servants."

Well done people of Christ Episcopal Church. Once more you have responded to the Savior's call, which, as our mission statement puts it, is "To know Christ and to make Christ known."

Lean on me

In one of the Psalms, the writer says, "The Lord is my strength and salvation...."

Daily, I rely on the Psalms in my spiritual journey. They are like food and drink for this weary soul.

When I am scared, weak, confused, facing darkness of many kinds, I find the Psalmist usually speaking to my heart.

Actually, God is speaking to me in the Psalms (and in other words of the Holy Scriptures), strengthening me.

Medieval wall on Iona

In fact, just the other day, I read one of the Psalms--I can't remember which--wherein the Psalmist affirms "God strengthens" me.

God does the same for me again and again and again.

That strength is his grace or supernatural help. His grace it unseen, usually, except when I receive it in the consecrated Body and Blood of Jesus in the Holy Communion.

Seen or unseen, God's grace is powerful. It excerts the necessary pull or push in me so that I can do what I must do, bear what I must bear, persevere when it would be so easy for me to give up on God, turning instead to my own feckless power, intelligence, will.

Whatever happens, then, I know God will give me his fortifying help. I know it because I believe it.

I make no apology: I need God to lean on.

A pilgrimage of trust

Jesus is always urging his followers to trust the providence of his heavenly Father. He knows he can.

On the cross, he lets go of self-possession fully and slips into the eternal life of God. His earthly birth, living, and death are acts of his daily surrender to the goodness of God. Jesus knows that God is with him always, and he can count on God always.

I am learning the same lesson again and again--certainly not in the glorious way of the Savior, but in the way that is my own--struggling against the strong winds and high tides of anxiety and fear and stumbling forward, I hope, ever deeper into God's safe embrace.

Iona from the Sound

On Saturday we left the Holy Isle of Iona in Scotland's Inner Hebrides for a long ferry and car trip--some 12 hours by our journey's end: in the Outer Hebrides on the Isle of Harris (home of one of my favorites, Harris Tweed jackets) and Lewis.

Main Street Iona

As we journeyed, I secretly worried--my response to feeling out of control--about making all the tight and complicated transport connections, which included collecting the car before the car hire office closed.

And what shall we do for food, arriving late on Saturday in Harris, after closing time?
What about Sunday, when shops and petrol stations will be shut? Will we find a Scottish Episcopal Church for Sunday worship?

All the while I am worrying, I am also praying. I am putting everything into God's hands. I cannot help my worrying, for I am human, but I can help myself to God through prayer.

As we travel, God is taking care of Penny and me beyond all our expectations. We make all our connections with time to spare. We meet wonderful travel companions along the way. We have time to buy some groceries in Uig before we take the ferry for Tarbert on Harris. We find our Saturday evening meal on board the ferry, thanks to the purser who says we might want to eat on board, because nothing will open in Tarbert. He is right, of course.

We have enough petrol to get to our seaside cottage in Grossebay and are safe on the perilous drive through thick darkness and sheeting rain and gale force winds. We get into the cottage and settle in for the night. Ours is an ancient and sturdy house, a former shepherd's cottage, or bothy, and a metaphor I think for my relationship with God amid the storms of life.

In the morning, which breaks in gloom and rain, we improvise a service of the Holy Eucharist on the kitchen table, Penny's Gordon clan scarf being our fair linen; oat cakes bought in Oban our Communion bread; a cup of champagne from the bottle left by the cottage owner for us, his guests for the week, our Communion wine. Little tea candles provide the light, and a Celtic cross from Iona makes a perfect altar cross.

And thus Christ provides all we need for this holy meal, our Eucharist, our thanksgiving to the God who is always with us, protecting and providing for us and his whole creation.

A different pace

Penny and I have arrived on the Holy Isle of Iona in the western islands of Scotland. We got here late yesterday evening under grey clouds, hinting of rain. The rain came in the early morning, along with gale force winds that tossed the anchored boats on high white waves. From the Hotel Argyll where we are staying the week, I watched the ferry struggle against the fierce wind and waves to deliver its cargo of day tourists and a truck of provisions from the larger and nearby island of Mull. Poet Mary Oliver says poets are people who pay attention. I am slowing down here after two busy weeks of reading, listening, learning at Oxford and am, with the change of pace, paying greater attention to what is happening around me and giving God thanks, howling winds and all.