Reflections of My Childhood
Photo by John Macdonald on Unsplash
In my old age my sleep is much too often interrupted. I cannot easily go to sleep or stay asleep. On one such restless night recently, I spent my unwelcome wakefulness reminiscing about my younger years, and especially about my father, August, a rural pastor. Thus in a flash I got these several memories of his fatherly care for me:
My first job for pay (after mowing many lawns in our little town) was to work for Herman Brunkhorst, a grocer in town and a member of our church. (My brother Ed worked next door at the grocery store of Mr. Louis Gottenstrotter). I was hired to be a gofer, and a stock-boy who regularly swept out the store. I imagine that Mr. Brunkhorst did not really need me, but my dad quietly arranged the deal with him. I earned 83 cents a day. One day at work Mr. Brunkhorst took me to his little farm outside of town where I moved some really heavy concrete blocks. I reported this routinely at home; my dad (I learned later) quietly went to Mr. Brunkhorst and told him he did not want me to do that work, as it was too heavy. I should remain in the store. Nothing was ever said to me, and I remained at work in the store.
I had a severe case of pneumonia in a time before penicillin. In my recovery we were scheduled to go to see Dr. Koelling in Waverly, Missouri for a check-up. My appointment happened to be the same night as a champion prize fight. I think the match was between Joe Louis and Billy Conn, a fight that lasted not more than about twenty-four seconds. For reasons I do not now understand, I protested vigorously about missing the fight on the radio in order to see the doctor. The response of my dad was to go to the drug store and buy for me a wee transistor radio he could ill-afford; he was determined to have my visit to the doctor go well.
My regular job through high school was work at a local Skelly gasoline station owned by Harry Knipmeyer. (We called it a “filling station). I worked after school, afternoons and evenings, and on weekends. On day at work, my dad came to the station which he seldom did. He came to bring me a piece of cake. I was mightily embarrassed to have cake at work. But he said, “Your mom baked this, and we did not want you to be left out.”
Our high school basketball team consisted of ten boys. We had eleven boys in high school, but Lester Cook had a heart condition; he did not play; he was our team manager. We were not a very good team and did not win often. (Disclosure: my brother Ed was a star on the team.) When we won a game, the young male adults in town who had previously played for the team made sure that the team was showered with free cokes, a great treat for us. Of course they did not come around when we lost. But my dad did come around after we lost. On his parsimonious salary, he bought cokes for the team. I suspect he wanted to say that winning or losing was not a very big deal.
Our high school had very limited offerings. I discovered later that my dad had gone to the school board (constituted of six farmers) to insist that the school should offer Latin instruction for Ed and me. And they did so, for these two years, the only two years in the history of the school. In our first year of Latin with Mrs. Yowell, there were five of us. In the second year there were only Ed and me. My dad did not know Latin, but he surmised that it was important prep work for our college years. And that turned out to be the case, for we learned a great deal about grammar and word usage.
Thus I lay awake and was flooded with these several memories in which my dad loomed large. It struck me that what he did in all of these instances was to provide for my wellbeing in attentive generous ways. He quietly intervened on my behalf in ways that I did not know at the time. All of this came to me in the middle of the night, and I was swept up in a cascade of gratitude. I thought about the word “provide,” that led me to “provision,” and that soon led me to the word “providence.” I ways that I did not know at the time, dad’s generous attentiveness to me was indeed “providential” for me, as it set in on a course of study, work, and wellbeing that continue to mark my life.
Before I got back to sleep, I thought more broadly about “providence.” I recalled that in a riff on Genesis 22 in Church Dogmatics (in a reference that is now lost to me) Karl Barth has pondered the dramatic interaction of Abraham and Isaac, a father and a son. As Abraham prepared a burnt offering, his innocent son asked him:
Where is the lamb for a burnt offering (Genesis 22:7)?
Abraham in faith and perhaps in perplexity, answered his sin,
God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son (v. 8).
Barth imaginatively considers the fact that our word “provide” translates the Hebrew word ra’ah, a term almost always rendered as “see.” That is, God will see it, or God will see to it. And so it is reported that in the nick of time a ram appeared in the thicket to be sacrificed. As a consequence, the narrator can report:
So Abraham called that place “The Lord will provide,” as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided” (Genesis 22:14).
Both times our word “provide” translates ra’ah (see). Barth takes the usage to mean that God could see ahead of time what was required. He translates, “see ahead of time” as pro-video, thus pro-vidence. God knew ahead of time what is required and sees that it is given. It struck me, amid this flood of good memories, that my dad was doing exactly that provision for me, ahead of time, about which I knew very little at the time.
The next day, after some sleep and reawakening, I had a chance to think more about my dad and about God’s providential care. Such thought led me back to The Evangelical Catechism in which my dad had instructed me for confirmation. The catechism attests to the simple pietism of my theological tradition. In the catechism there is not much abstract theology. Even in the first part entitled “God and his attributes,” we do not get anything that we might expect about omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience; rather the “attributes are “life, light, and love.” Rather what we get is a rendition of the goodness of God that is appropriate for a young teen-ager. With a focus on “providence,” I as led to three questions in the catechism:
#15 How does God constantly prove himself to be the Creator?
God constantly proves himself to be the Creator by his fatherly providence, whereby he preserves and governs all things.
#17 What does God still do for you?
God daily and abundantly provides me with all the necessaries of life, protects and preserves me from all danger.
#18 Why does God do this for you?
God does all this out of sheer fatherly and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness on my part.
The accent on the work of the Creator as providential led to in the catechism to two suggestive scriptural citations:
The eyes of all look to you,
and you give them their food in due season.
You open your hand,
satisfying the desire of every living thing (Psalm 145:15-16).
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing (Matthew 6:25)?
The sum of this teaching is the offer of a well-governed, generous world guaranteed by the trustworthy goodness of God. Answer #18 sounds the Reformation note of “grace alone” that is here applied to all of created reality. I have no doubt that my dad not only fully embraced this teaching, but it was the form his life took as pertained to my identity and wellbeing.
It occurs to me that this deep conviction of God’s providential care (that as instanced for me by my dad) is best sung, because it does not conform to our conventional adherence to patterns of “cause and effect.” That is, it dwells outside of our common rationality and invites us to think in alternative categories. The claim of such trustworthy governance simply overrides all calculation. Thus we sing audaciously:
Be not dismayed whate’er betide, God will take care of you.
beneath his wings of love abide, God will take care of you.
God will take care of you, through every day,
o’er all the way;’ he will take care of you,
God will take care of you.
(The United Methodist Hymnal 130).
We sing these words gratefully and innocently, even though we have much data to the contrary. Or we sing it defiantly, not accepting what we observe as the final reality of our lives. Or we sing with agricultural imagery:
We plow the fields and scatter The good seed on the land,
But it is fed and watered By God’ almighty hand;
God sends the snow in winter, The warmth to swell the grain,
The breezes and the sunshine, And soft refreshing rain.
You only are the Maker of all things near and far;
You paint the wayside flower, You light the evening star;
The winds and waves obey You, By You the birds are fed;
Much more to us, Your children, You give our daily bread.
We thank You, then, Creator, For all things bright and good,
The seedtime and the harvest, Our life, our health, our food;
Accept the gifts we offer, For all Your love imparts,
And what you most would welcome, Our humble, thankful hearts.
(The Presbyterian Hymnal 560).
This hymn attunes us to the rhythms of creation upon which our lives depend.
As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease (Genesis 8:22).
This hymn has dropped out of favor in more recent hymnals, likely because we mostly do not any longer live close to the cadences of the seasons; or perhaps we do not sing it because we are too aware of the ways in which the goodness of creation is so damaged and jeopardized by our technology.
Yet a third hymn that we do not sing much anymore is the stately poetry of James Russell Lowell who wrote in resistance to the slave-serving Mexican Wear. Here is the final stanza of what became, from his poetry, a hymn:
Though the cause of evil prosper,
yet the truth alone is strong;
though her portion be the scaffold,
and upon the throne be wrong;
yet that scaffold sways the future,
and behind the dim unknown,
standeth God within the shadow,
keeping watch above his own.
This final verse attests to God’s hidden but certain commitment to those who have signed on for the risks and costs of God’s good governance. The last lines of this verse echo for me in my dad’s commitment to me, “keep watching,” mostly “hidden,” but loving me since I was “his own.”
This awakened moment in the night was a great blessing to me. It permitted me to gather together elemental truths in my life, inviting me to pass easily back and forth, as we do, between the durable truth of the gospel concerning the goodness of God and the quotidian alertness of my dad. Such back and forth is warranted by the instruction of Jesus:
Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if a child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to you children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him (Matthew 7:9-11)!
I am so grateful for my dad; and then there is this “how much more” of the gospel that evokes limitless gratitude and wonder!
