The Gate of the Year

We can never be sure what might come of something we write.

Minnie Louise Haskins certainly never expected the leader of her country to quote from a little poem she had written thirty-one years earlier.

But he did.  He read from one of her poems on a broadcast as the nation was entering a war.  That excerpt has been widely quoted over the past seventy-five years, and the entire poem is quoted below.

Ms Haskins didn’t think of herself primarily as a poet.  She taught philosophy and sociology in college, but she did publish two or three books of poetry.

She was born and educated near Bristol, England, in 1875 and had a lifelong religious anchoring.  She went out to India as a Wesleyan Methodist missionary, and she published some of her books of poetry to raise funds to make this possible.

Her health broke, and she returned to England, where she worked at various jobs before joining the faculty at the London School of Economics and Political Science at age forty-three.

King George VI read from her poem on Christmas Eve 1939 in a radio broadcast to offer encouragement to the nation shortly after England and France had declared war on Hitler’s Germany.

Ms Haskins, who was sixty-four at the time, didn’t even hear King George’s Christmas Eve broadcast when he read from her writing.  But the poem titled, “God Knows,” has been often quoted under the better known title, “The Gate of the Year,” words from the first line.

We want to think we are self-sufficient, and the poet wants that status as she asks for light.  She doesn’t realize, if the Man at the Gate of the Year should give light to her, she would be dependent on him, rather than sufficient in herself.

Many so-called self-made men and women attained their wealth and fame from family inheritance, government subsidies, or “lucky breaks” opened by sources other than themselves.

Regardless of our financial success or social standing, everyone, from Warren Buffet to the homeless man who sleeps in a box in the alley, faces an uncertain future.  We may have warm houses, CDs in the bank, and sturdy bodies.  But we have no guarantee that any of these benefits will hold in the year ahead.

"GOD KNOWS"

Minnie Louise Haskins

1908

And I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be better to you than light, and safer than a known way.’ 

So, I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night

And He led me toward the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.

So, heart, be still!

What need our little life,

Our human life, to know,

If God hath comprehension?

In all the dizzy strife

Of things both high and low

God hideth His intention.

God knows. His will
Is best. The stretch of years
Which wind ahead, so dim
To our imperfect vision,
Are clear to God. Our fears
Are premature; In Him,
All time hath full provision.

Then rest: until
God moves to lift the veil
From our impatient eyes,
When, as the sweeter features
Of Life’s stern face we hail,
Fair beyond all surmise
God’s thought around His creatures
Our mind shall fill.

Miss Minnie is wise in recommending that we reach out in the gathering dark and put our hands into the Hand of God.

A Three-Inch Tall Jesus

When I was about twelve years old, the Sears, Roebuck store in Sweetwater, Texas, had a Christmas shopping display featuring a real-live Santa Claus who was just three inches tall.

He lived in a tiny, but attractive, house that sat on a table.  You could look in through the picture window and see the little man whom the store called Kute Kris Kringle.  He was sitting by the fireplace in his easy chair in his living room that was decorated for the holidays with packages under the tree.

At times, this Tom Thumb-sized Santa would get up and walk around the room.  He would look out and wave at those who watched him.

He had a tiny telephone on a table by his chair.  It was connected with a full-sized phone on the table where customers watched him.  If you wanted to talk with him, you could pick up the receiver and tell him what to bring you.

Parents would lead their kiddos to the display, point to the picture window, and get them to wave.  If the little folks were brave, they could pick up the phone and tell the Jolly Little Elf their hearts’ desires.

Because I had parted company with Old Saint Nick a few years earlier, I watched, trying to figure how Sears, Roebuck managed to set up the display and get the real-live man to look so small.

After a while, I noticed a walled-off section immediately behind Kris Kingle’s Little House on the Table.  So I figured the full-grown man was just on the other side of that wall on a movie set that looked like a living room.  My guess was that we were, in effect, looking through the “wrong end” of a telescope.

With the boldness of late preadolescence, I picked up the phone one day to talk to Santa.  That was OK with him .  .  .  the first time.  When I left the area and came back and called him several more times, the big man behind the three-inch illusion strongly suggested into his mouthpiece that I find something else to do.  Leave the phone line open for younger boys and girls.

As I think back to how the Sears people had managed to shrink Santa Claus to a manageable size, it occurs to me that we try to do the same thing with Jesus.  A three-inch tall Savior is much more convenient than the full-grown One who comes to life on the pages of the New Testament.

The Babe in Bethlehem with shepherds and angels and Three Kings make a beautiful scene on our Christmas cards.  The stable in the creche on a table top in the family room is a bit larger than the Sears house where Santa lived. But the Babe in the table-top manger may be just about three inches long.  There also are tree ornament versions of the manger scene, with the Holy Family, reduced to no more than three inches.  Then, when the season is over, we can pack them all up and get them out of our way without great inconvenience. 

There are other ways -- more serious ways -- of keeping Jesus small beyond confining Him to the creche at Christmas.

Some people shrink Jesus to a manageable size.  They may say, He was a great teacher, nothing more.  Or they deny His miracles. When it comes to the New Testament’s greatest miracle, the resurrection of Jesus, some say those original followers wanted so badly for Him to come back to them, they believed He actually was raised from the dead.  

But if the resurrection is a delusion, how do we explain the millions of people across the centuries whose lives have been transformed through faith in a fairy tale?  The course of Christianity history cannot be so handily dismissed.     

Some people say they “believe the Bible from cover to cover.” (And they say they believe the cover, too, because it says "Holy Bible"). But they whittle Jesus down to size in the way they carry out Christmas.  

       A friend sent me an animated Christmas greeting through the Internet.  It was an attractive, colorful production that lasted about two minutes.  It was filled with trees and wreathes and reindeer, including red-nosed Rudolph.  There were lights and snowmen and elves, and a fireplace and candles and decorated lamp posts and bells.  And, by the way, they did manage to slip in a few religious symbols: manger scenes and an angel or two and an open Bible.  But it was mainly Santa Claus, sometimes flying off with his team of reindeer, sometimes resting peacefully after his hard night’s work.

The Santa Claus side of Christmas has overshadowed Jesus, not only in that animated Christmas card, but in real life.  As an example, I read this story on the Internet.   It probably didn't happen, but it could have:

There was a church that always put on their sign out front, "Jesus is the reason for the season." One lady had to pass the sign every day on her way to and from work. It really upset her, so she wrote a letter to the preacher and told him she didn’t appreciate the sign. Her final words in the letter: “I don’t think the church should try to drag religion into every holiday.”

Well, for all this cutting Jesus down to size, in St. Paul’s version of the Christmas story in Philippians, we see how Jesus trimmed Himself down to size: 

.  .  .   though he was in the form of God, [He] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,  but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. 

       But then with the resurrection, the whittling ended, and Jesus was exalted to greater life :

        Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,  and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.  

[Adapted from the story "The Three-Inch Tall Jesus" in my book, Once for a Shining Hour from amazon.com]

December 11: My Grandma's Birthday

December 11, 1888

Grandma’s birthday.

I was born in her little three-room house in West Texas.

So were my two sisters and three of my brothers.

Her farm was about nineteen miles from the Sweetwater hospital.

Our family had no car, so home delivery was the order of the day.

Mother’s mother’s farm was the closest thing we had to a permanent home.

For six or seven years, we moved three times a year, including a move back to Grandma’s.  All this within a twenty-five to thirty mile radius of Sweetwater, the county seat of Nolan County.

The three-pronged living pattern took us from her farm to the farm owned by Daddy’s youngest sister and her husband, Aunt Chessie and Uncle Jim.  Uncle Jim planted huge cotton acreage, and we were, in effect, migrant workers who came in each fall to harvest the crop.

When the boll-pulling season was winding down, Daddy would start his quest for a farm job.  I never learned the details of his search, but he would find a farmer who needed a hand and had a “rent house” for the farm hand to live in.

Each year, something would happen that Daddy disagreed with and wouldn’t put up with.  So he would tell the farmer what he could do with his nice farm and leave us with nowhere to live.

Grandma to the rescue.  

Robert Frost wrote, 

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, 

They have to take you in.”

Grandma may not have known Frost’s poem, “The Death o the Hired Man,” but Frost knew human nature.

I can only guess the logistics of getting us back to Grandma’s.  This was long before the cell phone era.  We had no phone.  Neither did Grandma.  So Mother probably wrote to her when she saw the end coming .  .  . Or maybe after the blowup, the boss let us stay until we heard from Grandma.

Daddy then must have hitchhiked to Aunt Chessie and Uncle Jim’s and prevailed on his brother-in-law to move us back to Grandma’s.

Then the cycle would begin anew.

Grandma was from a proud family of six sisters and a brother who trekked to Texas early in the twentieth century from their home in Mississippi, leaving one brother behind.

She apparently never approved of her only daughter’s choice of a husband.  I’m sure Mother did a lot of negotiating and praying — sometimes unsuccessful — to keep her husband and her mother from snarling at each other.  

I remember one night during one of our sojourns with Grandma: The three adults were in the kitchen with the door closed, while we five younger Webbs cringed in the big middle room.  The closed door blocked little of the yelling as mother-in-law and son-in-law hurled verbal rocks at each other. 
No doubt, these moments hastened our departure to the next location.

Despite such outbursts — which actually were few and far between — we seemed to live in relative peace as Grandma, like the farm couple in Frost’s poem, felt she had to take us in.

Two factors brought an end to our annual work in Uncle Jim’s cotton patch: First, Daddy’s two oldest boll pullers (my older sister and brother) grew up and got paying jobs on a year-round basis.  About that time, the Texas Legislature passed a law enforcing school attendance for children under sixteen.  That included me and my younger sister and brother.

Deprived of this source of autumn income, Daddy moved us to Sweetwater where he found fairly regular work with a cement contractor.  He supplemented this with occasionally assisting a man who ran a local moving company.

I haven’t mentioned the effects this impermanence had on our education.  It meant that we missed two months or more of school each fall, and we almost always were in two different schools each year.  One of the schools almost invariably was the tiny Divide School in the village about four miles from Grandma’s farm.  Our irregular attendance and shifting from school to school took a terrible toll, with my older sister and me the only two who finished high school.

We moved to town at the end of my sophomore year.  Though Mother was relieved to be freed from packing our meagre belongings for three moves a year, she was concerned about Grandma living alone all year long.  

Because I was familiar with Divide School and many classmates I had known since first grade, Mother got Daddy to agree to let me stay with Grandma for my junior and senior years.  Though I frequently hitched rides to town and back, this living arrangement provided some sense of stability for Grandma and me.  I was the high honor boy in our Class of 1951.

If Grandma had not opened her home to her daughter and family across the years, who knows what might have happened! We might not have survived as a family unit. Daddy might have drifted away, or we might have been sent to foster homes, or .  .  . 

       Forget the "What If's," and Thank God for Grandma.

“My mama was a cotton picker and My daddy was field hand."

“My mama was a cotton picker and

My daddy was field hand.

My mama had the face of an angel and

My daddy was a mighty man.”

I googled those lyrics again and again before they finally came up in a Twitter. I needed the words because they are a good poetic description of my parents. 

And yet, these words are not just poetry. They are literal. 

Well, not quite literal. When I was growing up in West Texas, my whole family spent the fall months in the cotton patch. This meant my brothers and sisters and I missed most of first semester of school — however long it took to harvest Uncle Jim and Aunt Chessie’s crop — but we didn’t pick cotton. We pulled bolls. The end result was similar: We filled Uncle Jim’s trailer with the white fluffy stuff. But the process was different.

When you picked cotton, you plucked the cotton out of the burr or boll. When you pulled bolls, you broke the boll off the stalk with the cotton in it, removing the stems and the leaves, and put the boll and cotton into the sack. West Texas gins had an upfront process that separated the cotton from the burr.

        Everything about manually harvesting cotton — whether picking or pulling — has disappeared with technology. It’s all gathered by machines, and I’m not at all nostalgic about “the good old days.”

Of course, if the harvest had been mechanized in the 1940s, Daddy would have had to find some other way to scrape out a living for his wife and five kids, probably involving all seven of us in that endeavor as well.

Another way the words to the song aren’t literal: We never called our female parent “Mama.” She was always “Mother.” In retrospect, it seems odd that the softer, more outwardly loving parent had the more formal appellation, while we called our sterner parent the softer name. “Father” would never have worked. He was “Daddy.”

Some of the lyrics to that song fit our family to a T: 

Mama in the song wore a skirt made from a flour sack. So did Mother and my two sisters. My brothers and I wore flour-sack shirts — all made on a foot-powered sewing machine — with our overalls.

Another line from the song hits home: “I still draw strength from my daddy’s strong back and my mama’s sweet face.”

Daddy was not big and muscular, but he was strong. In the cotton field, owned by his youngest sister and her husband, Daddy moved quickly along three rows at a time, straddling one and working the one on either side. He did that while we toiled over one or two rows, depending on our level of physical maturity.

He quit school when he was thirteen or fourteen, probably because his mother or daddy one too many times told him what he was supposed to do. To show them, he left home and was on his own the next fifty years. Along the way, he was no more disposed to taking orders from the men who signed his paychecks than he had been with his folks back home.

He never learned a trade, but he was good with his hands, stacking feed, chopping cotton, driving a John Deere or Farmall tractor on somebody else’s farm, or pushing a wheelbarrow of cement for a building contractor.

We lived in a string of different communities, most within a thirty-mile radius of Sweetwater, the county seat of Nolan, County, Texas, as Daddy moved from farm job to farm job. But we frequently returned to the small farm belonging to Mother’s mother. 

Robert Frost, in “The Death of the Hired Man,” said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Grandma was always ready to take in Mother, her only child, and us grandchildren, but she probably felt a case of “have to” when it came to her son-in-law. 

Daddy had a quick mind. If he’d had the patience to learn chess, he would have been a master. In card games, checkers, or dominoes, he could anticipate his opponents’ moves and what cards or dominoes were in their hands.

Texans play “Forty-two,” a bidding game with dominoes. I’ve seen him get, literally, fighting mad when his partner in Forty-two made what he considered a dumb play. Once, with a nephew as his partner, Daddy jumped up and almost knocked over the card table in his effort to hit my cousin.

Though he owned no house, he was the head of any house he lived in, other than Grandma’s. You argued or disagreed with him at your peril. As the eight of us (Grandma, Mother, Daddy, and five kids) were at breakfast in Grandma’s crowded kitchen one morning, I was seated next to Daddy. I expressed my opinion about something, and he said, “I don’t care what you think.” In return, I said, “And I don’t care what you think.” Before there was time for another thought, I found myself in the back yard, he had his belt off, and my back end was stinging under my overalls.

He and Mother struggled financially all their lives, living in rented apartments or farm hand houses and buying their first car after I was out of college and seminary.

With his harsh exterior, “loving” was nowhere near the top of my list of adjectives for Daddy. But with hindsight, I can see, even as he lived with pressures of holding a job and keeping Sears, Roebuck and Piggly Wiggly at bay as they pressed for payment, he found ways to express his love:

• When he and my older brother Lee Roy and I would hitchhike into Sweetwater on Saturdays, he would buy us hamburgers and give us enough change to see Gene Autry, Johnny Mack Brown, or Roy Rogers in a movie. 

• He expressed affection by getting me or one of my brothers in a headlock with his left arm and raking his right-hand knuckles across the scalp in a “Dutch rub” or a “dry shampoo.”

• If any of us got sick, Daddy left the nursing to Mother, but he kept close watch to see whether it was anything serious.

• When we made good grades or received recognitions, we would get a hug or a pat on the back.

• When I went forward during a revival meeting to “accept Christ as my personal Savior,” he wasn’t there to see it because he wasn’t much into church in my pre-college years. But he was visibly moved when we came home and my older sister told him and Mother, “Lawrence professed this morning.”

• When any of us got recognition in school, he and Mother went to see us. When I was in high school plays, he was there. When I graduated from high school, they were there. 

• When I publicly declared my sense of calling to the ministry, he expressed his joy, and he was there to hear my first “sermon,” all three minutes of it. When I started to college to study for the ministry, he told me he was proud of me as he apologized for having no money to spare that he give for financial support.

• He was on the edge of tears when I told them I was going to the seminary in Kentucky, rather than the one much closer by in Fort Worth.

Both he and Mother readily came to love my wife Pansy, with good reason. They were always glad to see us come back for visits, and they loved our sons. The last time I saw Daddy alive, he was heavily sedated and in and out of wakefulness. Shortly after I arrived, when Mother said, “Lawrence is here,” his very last words to me before he sank back into sleep were the question, “How are Russell and Jonathan?”

Today, thirty-five years after his death, I think of positive examples he left me:

• A deep desire for honesty — even though it often cost him a job because he was too quick to speak his mind

• A determination to work hard — leaving me in the dust when it comes to manual dexterity

• An unembarrassed, unapologetic love for his wife — often finding ways to get her small gifts, a box of handkerchiefs or inexpensive perfume for no special occasion

So, though he and I didn’t often say it in words to each other when he was alive, I’ll say it now: I love you, Daddy.

Space Available

College dorm rooms often have assorted placards and signs, a mixture of the serious and frivolous. A suite I shared at Hardin-Simmons University long ago with two other freshmen had a religious message next to a sign filched from a parking lot. A fellow student came to our room, looked around, and read the two signs aloud as if there were one:

"Only one life, 'twill soon be past, Only what's done for Christ will last.  Park here."

Similar incongruities sprout on billboards and business marquees, especially in times of national crisis:

• A hamburger chain had a facsimile of the United States flag just below the company name. Under the flag were these words: "Satisfy your craving. Bacon, Mushroom Melt."

Wow! Show you are a loyal American by eating a Whopper with bacon, mushrooms, and cheese.

• That same company had another sign at Christmas. The flag was still there, but with this statement: "Jesus is the Reason for the Season."

A respectful reminder: there is no logical connection between patriotism and Jesus and eating burgers.

• A gas station had these two statements that read like one: "God Bless the U.S.A. Cigarettes as Low as 99 Cents a Pack.”  Does God also bless inexpensive cigarettes?

• For years, car dealerships have been festooned with flags by the dozen. 

While it is certainly appropriate for a merchant to express loyalty to country if he or she chooses, there is no obvious connection between patriotism and eating a hamburger or smoking a cigarette or buying a car. The car dealership’s flags may be sending a mixed signal.  After all, many cars sold in this country were manufactured overseas.

• On the ad space in front of a shopping center, a couple of merchants had their ads in strip signs, but not all the slots were rented. To encourage others to advertise, the ad agency put a message below a religio-patriotic message. When the messages were read in continuous flow, the effect was as follows:

"In God We Trust.  

        United We Stand.

Space Available."

With this sign, I saw a positive reminder: As we declare, "In God We Trust," we should leave space for all who care to join us. Not all Americans trust in God. Among those who do trust in God, there are many different understandings of God. While sincere believers cannot endorse competing understandings of God, we must endorse our fellow human beings who follow other paths. We must insist that they be able to take advantage of "Space Available" with the same freedom we enjoy.

Current suspicion of all things Arabic and all things Islamic recalls a similar attitude toward German-Americans in World War One and toward Japanese-Americans in World War Two.

In the First World War, everything German was suspect. For example, in Wisconsin and other states with large German-American settlements, many school systems stopped teaching German as a foreign language. People of German ancestry were pressured to buy war bonds and make large contributions to the Red Cross to prove their patriotism, under the threat of being tarred and feathered if they refused. Lutheran congregations, who historically had conducted services in German, were forced to forsake their heart language and have their services in English.

In World War Two, some one hundred ten thousand people of Japanese ancestry (including seventy thousand U.S. citizens) were rounded up and forced to live in barbed wire and machine gun-enforced camps. Their only crime was their Japanese heritage.

Given the current political atmosphere, we need to remind ourselves that not all Arabs are Muslims and not all Muslims are Arabs. We also need to remember violent Muslims are no more representative of all Muslims than murderous church members represent all Christians. The analogy has often been made that it would be as logical to identify all professing Christians with Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, as to identify all Muslims and Arabs with those who destroyed the Twin Towers.

"In God We Trust. United We Stand."

Those are wonderful words. But our unity has always been unity amid diversity. Under the Stars and Stripes, Americans of all stripes have insisted on defining patriotism and unity on their own terms. 

Over the past decade, I have received an identical email message from several people in different parts of the country who probably don’t know each other. The bottom line can be summed up this way: You are entitled to freedom of speech as long as your speech agrees with mine and you say nothing critical about our country. The article concludes with this in-your-face advice:

"Our First Amendment gives every citizen the right to express his opinion about our government, culture, or society, and we will allow you every opportunity to do so. But once you are done complaining. . . . I highly encourage you to take advantage of one other great American freedom, the right to leave . . . ."

That ultimatum raises several questions:

• Who are the "we" who say, "we will allow you every opportunity" to express your opinion? No group has the right to tell you, in the words of the old song, "Hit the road, Jack, and don't you come back no more!"

• Why should you be invited to leave this country because you express displeasure with aspects of government? Why is it unpatriotic to criticize our government leaders? "My country, right or wrong" is an unthinking slogan. "Love it or leave it" is arrogant.

• Where is a person supposed to go? The first advice may be, Go to the devil.  A second suggestion will probably be the country currently considered the worst place on earth--Germany or Japan in World War Two, the Soviet Union in the Cold War, Afghanistan and Iraq in the war on terrorism.

Most U. S. citizens stand united in love for our country, though not always in how we express that love. Sometimes deep affection leads to a lovers’ quarrel.

Another sign from my college days back in Abilene, Texas: One of the janitors at Hardin-Simmons had this message on his pickup: "You are welcome to Abilene, but come in quiet." 

This sign was intended to amuse us who read it. But those who equate disagreement with disloyalty often are noisy as they tell others to be quiet. If we seek to silence those who disagree with us when we are in the majority, we should realize this is a two-edged sword that can cut against us when our viewpoint is not in the ascendancy.

The Golden Rule applies here: "Grant unto others the same freedom of expression you would want granted unto you." Love for our country, respect for one another, and, especially our love for God, should enable us to hang out the "Space Available" sign, welcoming those with whom we disagree.