I knew he was going to ask for money.

He was about my height (six foot) and heavier than me (considerably bigger gut), dressed in jeans, a jacket, and a woolen toboggan.

My wife and I had gotten out of our car and started walking toward a little church.  He was walking in the same general direction, several steps away on our left.

I looked like an easy touch in my solid black preacher suit, heading to church on a chilly November Sunday morning.

Taking the initiative, I spoke first, “Good morning.”

“Mornin’.”

“Are you going to church?”

“Thinkin’ about it.”

“We’re visitors here.”

He mumbled something that sounded like “Two dollars?”

I said nothing.

More clearly this time, he said, “Could you give me two dollars?”

“Don’t give people on the street money for food.  If you have the money, take them to a cafe and buy them something to eat.”  Daddy was speaking to me, as he had since I was in grade school.

“I don’t think so.”

We kept walking.

He kept walking past the church building.

We had hardly found our way into a pew before I realized I had forgotten something important to tell the man.

The church we were visiting is called South Main Chapel and Mercy Center, and one way they show mercy is by providing a free lunch every Sunday after the service for anyone who cares to stay (as well as another meal or two during the week).

I blew it.

I let an opportunity slip by.

But .  .  .

Did the man want food .  .  .  or money?

I’ll never know the answer.

I had several singles in my pocket, so I could have given him what he asked for.  But maybe he was asking for something more substantial than two dollars.  Maybe he wanted me to share myself with him.

Before I retired from college teaching, I took a couple of courses one summer at Columbia University in New York City.  There, I was approached daily by homeless and hungry people on the street and on the subway.  Without Daddy’s instruction, any day, I could have spent every dollar I withdrew from the ATMs around Manhattan.

Often it was easy, to shake my head or simply keep walking without acknowledging the person asking for money — and not worrying about it.  

Every time I left the central campus at Columbia, I passed a grocery store near my dorm.  One day, as I rounded the corner for my room, a man called out, “I need some formula for my baby.”

I couldn’t ignore that call.  

“Let’s go in the store here, and I’ll buy you a case.”

“They don’t have the brand my baby needs.”

“I’m sorry.”

Did he want formula or money?  Did he even have a baby?

I’ll never know the answer.

Many years earlier, I met a homeless, hungry man who didn’t let me off as easily as the man at church or the man who asked for money for formula.  

I was at a religious convention in New Orleans in the years when delegates to such a meeting wore suits and ties.  

One afternoon, I skipped the convention and went down to the French Quarter and found my way to the Cafe du Mondé, intending to enjoy some beignets, their famous powdered-sugar, deep-fried dessert.

I bought several of the little delicacies along with a cup of their chicory coffee, then made my way to an outdoor table.  But I can’t say I enjoyed my afternoon snack.

A smallish, dark-haired man with a sunburnt face invited himself to my table.  Though he could tell without asking, he did ask, “Are you a preacher here for the meeting?”  I was one more among thousands of my counterparts who were roving the city between sessions.

“Yes, I am.”

Could you get me something to eat?”

“Yes.  Would you like one of these cakes?”

He studied the beignets, paused, then took one.

I lost no time devouring one while he simply nibbled on his. 

“I can’t eat this,” he said after a bit.

“He’s going to ask for money,” I said to myself.

“There’s a place around the corner where I could eat something.”

“OK, let’s go around there.”

He obviously had been there before.

“What’re you doing here?” the man behind the counter asked, not kindly.

“My friend here is hungry,” I said as we seated ourselves on the stools.  “Fix him whatever he wants.  I’ll pay for it.”

“I want a hamburger with lettuce and mayonnaise and tomato and onion.”

The counter man nodded quizzically at me:

“Nothing, thanks.”

My newfound companion devoured the burger in a few huge gulps, washing it down with iced tea.

I had done my Christian duty after sharing my precious powdered-sugar pastry and buying him a burger.  Hadn’t I?

He didn’t think so. 

“I will be praying for you,” I promised as I headed toward my hotel, hoping for a bit of rest before the night session at the convention center.

“Reverend, do you love me?

“Yes, I do.”

And I did.

“I don’t have a bed for tonight.”

“Where can we go to get you a bed?”

He mentioned a place, and we began walking the several blocks to a “flop house.” I inquired at the desk.

“Do you have a room for my friend for tonight?”

“I’m sorry, sir.  All our beds are taken.”

“Where else can we go?”

He named another.

And another.

And another.

Each of the others was blocks and blocks removed from the previous one as the June afternoon grew hotter.

On each new leg of the journey, as my legs were tiring, I prayed more earnestly for the Lord to open the door and provide a bed for this man at the next place.  I felt like the importunate widow with the judge in Jesus’s parable.  But it seemed God, unlike the judge, was unmoved.

The sun was traveling quickly toward its nightly siesta as we came to yet another cheap hotel.

My partner of the afternoon looked around, nervously, then stepped inside just ahead of me.

“What the hell are you doing here?” a harsh voice cried. “I’ve told you not to come back!”

“It’s OK, sir.  He’s with me.  I’ll pay for his bed for tonight if you have any available.”

The clerk didn’t look happy to see me, but, in a softer voice, he quoted the price of the night’s lodging.

I paid the three or four dollars and watched as he called out a room number.

I shook my friend’s hand and patted him on the back:

“God bless you, sir.”

“Thank you, reverend.”

I never saw the man again, but he stayed with me every night in my more expensive room a few blocks away.

Likewise, the man at the South Main Chapel and Mercy Center did not leave me just because he chose not to go into the church with us.

Thoughts from 1971 and 2002 for Independence Day 2014

I’ll start by doing a little namedropping.  

A decade or so ago, I wrote a few essays for “Sightings,” a website connected with Martin Marty.  One of the pieces pertained to Independence Day.

In case I dropped his name in vain, let me introduce Dr. Marty. As a longtime professor of American church history at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he is highly respected among many Protestant leaders.  He wouldn’t remember my name and couldn’t pick me out of a police lineup.  But I was honored for some of my writing to appear on his website.

My article on July 3, 2002, was titled, “Revisiting Independence Day, 1971.”  The opening sentence said this: “I recently rediscovered notes I had scribbled in church on a bulletin dated ‘Independence Day, 1971.’" 

I can reconstruct what I wrote for “Sightings” because they keep an archive, and I found me by typing in my name under the “Author” heading.

At some point, my concern over activities in that 1971 church service caused me to tune out what was being said and sung so I could jot down enough thoughts to fill the back side of the worship order.  And the paper was still in a file folder thirty-one years later.

I’m writing this article for Independence Day 2014 for two reasons: First, I think some of what I said in 1971 and 2002 is worth repeating.  Then, too, I remember a little flap with the graduate student who edited the “Sightings” materials.

  Here’s what I wrote in 1971:

"Going to church on Independence Day proved to be a strange experience. In the service which included patriotic songs and the pledge of allegiance to the nation's flag, I had mixed emotions. My boyhood training of national pride and idealism welled up. But those emotions kept getting tangled with darker feelings. I kept thinking of those whose freedom is abridged in our land -- the blacks who as a people have not known liberty and justice -- and of those in high places who seem to be trying to suppress such basic freedoms as freedom of speech and freedom of the press. We all too readily sing 'My Country, 'tis of Thee' and say the Pledge as if these express realities rather than ideals toward which to strive. In a comfortable, all-white, middle class congregation, we can convince ourselves that these things are so and that God is guiding and blessing America on a predestined course as holy nation---one nation under God." 

The young editor was exercising his editorial prerogatives, making changes in my comments from 2002, and I didn’t argue with that.  Experienced writers and editors — of whom I am one — need to be edited.  

But then, in a phone conversation, he suggested a change or two in that paragraph from 1971.  I told him I didn’t want to change anything in that section.  Those are the exact words I wrote in 1971, but this young man doing graduate study in church history — of all things — wanted to “improve” the wording of a document from the past.  

That paragraph had little historical value.  But it said what I was thinking that day in church, and it was said the way I said it in 1971.  I’m sure the editor and I could have improved on the wording.  But I didn’t — and don’t — think we should have.  And we didn’t.  

He acquiesced to my stubborn resistance to his effort to make me look better.  I don’t even remember what he wanted to change.  You probably could edit that paragraph and help me, even now.

To me, this would change history.  The piece probably isn’t worth the to-do I’m making twelve years after the fact.  But if you’re willing to change an insignificant paragraph from the past by a relatively unknown essayist, where do you draw the line?   Do you delete obscene or untrue or undiplomatic words from a past president?

*****

Whatever you make of that little dust-up, I’ll close with further words from 2002. They probably could stand some editing.  They still may have relevance for Independence Day 2014:

“As I look back, I am struck by how little things have changed [since 1971]. If all are equal in this land of the free, some are still more equal than others. Today many African-American children attend schools that are separate and unequal. In the past nine months  [since September 11, 2001], Arab and Muslim Americans have received governmental and non-governmental scrutiny at odds with Constitutional guarantees and the lessons of American history. 

“Another troubling aspect of that 1971 church service is still with us. In many churches on the Sunday closest to Independence Day, it is difficult to tell what, exactly, is being worshipped. Patriotic songs replace Christian hymns, and the Pledge of Allegiance is recited almost as if it is a creed or confession of faith. 

“As a Baptist, I am fiercely loyal to both my nation and my church. I am equally dedicated to keeping a respectful distance between them. When my Baptist ancestors in some English colonies refused to pay taxes to support state religion, they were jailed and, in some cases, killed. The principles for which they struggled -- free exercise and disestablishment -- are now codified in the First Amendment of the Constitution, and have long been a hallmark of Baptist groups.”

A Wedding On the Air

I recently performed a wedding that was broadcast on the radio.

I teach the weekly Baraca Radio Sunday School Class from the First Baptist Church of Anderson, South Carolina.  A couple who had been attending the broadcast at our church early Sunday mornings asked me to marry them.  The lesson each week is available 24/7 on the church's website: www.andersonfbc.org/baraca.

We followed the usual schedule for the broadcast, with a shortened lesson/sermon along with a vocal soloist and the wedding as the only deviation from our regular Sunday morning radio ministry.

The transcript of the lesson follows:

This is a distinctive morning for the Baraca Radio Sunday School Class, focusing on Christian principles of love and marriage, and culminating with the actual exchange of vows between Teresa Ross and Jack Abraham after our lesson.
A few weeks ago, Teresa came to me, worried about “love, honor, and obey” in the traditional vows. Was I going to call for her to obey Jack?  I told Teresa, that idea of the wife obeying the husband went out with the kerosene lamp.
When Pansy and I married, nearly forty-nine years ago, we both were mature Christian adults.  We never asked who was going to be the human head of the house.  We both had heads, and we both intended to use them.
Some years ago, when one of my nephews was getting married, I saw the absurdity of the husband being the head of the house simply because he is a male.   Terry was a handsome fellow, every bit of twenty years old.  He stood there with his beautiful bride, Denise, who also was twenty.  As I sat listening to the call for her to obey him, I thought, 
“What maturity, what wisdom does this boy have that gives him authority over this sweet girl that makes her promise a church full of relatives and friends that she is going to obey whatever he tells her to do?”
The codes of Bible times definitely favored men. In the time of Jesus, for example, a man could divorce his wife if she burned the toast. She had no recourse.   But the great biblical principle of marriage is in the first chapter of Genesis.  God created both the male and female in His own image. Because both are created in God’s image, they have equal standing before God.
All through the first chapter of Genesis, God as God makes the various elements of the heavens and the earth, He says each part of it is good.  
God made the sun and the moon and the stars, And God saw that it was good (v. 18). 
God made the simpler forms of life that inhabit the sea and the air, And God saw that it was good.  And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the cattle according to their kinds, and everything that creeps upon the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
After God made the first man and woman, God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
But let’s go back to the creation of that first couple: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
First, it says God created man in his own image. But then it says male and female he created them.
That first reference is to what we traditionally call mankind, or humankind.  But the writer wants us to know humans include male and female.  He made both to share His likeness.  Bottom line: He created both man and woman in His image.
He gave them charge over the rest of creation.  So the image of God means we are superior to the other life forms.
But it also means we are spiritual beings.  The image of God doesn’t mean we look like God, physically.  God is Spirit, not a physical being.   The second chapter of Genesis has God walking around in the garden like a farmer looking after His land.  But that is poetry.   
The New Testament says, God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
So when God made male and female in His image, it meant each of us shares God’s essential qualities.  We share that with God, and we share it equally with each other.
I’ve presided over weddings in various settings.  My first wedding ever was for college mates at Hardin-Simmons University out in Abilene, Texas.  I still keep in touch with that bride and groom, Freddy and Maxine Blalock.
  Probably my most beautiful wedding location was at the foot of Toccoa Falls when I was one of the ministers at the First Baptist Church in Toccoa, Georgia, back before the terrible 1977 flood.  
I’ve done weddings at Anderson University,  at Table Rock State Park up in the South Carolina mountains.  I did a wedding in the back yard of a farm with live music by cows just across the fence.
  I did the honors for Phil Marett Junior and his wife Lynn as I stood by a hot air balloon and the couple stood in the basket.  They ascended after the ceremony.
My most unusual wedding experience was in Scotland.  Pansy and I were witnesses for a couple we met only minutes before the ceremony, in the village of Gretna Green — in a blacksmith shop, of all places. The story behind that goes back to England in the seventeen-hundreds. You had to announce your wedding at least two weeks in advance and had to be married by Church of England priests.
Scotland had no restrictions.  A couple could marry simply by declaring their intentions before two witnesses.  So the Old Blacksmith Shop in Gretna Green became a popular place for elopers. 
About all it took was for the officiant to ask, “Will you?”  The couple would say, “We will.”  Then the official would say, “OK, then you are.”
England has relaxed its marriage laws, and the fire no longer burns in The Old Blacksmith Shop, but thousands of couples with the fire of love in their hearts still exchange vows over the original anvil where the blacksmith once performed ceremonies for run-away Englanders.
Pansy and I went to Gretna Green, thinking we would tour The Old Blacksmith Shop. But just as our guide was getting us started, the man doing the weddings came in and asked us to be witnesses for Becky Barnett and Mark Jones, from Liverpool.
The secular ceremony called for faithfulness of one man and one woman to each other as long as they live.  Mark and Becky, both in their early thirties, also repeated the familiar vows "for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, for better or worse."  Then, as the wedding official struck the anvil with a hammer, he declared Mark and Becky to be husband and wife. Then the four of us signed official papers, documenting what had just happened.
The newlyweds invited us to a restaurant in the wedding complex for tea and "biscuits"  -- we call them cookies. So, over tea and cookies, we discovered a mutuality and have kept in touch.
Mark and Becky are both creative artists in Liverpool:  she a visual designer, he a musician.  
They had lived together about ten years before they finally got married.  They laughed at marrying as just doing what the culture expected. 
Mark said, when they decided to go ahead and marry, he didn’t think marriage would make any difference.  But it did.
They both began to sense a commitment they did not have, could not have — outside of marriage.  It put a secure flooring under their relationship.  This from a couple who had laughed at conventional morality. They had lived together for ten years.  They had a non-religious ceremony.  But they came to see the need for a permanent, loving commitment.
I’ve talked at length about casual settings and casual attitudes toward marriage.  Love often just means the excitement of the physical.  Too often, what we call love is selfish: What’s in it for me? 
The way they spell love, it has an “I”right in the middle of it.
I went along with those unusual settings because I wanted to help the couples.  But I wonder whether these settings reflect the desire to keep a safe distance away from the church building, for the generation that has rejected church in large numbers. But novel locations make great pictures. 
We have pictures of our grandchildren in a little corner next to our family room.  Jonathan and Vicky sent the pictures three or four years ago, and I had them framed as a birthday present for Pansy.  The pictures are sweet.  They caught Ethan at age eight and Addie about five.  But our grandkids have moved on beyond those pictures.  Ethan is pushing toward twelve and Addie has hurried past eight.
There’s usually a photographer at a wedding, recording the soloist’s magnificent song.  The bride’s dozen red roses.  Her gorgeous wedding dress.  The wedding pictures bring back memories of the ceremony.  But life moves on beyond that day.  Much like my grandchildren, we change.
Sometimes, the wedding never turns into a marriage.  Something goes wrong.  The song is a mere echo on the backroads by the rivers of your memory and aren’t necessarily gentle on your mind.  The one remaining rose is pressed between pages of a Bible that’s never open.  The bride gave the lovely wedding dress to Goodwill and cut the groom out of the picture but still admires the dress.  We’ve seen couples like that.
But every wedding is a sign of hope.   As pastor in New York’s Hudson River Valley, 
I re-married a couple in the parsonage.  In that community, I also married a couple in their eighties.  Talk about hope! The groom’s first wife had died, and he was marrying her sister.   On a snowy Sunday afternoon, I stood in the archway between the living room and dining room — a step away from the table, richly laden with the wedding feast.
We’ve come today to the marriage vows for a mature couple who didn’t run away to Scotland. Teresa and Jack have been planning this wedding for months.  They came to me, a Christian minister, asking the blessing of God and the church.
Genesis 2 gives the basis for marriage: Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.  Jesus quotes that.  So does Paul.  
The example of Christ does not permit any person — man or woman — to be harsh and demanding, especially toward the marriage partner.  It’s not easy to be harsh and demanding in a sweet, loving spirit.
In First Corinthians 13 (vv. 4-8a), Paul spins a poem about the greatness of God’s kind of love. 
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends; 
So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
The challenge for each Christian, especially each wife and husband, is to model God’s kind of love.

A Song for Father's Day

“My mama was a cotton picker and

My daddy was a 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.  Here at Father’s Day, I needed the words because they are a good poetic description of my parents.  

And yet, these words are not just poetry.  They are pretty 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.”

Even so, 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 about cotton picking 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.  And my brothers and I wore flour-sack shirts — all made on a foot-powered sewing machine — to go 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, milking cows, 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. As Robert Frost said, in “The Death of the Hired Man,” “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 his mother-in-law’s.  You argued or disagreed with him at your peril.  As the eight of us 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.

He and Mother struggled financially all their lives, never owning their own home 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 for movie tickets.  

He expressed affection by getting me or one of my brothers in a headlock with his left arm and raking his right 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 acknowledge my faith in Christ, 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 were proud. 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 could 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 Pansy, with good reason.  They were always glad to see us 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 were a question just before he sank back into sleep: “How are Russell and Jonathan?”

Today, thirty-five years after his last Father’s Day, 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

 • A love for his children -- even though it may not find expression often enough

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.

The World Came to Live Next Door

That Championship Season

When I see men place so much stock in rough-and-tumble physical activities of the long-ago, I feel sad.

The coach and four members of his state champion basketball team are five such men in the Pulitzer Prize play in 1973. The team gets together every year on the anniversary of their win, and That Championship Season takes place at their twentieth reunion.

Though they are still under forty, these former stars of the court spend most of their time looking back. Life is behind them. Everything else pales in comparison with that championship season. But by their Big Two-Oh anniversary, the Big Win from  Long Ago is proving to be a thin thread for holding together the loyalty of the starting five who once swore “all for one and one for all for always.”  This could be The Last Reunion.

I saw the play in a small theatre in lower Manhattan and afterward wound up on the same uptown subway car with one of the actors in the original cast.  We talked about the show, and he said the author, Jason Miller, based the play on middle-aged men he knew in Pennsylvania. As preparation for doing the play, Miller took the cast to his basketball-loving home state where they visited bars frequented by men much like the characters in the play. These true-life former jocks were still cursing each other for mistakes they made on the court decades earlier.

Even with this testimonial from the actor, I tended to think Miller’s play as greatly exaggerated. People don’t get that worked up over a ball game and stay worked up for twenty years. But then, I think of where I live.  Less than twenty miles up the road, the football stadium at Clemson University seats eighty thousand fans.

More than thirty years ago, the Clemson team was declared national champions after a post-season win at the Orange Bowl. Ever since, that championship season has been a benchmark for football patrons.  On the twentieth anniversary of the Big Win, a newspaper quoted someone as telling the winning coach, the 1981 Orange Bowl win was the greatest moment of his life. This not from a former player but simply an ardent fan. 

Our local newspaper publishes a sports magazine dedicated to Clemson teams. The Orange and White is named after the team colors. Many papers sell metal containers readers can mount on posts at the street near their mail boxes so the carrier can put the daily paper in a safe, dry place. For several years, those containers in our town were orange and white. The containers carried no mention of the teams, but the colors conveyed a silent message for many athletic boosters. 

Win, lose, or draw, clothiers cash in on team loyalty, selling orange wearing apparel: pants, shirts, sweat suits, T-shirts, caps, and, for all I know, underwear. On home game days, many fans are seen around town  before and after the game wearing some or all of the above. 

My thought after the Orange Bowl and twenty years later was, “Let us pause briefly while everybody says, ‘Who cares?’” I am probably in the minority with this attitude, but that doesn’t bother me. I voted for George McGovern in 1972. 

I guess I’m missing something. A dear friend who played high school football tried to explain the intense sense of belonging and unity among the eleven males out there on the field, especially in the huddle and as the ball is snapped into motion. Fine, I wanted to say, To what purpose? 

Granting the unity among those eleven males in the huddle, how does that spill over and bring capacity crowds to an eighty-thousand-seat stadium? No doubt, a fair percentage of the males in the crowd are alumni of some team. But a bunch of them aren’t. And then there are women. And little children. Many of them in the same orange outfits. Again, To what purpose?

It starts in high school or junior high if not in elementary school. Coaches promote and principals support the idea of making the athletic mascot the symbol for the whole school, not simply the sports teams. Marquees in front of schools typically carry logos depicting the Raiders or the Bumble Bees.  I frequently pass an elementary school whose electronic marquee proudly calling attention to the Panthers. These and other hostile critters are intent on boogering up their enemies. This is probably are an accurate depiction of the purpose of the athletic teams but not of academics or the choir or band.

Many boys are initiated into this All-American Obsession at the peewee stage. Some midget teams play in a little park in our neighborhood. I can see and hear them at times as I sit at my computer.  I heard a coach, trying to get one little guy to come up to team expectations, tell the boy, “I know you want to have fun, but this is serious.” 

I well remember the last time I was in a football stadium. It was a year or so before the team up the road was declared national champs. My wife and our sons and I were living in Waco, Texas, and my older brother-in-law, a Baylor football fan, had an extra ticket for one of their home games. I accepted Jeff’s invitation to the game for two reasons: I loved him like a brother, instead of just a brother-in-law, and I didn’t want to turn down the opportunity to spend some time at his side in an activity that meant something to him. 

I guess I inherited a defective sports gene. I’m the only son or son-in-law in my generation who doesn’t connect with football, Sports fever took with the rest of the guys, but not with me. Actually, I couldn’t have played football in school if I had wanted to.  Our whole family spent most of the fall months in cotton patches of West Texas while most other school kids were in the class room. On the other hand, if my older brother and younger brother had been in school, I’m sure they would go “gone out” for sports.

I transmitted that defective gene to at least one of my two sons. Number One Son never got into athletics. Number Two Son played basketball and soccer on church teams in grade school and junior high and still keeps up with college and pro stuff, especially the Georgia Bulldogs in the state of his birth the Bulls and Bears in his adopted city of Chicago.

Because I am not mucho macho, I wish jock types had something more significant in their store of  memories than perfect or flawed hand-offs or lay-ups in a football or basketball game twenty years ago.  Yes, I feel sad when I see men place so much stock in rough-and-tumble physical activities of the long-ago. If an able-minded, able-bodied person clings to past achievements, even those which ennoble and enrich the greater society, this suggests a lack of meaning in life in the present. I treasure many aspects of my past, but I try to build on the past as I seek meaning in the present. 

If those who must look back to find meaning for life got involved in a civic club, church, mentoring, or local politics, these activities might help them find meaning in the present.

The Bible contains athletic references, typically likening life to a race.  The challenge always is for the Christian to discipline himself or herself as a follower of Jesus:

“Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.  Brethren, I do not consider that I have made it my own but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:12-14). 

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us,  looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.  Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted (Hebrews 12:1-3). 

In one final passage, notice St. Paul uses the double image of running a race and a boxing match: “Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it.  Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Well, I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air;  but I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:24-27).