Man of Hope, Man of Faith, True Believer

Sometimes I think back to those days, especially between 1962 and 1965, when I sat in a circle with a dozen or so other children in a Sunday School class at Casa Linda Presbyterian Church in Dallas. Who was our teacher? Did she—such teachers were most often female—have any kind of training or certification? Was she paid? She probably followed some kind of schedule with Bible readings and commentary thereon, the singing of hymns (“Jesus Loves the Little Children,” “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “Amazing Grace,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” etc.) and the saying of prayers, but my memory is vague. I know we later had a separate one-month class that led to our “confirmation,” the Protestant version of young Catholics’ “first communion.” Most of us went along only because our parents, as well as the Sunday School teacher and pastor, insisted. It was a perfunctory process, and I recall hearing and making jocular comments. The course and culminating ceremony were not taken as seriously as they should have been, something that I now regret.

Here we are 60 years later, and I wonder about those people. Is the teacher still alive? If so, how does she remember the Sunday School classes she taught at CLP? Even more, I think about my fellow students. Dead, alive, still in Dallas, retired, surrounded by cherubic grandchildren, rich, poor, incarcerated, heavily tattooed, transgender? Most of all, I would like to know how many of them still adhere to the Christian faith. The struggles of mainline Christian churches in recent decades is a vexing affair; many have shriveled up and been desacralized, closed and/or repurposed. Nothing galls me more than to see a church that has been turned into a mosque. (See “Lamentation for the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.”)

The Pennington home was one in which the blessing (“God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for this food”) was said with hands clasped and heads bowed before every meal. Again, we were just going through the motions. At no other time was faith mentioned. Our parents were, at the very least, consistent. The teacher of one of my Sunday Schools had a special way of taking attendance. She put a blue star next to each kid’s name when he or she showed up. At the end of the year, I was the only one in our class with 52 blue stars.

My junior high, high school and college years rolled by. If such issues were on the back burner, I was always aware of them. In the summer of 1976, when I was driving a delivery car for Burks Reproduction Company in Austin, I made an intellectual assent to Christianity. I thought that would suffice, but of course it did not. Over the next three years, I read books, engaged in conversations, and pondered the meaning and direction of my life. It was not the fear of an eternity of hellfire and brimstone so much as a growing attraction to Jesus that brought me around. I had pondered more and more about him as the preeminent figure in human history. What follows is private, but I will share it now: One night in April 1979 in my rented house (718 North Crawford Street, to be precise) in Denton, Texas, I said a wholly unplanned prayer. I confessed my faith to the Lord. Nothing too dramatic happened, and it was no darkness-to-light deal. At a Baptist church in Denton soon thereafter, I stood up and walked forward when the preacher asked who wanted to make a public confession of faith. I have celebrated each April ever since. There has been no wavering or backsliding.

Many books on Jesus, Christianity and Christian history have been added to my library, and I have entered dozens of holy places in the ensuing 44 years. It has been a gradual maturation, with roots growing slowly and deeply, and that is the best way; I am not one for emotional displays or holy-roller stuff. I would never pretend to have any special insight about theological matters. On the contrary, I know how little I know. I do not obsess about sin, the devil or anything of the sort. Although I once read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, this did not have any great impact. Perhaps you will be shocked when I say that not all of it is to be taken literally—for example, when Balaam’s donkey allegedly saw an angel and spoke. The Biblical canon was compiled in a manner that was both messy and godly. Some of the apocryphal books (those left out of the canon) may be just as valid as those included. Who’s to say? Protestants, Catholics and Jews have their own Bibles, a fact that Muslims point to with glee.

I have sometimes suggested that a first-century Robert Boswell should have accompanied Jesus during his 33 years on earth. Boswell, you recall, stuck closely to Samuel Johnson, observing and documenting just about everything he did or said. I no doubt admire and respect Dr. Johnson, but his bon mots and pithy sayings are not to be confused with the message of the man from Nazareth. I do not sort-of believe, I truly believe. I believe the essence of the Gospel—that Jesus fulfilled dozens of Hebrew prophecies, that he performed miracles, that he is the one and only son of God (fully human and fully divine), that he was killed by a bunch of misguided Romans and Jews in Jerusalem, and that he rose from the dead after three days. Not only do I believe, I trust.

If people consider my faith a simple one, I remind them of what Jesus said (in his native Aramaic, translated into Greek and one or two other languages, and finally English): “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” I am not, as indicated earlier, a Biblical scholar. Nor am I a member of any church. I admit to being a bit of a lone wolf. While I do not preach or proselytize, I respond honestly when people ask about my “religion.” What I try to do is live the Christian life in the here and now. God has blessed me with faith and a loving heart, and I am grateful for both.

Being diagnosed with a life-threatening disease—prostate cancer—has inevitably drawn me closer to God. I have spent a lot of time on bended knee in the last 18 months, and that’s the truth. I pray not only for myself but for others who are in need. I have a friend, a dedicated Lutheran, with whom I sometimes discuss this and related subjects. I hope he will not mind me paraphrasing one of his lines: “If you don’t have faith, you are adrift without a paddle.”