This post is written by John Buchanan, Pastor Emeritus, Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago.
Lectio Divina
Reply
Category Archives: story
The Hitch-hiker and the Cop
Three college classmates who didn’t have two nickels to rub together decided to hitch-hike to B.T. Biggart’s home in Reynoldsburg, OH for the Thanksgiving holiday.
One of the rides was like the one in Steve Shoemaker’s story “Hitch-hiking” posted just minutes ago here on Views from the Edge. The three of us sat in the back seat of the driver’s big 1960 Ford 500 while he and his buddy passed the bottle between them, belted out country music, and swapped stories about women that are un-publishable. Eventually, by the grace of God, they dropped us off on the interstate in downtown Cincinnati.
Soon after we had stuck out our thumbs on the Interstate about 3:00 a.m., a Cincinnati squad car pulled over.
The officer asked for identification.
I had no wallet. My wallet was back at the college.
The officer declared that he could take me in for vagrancy.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Gordon Stewart, Sir,” I answered with my heart pumping faster and my knees about to buckle.
“Where you from, Gordon?”
“Broomall, Pennsylvania, Sir.”
“What’s your father do?”
“He’s a minister.”
“What church?”
“Marple Presbyterian Church in Broomall where I grew up.”
“What kind of church?”
“Presbyterian.”
“What’d you say your name was?”
“Gordon Stewart.”
“Did your father serve in World War II?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where did he serve?”
“Saipan, Guam, and Tinian in the South Pacific.”
(PAUSE)
“What branch of the service was your father in on Guam?”
“Army Air Force, Sir. He was a chaplain.”
“What’s your father’s first name?”
“Kenneth – Kenneth Campbell Stewart.”
“O my!!! After all these years! Red Stewart! Chappy Stewart! Well, I’ll be darned!
“You can go son. Just get a ride out of here as soon as you can. God bless you.”
…
So the cop who could have taken me in for vagrancy celebrated a vicarious reunion with his old Chaplain while we hitch-hiked to B.T Biggart’s for Thanksgiving – thankful for a serendipitous rescue from the boys in the Ford 500 and from the holding cell for vagrants.
Thanks, Dad! And thanks, Officer Anonymous! I never got his name. Grace abounds…even when you have no money and no identification.
Hitch-hiking
The Hitch-hiker
said that when in college
in the 1940’s,
he once hitched a ride
in the car of a guy
who drove to an airport
and flew him in his plane
all the way to his school.
…
But another driver
who stopped at his thumb
was drunk and about rolled
the car at the first bend
in the road.
…
He mused: Only some
Samaritans are good…
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, July 24, 2013
Stevie Wonder and the Blind
Remember Stevie Wonder’s song that lifted our spirits and brought tears to our eyes? Click We are the World.
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
It’s true we’ll make a better day
Just you and me
Stevie Wonder got it then, and he gets it now. He’s made a choice to help save lives.
He has announced that he will no longer appear in the state of Florida. He’s boycotting Florida and every other place with “Stand Your Ground” laws in the wake of the Trayvon Martin jury verdict.
The acquittal of George Zimmermann brings to the fore once more gun violence, race, and the Stand Your Ground laws that move the right to defend one’s home without retreat into the streets.
The dark sun glasses are a trademark of the performer who cannot see, but he sees some things very clearly. This is one time the blind need to follow the blind man who sees. “Once I was blind, but now I see,” wrote John Newton, the captain of a slave-trade ship, after he came to his senses and refused to participate any longer in the evil of the slave trade.
It’s choices like Stevie Wonder’s that help us to save our own lives. Decisions like Stevie’s shine a light on the blindness of a society whose laws in Florida and elsewhere turn back the clock to the old days of vigilante violence.
Someday hence it will be said that America suffered years of temporary blindness – that we forgot that we are the world – and that a blind man named Stevie led America in singing with joy the hymn of the old slave ship captain: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…I once was blind, but now I see.”
Click We are the World.
The Fight in the 7th Grade
Two boys I did not know
were to meet after school
in a park just two blocks
away. We all went to see…
…
The girl they were fighting for,
or over, was surrounded
by other girls from her class.
…
The first boyfriend stood
in an open space
looking down the street.
…
Boy number two
was pushed by friends
into the ring
made by classmates.
…
There were thuds,
then a headlock,
a bloody nose, and
tears from the boy
left on the ground.
…
His girl ran past
the victor and fell
to hug and wipe away
the blood, dirt, and tears
of the boy she had
just learned she loved.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, July 20, 2013
Time
My son once asked me “What is time?”
I answered, “I don’t know. It’s a perennial question of philosophers and theologians. But, so far as I can tell, time is what we have.”
Some people think that time isn’t real. It’s a human construct and only eternity is real. They think of time and place as the prison of the soul, the antithesis of, or the prelude to, eternal life.
It always seemed a bit strange to me. Like the imaginary friends children make up because they’re afraid of being alone in the dark. I could never understand.
“Time is what we have.”
The animals know what time is. They also know eternity. They wake and sleep with the rhythms of the sun – rising and setting daily – the markers of what we call time. They know nothing about clock time or the names of days, months, seasons or years, but they live in the reality of time.
Time is what we have between birth and death. Eternity is the depth of time, the Mystery beneath, within, and beyond the limits of time. We participate in the eternal, but we are not eternal. To think otherwise is to consider ourselves the exception to nature itself.
The illusion of superiority to nature – the idea that the human species is nature’s singular exception – is a fabrication peculiar to the species that considers itself conscious. The imaginary friend of eternal life may help us sleep better at night, but it leads to slaughter and, eventually, to species suicide.
Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death) saw the denial of death as bedrock to American culture. The denial of death – the refusal to acknowledge it as real; the flight from the knowledge of our mortality – not only deprecates life here and now; it takes into its hands the life and death of those different from ourselves. It builds towers to itself that reach toward the heavens while it plunders an earth it considers too lowly for its aspirations.
Time is our friend and time is our limit. We are meant for this. “Grace and pride never lived in the same place,” says an old Scottish proverb, for pride always seeks to exceed what is given (grace).
Time is what we have. Time is a participation in the glory of God. If there’s more, it will only by grace.
Someone really died?
Verse – “We All Used to be Equal Under the Shroud”
About half way through my life
(I am now 3-score and 10)
funerals became the new
thing, “Celebrations of Life,”
with friends (no enemies would come)
saying fine or funny things
about the very special one
who sadly couldn’t be there then
because the ashes were still stored
at the crematorium
and might not ever be picked up,
or buried (unless family had
a plot already bought and paid for,
then a private internment
might for seven very short
minutes remind a few folks
that someone was dead.)
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, July 8, 2013
Four brothers who sing together
Our parents took us to their church four times
each week: on Sunday, twice, and then for prayer
on Wednesday night–on Thursdays they sang hymns
in choir rehearsal while one, two, three, four
of us played on, around, and under pews.
“You boys be quiet!” they would often say.
We learned to sing in Sunday School: “Jesus
loves me,” and “Hallelu Hallelujah!”
Soon all of us were singing in the choir…
Then we grew up, our parents aged and died.
One atheist, one pantheist, one pair
of liberal Presbyterians–none tied
to our folk’s Baptist faith, yet when we drink
we sing their songs in four-part harmony.
– little stevie shoemaker, urbana, il, july 6, 2013
The Pine Grove
Thrice happy he, who by some shady grove,
Far from the clamorous world, doth live his own;
Though solitary, who is not alone,
But doth converse with that eternal love.– William Drummond, Urania
Next to the big barn attached to the big house on the big hill in South Paris, Maine was my favorite place: the pine grove.
It was a quiet place. The pine trees reached up to the sky, so tall that I wondered whether their tops could touch the blue sky and the white clouds I would watch floating over them through the filtered light of the trees, lying on the pine needles of the pine grove floor.
Sometimes Annie went with me to the pine grove. She lived just behind Grandpa’s and Grandma’s big house on the hill.
Annie liked my grandmother’s sugar cookies almost as much as I did…and the gingerbread cookies and the toll-house cookies, but mostly the big white sugar cookies my grandmother made every day because she knew we liked them best. We would settle on the granite steps outside the pantry with big glasses of fresh milk from real returnable glass milk bottles brought that morning by the milk man, and eat the cookies and drink our milk. Then a cookie or two would go with us into the pine grove.
We would lie there and look up…without talking…smelling the aroma of the pines. It was a sacred place of solitude and quiet – God’s greatest gift – where I could forget that my father was somewhere far away on the other side of some great big ocean in a great big war against a great big monster. I would retreat to the pine grove to get away from the radio broadcasts we listened to that might tell us whether my father was alive or dead.
There was no war in the pine grove. There were no people there. Just the great big pine trees that didn’t seem to care about the war. They just kept reaching up to the sky.
After we moved far away to Pennsylvania following my father’s return from the war, we returned to South Paris annually for vacation. Every year those pine trees were there waiting for my return.
During the 10 hour drive to South Paris, I looked forward to lying on the floor of the pine grove with a fresh-baked sugar cookie. As we drove up the road from Gray and rounded the bend by the Fair Grounds, the anticipation grew. I could almost smell the scent of the pines of the pine grove.
Until the year I looked up to see a franchise submarine sandwich shop standing where the pine grove had stood. The pine grove was gone. Clear cut. All the trees. All the pine needles. And the hill had been leveled to street level.
Someone had declared war on the pine grove, and the trees couldn’t fight back. Trees don’t fight. I sobbed like a baby.
How to win over the new neighbors
Cowboys may ask forgiveness,
but never ask permission.
The house-movers had slid huge beams beneath
the floor joist after they used jacks to pry
our home off its foundation. Hauling with
a dirt-filled dump truck, a long chain would try
and pull the house still filled with chairs and beds
and dishes, glasses, breakfast cereal,
to our new farm ten miles down country roads.
…
Our house arrived intact, but neighbors still
will tell of cowboy-movers cutting trees
and posts of mail boxes with their chainsaw,
then handing out one hundred dollar bills
to angry folks before they called the Law.
…
The foreman said, “We never ask before
we move a house for someone might say no…”
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL
house-moving
Views from the Edge 