THREE WAYS TO SUNDAY

THREE WAYS TO SUNDAY PART I GETTING REAL

Love Conquers All

Love will see us through. All we need is love. We can live on love.

               

Sayings, movies, songs, many things in media tell us we can overcome any obstacle if we are just in love. This is about the love between two people. You got me , babe, and I got you. Love conquers all.

There is a song by that title written by Nanci Griffith and Charley Stelf. The lyrics tell about several couples, a "brown-skin girl" and a white soldier, a "wheel-chair bound" senior citizen marrying a divorced man, people from "far and near", different backgrounds, economic situations and race. The song assures us each time that love conquers all.

So far, no problem really, true and lasting love can overcome many difficulties. Still, it takes work to make a marriage last, as well as love, even where two people are as alike as peas in a pod. I have no doubt that for the couples, so far, in the song love could see them through.

It is the last example that raises the far more important spiritual question, not the physical.

It is of a Muslim girl marrying a Catholic boy. Love will conquer all it tells us again.

Before I began dating the woman who became my wife, I went with several others. The last of these girlfriends and I were very much in love. One day, after we had going steady for several months, she told me we couldn't see each other anymore. Why? She was honoring her mother and father's wish to break it off because they saw we were getting serious. The problem?She was Roman Catholic, I was not.

Harsh? Yes. Unfair? Maybe.            Good idea? Yes. 

Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? 2 Corinthians 6:14 

Harsh passage? Yes.  Unfair passage? Maybe by worldly standards.               Good idea? Definitely.

The quote from Corinthians was not specific to marriage, but it applies here as well as to other relationships. But why do I say something seemingly harsh and possibly unfair is good?

Relationships, even between individuals deeply in love with each other, are full of conflicts. For example, one may be an early riser and the other a night owl. One might want to be out on the town at midnight, the other wants to be in bed so to get up with the sun. The other might hit you with the alarm clock if you tried to awake them to see a sunrise. Such a difference calls for compromise if conflict is to be avoided. If one or the other is too insistent on their lifestyle prevailing it can lead to real difficulties in the marriage. Yet this is a difference of no real significance.

There are many such conflicts that must be resolved in a successful marriage. Each gives a little here, gives a bit there and they accommodate each other's particulars. If they can't do this, the marriage will fail.

But if the difference is spiritual belief, how can one give a bit or bend a little to accommodate the other and stay true to their faith?

Oh, you may say, we just won't impose our separate belief on the other. That part of our lives we will keep private to our self. And perhaps you can, perhaps you will, but what do you do when children come?

Let's suppose no children come. Does that Muslim girl go to Mosque and the Catholic boy go to Cathedral and at home never speak of God? Do they argue they are not unequally yoked because they are both believers in God, the same God, the God of Abraham? Yet their view of Christ is quite different. Can they ignore that difference if they are devout to their religions?

To the secular and the nominally religious a difference in faith is no more consequential than the early riser versus the night owl. Asking if love conquers all in this situation is a good test of the depth of your faith. Certainly it is for the Christian.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son." John 3:16-18

  

To the Christian there is no salvation and no doorway to God except through Christ. Perhaps you could pretend this doesn't matter in your outward approach to the one you love, but how does a Christian endure the agony of knowing the one they love is condemned? How could one as a Christian keep silent and live in peace when so yoked? Your love for your spouse can not conquer this condemnation. Only the love of God and your spouse's love of God in return can conquer all and without that your yoking together with an unbeliever will be a heavy burden upon your heart.

Nominally Christian

We were in a group a few evenings ago having a discussion about marriage. Some one asked if we were Christian when we wed and I answered, "nominally". Why did I say that? After all, we were wed by a Minister in a Methodist Church before a host of witnesses. A beautiful stained-glass window depicting Christ as the Good Shepard shown before us. The vows were the standard Christian ones.

I have told of my early exposure to the church, where I was sprinkled as a baby in the Grove Methodist Church and later attended Sunday School and Methodist Youth Fellowship in Downingtown.

My wife's family were Lutheran and she had a similar background of attendance, although in her case, her parents were regular church goers, in fact her mother played the organ.

In 1956 my parents bought a home in Bucktown and at the end of ninth grade I moved to the new home. I thought I left church behind at that point, but for some reason when my parents settled into their new home, they also settled into a life of church going, to a Methodist Church in Spring City. Immediately the pressure was on me to go to church again. This time I had no out, not being able to point to their lack of church going as a reason why I shouldn't go either.

I was stuck.

But the next year I turned 16. I got my driver's license and I had a car. I soon struck a bargain. I would go to Sunday School, but not church. This was agreed to. What did I see as beneficial in this? Sunday School was shorter for one thing. It began at 9:00 and ended 45 minutes later to allow for preparations for the church service at 10:00. The service itself, although scheduled for an hour, often ran longer, especially on communion Sunday.

The second benefit was it gave me time alone at home while my parents and Grandmother, who was living with us at this time, attended church. I could use this time perusing the magazines hidden under my mattress. Actually, I never hid anything under my mattress. I had a safer cubby hole for hiding that kind of material. (Is there any need to explain further? I think not.)

The first Sunday of this new arrangement, I had just gotten home to the now empty house and changed from my "good" clothes when someone rapped on the door. I knew it was a stranger, because they came to our front door, which no one used who knew us. When I answered, there were two people there, Jehovah Witnesses, and the only way I could get rid of them was to buy a book. I probably should have taken this as an omen, but instead I just made certain I didn't answer any knocks at that door.

This went on for a while, except I found Sunday School deadly dull. This was probably because it was deadly dull. The man teaching it simply was not suited to teaching teenagers. Soon I worked out a new deal with my folks. Instead of Sunday School or church, I would go to the Sunday evening Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings. There were no trips to Dick Thomas's Brick Oven from this church, but the meetings were still more interesting than Sunday School. Sometimes we even had cookouts and hayrides.

The next year, I was elected President of MYF. I decided to shake things up and changed the structure from what it was to one of open discussion of Bible stories. I played Devil's Advocate, asking questions attacking a lot of the passages we read. I was right back to what I was at Downingtown with my "okay, then where'd God come from" challenges. Everybody took it I was just trying to make them think and the discussions were lively, enough so that our membership grew as new teens heard about what we did and came to the meetings. I was praised for my leadership. I was praised as a shining example of Christian youth.

But I was no Christian other than a nominal one. I didn't ask my questions to spark discussion. I meant them. I asked them to challenge the beliefs of those attending, to shake their faith if I could.

When my wife-to-be and I met, we were barely out of high school. When we married, she was 19 and I was 20. I was not that long out of MYF. My parents were still faithful attendees. There was never a doubt we would be wed in that church. Thus we had a proper Christian wedding before a long ordained Methodist minister. Yet, I wasn't a Christian, not really. I had never professed any belief in Christ. I thought I was a good guy, but I wasn't a spiritual one.

If I was only a Christian-in-name at my wedding, I was to go a long way down a different road after the honeymoon. I still thought of myself as a "good" guy, and probably in comparison to some, I was, but after a while I even renounced the nominal tag of being a Christian.

Welcome to the Real World

After getting married, I was free of church. My wife and I didn't attend any church. We were riding high and fine without any help from religion. We both worked for the same big oil company and both made what was considered better than average salaries for our age, our position and our time. We bought a four bedroom Cape Cod house even before the wedding. We had a new car. We had Honeymooned throughout New England and Canada and we went to New York and Virginia the next year. We ate out regularly in fairly expensive restaurants. (Keep in mind that you could buy steak dinners for two with drinks for $12 in those years.) We would rather go off to the shore for the weekend than spend anytime in a church. We started off having it too good, so who needed God.

When things went south, we blamed God.

We were fine with two salaries, but when my wife lost her job it was difficult to meet all the monthly bills so the trips and high end restaurants disappeared from our routine. Then my wife became pregnant.

She was two-thirds through term and home alone. I was at work in Philadelphia, a trip I made every week day by train. We lived halfway between each of our parents, a half hour drive to either one. My wife didn't drive then. She felt she was going into labor and called our doctor.

He told her that was impossible. She asked him to come out, but he refused. He told her he would have the drugstore deliver a prescription to her to ease her pains. It was just as the drug arrived that the baby came. She didn't go to the door and the delivery man left. She delivered a boy, who lived briefly and died.

She placed it in a pan in the bathroom and called me. I left work and caught the next train home. When I got there she was in the bedroom. I asked if she had called the doctor again, but she hadn't. I called him and he came to the house. After he had attended to my wife, I asked what we should do with the baby. "You can toss it in the trashcan for all I care," he answered.

Not exactly great bedside manner.

As my wife recovered from this loss, our financial situation continued to worsen. Her father was giving us about $20 a month to help pay the bills. (Again, $20 was a fair amount back then.) Finally, we decided we need sell the house and engaged a realtor who put the House for Sale sign up by the driveway.

During this period a friend of our's visited with her boyfriend, who was a black man. This visit was observed and it was perceived this couple were house-hunters. Soon we received a warning from the Realtor not to sell to any Negroes, not that she (the Realtor) cared, but some people might make trouble. We told the Realtor we'd sell the house to anyone who wanted to buy it. Next we started getting threats that we better not show it to any niggers if we didn't want all our windows smashed out.

I don't know if anyone would have carried out their threats. The house sold soon after the threats to a white couple. Perhaps the Realtor pushed the sale to get rid of us "nigger-lovers".

We didn't make any money on the sale. It was a down market at the time and we sold for slightly less than we bought. We had no escrow built up. We had no savings. We were naive and didn't think we could rent any where and we moved in with my father-in-law. (My wife's mother died while she was in high school.)

This was not a good arrangement. Things reached a point where we separated. She stayed at her fathers and I moved back with my folks. We both began dating others, although no formal separation was filed or any talk of divorce had happened.

I quit my job at the oil refinery and she got a job at the University of Pennsylvania. I was spending my time writing, although I did take a part time job at a chewing gum maker.

After a few months we went back together, but on the condition we leave her father's. We moved into an apartment in Philadelphia's University City area, a place that had seen better days. It was an interesting place, occupied by college students, drug addicts, prostitutes and radical Black Power groups. The building behind us was a college dorm and all kinds of things were hurled from its windows into the alley behind us. (To the right is a picture of our kitchen there.)

We were living on her wages, which weren't great, and the very few dollars I sometimes got paid for a piece I wrote and sold. Sometimes I would walk along the streets, looking about the trolley stops for dropped change. I usually found a couple dollars each day and that often bought something to eat.

But it was an adventure. We were living the Hippie life. I was actually getting published regularly. In the summer, I got a job with a publisher and we had money now to go to concerts at The Trauma, The Kaleidoscope and the Main Point, even to a Dylan show at Convention Hall. We had the Hippie car, a VW Beetle.

Soon after I got that job my right to vote was challenged and I had to take off from work and go to court. But that is another story.

Our experiences from spoiled newlyweds to Hippie activists was complete. We had "soul", but not The Spirit. One of my campaigns, my cause, was to show up the hypocrisy of ministers and I was back to smugly throwing those challenging questions at pastors again.

Oh, I was so smart when in my twenties. I knew everything then and I knew there was no God.

Here is what I didn't know:

"A man's own folly ruins his life,
yet his heart rages against the LORD." Proverbs 19:3