I must remember to find them and destroy them.
The letters, typed on a Government Issue typewriter in the base chapel where I worked, recorded little fact and a lot of fiction about my life as a virgin airman. I made carbon copies of the letters and looked forward to collating them as a coherent journal of my experiences as a Cold Warrior.
But the contradictory accounts of my exploits limit their usefulness as a Pepsyian paean to my youth. When I wrote to my old high school pal John Nickel, I lied about my erotic triumphs. When I wrote to my mother, I exaggerated my chastity and never mentioned my frequent visits to the Taboo Exotic Dance Club in London’s Soho district. When I wrote to old girl friends, I stressed my lonely devotion. Sometimes I even wrote pure fiction, following the salutation with crude imitations of Aldous Huxley or J.D. Salinger and leaving the recipient to wonder if I had slipped into non sequitur madness.
Typing letters actually kept me sane on lonely nights away from home, but I now question whether it was wise to keep copies. Now that I’m in my mid-sixties, I have no desire to revisit these typewritten records of hormonal chaos.
But the letters did serve a useful purpose. They introduced me to the typewriter keyboard as a place where I could safely explore my innermost thoughts while developing a rhetorical style.
For it was in the Air Force that I first became a successful writer, not as a diarist but as a chapel supply airman.
The duty of the chapel supply airman was to order any accoutrement the chaplain felt was needed to operate a successful chapel program.
Conversely, the corresponding duty of the supply NCO was to protect the Vietnam War effort by rejecting requests for expensive, gratuitous or unnecessary items to duty sections.
That tension created a cordially adversarial relationship between the chapel supply airman and the supply sergeant. Virtually all the chapel’s equipment needs were gratuitous and expensive: gold patens, chalices or monstrances, sacristy wine, padded folding chairs, hundreds of pounds of ground coffee, even gallons of Hawaiian Punch.
“The hell you need Hawaiian Punch for?” Master Sergeant Cyril J. Garafano, NCOIC of supply, would inflate his barrel chest and chew his cigar to shreds as he interrogated me.
“Protestant Youth of the Chapel,” I’d reply. “They wouldn’t come if I didn’t serve it.”
“Shoot,” Garafano would say, or a word to that effect. “Fill out a [adjective deleted] requisition form.”
Filling out requisition forms – justifying to the Air Force why the chapel couldn’t function without something it didn’t actually need – was how I learned to write creatively.
“The prie dieus in the chapel date back to the Normandy invasion and can no longer be trusted to bear the full weight of the wing commander who, as is commonly known, is a very pious Episcopalian. As President Johnson said recently, “The men who have guided the destiny of the United States have found the strength for their tasks by going to their knees. The private unity of public men and their God is an enduring source of reassurance for the people of America.” In this time of war, when freedom is in danger at home and abroad, there can be no greater weapon than the faith of our fighting men and women as it is nurtured by the time they spend on their knees. If they are to continue to do so without fear of sudden injury, the prie dieus in the chapel need to be replaced. ASAP.”
I don’t know if Sergeant Garafano actually read the forms but he never turned down one of my requests. He raised his eyebrows only slightly when I submitted a sacristy request in the form of a Haiku:
Our red wine is sour, Cyril.
Replace it now to
enable blood redemption.
I wish I had kept copies of the requisition forms I filled out. They probably provided a more accurate record of what Air Force life was like than my whimsical letters home.
As I ascended to the rank of buck sergeant, I was given more official opportunities to write. I wrote articles and drew cartoons for the chapel bulletin, the Bentwaters monthly newspaper, and other media. My career as a cartoonist ended when the wing commander complained that all the officers I drew “look like potato-bellied cockroaches.” On some nights I took courses in British history offered on base by the University of Maryland extension school and wrote protracted term papers about Queens Mary I and Elizabeth I. By the time I rotated back to the States in 1968, I was in the habit of writing almost every day.
I enrolled at Eastern Baptist College in September 1968 with a goal of earning a bachelor’s degree as soon as possible, continuing on to seminary and possibly getting a commission as an Air Force chaplain.
The idea of returning to the Air Force faded as I became involved in the student peace movement in the Philadelphia area. I began writing anti-Vietnam War essays for the student newspaper while honing my rhetorical rhythms in term papers under the tutelage of some extremely gifted professors.
The first course I took as a freshman was a writing class taught by Professor Caroline L. Cherry, a recent Ph.D graduate who was about my age. Her first assignment was to write an essay entitled, “The Culture Hero of the Sixties.”
I don’t recall whether I labored over the essay or breezed through it. Nor can I remember why I chose not to write about my own heroes, John F. Kennedy or Pope John XXIII. Perhaps I thought it would take too much time to do the necessary research about them. Whatever the reason, I decided to write about the Charlie Brown, Charles Schultz’s beleaguered Peanuts character. The essay required little research because, as a devoted consumer of the comics, everything I needed was in my head. I wrote it, typed it on a small portable typewriter, and handed it in.
The paper was returned with an A, and Caroline was generous with her assessment. She encouraged me to keep writing, and gradually I shifted my major to English Writing, with minors in history and psychology.
I began submitting cartoons and articles to the college newspaper, The Spotlight. By the end of my freshman year I was spending more time in the newspaper office than in class, and by the time I was a senior I was the editor. I busied myself writing scathing criticisms of President Nixon’s war policy and Supreme Court appointments, and – because it was the sixties – indulged in open criticism of the college’s conservative administration. Although The Spotlight’s circulation never numbered more that 500 students, most of whom tossed the paper in the trash, I was exhilarated by the power of the pen.
If there was ever a decisive moment in my resolve to become a writer, it would have been when Caroline told me she and her husband, Charles, were writing a text book called Contemporary Composition [Prentice-Hall, 1970] to assist students in the art of writing and critical thinking. She asked my permission to include “The Culture Hero of the Sixties” among the essays in the book.
I was exhilarated and astonished by her request, but when the book finally appeared, my mind was – as we said then – blown. There in an actual Prentice-Hall font was my small essay, nestled among offerings by Langston Hughes, John F. Kennedy, and John Updike. Only another would-be writer knows the near orgasmic intensity of seeing one’s own words in type. I never deluded myself that I might become another Updike: but I knew then I wanted to devote my life to writing.
After college, I managed to secure a temporary assignment as a reporter for Today’s Post, a small daily newspaper in King of Prussia, Pa. It was my first experience writing on a daily deadline and I quickly learned that accurate reporting wasn’t as easy as it looked. I almost never calculated correctly the average tax hit for every millage increase in the township, or the average rise in a household electric bill when the utility company raised its rates. Reporting on fires, car wrecks or school board motions was rarely straightforward because firefighters, EMT’s and board members had differing opinions about what happened. It was also a challenge to walk the narrow line between misquoting the police chief or quoting him accurately and making him look stupid. The only story I wrote that caught the editor’s full attention reported the arrival of the township Christmas tree. “The erection,” I wrote, “took 35 minutes and required the use of a crane.” I saw nothing amusing about it, but editors and reporters laughed and quoted it to me almost every day.
One of the columnists at Today’s Post was Dr. Frank A. Sharp, whose main job was director of American Baptist News Service. Frank knew who I was because of our mutual Baptist ties.
In April of 1972, he and other Baptist staff were busily preparing for the annual American Baptist convention slated for Denver in May. One weekend Frank’s primary news writer, a woman in her forties, was struck by an aneurysm and suddenly died.
I’m sure Frank mourned her passing although, as a taciturn Yankee, he rarely showed any emotion. But the fact that he was suddenly without a press room aid and news writer on the eve of the denomination’s most important meeting left him in a state of near panic.
Frank called me to his office in the “Holy Doughnut” – the circular American Baptist mission center in King of Prussia – and didn’t ask me to sit down. I slouched against his door jam as he studied me, probably trying form an opinion about my shoulder-length hair.
“Can you write?” he asked finally.
“Yes,” I replied with youthful confidence.
Frank scratched his balding head.
“Think you could lift a typewriter?”
“Sure.”
“How about a carton of mimeograph paper?”
“Sure.”
“Can you start tomorrow?”
It was the briefest and most productive job interview I had ever had, before or since.
Obviously Frank’s most pressing need was for someone to haul reams of paper and operate mimeograph machines more than he needed a writer, and he needed that person fast. I was unceremoniously added to the staff.
Before long I was the primary press release writer for American Baptists while Frank turned his attention to writing columns for Today’s Post and submitting contributions to William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review. (The only response he got from Buckley was a single sentence on plain bond paper: “Thank you, Doctor, but you really needn’t bother.”)
For the next two years I wrote news copy for American Baptist News Service and feature articles for The American Baptist magazine. The American Baptist was edited by Norman R. De Puy, an erstwhile pastor and brilliant writer who specialized in iconoclastic thinking and dazzling turns of phrase. His monthly column in The American Baptist, “The Bible Alive,” was written with insight and laugh-out-loud humor and was widely co-opted by preachers looking for a last-minute sermon.
Norman, who had grown up in Pennsylvania coal country, had a prodigious sense of humor and a vast lexicon of colorful metaphors and off-color jokes. He was also a perfectionist who openly confronted colleagues – most often his superiors – when he felt they were doing shoddy work. His particular management style was to create a crisis where none existed and then move resolutely to resolve it.
I learned from Norman that crisis management was something I needed to avoid at all cost, but I loved working for him and quickly adjusted to his occasionally mercurial personality (he referred to his volcanic eruptions as “French fits”). He was a loyal and supportive boss, and I like to think I was helpful to him on many occasions – particularly the month his “Bible Alive” column was entitled, “Jesus was no Pussy Cat”
In the early 1970s, type for The American Baptist was set by a composition machine that printed out justified columns of type. The type was trimmed by a razor and affixed with wax to a layout master, which was photographed for photo-offset printing. Usually the process worked fine, but as I stood next to the web press that night I noticed that part of the headline for “The Bible Alive” had disappeared: the word “Cat” was missing.
Whether the missing word was an accident or an act of sabotage will never be known, but it did give me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shout, “Stop the presses!”
In 1974, Norman decided to leave his position as editor to accept a call as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dearborn, Mich.
Norman called me into his office and asked me to sit down.
“Look,” he said. “I’m leaving and you’re my candidate to replace me.”
I had no management experience, I had no editorial experience, but I was 28 and had no idea how unqualified I was for the job. Looking back, I can only regard the offer as one of Norman’s more unorthodox management experiments. Then, I thought it was an exciting idea. Looking back, it made no sense.
“You’ll do fine,” Norman Said. “I’m going to tell you what to do.”
As I sat speechless in his office, Norman outlined a campaign strategy to convince the board that I could do the job.
“First,” he said, looking at my shaggy hair and rumpled double knit baggie pants, “You’ve got to start dressing for success. Put on a tie.”
He ticked off the necessary steps as if he had been thinking about the all week.
“Second, don’t get all democratic and stay in your two-holer. Move into my office as soon as I’m gone.” Norman classified the offices in the circular American Baptist mission center by the number of windows they had: most staff had “two holers.” Division heads like Norman had “three holers.” The General Secretary, Bob Campbell, had a “four holer.”
“Third,” he said, “you should start writing a monthly column for the magazine.”
It was the third point that gave me pause. The thought of writing a monthly for a national audience was daunting. I was pretty sure I could write one decent column, perhaps two. But where was I going to come up with something new to say each month?
This kind of anxiety, of course, will be familiar to pastors who have to come up with profound homilectical insights every week.
I began to sweat. Writing a monthly column was a scarier prospect than editing a magazine or supervising writers.
I paced and fretted for a week, and finally turned to scripture for inspiration. I decided to call the column, “The Little Scroll,” based on the reference on Revelation 10:2-7:
And I saw another mighty angel coming down from the heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire. He held a little scroll in his hand.
I’m sure I had no idea what that meant, although today I might be tempted to exegete the rainbow into a heavenly affirmation of gay power.
The column’s debut in March 1974 broke no theological ground. It was entitled, “Mighty Maggie,” a commentary on Margaret Thatcher’s ascendancy to head the British government.
“When we as a denomination stop withholding our leadership jobs from people who happen to be women, or conversely, when we stop patting ourselves on the back when we find jobs for women,” I ventured, “then we’ll be on our way to making some significant progress toward the fulfillment of our Christian mission.”
I’m sure I struggled over that column for days, and could have struggled a bit longer to make it less wordy. Letters to the editor did not affirm my commitment to women leaders but some complained about my demeaning use of “Maggie” to refer to the P.M. I could see from the very beginning that this wasn’t going to be easy.
I wrote “The Little Scroll” each month for 20 years, shifting formats from editorials to personal commentaries to poems to single-scene dramas to cartoons. Often it was more important to me to submit the column on deadline (so as not to delay publication of the entire issue) than to make an important theological declaration. As I look back on the pile of editorials that accumulated between 1974 and 1992, I’m reminded of an old newsroom maxim: I never missed a deadline but I wrote a lot of crap.
I discontinued “The Little Scroll” when I left the American Baptist Office of Communication in 1993 to return to newspaper reporting.
Perhaps that’s where I should have left it.
Then in March 2009, as I was looking for an outlet to express some thoughts, I discovered the modern format of the blog. “The Little Scroll” reappeared, haphazardly and irregularly, in this space.
In August 2010, I was invited by the blessed remnant of North Baptist Church in Port Chester, N.Y., to be their lay preacher.
Though few in number, rarely exceeding the prescribed twos and threes who gather in Jesus’ name to qualify for his presence, the congregation proved to be welcoming and uncritical. Their unwritten understanding with me is that I would preach as if I was addressing a packed house. I would mount the pulpit, turn on the mike, and shout to the rafters so we could all go home and say we had been in church.
I also quickly discovered that this loving and tolerant remnant was happy to listen to almost anything I had to say, regardless of scholarly acumen or theological orthodoxy. That made me more conscientious about following the prescriptions of the Revised Common Lectionary and the views of known theologians on most issues. If I strayed from orthodoxy, it was inadvertent and attributable to the fact that I am an untutored Baptist layman, driven by curiosity about God’s word but prone to error.
After a few weeks of sermonizing, I decided to upload the text of each discourse online. Immodestly, I persuaded myself this would be a good evangelical tool and – who knows? – I might even be able to double the number of people tuned in to my ruminations. The online version of “The Little Scroll” became a weekly homily following the lead of the Revised Common Lectionary.
This amalgamation of the blog as sermon – or the sermon as a blog – has become a profoundly personal devotional experience for me.
Someday I may gather these columns and other musings between two covers as a means of sharing that devotional experience with others. If that happens, let the reader beware: there are no profound insights or metaphysical discoveries in these columns. They are merely, as the subtitle claims, accounts of misplaced sandals on holy ground.
But each time I sit down at the keyboard, my prayer is that the next spiritual journey, however imperfect, will bring me closer to the mysterious, confounding, puzzling, and loving God who is at the center of all our lives.
If you ever do compile the Little Scroll Editorials I hope you will let me design the book.
ReplyDelete