Okay! I figured the format out! (You were stressing about that, weren't you?) I'm going to use Stop and Smell the Flowers as basic framework and sometimes we'll do a bit of a flashback to Grandma and Grandpa Harvey or maybe even before then, just to spice it up a little.
And now, back to the book.
***
Chapter 1
A Fundamental Community
When I was born in 1911 Silverdale had gone through its rough-and-tumble, railroad boom days of open saloons and general degradation. The state of Kansas had enacted, on its own, alcohol prohibition laws thirty years before I was born.
Elsewhere, there seemed to be broad contempt for such legislation, as was the general attitude of the public following the 18th Amendment (ratified in 1919). Those prohibition laws were largely ignored throughout Kansas.
Not so in Silverdale.
The Women's Christian Temperance Union was active, with Grandma Harvey, slender and full of purpose leading the pack. It was not really temperance or moderation they were after, it was total and absolute abstinence. There were no town drunks visible, although certainly there may have been some hitting the bottle in secrecy. I never remember seeing anyone take a drink, yet alone being drunk. With so little evidence of drinking, I wonder why so much activity and resources were devoted to an apparently nonexistent problem.
Probably as an overreaction to compensate for its period of sin during the railroad boom days, Silverdale had metamorphosed into a "fundamental community" centered around two churches: Methodist and Baptist. We were Methodist.
There was no straddling: you were either one of us or you weren't. Catholics weren't. Democrats weren't. Baptists barely were. All such people were transgressors of our ideological domain and tolerated at best. Ours was the true religion, not to be improved upon or tampered with. I was glad we belonged to the Methodist and not the Baptist variety because Methodist's were God's preference, I knew.
This assumption was verified some time later when lightning struck the Baptist church and burned it to the ground. Those poor Baptists were so destitute they couldn't rebuild, so they joined us Methodists. It must have been bitter gall to pay for getting into God's favored congregation. I suspect we held an ill-concealed smugness toward our less fortunate brethren. They were never granted full membership. They had initially cast their lot with the Baptists when they could have chose to be Methodists. That choice demonstrated some inherent basic fault of character.
In Sunday school, we children sang, "I'll be a sunbeam for Jesus." As I sang, my heart would swell with pride, for I was going to do something wonderful for Jesus. I was on the right track. I was a little True Believer.
In this small, closed society of fundamentalism, sin was largely, almost wholly, relegated to the closet. Surely it existed, but nowhere was it visible. Mental illness and alcoholism, both taints on family character, were out of sight. We children never thought to ask whether other families had any crazy people or drunks hidden away. I assumed that everything and every one was normal, other than those democrats, Catholics and yes, even the Baptists.
The official function of our church was the salvation of our immortal souls. Probably not recognized as such, its primary social function was providing a meeting place for the regular interaction of its members. For many, those church gatherings were the only opportunity to meet and talk with persons outside their immediate families and farms.
Born into this social environment, my early concepts of the world about me were being formed -- ingrained concepts and feelings which I have had to deal with all my life. It included the ethic of hard work and sobriety, part and parcel of the Protestant Ethic, which was certainly a pragmatic quality in quasi-frontier society. However, if I had it to do all over, I would have preferred a bit less fundamentalism, with its heavy emphasis on the negative aspects of Christianity.
At about six or seven (1917 or 1918) I started being "saved" every year at the annual revival. The constant threat of hell was held over our heads, taking much joy out of our lives. The statistical probability of ending up in down there was given such heavy emphasis that even at that early age I could estimate the high probability of all that bad news. The preacher went to great lengths explaining how hot hell was going to be and how long eternity was. The probability of ending up in that amount of heat, for that length of time was staggering. It was easy enough for those evangelists to get me to the altar.
With such a preponderance of heavy negativism, I failed to catch the viewpoint of the "good news" of the Gospel. The bad news was so overwhelming.
Comments