Stop and Smell the Flowers

Chapter 1, Part 2: A Fundamental Community (Gee, Darn and Heck are not allowed)

I had one advantage over many others.  I knew what God looked like.  There was a picture of him in the front of  our bible.  There He was lying on a cloud, with white skin and whiskers, and what I took to be a rather malevolent look on his face.  He was peering down and watching what we were doing, every minute of the day and night, judging us. 

His personality projected jealousy, anger and revenge, all of which seemed to dominate his predispositions.  He also like to be worshiped.  Recognition would do for most of us mortals.  Of course, God being much more powerful could be expected to handle worship.  I failed to understand that if He were so omnipotent and we were of such despicable unimportance, why He would be so concerned as to how we felt about Him.

Oh!  We did sing, "Jesus loves me, this I know."  There was mention of even God, Himself, loving the world.  But, that seemed to be of relatively minor comfort when accompanied by all the threatening implications which appeared to dominate His relationship with us.

We applied all sorts of rationalizations to sweep away biblical inconsistencies which conflicted with our secular concepts.  Drinking was taboo, therefore the wine Jesus produced from water was in actuality non-alcoholic.  It was grape juice, just like we used in communion.  Surely that was what our Lord offered in the cup at the last supper.  When real sticklers were encountered, as Joshua commanding the sun to stand still while he disposed of the enemy, we could always fall back on miracles.  Anything is possible with God. 

But, sometimes that explanation left an uneasy doubt.  Because of all the human and institutional meddling which has occurred along the way, I now think of revelation as the basis for accepting something as truth risky ground.

To me the fundamental, literal interpretation of the Bible is somewhat like a notion expressed in "Alice in Wonderland," where one is asked to believe six impossible things before breakfast.  The implication that there was no rainbow before the Flood, asks us to believe that refraction of light from water particles in the air was invented as a sign promising no more big floods, and that this phenomenon never occurred prior to the Flood.  Possibly, the incorporation of these old myths in the Bible detract from the tremendous store of theological wealth. 

We not only received a goodly dose of religion at Sunday school and church, but a steady stream of it from my mother at home.  We were not allowed to say "Gee," for that was a substitute for saying, "Jesus."  "Darn," really meant damn and "heck" stood for hell.  All were forbidden.  Some of my earliest memories are of her reading the bible stories and trying to teach us the values in which she so strongly believed.  There was a dreadful sense of impending danger in her presentation.

All of this was serious business to a four-year-old.  (Which makes the year 1915.)  My nightly prayer was:

Now I lay me down to sleep. 

I pray the Lord my soul to keep. 

If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

To me, this implied that I might not make it until morning.  I must always be prepared, for there were dire eventualities hanging over daily existence.  The control of my destiny was not in my hands, but according to the whims of some inscrutable god.

I suppose had I remained in such a closed society for the rest of my life, those beliefs, which made up the cornerstone of my early years, would have remained the same.  But, I didn't.  Certainly for my own life, and for most of the rest of our society, the days of old and rural traditional society were numbered.  I'm not going to speculate at this point regarding the advantages and disadvantages attending such change. 

But be assured, the changes in store were beyond the wildest imagination of the most perceptive soothsayer.

Chapter 1: A Fundamental Community (Or, as I like to call it, "Those Crazy and Sober Methodists")

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.

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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.