I did not mean to criticize the trustees. I do understand the reluctance to make any substantial investment in the church building at this point. But if I were a little younger, I tell you, I’d be up on that roof myself. As it is, I might drive a few nails into the treads on the front steps. I don’t see the point in letting the old place look too shabby in its last year or so. It’s very plain, but the proportions of it really are quite pleasing, and when it has a fresh coat of paint, it’s all the church anyone could need, in terms of appearance. It is inadequate in other ways, I recognize that.
I did remember to mention to them that that weather vane on the steeple was brought from Maine by my grandfather and stood above his church for many years. He gave it to my father on the day of his ordination. The people in Maine used to put those roosters on their steeples, he told me, to remind themselves of the betrayal of Peter, to help them repent. They really didn’t use crosses much at all in those days. But once I mentioned that there was a rooster on the steeple, which most of them had never noticed before, they became a little uneasy with the fact that there wasn’t a cross up there. I believe they will put one up, now that it’s on their minds. That’s the one thing they’ll get around to. They said they will mount the weather vane on a wall somewhere, in the foyer,” probably, where people can appreciate it. I don’t care what they do. I only mentioned it at all because I didn’t want it to be discarded with everything else. It is very old. This way at least you can get a good look at it.
It has a bullet hole at the base of its tail feathers. There were a good many stories about how it got there. I was told once that, since my grandfather had no bell or any other respectable way to call a meeting, and almost nobody had a working timepiece, he would fire a rifle in the air, and one time he wasn’t paying enough attention where he pointed it. There was a story, too, that a man from Missouri who was passing by just as the people were gathering fired one shot and set the rooster spinning around to try to dishearten them a little, since he knew they were Free Soilers. And there was a story that the church had taken delivery of a crate of Sharps rifles and somebody wanted to find out if they were really as accurate as they were said to be.
A Sharps is a very fine rifle, but I suspect the first story is the true one, because in my experience that degree of precision is only achieved accidentally. My grandfather could be very quiet about his embarrassments, so he might just have let people speculate, invent. I told my committee the story about the Missourian because it has a certain Christian character dinging the weather vane would have been an act of considerable restraint, because feelings ran high in those days. That story has the most historical interest, too, I think, and it could well be true, for all I know to the contrary. It is hard to make people care about old things. So I thought I should do what I could for that poor old rooster.
Often enough these settlers’ churches were only meant to keep the rain off until there were time and resources to put up something better. So they don’t have the dignity of age. They just get shabby. They were never meant to become venerable. I remember that old Baptist church that my father helped to pull down, all black in the rain, looking ten times as formidable as it would have before the lightning struck. That was always a major part of my idea of a church. When I was a child I actually believed that the purpose of steeples was to attract lightning. I thought they must be meant to protect all the other houses and buildings, and that seemed very gallant to me. Then I read some history, and I realized after a while that not every church was on the ragged edge of the Great Plains, and not every pulpit had my father in it. The history of the church is very complex, very mingled. I want you to know how aware I am of that fact. These days there are so many people who think loyalty to religion is benighted, if it is not worse than benighted. I am aware of that, and I know the charges that can be brought against the churches are powerful. And I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, sheltered and parochial. In every sense, unless it really is a universal and transcendent life, unless the bread is the bread and the cup is the cup everywhere, in all circumstances, and it is a time with the Lord in Gethsemane that comes for everyone, as I deeply believe. That biscuit ashy from my father’s charred hand. It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for. If I could only give you what my father gave me. No, what the Lord has given me and must also give you. But I hope you will put yourself in the way of the gift. I am not speaking here of the ministry as such, as I have said.
***
I did a strange thing this morning. They were playing a waltz on the radio, and I decided I wanted to dance to it. I don’t mean that in the usual sense. I have a general notion of waltzing but no instruction in the steps, and so on. It was mostly a matter of waving my arms a little and spinning around a little, pretty carefully. Remembering my youth makes me aware that I never really had enough of it, it was over before I was done with it. Whenever I think of Edward, I think of playing catch in a hot street and that wonderful weariness of the arms. I think of leaping after a high throw and that wonderful collaboration of the whole body with itself and that wonderful certainty and amazement when you know the glove is just where it should be. Oh, I will miss the world!
So I decided a little waltzing would be very good, and it was. I plan to do all my waltzing here in the study. I have thought I might have a book ready at hand to clutch if I began to experience unusual pain, so that it would have an especial recommendation from being found in my hands. That seemed theatrical, on consideration, and it might have the perverse effect of burdening the book with unpleasant associations. The ones I considered, by the way, were Donne and Herbert and Barth’s Epistle to the Romans and Volume II of Calvin’s Institutes. Which is by no means to slight Volume I.
There’s a mystery in the thought of the re-creation of an old man as an old man, with all the defects and injuries of what is called long life faithfully preserved in him, and all their claims and all their tendencies honored, too, as in the steady progress of arthritis in my left knee. I have thought sometimes that the Lord must hold the whole of our lives in memory, so to speak:. Of course He does. And “memory” is the wrong word, no doubt. But the finger I broke sliding into second base when I was twenty-two years old is crookeder than ever, and I can interpret that fact as an intimate attention, taking Herbert’s view.
This morning I strolled over to Boughton’s. He was sitting in the screened porch behind the trumpet vines, dozing. He and his wife were fond of those vines because they attract hummingbirds. They’ve pretty well taken over now, so the house looks sort of like a huge duck blind. Boughton corrected me when I told him that. “A hummingbird blind,” he said. “There are times when a little bird shot would bring down a thousand of them.” But, he says, since that’s not enough yet to season a cup of broth, he’s going to bide his time.
All his gardens have more or less gone to brush, but as I came up the road I saw young Boughton and the daughter Glory clearing out the iris beds. Boughton owns his house. I used to think that was an enviable thing, but there’s been no one but him to see to it, and things have gotten a little out of hand these last years.
He seemed in excellent spirits. “The children,” he said, “are putting things to rights for me.”
I talked to him some about the baseball season and about the election, but I could tell he was listening mainly to the voices of his children, who did sound very happy and harmonious. I remember when they played in those gardens with their cats and kites and bubbles. It was as pretty a sight as you’re likely to see. Their mother was a fine woman, and such a one to laugh! Boughton says, “I miss her something dreadful.” She knew Louisa when they were girls. Once, I remember, they put hard-boiled eggs under a neighbor’s setting hen.