Beginning the Graduate School Adventure (Part 13)

In the summer of 1961, A.C.C bachelor’s degrees in hand, Laquita and I packed our few worldly goods and launched on the trek to Seattle, Washington and the University of Washington.  We saved money by camping out in a tiny tent that we had bought back in Abilene.  Things went fairly well with our outdoor life, except that our first night was up in the Rockies at about 11,000 ft., and we had no sleeping bags and slept on cots, which insured a good circulation of frigid air above and below us.  Our blankets didn’t offer much protection, and we got up early after a miserable night and built a fire to get warm.  Another time it was raining, and we didn’t know how to prevent water from coming into the tent, so that wasn’t a very comfortable night either.  Then there was the remote campground where there were bears roaming around.  One of them came prowling at our campsite, sniffing around our tent while we were having evening prayer; that quickly added another dimension to our prayer!  He finally went over to our picnic table and knocked off our sturdy metal ice chest.  It broke open and the bear found some cheese to eat and went off.  We had a permanent dent in the ice chest, but it was still quite functional.  Oh well, it made for good stories afterward—and camping out did save us motel bills.  Good thing we were young, so we could rebound from these mishaps in roughing it.  We did some further camping afterward, but we were never fond of it.

We made immediate contact with Laquita’s brother, Lester Alexander, and his wife, Doris upon arriving in the Seattle area.  They lived in Renton, a suburb of Seattle, where they owned and operated an auction house.  They sold everything from household items to antiques, and every Saturday night drew a crowd to the auction, where my brother-in-law, assisted by Doris as manager and cashier and one or two others to transfer the items for sale to and from the stage, engaged in the traditional sing-song patter of the auctioneer, unintelligible except for the beginning “Whattamabidnow?” and “Sold! to number 44.”  He was good at it, and the auction was earning them a living at the time.  We enjoyed browsing around the auction warehouse when we visited them.  We had to be careful during the auction, however, since Lester was always quick to end the bids if he saw we were interested in an item.  One time, he thought I wanted a lawn mower and hollered “Sold!” when I scratched my ear.  He didn’t make us pay for it and it went back on auction the next week.

We found a place to live in the upstairs apartment of a widowed missionary, Mrs. Edmunds, who had spent many years in China, of which she shared many of her experiences.  She was a somewhat quirky lady, though, and we occasionally got crossways with her.  She let us keep our car in her vacant garage, which was a convenience, but next to the driveway was a bush that brushed against the car when I was driving into the garage.  I asked her if I could trim the annoying bush, to which she agreed.  But it turned out that she and I were thinking of different bushes, and I proceeded to trim a bush that she had been carefully cultivating.  She saw me out the window and opened it to yell at me to stop, accompanied by a glare that would have melted steel.  She confessed that her Christian charity was sorely tested by my blunder.  Another time, she informed me that my dropping my shoes on the floor above her when I took them off at night was very irritating, so I learned to set them down gently.  She was kind at heart, though, and it was a well-kept accommodation.

Living in a large northern city and attending a big state university were a culture shock, both in Seattle and, later, Pittsburgh.  I was not used to being regarded as something of a Southern hick, who really wasn’t much acquainted with the sophisticated setting of an urban (and urbane) academic institution.  In addition, some people smirked at my wearing my Christianity on my sleeve by sporting a big “Abilene Christian College” decal on my briefcase.  I had rather ineffective debates with one of my professors, Dr. Jacob Korg, who taught Victorian literature and the novel.  He tried to enlighten me about the deficiencies of Christian Scripture, pointing out that Jesus endorsed perpetual poverty for some people when He said, “The poor you have always with you.”  That greatly offended his socialist philosophy.

The great bright spot in that year was my friendship with Dr. David Fowler, who was my graduate advisor.  He was a respected textual scholar in medieval literature, particularly of the works of the Pearl Poet and the writer of Piers Plowman, both of which were subjects of my doctoral dissertation a few years later.  Dr. Fowler was a true Christian gentleman.  My first meeting with him was in an elevator on the way to a gathering of Woodrow Wilson scholars held before we had been introduced to any of the faculty.  I asked him if he was one of the graduate students, and he politely said, no, he was a member of the faculty.  I hope he was flattered that I misjudged his age.

I was very sorry to leave the University of Washington at the end of the year, but, although the University was given a certain amount of money for each Wilson Fellow who attended, they were not required to spend it to support those Fellows.  I was offered only minimal student aid for my second year, perhaps because I compiled only a 3.5 GPA for my first year, rather than a perfect 4.0.  However, I didn’t put all my eggs in one basket and applied for other sources of student aid.  I hit the jackpot when the University of Pittsburgh offered me one of its Mellon fellowships with about the same benefits as the Wilson Fellowship, a full ride with tuition and living stipend.  When I went in to see the director of student aid about what had happened, he told me I could have had a teaching fellowship if I had stayed, and  that my degree at Pitt would not be as prestigious as one from U. of Washington.  He might have been right, but it seemed a bit arrogant of him to tell me so, in a tone of voice that said, “If you don’t have the good sense to know how good we are, we’re better off without you.”

For our second semester at U. of Washington, we were offered a six-month tenancy house-sitting for one of Laquita’s fellow teachers at the elementary school where she was employed.  Since we weren’t on a lease arrangement with Mrs. Edmunds, we took the offer.  The house was in a very good neighborhood and had a view out its front picture window of Mt. Rainier and the Cascades range when the weather was clear; that was a magnificent sight!  That was the best housing deal we had during our whole academic experience.

Another significant experience during this year was Seattle’s being the site of the 1963 Word’s Fair, for which the still-famous Space Needle was built.  It was in the spring, and several relatives and friends availed themselves of our spacious house as a place to stay when they came up to the Fair.  We ourselves attended a few times, the only time in our lives when we were on the grounds of a World’s Fair.  As is usually the case for such events, it was huge, spectacular, and memorable.

We had two pleasant excursions that I remember from that year.  One was a boat trip up the Skagit Valley, conducted by a local utility company to view its hydroelectric generating facilities.  The setting was breathtaking, and the information on the production and transmission of electric power very educational.  The other trip was up into the mountains of Mt. Rainier National Park to camp out and do some trekking on the trails.  That, too, offered tremendous views and experiences of nature.  I think it was on this trip that a bear broke into our metal ice chest, left out on the picnic table, to find something to eat.  He put a dent into the chest, but didn’t do further damage, since the lid latch came loose and he got whatever he wanted to eat.  We used that dented old ice chest for many years after that, and it several times occasioned a good story about the source of the dent.

We had a very satisfying church experience while we were in Seattle.  We attended a Church of Christ downtown, and we made some rich friendships, although we didn’t maintain them long after we moved to Pittsburgh.  We participated in a choral group conducted by Dick Still, and we spent some social time with him and his wife, Betty.  Her middle name began with a “B,” and they liked to joke about her being “Betty B. Still.”  I taught some adult Sunday School classes.  The preacher J. C. Hartsell, was young and dynamic and delivered meaty sermons, and I had some good conversations with him when we met occasionally for lunch. Interestingly, we made acquaintance with a student from Seattle Pacific College, which was associated with the Free Methodist Church; later, in Michigan, we twice were members of a Free Methodist Church, and our daughter Liann married into a Free Methodist family.

We finished our year in Seattle, packed up our 1950 Plymouth, and headed to Pittsburgh in the summer of 1963, via a visit to relatives in Texas.  Ahead of us was an entirely different kind of city from Seattle, gritty, industrial, and still soot-stained from its days as the steel capital of the nation.  But our three years there was also rich in friendships and cultural experience, as well as being the site of my major doctoral work.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

More Undergraduate and Early Marriage Experiences (Part 12)

After the wedding and a brief honeymoon, Laquita and I returned to the A.C.C. campus to continue our undergraduate work, the middle of her junior year and my sophomore year.  Our first residence was the “married barracks,” old military buildings divided into apartments for married people.  Its advantages were that it was cheap and right on campus, so we didn’t need transportation.  It was, as you might imagine, very Spartan accommodations, with male and female bathrooms in each hallway and rough wooden floors.  There were basic kitchen appliances so we could cook, after a fashion, but we continued to take our regular meals in the cafeteria.

Happily, we were able to move at the end of the spring term to a tiny house across the street from the campus.  It had perhaps 600 square feet, divided into a bedroom/sitting area, a kitchenette, and a bathroom.  But it was still reasonable rent, and it was private!  We have fond memories of that little house.   Even though it backed on to an alley, it had grass and flowers in the front, being the back yard of a larger house on the front of the lot.  The flowers were daylilies, and they bloomed profusely.  We had a pleasant neighbor in another little house across from us, a widow lady named Mrs. McClintock.  And down the alley a few blocks lived Laquita’s sister, Grace, and her husband Farrell Hogg.  That supplied us with a place to do our laundry and have a meal from time to time.

Laquita continued to work in the cafeteria, even working extra hours serving at banquets there.  I continued my work on the maintenance crew, graduating to operating the big mowers during the spring and summer.  She continued in the elementary education major, and I definitely settled into the English program, taking the sophomore surveys of English literature under various teachers and having more contact with Dr. James Culp, who took over as head of the English department during that year.  He became my mentor and close friend during the last two years of my baccalaureate program.  I had no more classes from the elderly Mrs. Retta Scott Garrett, but Dr. Culp recommended me to her as someone who could do gardening work for her.  Particularly when she was away during the summer, I would make sure that the house was all right and that her garden was watered, her grass cut, and her hedges trimmed.  The skill I gained in hedge trimming has been very useful in taking care of the yards of houses Laquita and I owned later.  Strangely enough, learning to trim hedges has been helpful in trimming my beard when it gets bushy; start boldly with big swaths and then fine tune the straggly spots.

I took time to engage in a few extra-curricular activities, such as assisting with a night-time talk show on the campus radio station and joining the Pickwickian Club, a group of people who liked to do creative writing.  I also participated in a group of men who sponsored talks on biblical subjects and then discussed them.  Both Laquita and I would very much have liked to sing in the Acapella Chorus, but neither of us had the time for regular rehearsals and frequent performances.

I enjoyed my class work, especially as I got into my junior year and took advanced literature courses, along with electives in philosophy of religion and second-and third-year courses in New Testament Greek.  I took several advanced courses with Dr. Culp, and in my senior year he asked me to be his office assistant.  It was the best job I had on campus, since it allowed me to study when office duties were slow and to strengthen what turned out to be a lifelong relationship with Dr. Culp and his wife.  They often had some of his students over for dinner, and we were several times on that guest list.  Such occasions also provided the opportunity for some of the English majors to get to know each other.

In Laquita’s senior year she had to do her practice teaching, and that meant we needed a car.  My uncle Lester was aware we were looking, and he gave us the best car-buying tip we ever had, resulting in our buying our first car, a black 1950 Plymouth sedan, 10 years old but with low mileage and in perfect shape.  It was the archtypical old lady who had had it in her garage and rarely used it.  That car served us through graduate school and into the first year of my job at UM-Dearborn, a period of six years with trips to Seattle and Pittsburgh.

My senior year was a very successful one.  I graduated (barely) summa cum laude and received the Dean’s Award for the person judged to have taken the best advantage of his opportunities at A. C. C.  I also won a Woodrow Wilson Graduate Fellowship to receive full tuition and living expenses at a graduate school of my choice for a year.  Back then, colleges were growing and there was a market for Ph.D.s in English.  I chose to attend the University of Washington in Seattle (which happened to be where Laquita’s brother and his family lived), and we moved up there in the summer of 1961.  Thus began my four years of graduate study, one at the University of Washington and three at the University of Pittsburgh.

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 Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

The Next Step in College and Courtship: Marriage! Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 11)

          After the short-lived summer harvest job, I made the rash decision, driven by passionate love, to make my way to Laquita’s home in Burnet, TX, where she had returned to take up her job with the town’s downtown drugstore.  She was what was known back then as a “soda jerk,” a term that had nothing to do with the worker’s character, but rather originated from the jerking action required to operate the big handle controlling the output of carbonated water required to produce the fizz for various drinks.  This was a job that required some social grace to interact with customers and the skill to mix the elements of an ice cream soda or a cherry coke in the proper proportions.  None of the premixed drinks one gets now from the fast food places!  I hitch-hiked from Abilene to Burnet (about 180 miles), my longest trip of that sort and the last time I ever did it. 

I surprised Laquita in the drugstore while she was at work, a surprise that had a negative tinge for her because I had grown a mustache during the first part of the summer.  I had no idea what I was going to do after I got there, so I stayed a couple of nights with Laquita’s family before finding a room to rent there in town.  Laquita’s father, whom I called Mr. Alec, liked me because I got up early one morning and went with him on his rounds tending his chickens and his garden.  He was a simple, pleasant man, a hard worker who had a job with the City of Burnet on the maintenance crew.  He invited me to have meals with the family, and would even have been all right with my staying with them, but it would not have been proper (nor even wise, I think), for me to have done that, in view of my romantic interest in Laquita.  Laquita’s mom (whom I called “Mom A” liked me, too, and was gracious to me, but I think she would have been more comfortable with me being back in Abilene.

Mr. Alec was able to get me a job with the city maintenance crew, where the tasks consisted most often of cleaning the street drainage gutters (“curbs and gutters, gutters and curbs” Mr. Alec would say) and unloading sacks of lime at the water purification plant.  This last chore always left me itching at the end of the day, as the lime dust would get under my clothes and irritate the skin.  Mr. Alec liked to tell stories, so I got to know him better as we worked together.  He was not a church-going man at that point (he underwent a conversion later), and in fact (I found out later), he used his Sunday mornings to engage in illegal cock-fighting, using game-cocks that he kept apart from the other chickens at the back of the family property.  I was informed later by his grandsons, who were also living with their grandparents at the time, that he had a fairly profitable business breeding and selling game-cocks.

Our last project before the job ended was working in an open field just out of town which was going to become the town’s airport.  We were assigned the task of clearing away the biggest rocks so that the runway could be built.  It felt a little bit like being on a prison chain-gang, but I’m glad to report that there were no shackles or ball-and-chain. 

Of course, I went to church with the family at the local downtown Church of Christ, where the Alexanders (especially Mom A) were active members of the congregation.  I was welcomed there and enjoyed getting to know the people, who accepted me quickly because of my association with Laquita and her family.  Laquita’s oldest brother, Marion, was the father of the five boys living with the grandparents, and he would visit on weekends, usually going to church on Sunday also.  He was a very lively and charming fellow, but he loved to tease Laquita and me about our relationship.  He was a good salesman and he was able to pay for the boys staying at his parents’ house.  It was rather chaotic at times, since the boys ranged in age from teenagers to the little boy Paul, who was only about five or six at the time. Marion’s wife was mentally ill and was unable to care for the boys.  Marion was a very responsible father, and he spent time and money to engage in activities with the boys, like playing “rounders” with a softball and bat in the vacant lot across the street from the Burnet house and going fishing on one of the local lakes.  Laquita and I sometimes went along on these excursions.

I don’t remember many details of the time Laquita and I spent together that summer.  There certainly wasn’t much chance for private time at her home.  Our companionship was mainly going to church together and hanging around her house at meal times. Both she and I were working all day during the week. There was one occasion, however, that I remember our going for a walk along a dry creek bed that ran right by her house (it had water in it only when it rained).  We got to a sort of secluded spot with some trees around, and I made bold to initiate our first kiss--at least it’s the first one I remember, late as it came in our courtship.  It was rather tentative and shy, but a very meaningful development in our relationship.  I was not a sophisticated courtier!

One of the memorable experiences during this period was my reading for the first time C. S. Lewis’s classic work, Mere Christianity.  I don’t remember how I had gotten a copy, but, as with many other people, it changed my thinking in basic ways.  Never had I read such a cogent but simple argument for the existence of a God who is the source of all moral principles.  I had now a philosophical foundation for the faith I had so far accepted as a given.  My boss on the maintenance crew was a thoroughgoing sceptic and a rather profane man, and he rejected my faith as a mindless illusion.  He was an enthusiast for geological research and had amassed a collection of fossils that he was eager to show me to bolster his argument that the geological record and the theory of evolution explained the origins of life, leaving no room for religious fantasies.  God must have protected me from his influence, for my new perspective from C. S. Lewis overshadowed his arguments.

When I arrived back at A.C.C. in the fall of 1958, I teamed up with three other guys to live in a little bachelor apartment about a five-minute walk away from the campus.  My companions in this enterprise were my two Bible-selling buddies, Fred Selby and Carl Reed, along with a college cafeteria worker named Claude Crawford.  Our landlady was named Mrs. Pettigrew, or as she was affectionately called, “Momma Pet.”  This certainly beat living in the barracks, and it was a good healthy walk back and forth to campus.

Laquita was back in her dormitory, and since both our living places were off limits to the opposite sex, we had to hang out in the library and go to church together three times a week.  We attended, as did many students, the Graham St. Church of Christ, which sent a bus to the campus to transport the students.  The preacher was a dynamic faculty member named Carl Spain.  We learned a lot from him about deeper Christian thinking and behavior.  He paved the way for a shift by the Churches of Christ to a more Spirit-filled understanding of Christian living, and he emphasized the doctrine of grace, which to that point had not been at the forefront of Church of Christ thinking.  I was glad to have had some personal contact with Dr. Spain when I led singing for one of his Gospel Meetings at the Stamford church I attended.

I was not a happy camper that term.  I was greatly desiring to get married, now that we were committed to it.  Laquita (and her mother), however, wanted to wait until she had graduated, or was at least within a year away from it.  But in my immaturity, extended celibacy was pretty low on my list of desired disciplines.  I was selfishly impatient, so I rashly decided to use the “nuclear option”: “Marry me now or that’s it.”  She knew it was a dumb thing to say, but somehow she swallowed her pride and good judgment and gave in, so we scheduled a December wedding.  She has said many times since then, “I knew God had brought us together, even if you were being silly.”  If she have been then the more gently assertive woman she became later, she might have said, “O.K. buddy, I’ll give you a chance to forget you said that, and we’ll talk again tomorrow.”  But she gave in to my stupidity, and the Lord prevented any bad results from my blunder.  Definitely not one of my better moments, though.

Somehow we managed to arrange for the wedding and a little reception at Laquita’s home afterward.  I had to borrow money from my uncle in order to fund my part in the occasion, and I borrowed my friend Fred’s car.  The only honeymoon facility I could afford was a lakeside summer camp with a cabin available at off-season rates.  However, our happy few days there transformed it into a memorable spot, the beginning of our long and greatly blessed life together.  I’m so glad she (and the Lord) didn’t allow me to throw her away.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

Matriculation at Abilene Christian College (1957): Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 10)

As a teenager growing up in a premillennial Church of Christ, I had assumed that I would go to the college associated with that group of churches, Kentucky Bible College in Winchester, KY.  But by the time I had been away from that milieu for over two years, there seemed no reason to go so far away, and I enrolled in the fall of 1957 at Abilene Christian College, which was affiliated with the mainline Churches of Christ that rejected premillennialism.  That doctrinal issue no longer seemed central to my faith, and though I couldn’t subscribe to the hardline rejection of it by mainline Churches of Christ, I felt that A.C.C. would meet my educational needs.  Over the four years that I spent there, my vocational plans evolved from thinking I would be a Bible or Religious Education major, to preparing to be a high school English teacher, and finally to plans to attend graduate school and become a college teacher of English.

          As I mentioned in the preceding installment of this autobiography, I went a few weeks early to Abilene to find a job.  Actually, I had two jobs for a while, my truck-driving job with the College maintenance department and work at a drugstore soda fountain across the street from the College.  Although the drugstore job lasted only a few weeks, until I was fully involved in classes, it had one very memorable moment.  My boss on the job was a young man who had worked there a while.  I was mostly a cleanup employee, so it was predictable that in my first week I was called on to do the dirtiest job associated with the fountain: cleaning out the grease trap.  A lot of goop-filled water went through the clean-up sink, where we washed the glasses and other utensils used to operate the fountain.  Every week or two the grease trap had to be cleaned to avoid a blocked drain.  The cleaning involved taking the trap apart, scooping out the accumulated goop, wiping it clean, and putting it back together—a thoroughly nasty job.  I did it the best I could the first time I was asked, and my boss seemed satisfied.  A week or ten days later, he asked me to do it again, but this time he gave me a bit of worldly wisdom before I got started: “You know,” he said confidentially, “If you’re asked to do a dirty job and do it well, you’ll probably get asked to do it again.”  That stuck with me and I have several times been reminded of it when I was confronted with the call to deal with messes much more consequential, if less literally dirty.  There is some ambiguity in the recognition one receives for doing a good job; performing well will often get you into even dirtier jobs.

          Back in 1957, the campus housing at A.C.C. still included some WWII era barracks which were as spartan for the students as they were for the soldiers.  My friend Fred Selby and I had our first-year lodgings there, along with Fred’s brother, David, who was coming back to school in spite of suffering from a form of leukemia that had made his life difficult.  I remember seeing him experiencing a cold sweat one time in his room.  He was unable to finish the term and had to go into a cancer hospital.  Unfortunately, he died before the academic year was over.  Fred and I were best buddies, and I went home with him several times during that year, which enabled me more easily to visit my folks in Rule, which was only ten miles away from Fred’s home.  That was fine with Fred, because he was sweet for a while on my niece, Linda, even though she was still in high school and her mother did not encourage the romance. 

          My campus job with the maintenance department had me often driving their old dump truck to take loads of refuse to the land fill a few miles away.  There I first encountered the smell of perpetually burning garbage, an unforgettable stench both acrid and heavy.  The truck was a challenge to drive, and there was much grinding of gears before I mastered the coordination of stick shift and clutch.  When I was not driving, there was plenty of grounds grooming and weed hoeing to do.  There was an outside maintenance crew of about four or five guys, and an inside crew rather larger who tended the dormitories and other buildings.  When it was raining or there was insufficient outside work to be done, the outside guys would be drafted into painting, or changing mattresses, or sweeping halls.  I preferred the outside work and the chatting time it supplied between the guys as we plied our hoes and rakes.  We were paid 60 cents an hour for our work, and I worked about 20 hours a week, in addition to carrying a full-time academic load.

          I received two pieces of special news during my first weeks of class.  As I was going through orientation and registration, I was called over to the table of the English Department head and told that my placement exam entitled me to be enrolled in the honors composition class taught by a venerable elderly lady called Mrs. Garrett.  Later on, I came to have very close relationships with both Mrs. Garrett and the Department Head, Dr. James Culp.  I received the second news a bit later when I was called out of class to hear that my father had died.  The funeral was held in Rule, but his body was brought to an Abilene cemetery for interment.  After attending these events, I returned to campus and took up classes again.

 Mrs. Garrett’s special class allowed and encouraged creativity in writing and featured a great deal of her reading aloud.  It was there that I first encountered the pleasure of listening to an expressive reader.  Freshman English elicited some memorable writing assignments, including a research paper on the circumpolar constellations, which fostered a lifelong interest in astronomy, even though I never took a class in the subject.  Mrs. Garrett’s class undergirded my decision in my sophomore year to major in English, rather than Bible or religious education.

          Much as I enjoyed my classes in my freshman year, my academic program was not the most significant part of my experience that year.  I had a few short infatuations with female classmates in the fall term, but they all faded away when, toward the end of November or the first part of December, I met the girl who within a year or so had become my wife.  Laquita Alexander was a cutie who smiled at everybody across her cafeteria line, but I thought she had special eyes for me; I certainly had special eyes for her, so it was natural that one day when we met on the stairs as we changed classes, we introduced ourselves to one another.  Shortly after that, one day after I had finished my meal, I strolled back to the line to see if she was free, and she was, and I asked her for our first date, going to the Tuesday Night Devotional on the steps of the Administration Building.  We both liked to sing, and that mutual interest was made evident as we sang the hymns that formed the major part of the devotional time.  After that, we spent most of our free hours together, going to church mostly and studying together in the library.  However, she had (and still has) more common sense than I did and thought that hand-holding interfered with study.  I was so amazed that she wanted to be with me that I was willing to concede to her priorities.

          By Christmas time, we were “going steady,” and I gave her my high school class ring to wear around her neck.  We saw each other as frequently as we could, but her time was more limited than mine, since she worked as much as her boss in the cafeteria would let her, usually 40-50 hours per week in addition to her classes.  She got up at 5:30 a.m. in order to work at breakfast time.  She was not happy that I made 60 cents an hour on the maintenance crew, while she made only 50 cents an hour in the cafeteria.  She had accumulated some savings from her work during her high school years, but she lived in continual fear that she would not make enough to pay her school costs each term.  She managed to pay her bills and not to incur any debt during her bachelor’s work.  In fact, her love for me was abundantly manifest when she agreed to use her hard-earned savings to pay part of my bill one semester.  She has taught me over the years how to be more thrifty, and she says that I have moved her toward being a more generous giver.

          However, I did get some breaks through scholarships.  I was amazed when one day I was called to the ACC vice-president’s office and he told me that I had been selected to receive a $500 award from the Texas Club of  New York.  That was as big to me as receiving a full fellowship during the years of my graduate work.

          Although I had laid aside my plans for a Bible major, I was still interested in biblical studies, so I eagerly engaged in the required general courses such as Survey of the Old and New Testaments.  One of my Bible teachers that year was a man named J. P. Lewis.  His approach to teaching the Bible was to encourage close attention to the text, reinforced by tests that offered multiple choice and fill in the blanks.  This kind of feedback was right up my alley, and I aced most of the tests he gave.  As I remember, he didn’t have much by way of deeper interpretation or application, but I didn’t fault him for that, letting my success in mechanically mastering the text outweigh any shortcomings he had.  I took two terms from him, and one day I encountered him in the barber shop (back in the days when I still had hair to be cut) and mentioned that I would like to sign up with him for still another course in my sophomore year.  He rather dryly responded that it would perhaps be better for me to go on another teacher who would have a different perspective to offer.  Maybe he was tired of having a smug know-it-all in his class, but his put-off was heeded, and I had other Bible teachers my sophomore year. 

          During the second semester of my freshman year, I was preoccupied with hanging out with Laquita, and Fred, my roommate, was sadly absorbed with the final hospitalization and death of his brother David.  So we didn’t see much of each other. that term.  That summer (1958), Fred and I were closely associated once again when he obtained a job for me working with him harvesting wheat and other grains, moving north as the grain ripened.  Our boss was a man named Joe Vosek, with whom Fred had worked before.  That was quite a different experience from anything I had done before.  My job was driving the truck that collected the harvested grain, driving alongside the harvester as it deposited the grain down a chute into the truck.  I then took the load to a grain elevator and came back for more.  It was a hot, dusty job, and everybody was filthy at the end of the day.  Joe rented motel rooms for the crew when we got away from his home territory, and we conked out there after we had eaten. 

I’m afraid that my driving was not always satisfactory to Joe.  One time in particular I turned back into the field from the highway and made a wide swing for the turn.  Unfortunately, someone was behind me who was already passing me because I had signaled the turn, and he almost ran into me.  Evidently he knew Joe and complained to him about my driving.  Later I heard an irate Joe yelling to someone, “He’d better learn to drive that truck, or I’ll take him off of it!”  I don’t remember whether he spoke to me about the incident, but I knew I was on probation.  As it turned out, we were engaged in harvesting for only a few weeks, having to stop because of weather, whether rain or drought I don’t remember.   That precipitated my significant decision to hitchhike down to the town where Laquita lived, Burnet, TX.  More about the results of that move in the next installment.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

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Lewis and Tolkien on True Fairy-Stories

“On Fairy Stories”

J. R. R. Tolkien

Full Essay

“It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be “primarily” true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed. It is not difficult, for one is not called upon to try and conceive anything of a quality unknown. The joy would have exactly the same quality, if not the same degree, as the joy which the “turn” in a fairy-story gives: such joy has the very taste of primary truth. (Otherwise its name would not be joy.) It looks forward (or backward: the direction in this regard is unimportant) to the Great Eucatastrophe. The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused. ”

— J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories"

A clip from EWTN's Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings:' A Catholic Worldview portraying a debate between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien on whether or not myths are lies. This debate was ultimately instrumental in C.S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity.

My Summer of (Attempted) Bible-selling: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 9)

My Summer of (Attempted) Bible-selling: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 9)

Elton Higgs

In June, 1957, I said my good-byes to the family, packed up my suitcase, and, with my soon-to-be roommate, Fred Selby, piled into the car of our Bible-selling recruiter, Carl Reed, to make the trip to sales school in Nashville, TN, home of the Southwestern Bible Company.  My summer’s experience was not as financially productive as I had hoped, and there were challenging difficulties along the way.  Consequently, I came to see and accept some of my weaknesses and vulnerabilities, learned how to cope with unexpected difficult circumstances, and made discoveries that turned out to be helpful in years to come—and in the process produced some good personal anecdotes. 

In that era, the Southwestern Company had hundreds, maybe thousands of young men of college age selling for them in a kind of pyramid system.  That is, a portion of the profits for each salesman accrued to those who recruited them, and so on up the line.  In this way, young men who had several crews reporting to them could do quite well.  I recruited nobody and was not myself recruited to return the next summer.

After sales school (conducted by a slick super-salesman who later was indicted for some questionable business dealings), Fred and I were assigned to the town of Mt. Vernon, OH.  We found room and board in a residential house that had three rooms for rent, the other two occupied by elderly gentlemen with whom Fred and I had conversation from time to time.  We set out immediately to get town and county maps with which to plan our sales activities and checked in with the local authorities, which was protocol for all Southwest salesmen.  We were very disappointed to find that there was a restriction on door-to-door selling in the city limits of Mt. Vernon, so we were forced to sell in the outskirts of town or to hitch-hike to nearby towns without sales restrictions to pursue our enterprise.  We both did a lot of walking that summer.

We established ourselves with a local Church of Christ and were well received there as we attended each Sunday morning and sometimes went to week-night activities.  I remember being allowed to lead singing a few times and participating in Bible classes.  It was in one of the week-night activities that I first engaged in bowling, and I had beginner’s luck by throwing a couple of successive strikes, a feat I have repeated only rarely and don’t remember ever exceeding. 

Meanwhile, on the sales front, I tried some of the techniques we were taught at sales school.  Get the name of the first person who will talk to you on a street and use that name when you approach the next-door neighbor.  “Mrs. Jones, I’ve just been talking to your neighbor Mrs. Brown, about reading the Bible, and I’d like to share with you also how some books I have will make your Bible study richer.”  Or walk up to a door, and if somebody answers, say, “What beautiful flowers you have, how do you make them so healthy?”  If you manage to get inside and actually show some books, say, “This comes two colors; which one do you prefer?  Good, now let’s look at leather covers and hardbacks.  Which of those do you prefer?”  If they look the least bit interested, get out your order book and begin writing.  “Do you prefer paying cash today, or writing a check?  What delivery date is best for you?”  I rarely closed a sale this way, but I thought I had to try.

A few weeks into my stay in Mt. Vernon, I came down with mumps and had to stay in for almost two weeks, so that put a big kink in my income for the summer.  During this confinement, I was regaled by the two older guys in the rooming house with stories of grotesque swellings in adults who had mumps, and in more intimate places than the jaws.  My case, I am happy to say, was unremarkable.  I don’t really remember how I spent that time, but  since we didn’t have a TV, I assume I did a lot of reading.  It was probably on this occasion that I read some Jehovah’s Witnesses material that I came across, in which I first encountered their argument that Jesus was created by God (“the firstborn of all creation”) and was not the eternal, co-existent  Son of God.  Some of the resistance of people to talk to anyone who came to their door arose from their having been visited frequently and rather insistently by Jehovah’s Witnesses. 

I truly enjoyed meeting people, when they would let me in the house, and later, when the books I sold had to be delivered by others because I had been called home to be with my dying father, the recipients seemed truly concerned at not seeing me again.  Sometimes I would talk to people in stores and on the street just to get a feel for what a town was like.  I usually took a sack lunch along with me, but I needed to go to a store for something to drink and a little dessert treat; as I sat outside and ate, I would observe people going past.  I remember specifically sitting outside a store across from Gambier College in Gambier, OH, and eating my Twinkies while I watched the students going in and out.  I never went through the gates myself.

Other than the mumps, the summer was very healthy for me, because I walked miles on country roads, where the houses were up to a mile apart.  That was actually pleasant, since it was quiet and punctuated only by birdsong and the occasional passing car.  The residents were a bit more laid back and less suspicious than town folk.  I don’t think I was a very threatening sight with my little brown sample case, walking in from the dusty road.

My summer of selling Bibles and aids to Bible studies (I still have and use my Nave’s Topical Bible) came to an early end when I received a call from my sister-in-law in Rule, TX, that my father was dying and that I had better come back home to see him.  I had to ride the bus, since I didn’t have enough money to take the train, and it took me a couple of days to make the trip, sleeping on the bus.  Though my father was very frail, he actually lived until I had to go to the campus of the school I had decided to attend for my college education, Abilene Christian College (now Abilene Christian University), about 60 miles from Rule.  I was able to find two part-time jobs during the last few weeks before classes began, one with the College maintenance department ground crew driving a dump truck, for which I was qualified by still having the commercial license attained when I drove the school bus back in Rule.  My other job was working the soda fountain in a drug store across the street from the campus.

I remember very well receiving a piece of mail that put the official end to my summer of Bible-selling: I got a check from the Southwest Company for $220, my net profit from my summer’s work in Ohio.  Not a very remarkable reward for all my efforts, but it was better than being in debt to the Company.  In spite of my small earnings in this job, I have often harked back to the good experience I gained, and my knowledge of sales techniques has enabled me to ward off more than one salesman who knocked at my own door; but if they were young and nervous, I was gentle in my rejection.

I got news that my father had died during the week of Freshman Orientation at A.C.C.  I went back to Rule for the funeral and a period of mourning with the family, and my leaving home after that marked the beginning of my academic career.  Fred Selby and I continued rooming together in an old army barrack that served as the poor boys’ dormitory at A.C.C.  I will be describing my college experiences in my next installment of Autobiographical Musings.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

In Love with the Word: A Charge to Christian Literary Critics

In Love with the Word: A Charge to Christian Literary Critics

Marybeth Baggett

Back when I decided to become an English major during an American Literature class at the local community college, I was overwhelmed by many of the wonderfully creative pieces that we studied. Chief among the works that captivated my attention was Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. I don’t mean to overstate the situation, but I teach English today in no small part thanks to that book. It’s a tragic story, so its positive effect on me may be a bit surprising. But anyone who has read it can testify to Crane’s ability to use mere words to bring to vivid life the fully realistic character of Maggie and to garner sympathy and concern for her and those like her.

Somehow these marks on the book’s pages filled my mind with empathy for the less fortunate, challenged my preconceptions about poverty, and—among other things—helped me better understand American history and culture. Reading this novel impressed upon me what an astounding thing is language. Used well it fills us with joy and enobles our existence. Language can entertain us through stories and verbal games. It can delight us through brilliant literary expression. We can use it to convey our internal experiences and to get a peek into the experiences of others. In short, we can do wonders with words.

I felt as much when I wrote my end-of-term paper on Crane’s novel. I found such satisfaction in engaging Crane’s story, having responses to it formed in my mind, and turning those inchoate thoughts into something structured, something readable and understandable by another person. That was my first experience, I think, in writing an essay of which I was truly proud. What was true at that time remains true now: for me, there is little better than bringing ideas to heel in a well-crafted sentence. If I may engage in hyperbole, it sometimes feels like a miracle.

But as valuable and worthwhile as language and literature is, there is a danger of overvaluing the written word for those like us who spend our time dwelling on it. We risk overestimating literature’s worth and putting on it a burden it simply cannot bear. As we think about our love for literature, we can understand sentiments of writers like Samuel Coleridge who elevate literary expression to the apex of human activity. In Biographia Literaria, he says that “poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.”[1] Emerson, in his quintessential grandiosity, takes this notion a step further, making poetry foundational to reality itself and placing it beyond humanity’s comprehension or control:

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.[2]

On Emerson’s terms, we are unworthy mortals who can only glimpse poetry’s greatness.

Still others have put much hope in poetry as the means of personal or communal salvation, as does Matthew Arnold who, Culture and Anarchy, stakes his social agenda on advancing transformative cultural education:

Again and again I have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people’s life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive.[3]

It’s an enchanting vision to be sure, of society in full cooperation and prosperity. But literary genius as the source of such conditions strikes the ear as a bit of wishful thinking.

Yes, Coleridge, Emerson, and Arnold affirmed the existence of God and saw poetry or cultural activity as in some way or other directly tied to a divine source, but in their writings that so highly elevate poetry, we can see the makings of a disconnection between the two, a displacement and eventually an elevation of one for the other—and the wrong one. In Screwtape Letters through the mouth of his titular demonic character, C. S. Lewis warns of such a temptation regarding social justice. Rather than the so-called “patient” prioritizing Christian doctrine with social justice concerns flowing from that, Screwtape wants him to reverse the order: “The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice.”[4] The temptation process he describes to Wormwood could work just as easily for literature. What this amounts to, of course, is idolatry, a status for poetry that Wallace Stevens makes explicit in Adagia: “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”[5]

Christians would, of course, assiduously avoid embracing Stevens’ conclusions, not least of all because we retain a belief in God. But Christian or no, we’d do well to pause for a moment and consider the absurdity of Stevens’ claim. Poetry is wonderful, but life’s redemption? What a bunch of nonsense. In the face of death, disease, war, atrocities, we’ll respond with figurative language and some prosody. Grievous loss? Here’s a sonnet to remedy the situation. To offer lyricism alone as rectification for horrific abuse is frankly grotesque. Justice may at times be poetic, but poetry is far from justice’s source. At best it is a salve for sorrow, an intimation of a world set right.

But before we start patting ourselves on the back for recognizing the error of Stevens’ ways, I wonder if we don’t sometimes verge the same idolatrous thinking about our vocation. It’s often the subtle errors that are the most perilous and insidious. Do we ever ourselves prioritize literature and language at the expense of something more vital? Do we ever use it to overindulge our own longings or boost our own ego? Does our love of literature ever interfere with or displace our deeper callings, especially our highest calling as Christians to love God and love our neighbor? Do we mine literature’s truths as means for self-advancement instead of with kingdom-building aims? Have we ever allowed our God-given gifts for appreciating and analyzing literature to look down on others who don’t share those gifts? Are we guilty of imperialistic thinking, believing our discipline the most important, implicitly saying to another part of the body of Christ that we have no need of them?

In a poignant passage, William James well articulates the danger of mishandling literature:

All Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day world; but woe to him who can only recognize them when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form! The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale.[6]

Again, literature is a beautiful thing; prizing it over actual human beings is abhorrent.

In the literary field, we also sometimes see self-indulgence of a different kind, that which is practiced from a critical stance where a scholar or reviewer uses the work of another as merely a soapbox for self-promotion. W. H. Auden captures the temptations to pride involved in literary criticism:

If good literary critics are rarer than good poets or novelists, one reason is the nature of human egoism. A poet or a novelist has to learn to be humble in the face of his subject matter which is life in general. But the subject matter of a critic, before which he has to learn to be humble, is made up of authors, that is to say, of human individuals, and this kind of humility is much more difficult to acquire. It is far easier to say — “Life is more important than anything I can say about it” — than to say — “Mr. A’s work is more important than anything I can say about it.”[7]

A piece of literature is no human being, of course, but treatment of a book or literary work surely has implications for treatment of the one who wrote it and who poured so much of themselves and their time into it. It also has implications for our own character formation.

Christian literary critics must center our Christian identity as primary, with our study of literature flowing from that. John 13:35 says that love is the distinguishing mark of disciples of Christ. In Matthew 22, Jesus identifies love of God and love of neighbor as the two greatest commandments, ending with the profound but mysterious truth that “[a]ll the Law and the Prophets hang on [them].” Alan Jacobs uses this claim as a springboard for his worthwhile book, A Theology of Reading, which is intriguingly subtitled A Hermeneutics of Love. An adaptation of a well-worn scripture passage might frame our thinking here:

If I read through the lens of Marx or of Greenblatt, but do not have love, I am only a noxious judge or a nagging critic. If I have the gift of soliloquy and can fathom all poetry and all fiction, and if I have a style that can stir passions, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I pen all I perceive to the crowds and give over my essays to journals that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient reading, love is kind interpretation. It does not envy another writer’s gifts or troll another’s work, it is not vain about its own intellectual blessings. It does not dishonor others in the guise of criticism, it is not self-promotional, it is not easily angered when edited or evaluated, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are novels, they will cease; where there are odes, they will be stilled; where there is critique, it will pass away. For we read in part and we analyze in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

The challenge I want to pose—as Christians studying literature and language—is for us to contemplate what loving participation in the literary discipline looks like. What kinds of words do we use; when and how do we use them? What kinds of stories do we tell; why do we tell them? How do we handle the words and stories of others?

Literary studies today can give us critical frameworks for reading, terminology for literary criticism, insights into the creative process and lives of poets. It can provide us with untold lists of books to read, ways to understand them, and thematic angles for interpretation. But it cannot instill in us love for God or others. Even politically charged theories, concerned as they are with questions of justice, have no mechanism for personal transformation—they can tell us to be good but cannot make us good, as Jacobs points out in regards to cultural studies.[8]

What makes a difference for literary studies as for life—what makes possible our love for one another—is that God first loved us. He entered into our world to redeem his creation, thus enabling our free responses to his overtures of love. A belief in the incarnation, as Roger Lundin argues, should make all the difference in how we conceive of “the nature, scope, and power of words.”[9] Our words have value, they have meaning, they have purpose because of the Living Word, the Word made flesh who chose to dwell among us. This truth should ground our engagement with human words, our own and those of others. Done well and right, even our study of literature, if subsumed under the lordship of Christ, can become a way for us to fulfill the great commission and the great commandment, to discharge our God-given vocations, to do the good works for which we were intended.

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Marybeth Davis Baggett lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, and teaches English at Liberty University. Having earned her Ph.D. in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Marybeth’s professional interests include literary theory, contemporary American literature, science fiction, and dystopian literature. She also writes and edits for Christ and Pop Culture. Her most recent publication was a chapter called “What Means Utopia to Us? Reconsidering More’s Message,” in Hope and the Longing for Utopia: Futures and Illusions in Theology and the Arts. Marybeth's most recent book is The Morals of the Story: Good News about a Good God, coauthored with her husband, David.

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notes:

[1] Coleridge, Samuel. Biographia Literaria. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm.

[2] Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet.” https://user.xmission.com/~seldom74/emerson/the_poet.html.

[3] Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. http://public-library.uk/ebooks/25/79.pdf.

[4] Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. London: Centenary, 1944, Chapter XXIII.

[5] Stevens, Wallace. Adagia, section 1. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997.

[6] James, William. Psychology. London: Macmillan, 1892, p. 124.

[7] Auden, W. H. Dyer’s Hand. New York: Random House, 1962, p. 8.

[8] Jacobs, Alan. A Theology of Reading. New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 124.

[9] Lundin, Roger. Beginning with the Word. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2014, p. 8.

My Short Career as a Radio Announcer: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 8)

My Short Career as a Radio Announcer: Twilight Musings Autobiography

Elton Higgs

          The year between my graduation from high school (May, 1956) and my matriculation a year later at Abilene Christian College was a meaningful transition from living at home to establishing my independence and my responsibility for making my own living.  I had a full-time job during that year with a small radio station in Stamford, TX as announcer, disc jockey, engineer, and house cleaner.  I learned a lot on this job, and it developed vocal skills that have been valuable to me all my life.  It came to an end, however, in May of 1957 to leave a possible career in radio and spend the summer selling Bibles in Ohio.  In the terms of the table game Careers, I made minimal cash as a salesman and gained no fame during that summer, but I garnered a lot of experience cards.

          My opportunity at the radio station came because of my sister-in-law Lucille’s contacts with the owner of the station, David Ratliff, a state senator, probably because she had placed some ads on his station for the jewelry and appliance store that she and my brother, Otho, owned.  Shortly after my graduation, she asked me, “Would you like to work at a radio station?”  I said “Sure,” and she arranged for me to go to Stamford and try out.  The manager and sole employee of station KDWT, Phil Keener, had me read a script, and he offered me the job on the spot, on a trial basis.  With the promise of a steady income, I rented a room at the house of an elderly couple who were members of the Church of Christ in Stamford, where I had already attended several times, and I quickly made it my new home congregation.  I was allowed to take the family car, a big, old Packard, since my father had developed lung cancer and was no longer able to get about. 

          Phil Keener sold ads for the station during the times I was operating it.  I don’t remember that I had a consistent schedule, but at one time or another I worked all times of the day, from opening (must have been 6 or 7 a.m.) to the end of the day (perhaps 7 or 8 p.m.).  I also had to work some Saturdays and Sundays.  I had to learn the basics of turning on the broadcasting equipment, manipulating the controls, and closing down at the end of the day.  We were connected to the ABC radio network, and sometimes I would have to switch from home broadcasting to the network, mainly for national newscasts.  Phil would write out the log and I would do what was called for.  We played popular music from records that were sent to us as promotion discs.  I had an hour of music each day (punctuated by commercials) on a program that I called “Cactus Caravan.”  It consisted of all kinds of music, from country and western to folk and pop songs.  I remember liking and playing songs by the Everly Brothers, among others.

          My “patter” between songs almost got me fired one time.  As I finished one of these interludes, the phone rang and it was the owner, Senator Ratliffe.  He was not pleased, and all he said was, “Higgs, more music and less talk,” but that was enough to curb my personal contributions to the program.  Another mistake was even more serious.  It took place one evening when daylight saving time had just come into play, and unfortunately for me, it was also during a political campaign.  At 6 p.m., we usually had a network program, but this evening a special ad was to be run, and I had to decide whether to run the network program at the regular time and delay the ad, or give priority to the ad.  I had not been told that the ad was a political promotion and that it had been advertised to be heard at the scheduled time.  I opted for the regularly scheduled network program, much to the dismay of Mr. Ratliffe and the people who had purchased the ad time.  As soon as the ad failed to be heard at the scheduled time, Mr. Ratliffe called quite upset.  He said, “You know, if I can’t satisfy the angry customer, I’ll have to fire you.”  He settled the matter with the customer by offering to run the ad several times, along with announcements to promote it.  I suspect the ad-taker got more listeners that way than he would have originally, but my job was on the line.  I survived and made it up with Mr. Ratliffe.  When I came to the end of my employment with him, he tried to persuade me not to go on to something else, but to continue in a radio career.

          My tenure at the radio station was during the time of the Cold War and the notoriety of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose anti-communist Senate hearings terrorized anybody who had had the slightest association with the Communist Party.  I was a political neophyte and understood little of what was in the news those days, but I remember one of commentator Paul Harvey’s newscasts during my stint at KDWT (he came on at noon every day) in which he spoke warmly of Sen. McCarthy.  I think it must have been occasioned by McCarthy’s death in 1957, a few years after he had been censured by his Senate colleagues for his unethical conduct.  I don’t remember the details of Harvey’s comments, but I remember the gist of it was that in spite of his conduct he was a patriot.  Harvey was a political and social conservative, so it’s not surprising that he should have sympathized with anti-communism in general, but he was generally not strongly partisan in his comments, rather concentrating on human interest items in the news.  So it didn’t occur to me until some years later, when I became more aware of the political currents in the news, to question why Harvey felt compelled to speak approvingly of the discredited McCarthy.  I’m not even sure why those particular comments in one of Harvey’s many broadcasts stuck in my mind, but they did.

Two other incidents during my stay at KDWT are worth noting.  The first was a result of my neglecting to put away some records I had been going through.  Phil must have asked me several times to do that chore, but I just kept putting it off.  Phil came from a military background, and one day when I came in, he barked at me, “You’ve got ten minutes to get those records stored!”  I never again left records lying on the table.  One of the job’s fringe benefits, by the way, was that I got to take home some classical music records that had come to the station and were not going to be used in our programming.

The other incident was the outcome of a little listener response contest that Phil set up to see which of us received the most listener “votes” during our separate programs.  The loser was to push the other one around the town square in a wheel barrow.  Somehow I won the contest, and during my last week with the station, Phil delivered on his penalty, and I got a very public ride around the square, with Phil telling whoever we met, “I said I’d do it!”

          Parallel with my radio station activities was my association with the Orient St. Church of Christ in Stamford, which happened to be across the street from the house of the Sosebies where I had a room.  I quickly became active in the work of that church and was especially involved in the youth activities.  The youth group was led by a warm-hearted man named Joe Benson and his wife, Flo.  Joe would regularly meet with the young people, often in his house out in the country.  I remember the breeze on our faces as we rode in his pickup from town out to his home, where we would have games, refreshments, and sometimes a Bible lesson.  Those were delightful times in church fellowship and service.

          Because I was a bit older than the rest of the youth group and was familiar with Scripture, I was put in charge of their weekly Bible class at the church.  That deepened my connection with them, and I developed warm friendships with them, being both their leader and their companion.  I also led singing regularly, making a special effort to coordinate my selection of songs with the sermon theme when possible and always providing links between the songs by appropriate Bible readings.  There was a “Gospel Meeting,” as we called it, a week of trying to reach out to the community through having a guest speaker every night.  One of these was conducted by a professor of Bible from Abilene Christian College, forty miles away.  I consulted with him, and he gave me his sermon topics for the week so that I could connect the songs with his subjects.  He told me afterward that he had never had such close coordination with the song leader for a Gospel Meeting.  I got to know Brother Tony Ash better during the years I spent on my undergraduate work at A.C.C.

          I took a fancy to one of the girls in the youth group, Pat Massey.  She seemed somewhat pleased with my attentions to her, and I sometimes took her home from youth group meetings.  We would carry on lengthy conversations sitting in my car outside her house, though I think I talked a lot more than she did.  After a couple of times like this, her mother came out to the car and made it clear that she was not comfortable with this situation, even though she didn’t accuse me of trying to “make out” with Pat.  I think she was worried about how the neighbors would react.  However, Pat was the first girl I had ever kissed—“a mere peck” as I wrote in my diary.  However, there was a complication: she had a boyfriend in the army named Gerald.  She wrote him regularly and told me about her friendship with him, and noted that he was not a Christian.  I expressed concern with his unsound spiritual condition and took it on myself to send him a Bible.  After receiving it he wrote back that he already had a Bible, thank you, and made clear that he did not need spiritual instruction, especially from a guy who was probably a rival for his girlfriend’s affections.  I ask for your indulgence to remember that I was only a naively idealistic youth of 19 at the time.

          During this year I developed a very close friendship with Fred Selby, who was a member of the youth group at the Orient St. church.  He was a little younger than I and was still a senior in high school.  His mother lived in a farm house halfway between Stamford and Rule, where my parents still lived and my brother had his appliance store.  I would often visit Fred and his family on my way back and forth between Stamford and Rule.  His mother, Veda Selby, was an exceedingly warm and hospitable lady, and she became a sort of second mother to me.  Indeed, I say with some discomfort, I felt more emotional attachment to her, and more admiration, than for my own mother.  Veda’s husband had been a drunkard and had forsaken the family, but she and her children managed to keep and work the farm.  And then Fred’s older brother, David, developed leukemia and eventually died during Fred’s freshman year in college.  Veda was a strong, nurturing mother through all of this, and still had hugs and cookies for guests to her home.

          Toward the end of the year that I worked at the radio station, Carl Reed, a friend of Fred’s, set out to recruit the two of us to spend the upcoming summer selling Bibles and Bible study aids for the Southwestern Company of Nashville, TN.  It sounded both adventurous and idealistic, and Fred and I accepted his offer for us to be on his sales team.  When I announced my plans and gave my notice to the radio station, both the owner and the manager tried to persuade me to stick with the station and build a career in radio.  Mr. Ratliffe opined that I would regret giving up the opportunity to build on my experience and relinquishing the relative security that a regular job afforded me.  I refused to be dissuaded and soon left Stamford for Mt. Vernon, Ohio, where I spent two and a half months finding out that I was not a good door-to-door salesman.  More of that in the next installment.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

         

         

         

         

 

 

Snow White, the Seven Dwarfs, and Simplifying the Abortion Debate with One Question

Snow White, the Seven Dwarfs, and Simplifying the Abortion Debate with One Question

Stephen S. Jordan

As the father of three young children, a good bit of my spare time is spent eating popcorn and watching Disney movies and superhero films. Although scenes from these movies oftentimes leave impressions upon me, there is one scene that I have thought about for quite some time—especially in light of the abortion debate.

In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Magic Mirror reveals to the Queen that Snow White is now “the fairest” in the land, which sparks jealousy in the Queen and motivates her to instruct the Huntsman to take Snow White into the forest and kill her. As proof of Snow White’s death, the Huntsman is ordered to return to the jealous Queen with Snow White’s heart in a jeweled box. However, the Huntsman, in a moment of clarity, simply cannot bring himself to kill Snow White. Overcome with emotion, he tearfully pleads for Snow White’s forgiveness, disclosing to her that the Queen wants her dead. Therefore, he urges her to flee into the woods and never return.

Lost and afraid, the princess eventually stumbles upon what appears to be an empty cottage deep in the forest. In reality, the cottage, which is rather untidy upon Snow White’s arrival, is occupied by the Seven Dwarfs who are away from their home while working at a nearby mine. As the Dwarfs return to their home after a full day’s work, they are alarmed when they notice that the lights in their cottage are on and the inside of the cottage is now clean and tidy, leaving them to suspect that an intruder has broken into their home while they were away. Carefully searching through their home, beginning with the downstairs and eventually moving to the upstairs, the Dwarfs find “the intruder” completely covered with a sheet and asleep across several of the beds on the upper floor. Surrounding “the intruder” and arming themselves with weapons of their own choosing—from clubs to mattocks—the Seven Dwarfs raise their weapons in the air and prepare to eliminate “the intruder,” when Happy loudly exclaims three words that cause the other Dwarfs to immediately stop in their tracks.

These three words, actually forming a question, are the most important words in the entire abortion debate. Everything rises or falls on the answer to this question:

“What is it?”

Before the Seven Dwarfs killed Snow White, they answered the question raised by Happy: “What is it?” Then, upon realizing Snow White’s identity as a human being, they lowered their weapons. She wasn’t an “intruder” after all; she was “a girl.”[1] This reveals an important principle: Before killing something, we must first determine the identity of what we are killing.

We must apply the same question—“What is it?—to the abortion debate. One of America’s leading bioethicists, Scott Klusendorf, maintains that we can simplify the debate by focusing on the one question that matters more than all others: “What is the unborn?”[2] Elsewhere, Greg Koukl writes, “Whether or not it’s right to take the life of any living thing depends entirely on the question what it is” (emphasis added).[3] If the unborn are members of the human family, then killing them is morally wrong because it treats distinct human beings, possessing intrinsic moral worth, as nothing more than disposable objects. On the flip side, as Klusendorf and Ensor indicate, “[I]f the unborn are not human, killing them for any reason requires no more justification than having a tooth pulled.”[4]

Earlier I mentioned that I am the father of three young children, one of whom is a boy. Although both of my older children enjoy playing with all kinds of bugs and insects, my son is known to inflict what he calls the “Hulk smash” on these tiny creatures from time-to-time. For a moment, consider this scenario:

Imagine my son coming to me with something behind his back and asking, “Daddy, can I kill it?” My question to my son would be, “What is it?” If it was a bug or insect, I might say something like: “Sure, just not in the house and not in front of your mother.”

If my son came to me again with something behind his back and asked the same question, I would again respond by asking, “What is it?” If it was a small dog belonging to my neighbors, I would be upset that my son would even consider killing the puppy as an option. “No, we can’t kill the neighbors’ dog,” would be my response.

Now, think about my son coming to me a third time with something behind his back, inquiring, “Daddy, can I kill it?” Yet again, my question would be: “What is it?” This time, if it was his baby sister, I’d immediately stop what I was doing and take him to counseling, because it is obvious to virtually everyone that taking the life of a small child is morally reprehensible.[5]

The above scenario, along with the scene from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, makes clear that the most important question we must ask and answer when deciding whether we should kill something is: “What is it?” Again, before killing something, we must first determine the identity of what we are killing. With the abortion issue, are we talking about a disposable clump of tissue and cells or a human person possessing intrinsic value? If the former, then abortion is permissible for any reason; if the latter, virtually no reason for aborting an unborn child is justified.

Here’s the point: Before deciding where you stand on the abortion issue, you must first ask yourself, “What is the unborn?” If you do your research, carefully examining both the science of embryology and the arguments of philosophy, you might come to the same conclusion as Doc in Snow White: “It’s a girl!”[6] or “It’s a boy!” In other words, you’ll come to the conclusion that the unborn, even “[f]rom the earliest stages of development…are distinct, living, and whole human beings. Therefore, every ‘successful’ abortion ends the life of a living human being.”[7]

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Stephen S. Jordan currently serves as a high school Bible teacher at Liberty Christian Academy in Lynchburg, Virginia. He is also a Bible teacher, curriculum developer, and curriculum editor at Liberty University Online Academy, as well as a PhD candidate at the Liberty University Rawlings School of Divinity. Prior to his current positions, Stephen served as youth pastor at Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church in State Road, North Carolina. He and his wife, along with their three children and German shepherd, reside in Goode, Virginia.

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notes:

[1] In response to Happy’s question, Doc responds by shouting, “It’s a girl!”

[2] Scott Klusendorf, The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2009), 22. As a side note, on at least one occasion, I had the privilege of having Mr. Klusendorf in my classroom at Liberty Christian Academy, where he spoke to my students on the abortion issue.

[3] Greg Koukl, Precious Unborn Human Persons (Lomita, CA: STR Press, 1998), 7.

[4] John Ensor and Scott Klusendorf, Stand for Life: A Student’s Guide for Making the Case and Saving Lives (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2012), 8.

[5] Ensor and Klusendorf share a similar scenario in Stand for Life, 21. I’ve also heard Scott Klusendorf use this same scenario in a number of debates, lectures, etc. Interestingly, Klusendorf admits that he actually borrows this example from Koukl in Precious Unborn Human Persons, 7.

[6] Again, this was Doc’s answer to Happy’s question.

[7] Klusendorf, The Case for Life, 35.

Seed-planting and Fruit Bearing

Adoration of the Shepherds by Dutch painter Matthias Stomer, 1632

A Twilight Musing

           During the Christmas Season we concentrate on the beginning of God’s greatest act of seed-planting, the impregnation of Mary by the Holy Spirit.  We do well, however, to remember that the immediate fruit of her womb, the birth of the Incarnate Son of God was not the end of the matter, but the beginning of the ever-expanding purposes of God through His Son.  The poem below depicts Mary’s awareness that her understanding of what has happened to her will be an unpredictable unfolding.

The Husbandry of God

(Luke 1:26-35)

How can I contain this word from the Lord?

His light has pierced my being

And sown in single seed

Both glory and shame.

Content was I

To wed in lowliness

And live in obscurity,

With purity my only dower.

Now, ravished with power,

I flout the conventions of man

To incubate God.

In lowliness how shall I bear it?

In modesty how shall I tell it?

What now shall I become?

But the fruit of God's planting

Is His to harvest.

No gleaner I, like Ruth,

But the field itself,

In whom my Lord lies hid.

          “What now shall I become?” she asks, and realizes that, like the embryo in her womb, the purposes of God are developing.  When the baby is born and the shepherds make their surprise visit, Mary “pondered” the meaning of the message they brought (Luke 2:19).  She must also have pondered  the cryptic words of Simeon in the Temple when Mary and Joseph brought the baby to be dedicated to the Lord: that in addition to being “appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel,” that also “a sword will pierce through your [Mary’s] own soul” (Luke 2:33-35).  When Mary said, “Let it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38), she was letting herself in for more than she realized.  Those of us who have walked with the Lord for a while recognize that He often takes what seems submission to his will for a specific time and expands it into a much longer period of the development of His purposes.

          This sense of God’s ends being incipient in His beginnings is brought out beautifully and profoundly in the first 18 verses of John 1.  I have endeavored to create below a poetic digest of these verses.

“The Alpha/Omega Word”

(John 1:1-18)

Beginning Word

Spoke Light to Chaos;

Light pushed Life from sod,

And God through Word

Made forms to walk on sod,

And finally man to trod

On finished earth.

But darkness pierced

The perfect pearl of Paradise:

The Word no longer heard,

Nor known the fellowship with Light.

In darkness, tyrannous Time was lord,

But Time was also womb of Light renewed.

Word of Light

Re-entered world He made,

Took on a mortal mould1 

That showed the face of God,

Undimmed by shade.

Heralded by John He came,

Following in flesh

But eternally before;

Jordan-witnessed Lamb of God,

Light to be extinguished

So that Light could shine once more.

Time redeemed

Became a womb again:

Spirit spawned

Brothers of the Son,

Children owing naught to fallen flesh,

But reborn through God-in-Flesh,

The Light of Life.

New Covenant of Life,

Bought with blood,

Became God’s family,

Receiving grace and truth

Transcending Law of Death.

New breath breathed in

Through timeless Word,

 Beginning and also end.

        1 “Mould” is the British spelling of “mold,” with

        the old meaning of “earth” (decaying material).

            In this poem, we see encapsulated the maturing of God’s eternal purpose in cycles of renewal: Word creating flesh finally becoming flesh to redeem fallen flesh; Light dimmed by darkness, but Light piercing darkness; the tyranny of time and death reversed by Incarnate eternality; fallen flesh becoming like the Son of God, recreated in the image of the Word Himself.

          Praise in this season for our wondrous God, not only as the Alpha born of Mary, but as the Omega still working out His purposes in us and in the world.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

Good King Wenceslas: An Allegory of Advent

Good King Wenceslas, illustrated in Christmas Carols, New and Old

One Advent night in 1982 we attended a Christmas choral concert in the Bristol Cathedral in England.  Though I knew the “Good King Wenceslas” carol, I had never paid attention to the lyrics.  That night the majestic orchestra, joined with the cathedral choristers and choir, dramatized the Wenceslas lyrics in such a way the joy and awe of the Gospel message transfixed me.  As we share verse by verse this carol’s allegory, rejoice this Christmas season. God entered His world to rescue helpless souls like you and me!

Stanza One

Good King Wenceslas look’d out, On the feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round-a-bout, Deep and crisp and even.

Brightly shone the moon that night, Though the frost was cruel,

When a poor man came in sight, Gath’ring winter fuel.

On the Feast of St. Stephen’s, the day after Christmas or “Boxing Day,” the celebrations of giving and receiving continue.  King Wenceslas is comfortably settled in his great castle.  Fifteen-foot Christmas fir trees grace the palace drawing rooms with their candlelight and royal baubles.  Holly and berry swags adorn huge fireplace mantels.   Golden candelabras throw flickering warmth across the hall.  The king’s fireplaces blaze with forest logs.  His vast tracts of woodlands and forest supply against the coldest winter nights.  The king’s massive palace radiates with family cheer and contentment. He lacks for nothing. 

Good King Wenceslas embodies God.  Sovereign of worlds seen and unseen, He commands seventy sextillion known stars.  He is Monarch of more shining, heavenly spheres than ten times the grains of sand on earth’s deserts and beaches.  The earth is His and “everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.” “For every beast of the forest is mine,” says the Lord.  Wenceslas’ kingdom is the cosmos resplendent with light, order, and plenty.

The St. Stephen’s winterscape captivates the eye – at least from the sovereign’s side of the window pane.  Contented after a day of festivities, King Wenceslas looks out. The snow is “deep and crisp and even,” glistening in the moonlight.  The idyllic picture is betrayed by the fierce cold.  No one dare venture out on a night like this; yet, against the snow a dark figure intrudes into the king’s gaze. What’s that man doing out there on a night like this?  Rummaging for wood on the holiday?  Why does he not have wood?  Was he slack in stocking up in the summer?  Now he is come to trespass on the king’s property? 

This poor man rummaging for wood on a frigid night is every person’s ill state. Prophets painted our picture gloomy: “Cursed is the ground…. Through painful toil you will eat … and the pride of men humbled…. There is an outcry in the streets for lack of wine … all the merry-hearted sigh … people loved darkness … because their deeds were evil.” Ignorance of our blindness and rebellion against God cover like darkness. Human life is lived under sin as “far as the curse is found.”  Pitiable and bound to self and fleshly passions the “flood of mortal ills” and evils overtake us.  Under the power of sin, ruin and misery overtake our paths.  We are the desperate man come into sight scrounging every which way to survive against the cruel winter’s wrath.

Stanza Two

‘Hither, page, and stand by me, If thou know’st it telling,

Yonder peasant, who is he?  Where and what his dwelling?’

‘Sire, he lives a good league hence, Underneath the mountain,

Right against the forest fence, By Saint Agnes’ fountain.’

 “Come, here, page,” says King Wenceslas to his attendant. “Yonder peasant, who is he, where and what is his home?”  Little does the poor peasant know he is being watched, even by the king himself.  “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” said Henry David Thoreau.  “God will never see,” they say.  “The universe is dumb, stone deaf, and blank and wholly blind.”  Oh? Are not “the eyes of the Lord … in every place”?  Is not “his eye … on the sparrow?”   “Where can I flee from your presence?” asks the Psalmist. Under Pharaoh’s whip, Israel was unaware God was witnessing their misery. “I have observed the misery of my people … I have heard their cry … I know their sufferings,” said the Lord.

 King Wenceslas is not gawking.  The monarch is moved by the poor man’s need.   “I have surely seen the mistreatment of my people … I have heard their groaning,” the Lord God said.

Stanza Three

 “Bring me flesh, and bring me wine, Bring me pinelogs hither:

Thou and I shall see him dine, When we bear them Thither.”

Page and monarch, forth they went, Forth they went together;

Through the rude wind’s wild lament And the bitter weather.

One would think the king would snap his fingers, issue a command, and servants would rush to the poor man’s aid.  What? The monarch himself is going?  “You and I will see him dine, when we bear them thither.”  “No sire, this is contrary to protocol.  The Royal Court does not enter the peasant’s world.” “My subject’s welfare is my own.  Forgo the Court’s couch ... leave the velvet slippers and bring me snow boots.” 

 Incognito the king goes into the furious night.  He takes no retinue of riders, carriages, and security guards.  This is no “photo op” for the 6 o’clock news.  This is not to win the peasant’s vote.

The poor man’s predicament reveals the God who pities our human condition.  “He doesn’t forget the cry of the afflicted…. As a Father pities his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him…. But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious.”  Rich King Wenceslas becomes the poor peasant.  The punishing night is now his.  “Though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, so that by His poverty you might become rich.” Christ who was God gave up everything to enter our world.  “The Word was God…. And the Word became flesh and lived among us….”

See the Lord of earth and skies

Humbled to the Dust He is.

And in a Manger lies.

The Creator comes into his own universe.  The King enters His own woods. Unheralded and unknown He came to his own home, yet the world did not know Him. He leaves heaven and submits Himself to our sinful existence.  He even dies unjustly on a cursed cross to save trespassing sinners. He did it incognito … disguised … rejected … as just another commoner abroad on a foul night. 

Stanza Four

“Sire, the night is darker now, And the wind grows stronger;

Fails my heart I know not how; I can go no longer.”

“Mark my footsteps, my good page, Tread thou in them boldly;

Thou shalt find the winter’s rage Freeze thy blood less coldly.”

 

In stanza four, the king’s page comes to the fore in the story.  He is accompanying the king on the mission.  Jesus called disciples to accompany Him.  They go with Him to join in His mission of salvation. As they go, they encounter opposition. The night grows darker.  The winds blow stronger.  Opposition intensifies.  Inspiration grows weak.  The servant can go no farther.  “Sire, the night is darker now, And the wind blows stronger, Fails my heart I know not how, I can go no longer.”  Ever felt you can go no longer?  Sighing you say, “Lord, I have had enough.” 

Sheet music of "Good King Wenceslas" in a biscuit container from 1913, preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The fleshly servant is not up to his Master’s task.  Nonetheless, in his/her weakness, the disciple discovers God’s strength.  The Master’s greatness is manifest.  The King will save the poor soul … and bring His weak disciple along with Him.  The Sovereign’s grace, solace, help, encouragement, and strength reveal themselves under affliction. “Mark my footsteps, my good page, Tread thou in them boldly, You shall find the winter’s rage, Freeze thy blood less coldly.”  Our Master is ahead of us trodding down the snow, cutting a path, and forming our steps for us. The Master’s very footsteps heat up us servants’ cold.

Stanza Five

In his master’s steps he trod, Where the snow lay dinted;

Heat was in the very sod, Which the saint had printed.

Therefore, Christian men, be sure, Wealth or rank possessing,

Ye who now will bless the poor, Shall yourselves find blessing.

Indeed, the “Good King Wenceslas” carol dramatizes poignantly our Christian responsibility to the poor and disenfranchised. Nevertheless, I see a deeper allegory.  The King forgoes his palace to enter a fierce world in order to rescue a helpless man.  Christ Jesus leaves heaven, empties Himself, becomes flesh, and suffers death on a cross to save helpless humankind.  The Master calls His servants to go with him in His mission of bringing abundant life to endangered sinners in this dark, rude world.  We offer Jesus Christ and ourselves to helpless sinners in a frightful world.  As we go, He goes with and before us treading out our path.

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Tom was most recently pastor of the Bellevue Charge in Forest, Virginia until retiring in July. Studying John Wesley’s theology, he received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Bristol, Bristol, England. While a student, he and his wife Pam lived in John Wesley’s Chapel “The New Room”, Bristol, England, the first established Methodist preaching house. Tom was a faculty member of Asbury Theological Seminary from 1998-2003. He has contributed articles to Methodist History and the Wesleyan Theological Journal. He and his wife Pam have two children, Karissa, who is an Associate Attorney at McCandlish Holton Morris in Richmond, and, John, who is a junior communications major/business minor at Regent University. Tom enjoys being outdoors in his parkland woods and sitting by a cheery fire with a good book on a cool evening.

Personal Ecclesiastical History (childhood into adolescence): Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 7)

Personal Ecclesiastical History (childhood into adolescence): Twilight Musings Autobiography

Elton Higgs

I need to drop back and describe my early religious and social life, from childhood to graduation from high school.  The center of my social life has always been connected with my family’s church attendance.  We went to church at least three times a week, as did many people of my generation.  We had two hours of Sunday School and worship services on the First Day of the week, and then there were regular evening services on Sunday and Wednesday night Prayer Meeting.  In addition, my father, as an elder of the South Side Church of Christ in Abilene, TX, often went to “business meetings” on some other night of the week.  Once or twice a year, especially in the summer, we would have a week-long “meeting,” an evangelistic effort for which we gathered every night to hear an out-of-town guest speaker.  We were supposed to invite our neighbors to attend in the hope that they would “obey the Gospel” by going up to the front of the tent, confessing their faith in Christ, and being baptized.  Ideally, they would then become a part of our congregation.  Often those who were already Christian would go forward to confess their straying from the Lord. This was called a “restoration” and would be counted along with the baptisms to evaluate the success of our Meeting. During the mornings that week, the guest speaker would conduct classes, mainly for the ladies, since the men were at work.

The South Side congregation was at odds with the other congregations of the Church of Christ in Abilene, and indeed with all of the “mainline” Churches of Christ in the country.  We all in common practiced taking Communion every Sunday, did not use instrumental music in worship services, and insisted on immediate baptism as a part of the conversion experience; but we differed in our views of what the Bible taught about the End Times.  We, the minority group of the Churches of Christ, were premillennialists, that is, believers that the Second Coming of Christ would usher in a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, along with His faithful followers.  Mainline Churches of Christ were vehement rejecters of this doctrine, asserting that the thousand-year reign mentioned in Rev. 20 was figurative, not literal.  The family of my best friend in boyhood were members at a mainline Church of Christ only two blocks away from my church.  That congregation had been established primarily to combat the heresy of their wayward brothers and sisters down the street.  Both their regular preacher and most guest preachers for their week-long evangelistic meetings would target the South Side church in their sermons.  My friend often tried to win me away from my error, but I stood firm in my belief.

This rivalry would have been comic if it had not driven such a wedge between congregations which were much more alike than different.  However, being a persecuted minority did open us up, years before the mainline began to have this insight, to an understanding of the power and importance of prayer, and of the truth that we are saved by grace and not by works.  These two elements in Christian belief and practice would seem to be self-evident from Scripture, but mainline Churches of Christ for many years were quite comfortable combining their emphasis on being the true “New Testament Church” with what amounted to embracing a kind of salvation by works, since their main emphasis was proving that they fulfilled all the requirements set forth in the New Testament to be identified as the True Church.  It was a highly rationalistic approach to religion, one that was not sensitive to the “feeling” side of religious experience.

My earliest memory of attending the South Side Church of Christ is of my pre-school Sunday School teacher, Miss Addie Prater—just “Miss Addie” to all the kids.  She handed out little picture cards to illustrate the stories she told us.  She was a kind woman and was beloved by all.  I don’t remember having a personal attachment to any of my other Sunday School teachers, but I felt quite comfortable in my general interactions with adults.  I became friends with the other children whose families were regular attenders, and several of these endured through my high school years.

I have memories of the physical layout of the church building.  Inside, it was arranged like most Churches of Christ, with a Communion Table in the front center of the auditorium, and a raised podium with a pulpit, and behind that a built-in baptistry,  a layout reflecting the church’s emphasis on weekly participation in the Lord’s Supper and baptizing new believers immediately after their confession of faith in Christ   The church was heated by floor heaters fueled by natural gas.  They had to be lit with a match attached to a long stick.  These heaters with their grates received frequent unintended contributions of coins held too loosely in children’s hands.  In the summer, cooling had to be supplied by pulling down the tall top windows with a long pole with a hook at the end.  Very few churches were air conditioned in those days.

The outside of the building had wide steps leading up to a covered porch supported by three or four tall pillars.  On either side of these broad steps, extending out from the porch, were broad concrete “arms” extending horizontally from the top of the steps to the bottom, creating a drop-off at the end of about 4 or 5 feet.  It was a wonderful place for show-off boys to jump down from, sometimes pretending to be Hitler jumping off a cliff. 

Behind this “new” brick building was a white frame building that was the former church building, which in my young days was used for Sunday School rooms at one end and to house the preacher’s family at the other end.  There was no connection between the two buildings, and in rainy weather, one had to make a dash in the open air to get to a Sunday School class.

The big lawn beside the church building, in addition to being used for tent meetings, was also often the site of “dinner on the ground,” that is, a potluck meal.  I doubt that even in the early days the food was actually spread out on the ground, like a big picnic, but certainly in the 40s and 50s long tables were set up to hold the food and to seat at least some of the eaters. The home-cooked dishes that were shared on these occasions attracted probably more than did the tent meetings. It was certainly a time of good cheer and fellowship.  

This lawn was also a wonderful place to play croquet, a favorite game of the young people’s group during my teen years. The youth group met weekly usually on a Thursday night and was overseen by the preacher and his wife.  There were indoor table games as well.  Some of them included throwing dice to determine the number of spaces to move on a game board.  My father, who was an elder in the church, did not allow dice or playing cards in our home, and he objected to the use of dice in the young people’s games.  So our preacher, Karl Kitzmiller (the earliest in my memory), made a spinner that took the place of the dice.  Those nights of youth activities were satisfying and full of fun.  I was closely bonded with about a half dozen other young people.  I still remember the names of some of the people I knew best: Ray Conant, Frances and Wanda Prater, Janice Evans, Barbara Burroughs, Rita Hagar.  On Wednesday and Sunday nights after church, we would often go over to a drugstore on Butternut St., about a 15 minute walk, for fountain refreshments.  Since I lived within walking distance of the church and the drugstore, I would drop off at home as we walked back.  Other preachers I remember from those days were a newly-married couple from Kentucky named Frank and Pat Gill, and a mature man, Jimmy Hardison, who had a daughter named Sylvia, for whom I later, after her family had moved to Louisville, KY, had a brief infatuation.  She was the first girl with whom I held hands!  But the romance was squashed by her father, who informed me through a letter that she was too young to be courted.

I was an earnest believer in my youth, and I even made occasional forays into personal evangelism.  There was a boy 2 or 3 years older than I in the congregation named Jimmie Evans, son of one of the elders.  Jimmie was a football player and not by temperament a pious young man like me, so I undertook to bring him to Christ—specifically, to persuade him to be baptized.  I would sit with him in a car outside the church between services or after church and preach to him.  Amazingly, he finally went forward and was baptized, but it didn’t seem to have much affect on his life, for he became increasingly wilder as time went on.  He married right out of high school, and as I remember, the relationship didn’t last.  I don’t believe his “conversion” was a very strong validation of my evangelistic methods.

Growing up in the South Side Church of Christ was certainly a spiritually nurturing experience and laid the foundation for my continued church involvement through my life.  I learned the value of fellowship with a spiritual family, and much of my identity as a Christian was established in this setting.  Sadly, the personal ties made there did not long survive my family’s move away from Abilene, but while they lasted, they helped form my character.  I will speak more of my church experience during the next two years in Rule, my high school town, and Stamford, where I lived on my own and had a full-time job during the year between high school and college.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

My year in Small-town Rule High School: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 6)

My year in Small-town Rule High School: Twilight Musings Autobiography

Elton D. Higgs

          I don’t remember all the details of my family’s move from Abilene to Rule, TX, in the summer of 1955, but I’m sure it must have been once again because of my father’s ill health (cancer) and the need to be near my brother Otho and his family.  They had moved to Rule a couple of years earlier to establish an appliance sales and service store, with a jewelry repair service at the back of the store.  For me, it was a radical change in culture, and the year I spent there introduced me to experiences that I would never have encountered in Abilene.

          Rule was a small town of around 1,500 people, surrounded by small farms.  It had a couple of blocks of stores on the main road through town, a cotton gin at the edge of town, and a farming economy that depended on rain and good crops.  The high school had about 100 students in it, and the focus was much more on athletics than on academics, as is common in small towns in the South.  My graduating senior class had only 21 students, so my previous experience in a “big high school” of several hundred students identified me as a sort of egghead nerd who had never been exposed to the close-to-the-ground life of a farming community.

          Athletic games were great social events for the whole town, and boys who played football were minor celebrities.  I remember the star of the team was one Sonny Wharton, a good-looking lad who led the pack of boys in my class.  Since I had never played football and was not very big, nobody thought it strange that I didn’t volunteer to join the team; but those qualities were no hindrance to my going out briefly for basketball, and then a few weeks of running track.  I was pretty much a flop as a basketball player, but I might have had some success at track if I had known how to train.  As it was, when I was running my first (and only) 220 yard dash competition, I didn’t pace myself and found my legs giving way, and I skidded several yards on my belly on a cinder track.  I had scars for years afterward from that incident.  That brought an inglorious end to my athletic endeavors.  The burly coach at the school gave my brother Otho a concise assessment of my athletic abilities: “He’s the most uncoordinated 18-year-old I’ve ever seen.”  Just as well I had other places to shine.

          More to my taste and abilities was participating in the drama team.  Since the pool of actors was small, we prepared only a one-act play for the regional drama competition.  I learned my lines and was ready to go, but the afternoon of the affair, I was running a fever, and it was all I could do to get through the play, let alone do a quality job.  It turned out that I had chicken pox, and I was out of school for a week.  Happily, my other drama roles had better results.  One of my electives was a Future Farmers of America class (there was a scarcity of alternatives), and one of the activities was a little radio drama on farm safety.  Our team went to the state competition and won first place!  Who would have thought it?  My final thespian venture was the senior play, a farce in which my role as a father involved lathering up my face and pretending to have hydrophobia in order to scare away an unwanted suitor for my “daughter.”  The audience loved it!

          There was, however, a cruder side to my taking the Future Farmers course.  Every class member had to join the school’s FFA chapter, and traditionally that meant going through an initiation of the sort that only high school boys can devise.  Like all such unpleasant initiations, it hinged on humiliating and intimidating the new guys, and their showpiece exercise was to have them strip to their birthday suits, get down on all fours, and pretend to be hogs being judged.  Each of us had a handler shouting instructions on how best to display our porky selves.  The faculty leader was present, but he merely laughed nervously and looked on.  I survived the ordeal, but the image of it is indelibly etched on my pictorial memory.  At least my enduring without complaint made me accepted by the guys, even if I was basically a city boy.

          I held several jobs during that year, the first of which was helping my brother Otho in the installation of appliances and TV antennas.  Poor TV reception in Rule meant that many people chose to install an outdoor antenna on their housetop or atop a 60-foot tower with a rotator so that it could be turned 360 degrees to catch the signal from a particular station.  Those who couldn’t afford such luxury had to make do with a “rabbit ears” indoor antenna, which usually brought in only a “snowy” picture.  I learned some basic electronics in helping install those devices, and that has been a valuable asset ever since.  I also clambered on rooftops and climbed up some of those 60-foot towers, which gave me the confidence when I needed to do that for myself later on.  (I even installed my own rooftop antenna with a rotator on it at the first house my wife and I bought.)

          My work experience with Otho was not without problems.  On the lighter side, one time when we were installing a rooftop antenna during the winter, with some snow still on the ground, I was up on the roof following instructions from Otho on the ground.  At some point, I started sliding on the wet roof and didn’t stop until I hit a snowdrift down below.  When he was assured I wasn’t hurt, Otho burst out laughing, and he enjoyed telling that story for months afterward.  He said I just slid down smoothly as if it was a joy ride of some sort.  I suspect he wished he had been able to film it. 

But another action on my part almost cost him a finger.  He had installed a telescoping tower on the back of his pickup to use in raising home towers and accessing them for servicing.  While we were in transit, the telescoping tower segments were held in place by a wire wound around the overlapping legs of the segments.  The wire had to be taken off, of course, when the tower was ready to be cranked up.  One day, the tower seemed to be stuck when I tried to crank it up, and Otho climbed up to see what was wrong.  Unfortunately, I had failed to remove the restraining wire, but I kept applying pressure to the crank while Otho was trying to find where the bind was, and the restraining wire snapped and the tower shot up a few feet with great force, catching Otho’s thumb and almost completely severing it.  I remember Otho hollering something like, “Elton, you’ve ruined me!”  Somehow he managed to keep the thumb from coming completely off, wrapped his bleeding hand with some rags, and drove to the hospital, where they managed to get his thumb sewed back in place.  He recovered, but my terrible error rather soured our work relationship for a while.

Another job came from Novis Owsley, the dry goods store owner down the street from Otho’s shop,.  They were good friends, so Novis (Mr. Owsley to me, of course) dropped in frequently to the store.  One day, he asked me if I would be willing to come in early each morning, before school, and sweep out the store and take out the trash before the store opened for business.  I consented, and I spent some good hours listening to popular music on the radio and enjoying being there by myself.  I still remember some of the hit tunes of the time that I became familiar with, like “Que Sera, Sera” and “Love and Marriage Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage.” Then, when the fall cotton harvest time came around and the “braceros” (migrant workers from Mexico who picked cotton) would come into the store to buy basic clothes, Mr. Owsley needed someone who could speak enough Spanish to service these workers, and my basic Spanish was sufficient for the job. 

So I became a dry goods salesman, along with two classmates who also worked part time.  Sammy and Sharon were “an item” at school, so they obviously worked well together, and the three of us became fast friends.  Sharon was a sweet Southern girl who showed affection to everybody.  Her pet name for me was “El-twan,” and she used it regularly.  Sammie was a pleasant but serious young man, and easy to work with.  Between us, we sold quite a few clothes for Mr. Owsley.  (Some years later, I was surprised to find out that when Sammie and Sharon went away to college, they split up and did not get married as everybody expected.)

My final job in Rule was as a school bus driver.  That required me to get a chauffeur’s driving license, which stood me in good stead when two years later I applied for a college outdoor maintenance job which required a special driving license.  I drove the afternoon bus to take the kids home.  My route included both town and country stops and took me about an hour to complete.  A couple of times, I got supplementary work driving the bus for out-of-town sports events.  One of those times was to transport the girls’ basketball team, and I asked for one of my friends to go along with me.  The principal was understandably reluctant to permit such a thing, for reasons I think I was too naïve to understand at the time.  Finally, however, he gave in, based on my solemn promise that my friend Herbert would never be out of his seat next to me in the front of the bus.  Bus driving certainly added to my experience and skills in a significant way.

At the end of the year, I was declared to be the valedictorian, based on both my Abilene High School and Rule High School grades.  My family had a little celebration after the ceremony at our house, and I remember my brother Otho coming up to me with some advice: “Elton, stick to your books.”  By which he meant, don’t try to make you way in life doing anything that requires great coordination or practical skills.  I took his advice and pursued an academic career, but I’m also glad that I gained more from my practical experiences in Rule than perhaps he thought I had.

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 Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

Editor's Recommendation: Now You See Her by Mark Harris

Editor's Recommendation: Now You See Her by Mark Harris

Recommended by David Baggett

“Sequel to Fire in the Bones, Mark Harris’s Now You See Her—about nothing less than living with our dreams and the iconoclasm of reality—is an unmitigated joy to read. Once again he enchants readers with a poignant and charming coming-of-age yarn about the power of the stories we tell ourselves. Hungry for permanent love and a hope that doesn’t disappoint, the precocious protagonist searches for signs while navigating early 1970s America, culling insights from sermons and songs, from comic books to classical movies. With a fertile mind and incredible imagination, he scans the cultural landscape for role models of masculinity and virtue: from Columbo to John Dean, from Wolfman Jack to Bob Newhart, reminding readers in the process of an earlier time Harris is so adept at resurrecting. Negotiating the deep mysteries of young love and the opposite sex, Luke’s riveting pilgrimage and fascinating psychological journey ultimately tells the tale of the beauty of reciprocity and the power of unconditional love. Growing up, like waking up, reminds us of the infinite value of what’s real and the courage it takes to risk vulnerability to experience it to the full.”

— David Baggett, Executive Editor

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Jr. and Sr. High School: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 5)

Jr. & Sr. High School in Abilene: Twilight Musings Autobiography

Elton D. Higgs

Five of my last six years of public education were in Abilene, but I spent my senior year in Rule, TX.  The year at Rule High School was such a contrast to all my Abilene school and social experiences that it deserves a separate essay, which will come in the next installment.  My junior high and first two senior high school years in Abilene entailed growing through exposure to new educational structures and fresh opportunities for developing skills.  It was during these years that I had to come to terms with having to work hard in my courses, instead of breezing through, as I did mostly in grade school.  I learned to adapt to trying to do my best, even when my best was not going to bring me the good grades that I was used to.  In reality, some of the courses that were most difficult for me turned out to have long-lasting benefits. I hope that perhaps I made some first steps toward humility in the process.

It was during junior high school that I played in the band for a couple of years.  My brother Thavis got me a cheap clarinet and encouraged me to participate.  The director, Mr. Griep, was a classmate of Thavis in the master’s degree program at Hardin Simmons University, but that connection didn’t bring me any advantage.  I was a mediocre player, neither the best nor the worst in my section.  I remember being a part of a trio and practicing with two girls for a competition.  We did a passable but not an excellent job. The band played and marched at half-time for football games, so there was a lot of practice for that.  We traveled with the team for out-of-town games as well as performing at home games.  We went to the state band competitions, and I think we got a first, as a result of Mr. Griep’s vigorous drilling.  By the third year of junior high, I was losing interest in the band and didn’t sign up again.  However, I still remember the embouchure (lip configuration) for the clarinet and can make some kind of appropriate sound when I pick one up.  That is the only musical instrument that I ever learned to play, but it sharpened my ability to read music, which was a lasting benefit.

I had another girlfriend experience in junior high.  There was a girl named Charlotte Elliot who appeared on local television as a singer, and she caught my fancy.  I left notes in her locker, but, alas, she did not reciprocate!  I lived through it somehow.  As well as I can remember, all of my subsequent infatuations were with girls from church, none of which lasted long.

Taking a couple of years of Spanish in junior high school led to my first trip out of the U.S.  The class went to Monterrey, Mexico for cultural exposure to a Spanish-speaking country and practice in the language.  My family couldn’t afford the cost, so it was a blessing that someone at the school paid the fee.  I never knew for sure who it was, but I suspect it was my Spanish teacher, who thought I had done well in the class and wanted me to go.  I gained some proficiency in speaking Spanish, and even my rudimentary ability enabled me to work in a dry goods store in my senior year in Rule, selling clothes to Mexican migrant workers who were there picking cotton.  They were commonly referred to in Texas as “wetbacks” because they were pictured as having entered the country by wading the Rio Grande River (sound familiar?).

I went to Abilene High School for my sophomore and junior years, and I have several good memories of those two years. One of my initial courses there was two semesters of typing.  I was terrible at it, and my grades were the lowest of any course I ever took.  But the basic skill I gained has been monumental in its significance.  I became thoroughly immersed in touch typing, rather than hunt-and-peck.  I have often thanked God for making sure my advisor signed me up for the class. 

The high point of those years was singing, first in the Men’s Chorus and then the next year in the Acapella Choir, with admission only by audition.  The Acapella went on tour for a week toward the end of the year, and all music had to be memorized.  The director was Gene Kenny, a man with high standards, demanding the best we could deliver and using mostly classical and folk music for his material.  Those who heard the Choir commented on its mature sound for a high school group.  There was individual talent, too, in the person of a marvelous bass-baritone named Julian Long.  The Choir made a recording (33 rpm disc) of its repertoire, of which I still have a copy and play from time to time.

Another major high school memory is two world history classes I took from a dynamic teacher named Sarah Hardy.  She was probably in her 50s or 60s and had been around for a good while.  She engaged my attention and interest more than any other high school teacher.  I didn’t realize at the time that her anti-Russian bias marked her as a political conservative, but she was fond of saying that Stalin was from an Eastern culture and could not be expected to act like people from the West.  The framework of Western History she gave me in those two courses has been useful during all of my subsequent academic studies.

My five years in junior high and senior high in Abilene were a time of broadening my cultural and political perspectives.  My Spanish courses not only took me to my first visit to a foreign country and provided skills used in employment later, but also laid the foundation for studying other foreign languages, such as French and Latin, which were necessary to my graduate studies in English.  And not only did I enjoy singing high-quality music in the Acapella Choir, I developed an ear and a taste for classical music and excellent choral singing.  My early enjoyment of classical music was reinforced during my high school years by occasional times when I visited my brother Thavis’s room while he was attending college.  He had records of classical music that I listened to while he was in class.  And my world history class broadened my cultural and political outlook and paved the way for pursuing more history in the future, which meshed well with my interest in English literature as it developed in my college years.  All in all, my advanced public schooling in Abilene gave me valuable chances for trying new things and adjusting to the mix of success and failure in those endeavors.

My family’s move to Rule, TX in the summer after my junior year was necessitated, again, by my father’s illness with cancer, this time of the lungs.  We needed to be near my brother Otho, who had moved to Rule a year or two previous to our arrival to establish an appliance and watch repair store.  Otho provided work for my Dad in minding the store when my brother was out doing service or installation for the appliances he sold.  My enrollment in Rule High School was a part of the process of resettling, and it proved to entail experiences I would never have encountered back in Abilene.  More of that in the next installment.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

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Early Difficulties Translated into Valuable Lessons: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 4)

Early Difficulties Translated into Valuable Lessons: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 4)

Elton Higgs

My family’s move from Stamford, TX, back to Abilene when I was 7 years old turned out to entail challenges that became opportunities for me to grow.  The transfer to a new school is often difficult for a child, but since my illness in Stamford had forced me to begin 1st grade again, I went into 2nd grade with the advantage of being ahead of my classmates in both age and classroom experience.  That advantage put me ahead of the game for the rest of my primary school years.  Adding to the ease with which I made the transfer to a new school was the fact that I had very supportive teachers there, and that spurred me on to do my best.  I was hungry for approval, and it came most easily to me by performing well in the classroom.

I’m not sure what the immediate catalyst was for my family’s making the move back to Abilene in 1944, but it coincided with a downturn in our financial security.  Since my brother Otho and his wife Lucille had already gone back to Abilene and set up a business in watch repair, it made sense for my family to be there so that we could be more easily helped by them.  Not long after we moved back, my father was diagnosed with throat cancer, and that necessitated my going to work at an early age to earn some pocket money and eventually to contribute to the family’s purchase of groceries.  I had to adjust to the need for me to be a contributing member of the household, not just a dependent. 

We rented a house in Abilene only a few blocks away from Travis Elementary School, so I was able to walk to school.  I have numerous memories of my years at Travis.  My second-grade teacher, Mrs. Buttrick, enabled me to attract the attention of the woman who was to become my third-grade teacher, Mrs, Jackson.  Mrs. Buttrick had given me the task of reciting a little piece for the Parent Teacher Association, and after the event, Mrs. Jackson summoned me from the playground to tell me what a good job I had done.  Her commendation was a complete surprise, and it paved the way for a close relationship with her when I went into her class the next year.

At some point in my 3rd grade year, the principal of our school, Mr. Etter, gathered all the boys to present some basics on the “birds and bees.”  I suppose it was an appropriate time for such a lecture for me, because I subsequently developed a crush on my 4th grade teacher, Miss Caffee, and in the 5th grade I exchanged romantic looks and notes with a girl in my class.  It was there that I learned how “love” was engendered by the locking of eyes “across a crowded room.”  She sent me a little missive saying she liked me, and I manifested my early linguistic skill by replying “Likewise,” a word that probably no other boy in my class would have used.  I don’t remember that the girl to whom it was addressed responded, so our brief remote romance must have faded.

I was honored in 5th and 6th grades to be voted a Patrol Boy, which gave me the responsibility of standing at the pedestrian crossings outside the school to make sure traffic stopped to let the kids cross safely.  I was quite proud to wear the belt and the badge that went with the office.

Our Physical Education teacher was Mr. Sherman, a tall man who had a commanding presence.  Under him I learned to play soccer, a relatively new game at the time in the U. S.  It had this strange rule that you couldn’t touch the ball with your hands, so you had to learn literally to “use your head,” as well as your feet.  Mr. Sherman also coached the competitive team sports, football and softball.  My parents would not allow me to go out for the contact sport of football.  However, I did have a stint catching for the softball team.  I did not excel in sports, so early in life I accepted that my greatest successes would be achieved as an “egghead.”

My 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Barnes, inadvertently became an early sponsor of my entry into the work world.  She was a kind older lady, and my chief memory of her was her answering the door bell when I was going door-to-door selling greeting cards, my first work for pay.  Out of pure charity, no doubt, she bought some of my wares, for which I was grateful.  Though I don’t remember much about our relationship in the classroom, it must have been generally positive. 

Peddling greeting cards brought me my first pocket money, with which I bought my first bicycle, enabling me to graduate from self-employment to a brief career in selling newspapers.  I broke into the newspaper trade by walking around downtown Abilene selling the Fort Worth Star Telegram (which competed with the local paper, the Abilene Reporter News) on the street, in hotel lobbies, and in restaurants.  Getting up at about 4:30 in the morning to do this job; I rode my bike downtown to pick up my papers, passing by the lighted clock on a bank on Chestnut Street, which shone eerily on the deserted pavement.  I would set out with a bundle of papers under my arm, for which I had to account at the end of the day by giving my employer the wholesale price for each paper sold and returning the unsold papers.  It was a marvelous feeling to pay him his money and have no papers to return.  There were tips from time to time, but I didn’t have to tell him about those.  I found that areas around hotels were the best places to sell, since out-of-town people were most likely to want a newspaper from a major city like Fort Worth.  The papers were delivered twice a day by truck from Fort Worth, mostly on time but sometimes not.  When the papers were late and the delivery boys got rambunctious, Mr. Bennett, who managed the Abilene franchise for the paper, used to say, “When I die, I won’t go to Hell; the Lord will just make me wait for the paper truck to come!”

After several months of selling on the street (newspapers only!), I advanced to doing home deliveries on my bicycle, which gave me a steadier income.  The wind seemed to be my adversary during my newspaper delivery years.  When I was peddling papers on the street, the wind at the corners of tall buildings (as much as 17 stories in Abilene at the time!) would nearly rip my papers out of my arms.   When I was riding my bicycle on the residential route, it was exceedingly difficult to make headway facing into the wind.  Moreover, the bicycle I was riding supplied an additional challenge: it had only a cruising speed and it took a lot of initial energy to get it going.  However, that necessary struggle on the bicycle turned out to be good for my legs, creating good, firm muscles that have stood me in good stead over the years.

Meanwhile, back at Travis Elementary, my 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Lavinia Ward, took me under her wing and I worked hard for her, but my efforts were more quantitative than creative.  She didn’t much challenge that deficiency in my work in 6th grade, but it turned out that she went up to junior high teaching (7th grade) the same year I entered South Junior High School, so I had a social studies class with her there.  Her standards at that level, however, were appropriately more challenging.  I turned in an assignment (making a papier-mache map) on which I spent a great deal of time and turned it in expecting that I would receive the same kind of praise from her that I had in the 6th grade.  However, she returned the map with the comment that she expected some original thinking on the assignment, not mere hours spent.  That was my first real experience with thinking analytically, and I am thankful to Mrs. Ward for initiating it.  I was thereafter academically the better for it.

Our very early experiences shape attitudes and character.  In my case, God used what appeared to be difficult circumstances (early illness and the need for me to work) to help me develop special strengths.  My late start in schooling gave me an academic advantage which fed into my choosing an academic career.  My days selling greeting cards and delivering newspapers developed self-discipline and a sound sense of thrift in using the money I earned.  My family struggled financially during those years, and I was able to help out with my little bit of earnings, as well as being able to buy a few small things for myself.  I was profoundly affected by my father’s example of being a faithful tither, even when things were tight.  Even before I began earning my own money, I would put two or three cents of my weekly allowance of 25 cents into the offering plate on Sundays, so it was easy to transfer that principle when I had my own earned income.

I entered junior high school eager to navigate my last six years of public education and prepared to continue working to help the family. More about junior high school in the next installment. 

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

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Editor's Recommendation: C.S. Lewis and the Art of Writing

Editor's Recommendation: C.S. Lewis and the Art of Writing

“Corey Latta has accomplished a rare feat, penning an engaging and exquisite treatment of C. S. Lewis as a voracious reader and writer’s writer. It will be relished and savored by Lewis aficionados, and take readers of every sort on a fascinating guided tour of Lewis’s literary adventures with an assortment of disparate scenic stops along the way. A book worthy of the subject, it’s a fitting tribute to Lewis, often haunting in its beauty and perspicacity, on occasion downright stirring. It shows the indissoluble link between Lewis’s prescient and prodigious writing and his wide reading, features a treasure trove of eminently practical advice for the aspiring writer, and fills readers with a poignant sense of the nobility of the writing vocation.”

— David Baggett, Professor. Liberty University

“C. S. Lewis and the Art of Writing is an enjoyable and instructive treatise on all things writing-related. By uniquely centering the discussion on one of contemporary Christianity’s finest writers, clearest thinkers, and staunchest defenders, this handbook guides readers toward writing improvement, encouraging spiritual reflection and edification along the way. With his own lively style and passionate commitment to truth and beauty, Latta serves as both navigator for readers on this educational journey and model of its result.”

— Marybeth Baggett, Associate Professor of English, Liberty University

More Recommendations

The Early Years, From Gutter Sandpile to First Grade: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 3)

The Early Years, From Gutter Sandpile to First Grade

A Twilight Musing by Elton Higgs

If we stay long enough in one place, our personalities are affected by where we have lived.  I spent my first 24 years in Texas, and Texans absorb certain outlooks and perspectives.  For example, we smarted from Alaska’s joining the Union and becoming technically the largest state.  After all, one can travel 1,000 miles from border to border and still be in Texas.  The sky itself is bigger in Texas.  Everybody’s your neighbor in Texas, and we are a generally friendly bunch in casual interactions with each other.  Texas is so big, it has at least four distinctive topographies within its boundaries: “piney” forest in the east; flat, semiarid plains in the west and north; “hill country” in the central part, and hot, humid coastland in the south.  I grew up in the part of the plains called West Texas, mainly in a town called Abilene (named after the one in Kansas), in a region of cattle ranching and oil production. 

I lived with my family in Abilene the first four or five years of my life  My earliest memories (late 1930s, early ‘40s) are connected with the little house my family owned on Locust St. in Abilene.  A couple of them were traumatic, like getting into a red ant bed, or waking one morning to find that the city had cleaned the gutter outside our house, thus depriving me of the sand pile I had delighted playing in.  I was greatly offended by the maintenance workers’ arbitrary decision to take away my sand pile!  I flew in to tell my mother, with indignant tears, about this abuse of municipal power.  But in a happier vein are pictures of me in my overalls playing outside the house, or sometimes posing with my brothers.  One showed me in a little cart pulled by a goat, so there must have been enough money to give me a treat once in a while.

A couple of vivid memories from the house on Locust St. had to do with my paternal grandmother.  She was a wizened little lady who sat in her chair chewing snuff and spitting nastily into a receptacle at her feet.  When she died sometime around 1940, we went to the funeral and burial in Nugent, TX, a little town north of Abilene close to the family farm where my father had worked until he got married.  It had rained heavily the day before, and we had to drive carefully through a creek flowing high enough to cover the running board in order to get to the burial site.  As we sat in the car at the graveyard, my father wept freely, the only time I ever saw him do so.  

While we were at Locust St., my mother suffered a complete psychological meltdown (what was then described as a “nervous breakdown”).  I remember her spending whole days in bed, unable to get up and function normally.  I was sent to stay with my uncle Oby and Aunt Sarah, out in the country in the little village of Nugent.  This was rather fun for me, a change of pace from town life.  I enjoyed my aunt Sarah’s home cooked meals and going with my uncle on his rounds in a pickup to check on the large oil pumps that took the crude oil from the ground and pumped it into big tanks nearby.  I remember the cigar that he kept in his mouth most of the time; he must have put it out when he went to check the oil pumps, since we never experienced a conflagration on those trips.

As I look back on these earliest remembered experiences, I realize that in the midst of feeling secure with my family and feeling that I belonged, I was also being forced to deal with the realities of pain and loss.  Indeed, introduction to that mix of pleasure and unpleasantness is typical of our early years, and the places we have lived form a significant context for that stage of our education, both informal and academic.

We moved to Stamford, TX, when I was about 5 or 6, because of my mother’s felt need for some change in our situation.  My dad hoped that moving to Stamford would help her, and he was able to continue his bread delivery route from there.  Mother was a lifelong hypochondriac and was much pampered by my father, according to my brothers.  She was certainly focused on her illnesses and seemed always to be under physical and psychological stress. 

My earliest memories in Stamford were associated with the fact that my brother Otho had joined the Army Air Force and was stationed in Delaware, with the result that his wife, Lucille, came to live with us while he was away.  While there she gave birth to my oldest niece, Linda, and I had my first opportunity to observe an infant first hand.  That was my introduction to the anatomical differences between the sexes and my first lesson in sex education.  I knew nothing, of course, of the implications of those differences, but it made a deep impression on me nevertheless.  Socially, I was informed that I was now an uncle, and I was told later that I was very proud of the fact.  At some point we went to an event involving the Red Cross (related to war time, I imagine), and I was given one of their little pins.  So now I bragged that I was an uncle and a member of the Red Cross!  My sister-in-law was much amused.

Lucille was attended by a Dr. Metz, who sported a little mustache (rather resembling Hitler’s), and she drew a caricature of him on one of my Tinker Toy pieces (all wooden, no plastic) that gave us both a chuckle.  Lucille took a special interest in me at that time, and we continued to have a special relationship until she died many years later.  I was to her like an adopted son.

My memories of those early days in Stamford include playing on the sidewalk outside our house (a quite safe thing to do in those days) and encountering a girl with golden curls as she walked home from school with her mother.  Her name was Gwendolyn Rogers, and she was the object of my first crush.  I evidently had an early attraction for older women!  To her I was no more than a little boy on his tricycle whom she walked past on her way home, but she was my chosen one.  The attachment must have come to an end when I started to school, but I remember no trauma attached to the separation.

I have other memories of Stamford during my pre-school years.  We were within walking distance of the town square, and my brother Thavis took me sometimes to the drugstore, where we would drink a limeade at the fountain.  On the way there and back, I remember going by a shop that had a partially assembled small airplane, probably a military one, visible through a big window..  I don’t know the function of the shop, but the image of the plane stuck with me.  The town was evidently safe for kids to play in, even a little way from home.  I remember going down to the railroad tracks to watch the engines go back and forth, switching cars.  I have a vague recollection of meeting another little boy in that area, because he allowed me to read his Captain Marvel comic books, and I tried to see if the magic word that turned little Billy Batson into Captain Marvel (“Shazam!”) would work for me, but it never did.

On perhaps my fifth or sixth birthday, my mother made me a cake that lasted a few days after the party.  On the day when only one piece was left, my dad wanted to share it with me, but I said I wanted it all for myself.  That little act of selfishness haunted me for years afterward.  I’m not sure when the guilt faded, but the memory has stayed with me all this time.

I have vivid memories of playing indoors at our house in Stamford during my pre-school years.  My toys reflected the context of wartime.  I had a bomber model that dropped marbles, with which I destroyed imagined enemy installations.  One Christmas I was given a model electric train by Otho and Lucille, and it engaged me many hours with its electric engine and circular track.  It was operated by a transformer box with a lever that made the engine go backward or forward, and I often derailed it with my rapid changes in direction and speed.  I can still smell the oil with which I lubricated the wheels of the train.

Most of our news came from the radio, supplemented by the newspaper, and though I don’t remember listening to any of President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, the family must have listened to some of them.  One program that I do remember my mother listening to faithfully was the commentary of Gabriel Heater.  I can hear even now his soft but confident voice, delivering his opinions on the news of the day, particularly of the war.

My first-grade experiences in Stamford were dominated by respiratory illness.  I was sick so much during my initial enrollment that my parents decided just to pull me out so that I could concentrate on getting well.  Consequently, I started again from scratch the next school year.  Since I had learned the basics of reading in my first enrollment (including phonics, an exercise in audial perception that has helped me throughout life), I spent much of my convalescence time developing my reading skills, and consequently, when I went back to school, I had a head start on the other students.  In fact, I read so well that the teacher asked me to listen sometimes to students reading and to correct them, while she worked with still another group. That spotlight on my advantage was, I fear, unhealthy food for my ego—I enjoyed it overmuch.  However, being one of the oldest in all my classes thereafter contributed materially to my academic successes.  Being held back in early primary school is often a good strategy for an initially struggling child.

I should note several other memories of my first-grade years.  My family bought a milk goat because someone had said that drinking fresh goat’s milk is good for ailing children.  The nanny goat my father milked became a pet, and it was great fun to play with her baby when he was born.  We took the goat with us when we moved back to Abilene around 1944 and created a shed and pen in back of the house.  I remember going out with my dad to milk the goat, and he taught me how to do it, though I never became really proficient at it.

I had significant interactions with my brother Thavis (eight years older than I) during our stay in Stamford.  He was a builder of model airplanes, and he spent hours meticulously cutting out parts of the plane from sheets of balsa wood and gluing them precisely together.  His room was off-limits to me, but I sneaked in when he wasn’t home and looked over his work.  I don’t remember seriously disturbing anything, but when he caught me in his room, his displeasure was strongly expressed.

Another of his wartime activities was to collect tin foil from chewing gum wrappers and roll them into a ball to convey to a recycling center for the war effort.  I can still see and feel the process of starting at the corner and carefully peeling back the foil from its wax paper base. I helped with building some of the balls of foil, and they became rather large, say about the size of a hardball or larger.

While we were in Stamford, Thavis got a job at a little grocery store owned by a man named Earl Stagner.  He and Thavis became good friends and remained so for years after we moved back to Abilene.  Another of his jobs in Stamford was working at a little café, where he learned to cook some of the dishes he served.  As a result, he introduced me to an egg and jelly sandwich which was made with three pieces of bread, with a hole cut in the middle of the middle slice to fit over the fried egg resting on the bottom slice.  Jelly was added to make it a memorable taste experience.

My most traumatic experience with Thavis was his trying to teach me to swim.  After a few rudimentary instructions, he decided that it was time literally to let me sink or swim, and I sank.  I was very frightened and swallowed some water, I think.  The swimming lesson failed, and much to his disgust, I refused to try any more.  It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I made any progress in learning to swim.

Thavis decided to run away from home after we moved back to Abilene, in order to finish his senior year in high school at Stamford.  Our time together in Stamford created a bond between us, and he continued to be a special big brother to me even after we were separated.

These scattered memories attached to places lived make me aware of how important seemingly insignificant details of experience can be.   Being stung by the red ants and being deprived of my gutter sandpile were my introduction to loss, but it took the brief, isolated event of watching my father weep at his mother’s death for me to have my first limited understanding of the grief attached to death.  I had the dawning of conscience in the small incident of not sharing my birthday cake.  Early experiences with my sister-in-law and my brother Thavis were not dramatic, but they were the foundation for more mature relationships later on.  My illness as a little boy actually resulted in my having an advantage when I finally started school.  So it was that my early years in Abilene and Stamford contributed significantly to who God has enabled me to become.    

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

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Assessing One’s Parents: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 2)

Assessing One’s Parents

Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 2)

          Not all people have siblings, but we all have parents, and their presence (or absence) in our lives exerts an irradicable influence on who we turn out to be. I once heard of a college counselor who regularly told his undergraduate counselees that “We all have to come to the point of forgiving our parents.”  That is to say, whatever our relationship to our parents, to some degree or other, usually by the time we become adolescents, our parents’ faults will have become obvious to us, and we have to deal with our perception of their failures. 

            That may seem an ungenerous introduction to talking about my relationship with my parents, and I must make clear at the beginning that I suffered no abuse at their hands, and indeed they loved me and provided for me as they were able.  But their age when they were raising me, the last of their brood, meant that they did not have the energy or the health to be very actively involved with me.  Nevertheless, I received some significant guidance and nurture from them.  Sorting through this mixture of influences from my parents challenges me to honestly identify and evaluate their effect on me, being thankful for the good things they gave me and gracious about any deficiencies I thought they had.  It takes God’s help to review one’s upbringing clearly and to take responsibility for what we have become, whatever the advantages and disadvantages of our early home life.

I remember my father as a generally kind man.  He certainly went extra miles trying to make my mother happy, and he seemed to be well liked by his customers and fellow workers during his long employment as a bread delivery man.  Women responded well to his gentleness, and one of my sisters-in-law adored him as a surrogate father, having lost her father early in her life.  Dad was a Bible-reading man and a steady Christian, qualities that led to his appointment as an elder in our congregation of the Church of Christ we attended in Abilene.  He had strong convictions.  I remember that when the Revised Standard Version of the Bible came out in the 1950s, he was adamant in upholding the greater authority of the King James Version because the RSV rendered the quotation of Isaiah that “a virgin shall conceive” a child (Jesus) as “a young woman shall conceive.”  To him, that was changing the very Word of God; he had no conception of such a rendering being justified by a scholarly appeal to the meaning of the original Hebrew.  Neither he nor my mother went past the 8th grade in formal schooling, and neither of them had traveled beyond Texas, so they had no experience that exposed them to any culture except what they had grown up with.

My father and I didn’t share much at a deeply personal level.  When I was small he took me along with him on his bread route sometimes in the summer, but I don’t remember hanging out with him just to engage in some mutually satisfying activity, like attending sporting events or making visits to a park.  He was a hard-working man, and our only regular family activity was going to church and having an occasional extended family meal with my brother Otho and his wife and children.  Things were financially tough for my father and mother and me after he became ill with throat cancer.  After his employment with Mead’s Bakery came to an end, he took up selling Watkins Products from door to door, and I would sometimes go with him on his deliveries and his trips to the warehouse to purchase products to sell.  That ceased when I began to have jobs of my own to pay for my personal purchases and to add to the household income. 

My mother’s health was always precarious, and she had several operations to correct internal problems, including a hysterectomy.  Sometime during my early childhood, she had an emotional meltdown, or what was then referred to as a “nervous breakdown.”  For a period of weeks, she was unable to take care of household chores; I think I was sometimes taken care of by some of my aunts and uncles during this period.  She frequently felt bad, and though there were some real physical problems, my brothers and I, and several of our close relatives, I think, considered her to be a hypochondriac.  From the time I was aware enough to make an evaluation, I responded to her perpetual health problems by wishing that she could be more stoic in enduring them.  I can remember overhearing her telephone conversations with her female friends discussing clinical details of her ailments and medical treatments.

Merely by token of my being at home alone with her after she had sufficiently recovered from her meltdown to be active again, she exerted a kind of environmental influence on me.  I was a rather sickly child up through my primary school years, often having to stay home from school.  Indeed, I had to drop out of school during first grade, starting again the next year.  (Incidentally, this gave me an ongoing advantage in my subsequent years in school, always being a year or so older than my classmates.)  My mother took good care of me when I was ill and was very solicitous of me when I was well, insisting that I always wear a cap in cold weather.  I have some very vivid memories of being treated when I was ill.  As I recovered from upper-gastral problems, I was fed mashed banana and saltine crackers as soft food to re-accommodate my stomach to eating solid food again.  When the problem was constipation, the remedies were always unpleasant and awkward, involving either milk of magnesia or non-orally administered water to loosen things up.

All of this care could have established a close emotional bond, but my mother’s wearing her emotions on her sleeve actually effected a determination in me to repress my emotions, and that early development has been manifested in my adult life.  It took me years to learn to share emotionally with others, including my wife.  Even now, I remain governed more by rationality than by emotion.  That has probably been good for my scholarly pursuits, but less so for my personal life.  I was especially turned off by my mother’s frequent appeals in my teen years for me to tell her that I loved her.  The more she appealed, the less inclined I was to respond in the way that she wanted.  I loved her dutifully, but not fervently or deeply.  I honored my mother according to the commandment, and I saw to her needs to the end, but I did not weep when she died.  Indeed, I rarely weep at all, which is probably a deficiency in my life.

I remember being envious of one of my closest friends during my post-high school years.  His mother had heroically continued as mother to her two sons and a daughter as the family tried to make a go of their farm after the father had left them.  She was a warm, affectionate woman, who welcomed guests and always had a treat ready when her children’s friends visited.  I admired her for her combination of strength and warmth, and I wondered why my mother was so different from her.  I can’t remember my mother ever acting with that kind of spontaneous hospitality toward my friends.

More than balancing out any deficiencies in what my parents gave me was our religious life together.  We went to church three times a week and took it for granted that all of us would be there if not hindered by illness.  We lived close enough to the church building to walk there, which took about 15-20 minutes.  The routines of our household also reflected commitment to serving God.  I remember vividly our custom of praying together every night before retiring.  My father and I would kneel, and he would lead the prayer.  This time was called the “family altar,” and my parents told me that it had been their custom to do this from the beginning of their marriage.  Prayer came naturally in our family.  We gave thanks at every meal, and that’s where I first learned to pray aloud.  My mother was especially dedicated to prayer and had great faith that prayer was a spiritual privilege that produced results.  Her great faith and readiness to pray anytime conditioned me to see prayer as a natural part of everyday Christian living.

My Christian walk, then, was undergirded by the example and teaching of my parents.  Their lack of bitterness and their strong faith in the face of my father’s illness and loss of income encouraged me to work alongside them to supply the family’s needs.  I might not have learned the value of hard, honest work if we had been better off financially.  Their faithfulness to one another during over 35 years of marriage was another powerful working out of their desire to honor God and one another.

On the other hand, my lack of strong personal connection with my father and reaction against my mother’s excessive emotionality resulted in my taking a long time as an adult to learn emotional sensitivity to others, particularly my wife.  I am by temperament strongly inclined toward a rational outlook, and my upbringing did not contribute to tempering that inclination with appropriate emotional expression.

In sum, God gave me parents with both virtues and flaws, like most people.  I thank God that the benefits I received from them outweigh in significance those things I wish they had been able to give me.  I can’t blame any of my deficiencies on them, for I am responsible before God for what I have made of their gifts and how I have compensated for any disadvantages they might have passed on to me.  I must be as charitable and merciful toward them as I hope my children will be toward me.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

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