That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question. Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation.
-Martin Luther King, Jr. (from "I have Been to the Mountaintop").

Monday, February 21, 2011

The Fist and the Cross

HUNTINGTON—This past week our community lost two of its most beloved radicals. I came to know both Fr. Bert Valdez and Winnie Fox during my time as an undergraduate student at Marshall. For Bert religion was about being human, and for Winnie, revolution was religion.

For Fr. Bert, spirituality was not so much taught as it was performed in front of your eyes. He understood that the symphony of life never ceases, and his attuned ear did not miss the music. He did not expect people to always understand his point, but he did expect them to think about it.

He was fond of saying all stories are true, while some of them actually happened. He once told me during a heated debate in the sacristy that he didn’t believe in the Immaculate Conception. It wasn’t until after Mass ended that we were informed that his presider’s microphone had been on the whole time!

During one homily, he likened the Church to a house of ill repute and told the story of how he watched from his window at St. Charles Seminary on Paca Street in Baltimore as a madam kicked out a male patron. Throwing his wallet in his face, the woman screamed, “this is a respectable whorehouse.”

Winnie could be just as feisty. When she became more stooped over, she would amble up to politicians using her walker and fool them into thinking she was a sweet old woman. Then she’d grab them by the shirt collar. Waiting for her arthritic hands to twist, she would pull them toward her, and explain why her cause was vital.

Winnie was born in eastern Kentucky and her father politicked for Fred Vinson, a congressman who eventually became the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1946-1953. Her life as a political activist began when she stood up for her African American co-workers while working as a secretary in Washington, D.C. during the Second World War.

Winnie was always writing editorials and congressmen. She loved people and hated those in power who made decisions that benefit the rich without thinking of working folk. She was an outspoken feminist who attributed many social problems to the male perspective, but was fierce in her devotion to her late-husband Jack.

In the past few years I drifted away from both Winnie and Fr. Bert. Winnie was initially against my going to seminary, but a couple years later told a mutual friend that even though she couldn’t stand organized religion, she knew I would do right by the people and practice liberation theology. Regarding Fr. Bert neither of us picked up the phone. As I look back on my friends I don’t mourn their death so much as my own loss. Because of them I was able to find my own place, somewhere between the fist and the cross.

Interview with Winnie Fox

*I conducted this interview with Winnie as an assignment for a creative writing class at Marshall University in Fall 2005.

October 26, 2005

For this assignment I went up to the east end of town to interview Winnie Fox at her home on sixth avenue and twenty-sixth street . Winnie is 85 years old. She has four children and has been an activist, concerned citizen and community leader for over fifty years. The patron saint of Huntington hellraisers, Winnie is never too busy to sit down over a cup of coffee and discuss the status of our world. Although her bones don’t work the way they used to, Winnie is as outspoken as a rebellious teenager and has a mind like a steel trap. In this interview Winnie talks about growing up during the depression on the Kentucky side of the Big Sandy river.

I was born in a place called Torchlight, Kentucky on the Big Sandy river. It was a very small community above Louisa, a coal mining town. My daddy had the store there, and when the depression came he kept feeding people out of the store until he went broke because that’s what people did back then. It’s hard for people to sort out their lives, especially when it was so long since all this stuff has passed.

One of the first things I remember when I was just a toddler was when our house caught on fire. Those old houses used to have a living room and a family room. The living room was where you lived and had the fire place. I remember sitting there with my mother, and maybe I was 18 months old, something like that, and we walked into the kitchen and the whole ceiling was on fire. We had coal oil lamps on top of one of those old coal stoves—boy they made the best food in the world. Corn bread and biscuits to die for. Anyway, my mother called my father and then went up to the attic and started pulling out beams in the roof and throwing them out the window. Her hands were completely burnt and my daddy was bringing her barrels of water that they had around the house since we didn’t have running water.

When I was five I moved to Louisa. My uncle was a locksmith and captained a sternwheeler he’d built by himself in his spare time. Boy I loved that Big Sandy river. He used to take me up and down and every now and then he’d let me take the wheel. I remember going up the Big Sandy in a row boat at night with the moon shining. We were going to see a show boat, and just the idea of it was fascinating. My husband’s uncle’s name was Isaac and he worked on the river and when he was a child he was a Shakespearian actor on one of those showboats.

Back in those days though, times were tough. I had gone to live in Louisa with my uncle because my parents couldn’t keep me. One of my daddy’s best friends in Louisa was Fred Vinson. Daddy had helped Fred get elected to the legislature the first time and I used to go to his house when I was a kid. He lived in a big stone house near the post office. The house has since been torn down but I can still close my eyes and picture it. He was very good to me. He didn’t have any children of his own and I used to play with his grand nieces. They lived on a house on the property with their mom, and had the biggest playhouse you ever saw. It had a miniature kitchen and a living room. My mom used to ride horses with Fred’s wife Roberta.

Of course, fate would take the Vinsons to Washington as Fred’s political career advanced. When I went to Washington during the war to work for the Roosevelt administration, I met with the Vinsons. By that time Fred had become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Fred had a head for politics but Roberta told me she hated shaking hands with all those people she didn’t know. That’s the way they did women back then though. They wanted to keep you pregnant and uneducated. I don’t think it was a very good thing that he was head of the Supreme Court. He must have been rather conservative because someone told me if he’d been alive Brown vs. Board of Education might not have passed. He seemed like a nice man though and always talked to me when I was a kid.

Now before I go any further lets get one thing clear. America is full of shit and I’ll never salute the goddamn flag. Now I’ll salute people who try their hearts out. I’ll support the people that went to Vietnam and Iraq who were lied to. It’s pitiful when the only way some people can get an education is to go into the service. My husband got an education on the GI bill. They said he didn’t have to pay for it. But he paid for it. He paid for it when he was 18 years old in the Pacific and saw flame throwers, and mothers jumping off cliffs with babies and the sky so black with flies that you couldn’t see the sun. All so he could work like a dog his whole life at the nickel plant and then get cancer. Where’s the noble cause in that? No matter what they tell you, there is hardly ever a cause worthy of going to war over. And that’s the truth

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Book Review

A DARING PROMISE: A SPIRITUALITY OF CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE. By Richard R. Gaillardetz. New York: The Crossword Publishing Company, 2002. Pp. 137. $16.95

In A Daring Promise: A Spirituality of Christian Marriage, Richard Gaillardetz notes that his book “might best be viewed not as a marriage manual in which the author unlocks the secrets of a successful marriage but rather something more akin to a pilgrim’s journal in which (he) seek(s) to record something of the spiritual topography of the marriage relationship,” (10). To that end the author blends traditional covenantal theology with anecdotal stories of his experience as a fallible married man—who does not pray with his wife, who struggles with his identity as parent—and creates a volume which he hopes will give married couples of all stripes a better understanding of the daily rewards and challenges of wedded life.

The central theme of A Daring Promise hinges on the notion that vowing oneself to another before God is a radical act. Marriage is difficult for the simple reason that it is the setting in which most Christian adults will, through the help of God, work out their salvation. Gaillardetz eschews the notion that God is a third party brought into the marriage by the couple through prayer in favor of grounding the sacrament in the Paschal Mystery. The consequence of this action is that people are able to commune with God in their daily life of communing with others. “If God is love, if God is gift given eternally, then our participation in the life of God happens not by escaping our everyday world, but by entering more deeply into the life of love and that paradoxical logic of gift which we receive most richly only when we make “gifting” others a way of life,” (39).

A Daring Promise addresses marriage over the course of 137 pages in light of Christian Spirituality, the Life of Communion, Conversion, Sexuality and Parenthood. The author makes use of a multiplicity of sources regarding marriage including Thomas Merton, Saint Augustine, Kallistos Ware, Karol Wojtyla, Karen Lebacqz, and Evelyn and James Whitehead. The author also includes three discussion questions at the end of each chapter aimed at helping married individuals better relate to their spouses. The book succeeds in giving a view of marriage that runs counter to both the “happily-ever-after” and “old ball and chain” fallacies deeply embedded in society. The weaknesses of the book are a reflection of the author himself. At times, Gaillardetz seems to advocate a leap of faith from Church teaching into interpersonal relationships without giving a clear methodology for accomplishing the task. Throughout the book the author brushes off a traditional view of marriage as promulgated by celibate institutional church leaders. Nevertheless, Church authorities, and more importantly, married couples seeking to reconnect with one another could greatly benefit from reading this book. No Index.

Thoughts on Tuesday

Loneliness invades a man. It bores in amidst the classes and theological debates in the hallway, the cold beer at the end of the day among friends. It comes upon me when I realize I am not the man I was, and am not the man I will be. Strip away the black shirt, the tab collar, the classes the masses, the breviary and Morning Prayer and all you have is a man in the likeness of his creator, God. Somehow, it’s not enough. It’s incomplete, an alarming mess in a world defined by pixels and megabytes instead of loved ones and community.

The question of a lifetime: Does man need saving, like the Judeo-Christian teaching proclaims or does he save himself, as the Buddhist path seems to suggest. Does it matter? Life marches on until we arrive at death. We have no choice in the matter. A friend lies on his death bed at Saint Mary’s, more than forty years a priest and as feisty as ever. “No one gets out of this life alive,” he reminded me. We can define our life and in so doing, define our death. Our world is really in our head. Not only the Gospel message, but every message we receive is received according to the mode of the receiver.

It is this hearing, and consequently the defining that happens as a result of our soul’s journey, that makes a life. Most days it seems to be enough to smile, but this day isn’t one of them. In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”