I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: southern baptist churches in richards

  • Two Women on Faith and Hope (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)

    Two Women on Faith and Hope (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)


    “I know Papa has gone to heaven, and that is where I want to meet him. The Old Devil gets a hold of me sometime. I slap him off—and pray harder for the Lord to help me be a better Christian. I realize more that I need the Lord every day, and I want to love the Lord more and try to serve Him better. He alone can take away these heartaches of mine. I want to have more faith in Him. I have been so burdened, and I want to be happy. Serving God and living for Him is the only plan.” (excerpt from a letter written by my fifty-six-year-old maternal grandmother to a sister following the death of their father in 1954)

    My maternal grandmother’s belief that faith was the sole solution to the multitude of problems she faced throughout her life beginning with her husband’s accidental death that left her penniless with four children to raise during the Great Depression, a belief she expressed in the above letter to her sister, reflected her daily approach to “have more faith” that included a ritual of reading Bible passages while she sat at our small kitchen table and I lay in the darkness watching her from the next room, wishing she wouldn’t get up so early. But there she would be, struggling with her third-grade reading level to look for godly guidance in the ungodly hours before dawn. I want to be happy, she said, and God was her only plan.

    Shockingly, my paternal grandmother glossed over the deeper issues of faith in favor of a focus on hope. The Bible says there are three things that last forever: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of them is love. This grandmother wasn’t concerned with the intricacies of faith nor did she overtly exhibit love toward others outside her immediate family, but she attended the same Southern Baptist church faithfully every Sunday. Her hope was for humor, however. Her belief was that in every Sunday church service she could find something or someone or, preferably both, she could use to entertain her family at the dinner table later. The poor preacher was irreverently skewered on a regular basis; no one was sacred at that table. She was a woman in charge of her home, family and most of the conversations that took place within both.

    This was the faith of my grandmothers. The church was the teacher for one, the Bible the textbook for both, and the interpretations ranged from the holy to the inadvertently profane. I listened and watched these women for as long as they lived and throughout my childhood absorbed their diverse values that blended with the Sunday School teachings and preaching of the Southern Baptist churches my family attended. I learned to sift the messages and keep the ones that appeared to lessen my likelihood of going to hell in an afterlife.

    My maternal grandmother’s duel with the Devil evokes strong feelings for me, but they are feelings of sadness for her inability to achieve that higher level of trust she desperately wanted, the trust that would bring her happiness. Her faith never could be quite good enough, and I refuse to believe in a god that inspires fear and irrational guilt. As for my dad’s mother, her irreverence gave me permission to begin to overcome feelings of shame when I faced the puzzles of sexual identity that were my life. My life has involved many choices, but my being lesbian was not one of them. My paternal grandmother had a unique relationship with her God, but her words and sense of humor helped free me from the somber sermons of damnation in my youth and encouraged me to think for myself. I wonder if she knew.

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    “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews XI, 1)

               

  • unfinished business: a man of letters

    unfinished business: a man of letters


    In the summer of 2018 I published eleven stories focused on letters written during WWII by my father to my mother, his mother and others. I ended the series with the assurance that I had other letters written by my dad – letters to me when I was in college and beyond, more letters to his mother and father. However, I was all “lettered out” at that time and couldn’t continue.

    Today is another day, another year…summer heat continues with a vengeance. The earth is burning, scorching our world, searing our souls. Losing those we love has been too frequent in the past two years because of Covid and now its variants. Last week an entire condominium community in Miami, Florida was destroyed with more loss of lives. Gun violence rises daily in America as surely as the temperatures increase. I mourn with the families and friends of everyone who must face the reality of death.

    But today is the 45th. anniversary of a death I faced when I was only thirty years old: the loss of the man of letters. Born in 1925 in Huntsville, Texas, my dad survived 32 bombing missions as a navigator in the 8th. Air Force in Europe. He came home in 1945, eloped with his home town girl, had a disastrous honeymoon in Miami but successfully recovered to produce a daughter in 1946. He was unable to survive colon cancer in the summer of 1976.

    My dad and I grew up together. He was twenty-one when I was born. He loved to hunt doves and quail when they were in season but most of all he loved our bird dogs who were too spoiled to be much good to us in the fields, regardless of the season. He caught fish in any tank or stream in Grimes County, read poetry to me from Best Loved Poems of the American People. He taught me how to read The Houston Post – particularly the sports section. He followed the Dallas Cowboys, he coached high school basketball teams, he even coached a baseball team in Richards when he was the school superintendent of those two segregated public schools in the 1950s. He taught me to play golf on a public course in Freeport, Texas when I was a teenager. We cooled down with a root beer from the A&W root beer stand.

    He was always in school himself – the first in his family to get an undergraduate degree followed by a master’s degree that was capped off (literally) by a doctorate in education when I was also in college. He believed in God, the Richards Baptist Church, the First Baptist Church of Brazoria and finally the First Baptist Church of Richmond where his membership days were done. He also believed in writing letters.

    This letter was to his mother in lieu of a birthday card. It’s legible, reads like he talked, and so I am reminded of this time when he was nearly forty years old and finally able to buy his first home. Imagine his excitement.

    “I believe one of the ways that you have been most helpful to me is expecting good things of me. You know when you have people who believe in you, you don’t want to let them down.”

    I’ll close with a portion of a letter he wrote to me in 1970 when I was a student in Southwestern Baptist Seminary. He and I had an ongoing joke about my mother’s obsession with her camellias – hence his acknowledgment he was learning the names. Good one. Then he closed with a blessing from a Native American proverb. When I was a child, he regaled me with fictional stories about his rides with the Pony Express. I think this is a beautiful ending message so I wanted to share this with my followers in cyberspace who may appreciate the comfort he captured. My dad may have truly loved those bird dogs, but I know he also loved me.

    “May you keep your heart like the morning and may you come slowly to the four corners where men say goodnight.”

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    Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.