I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: southwestern baptist theological seminary

  • then sings my soul – Part 2 (from I’ll Call It and Not Quite the Same)

    then sings my soul – Part 2 (from I’ll Call It and Not Quite the Same)


    The call came on a cold Sunday afternoon in February of 2004. It was Amy, Janie’s older sister. I knew immediately this wasn’t a good call because I hadn’t spoken to her in years. I’ve been trying to call you at home, but I decided to call your cell phone when I couldn’t get you, she went on slowly. I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Is something wrong with Janie? I interrupted.

    Sheila, Janie died Friday morning in Africa. Her voice broke, and I felt her pain across the distance. We don’t know everything. Someone from the Foreign Mission Board called us Friday night, and said she didn’t come to work so her boss went to her house and found her. They thought it must have been a heart attack. That’s all we know. Her voice caught with the struggle to keep from being unable to talk. There was a silence on the line. Just the empty sounds of grief and loss.

    As I said goodbye to Amy on this bleak Sunday afternoon in February, I wept. Janie’s health had been a battle for a very long time. She inherited the genetic predisposition of her parents’ illnesses including diabetes that robbed her of her sight, heart attacks, breast cancer. Each time there was a crisis, she came back to the United States, was treated in Nashville and stayed with Amy and her husband Gary who took care of her. But she always returned to Africa. I visited her once in the hospital in Tennessee and begged her to stay at home for better medical care and the support of her family.

    Africa is my home, she said. My heart and soul are with the people there.

    *****************

    Janie and I became good friends the fall semester we enrolled at Southwestern Seminary in 1969. She graduated the previous spring from Carson Newman College in Tennessee, her home state, and grew up soaked in Southern Baptist doctrines and traditions. She was barely twenty-two years old, had already lost both her parents to illnesses but was very close to her two religious sisters. Her sisters had encouraged her to continue her graduate work in a seminary which led her to Southwestern because of its sacred music program offering a graduate degree, its proximity to her home in Nashville, and the size of the enrollment which fluctuated depending on the number of people feeling “called” to the ministry. Janie felt called to foreign mission service.

    The seminary had a touring choir known as The Southwestern Singers. This was a smaller auditioned group that made annual trips for two weeks each spring semester. The itinerary was different every year, but the chartered bus that carried us was uncomfortably the same. No complaints from me; I’ve always enjoyed a bus ride no matter the destination. Janie and I both were accepted into the choir and were excited to find our first spring tour would be from Fort Worth to Philadelphia. Along the way we stayed in the homes of the members of our host churches which improved the attendance for the concerts. We signed up as roommates for the tour.

    The intimacy of riding next to each other cross country on the bus during the day and spending every night together, often in the same bed, proved to light a fire that even I couldn’t extinguish with my mindless chatter, constant attempts to impress her. The physical closeness infatuated me – it was exhilarating, heady. As we rode hundreds of miles, I rarely glanced out the windows. Miracles do occur, and God works in mysterious ways. This is my testimony: when I was twenty-three years old, somewhere between Texas and Pennsylvania, Janie derailed my celibacy pledge. Thank you, God.

    Two years of seminary classes altered my perception of the clarity of my calling into the ministry. My vocal coach who was a really great coach, an accomplished soprano, encouraged me to pursue my accounting career because the Baptist denomination discriminated against women’s leadership in their congregations. CPA firms and the church both practiced random acts of unkindness toward women. I began to wonder if I had missed my calling and switched my major to theology from sacred music in the spring semester of 1971. If my singing was less than stellar, I could always preach on a street corner.

    *********************

    Please stay tuned for Part 3.

        

        

       

        

  • oh yeah, I met Neil Diamond once


    Peering into the darkness from my designated position next to the pianist who would accompany me for my two songs I had to sing for the four vocal judges sitting in the audience that were my jury and would determine my final exam grade in my voice class, I was unable to see the judge who had asked me about my attendance at the Neil Diamond concert that night. The bright spotlights directed to the stage to simulate actual performances blinded me.

    “I heard you on the radio this morning,” he continued as I tried to melt into the floor from embarrassment. Surely not one of these classical music teachers had even heard of Neil Diamond and would think pop music was the last rung on the ladder of musical hierarchy.

    “Congratulations on winning the two tickets to the concert – and the backstage pass. That’s quite something,” he said.

    “Thank you, sir. I rarely listen to that radio station,” I lied. “I was just trying to relax for the jury today. Lucky,” I mumbled and then tried to regain my composure to sing the Italian and German songs I had prepared.

    ***

    In 1969 I was a twenty-three-year-old lesbian struggling to find a girlfriend and the meaning of life – but mostly a girlfriend. I was a displaced Texas girl living in Seattle, working for a local CPA firm doing taxes and bookkeeping, and looking for love in the only comfort zone I had: the Mercer Island Baptist Church which had been introduced to me by a straight woman I worked with at the CPA firm.

    I came from six generations of Southern Baptists and was thrilled to know Seattle even had a Southern Baptist church out there in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. In my flight to escape my family and my “passing” as straight in the Houston area I drove 3,000 miles to a place where I didn’t know a single person except my lesbian friend who traveled with me, a girl who turned out not to be a lesbian (much to my disappointment) and left me two months after we arrived to move to California with a man she met at a bar. I hadn’t really made a plan to find friends.

    Enter the Mercer Island Baptist Church with mostly other displaced southerners whose religion made them feel that they were strangers in a foreign land, biblically speaking. That church became my lifeline to community with the unintentional bonus of developing my own personal “gaydar.” Without delving into specifics, let’s just say that lust and hormonal longings became so intertwined with my religious understandings at the time that I answered a clear call from God to move back to Texas and enroll in the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. The “call” came in the form of a rejection by a married woman in the church that I was madly in love with but a woman who was older, wiser, had three very young children, and identified as heterosexual.

    My mother wept when I called her to tell her of my career change and told me she believed I was following the path predetermined for me at my birth when she gave me to God for Christian service. Unfortunately, my voice teacher at the seminary seemed to disagree with my mother’s euphoria. As a matter of fact during one of our lessons, she abruptly asked me why I had decided to pursue a career as a church music director when I had such wonderful opportunities in business as a CPA. Church music directors were mostly men, she went on to tell me as I sang the scales with less enthusiasm.

    My music teacher was right on all fronts, but I’m not a quick learner so I stayed in the seminary for two years after switching my major to theology which didn’t require standing in front of four teachers singing words I didn’t know the meaning of. After two years at Southwestern, I left with a girl friend I had met there which in my mind at the time proved that God truly answered prayers.

    My new girlfriend was my date for the Neil Diamond concert that night in Dallas, and we did go backstage after a fabulous concert to meet him. He had long hair at that time (circa 1971), appeared to be exhausted, was shorter than I expected, but shook hands and spoke to each of us with a slight smile. I seem to remember a female guitar player who left with him…

    Yesterday I heard that Neil Diamond is retiring from touring as a result of Parkinson’s Disease, and I had a flood of memories of that night in Dallas so long ago. The world has lost a great performer, but thankfully we have his concerts preserved for posterity via new technology.

    Today is Neil Diamond’s 77th. birthday, and I would like to sing Happy Birthday to him, but alas, I’m worried that it might be slightly off key. Instead, I will simply thank him for the music he wrote and performed during the past 50 years of his life -and mine. His songs have brought joy to millions of people who will remember them with their own feelings, but not everyone will remember the privilege of meeting him backstage.

    Stay tuned.