John Egerton. Generations: An American Family. University Press of Kentucky, 1983.

By Will D. Campbell

Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 23-24

For too long we have cataloged, systematized and categorized the places and ways of learning. And too often we neglect, ignore or fail to see resources near at hand.

I sometimes spy on the Steeples by riding around in one city or another surveying what the outside billboards and electronic marquees are promoting. Aerobic dancing, weight watchers clubs, and Mother’s day out programs have been big the past few years. A few of them, the better ones I suppose, announce that the Koreans also worship there, though at a different time. (I saw one with the words: TEMPORARY WORSHIP CENTER. I guess I knew what it meant but it seemed sort of funny.) The other day I was riding from Fancy Gap, Virginia to Mt. Juliet, Tennessee and asked my friend and driver to get off the big highway and drive through one of the cities between Fancy Gap and Mt. Juliet so I could do my research on the billboards in church yards. “Marriage Enrichment Seminar” was the winner. Two were announcing a series of lectures on Human Sexuality, to be given by someone with several degrees behind his name, the most of which I didn’t recognize. I kept wondering where they got their material, who the experts in those fields are.

I have never been invited to conduct a seminar on marriage enrichment nor give a lecture on human sexuality. It is highly doubtful that I ever will. But if I should I would not begin by researching the materials listed in the latest cataloging of those subjects. I would begin by reading a passage from a book I have just finished. Generations: An American Family, by John Egerton, a man no more known for his expertise in those areas than I. His words I would read are of a passionate love scene. Two lovers are lying in bed, lying close together. It is a balmy Kentucky evening and the room is dark and quiet. Suddenly the woman speaks.

“Burnam, are you awake? I love you.
There was no answer. Addie spoke louder: “Burnam? I said I love you.”
“Huh? What’d you say?”
“You can’t hear thunder! I SAID I LOVE YOU! I never did love anyone but you.”
After a pause, Burnam replied, “I love you too, Addie. I must have loved you right from the first. You’re the only one I ever did ask to marry me.”

I would read those words because this marriage must have been enriched from the beginning or gained enrichment somewhere along the way for it had lasted seventy-nine years. The groom was 106 years old and the bride ninety-eight. And certainly it was not devoid of romance and sexuality. What could be more romantic than a wedding the day after the first flying machine was launched at Kitty Hawk? And by the time their thirteenth child was born one would begin to assume that a healthy and conjunctional sexuality was part of the union.

In the Seminar I would lead the participants back over the years as Egerton does, across peaceful Bluegrass landscapes and hostile mountains and rivers, out of the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina, over the Cumberland Gap and on into Cranks Creek in what is now Harlan County, Kentucky where the marriage began and never ended. For though the clinicians. finally declared one of the lovers dead it is not within their power to say the marriage is over. To Addie, Burnam is still “my husband.” Not “late” nor “departed.” Present Tense. These two knew what it meant to be “married.” John Egerton has written it down and I would use it in my seminar on Marriage Enrichment as genuine, unscientific reality.

Or “Death and Dying.” That’s big these days and appeared on one of the churchyard signs. Discussions groups gather. Theological schools offer courses on it and preachers preach on it.

“Everyone has told me how sick you’ve been, ” I said to him. “I’m glad you’re better. It’s a good sign that you’re able to sit up.”
He shook his head. “Uh-uhm. I’m not going to get well. It’s time for me to go home now, John. I ‘m ready to go. I feel like I’ve done all I can do in this world. I thank God for letting me keep my mind right up to the end, but I don’t want to stay any longer. I ‘m getting out of life now, before I get old and lose my mind.”

A 106-year-old man is grateful that he will never be old, knowing that the mind is the core and compass of age and life itself. John Egerton is not the detached and objective journalist. He has come to love these two as he loves his own flesh and blood. He tries to redirect his friend’s thoughts. They talk of other things, tell funny stories and look at the finished book John has brought him, a book two lives spent more than a century in writing. All that time Burnam has resisted death when it threatened, clinging tenaciously to life and living, missing none of it, winning out over diseases, pestilence, tragedy and misfortune of many kinds. Now a nurse comes into the room, smiling, humoring, trying gently to win his acceptance of the pills she has brought him, pills gladly accepted in other years and times.

“No more medicine! he exclaimed. “I won’t take any more! No more pills! I’m done with pills! They’ve been a curse to me! I’m trying to die and go home! You tell that doctor not to send me any more medicine.”

His tone is neither hostile nor maudlin. But emphatic, final and convincing. He continues to talk to his friend and scribe when the nurse is gone.

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“I said to her, ‘Addie, I’m ready to go home, ready to die. Are you ready to go with me?’ She said she wasn’t. So I asked her, ‘If I go on ahead and then call you to join me, will you come?’ And she told me she would. That put my mind at ease. I feel a lot better now, just knowing that she would come if I sent for her.”

That was almost a year ago and Burnam has not yet sell for his beloved Addie. But we know that it won’t be long.

“Death and Dying.” A course offered by Burnam and Addie Ledford. I’m glad I signed up for it Genuine, unscientific reality.

Despite all that, to suggest that Generations is a book about Marriage Enrichment, Human Sexuality or Death and Dying would be to deceive you. It is not. Yet if we have ears to hear and eyes to see all those things are there.

And a lot more. Egerton started out to write a simple story of a little known American family. He has left us with a complex, detailed and compelling history of the nation. While about it he learned that the history of America is not the story of generals and admirals, famous battles in big and little wars, assassinated Presidents, Monroe Doctrines, Louisiana Purchases, invasions of Grenada. It is the stories of the Ledfords of the land.

But more than history. Sociology and Anthropology. Theology and Geography. Conflict Resolution and Inter-group Relations. Civics and Republican Politics. Philosophy and Folk Lore. None of those things show up in the table of contents or index. It is not the kind of book that needs an index. For it is a Romance.

Read it aloud to someone you love if you like to see her laugh. But don’t read it aloud to someone you love if it bothers you to see him cry. There is a lot of both in this good book.

Will D. Campbell live in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. He is the author of Brother to a Dragonfly and The Glad River.

Mother Church

Will D. Campbell

Vol. 7, No. 3, 1985, pp. 37-38

Shortly after the spring thaw of 1573 a woman prayed for her children.

O holy Father, sanctify the children of Thy handmaiden in Thy truth, and keep them from all unrighteousness, for Thy holy name’s sake. O Almighty Father, I commend them unto You, since they are Thy creatures; care for them, for they are Thy handiwork; so that they may walk in Thy paths. Amen.

She was a cousin to some of us. Her name was Maeyken Wens, an Anabaptist woman of Antwerp, who had been arrested a few days earlier for proclaiming the Gospel of Christ as she understood it from her personal reading of the Scripture, and from study and discussion of it with others of her sisters and brothers.

Cousin Maeyken withstood the inquisition of ecclesiastics and the bodily torture of those in civil authority. When she would not recant after six months of imprisonment, and would not promise to cease her spreading of the Word, she was sentenced on October 5 to death. Included in the sentence read by the court was the instruction to the executioner that her tongue should be screwed fast to the roof of her mouth so that she might not testify along the way to the place of burning.

The next day her teen-age son, Adriaen, took his youngest little brother, three year old Hans Mattheus, and stood on a bench near the stakes so that her first and last issue might be present at the moment of her death. When it began Adriaen fainted, and was not able to witness her parting. But when it was over and the ashes had cooled he sifted through them and found the screw with which her tongue had been stilled. Three other women and a man died that day for the same offense. The remembrance of them makes me exult in my heritage.

Four hundred and eleven years later, June 13, 1984, many thousands of Maeyken’s spiritual relatives gathered in convention in Kansas City and resolved that women should not be ordained as ministers.

WHEREAS, while Paul commends women and men alike in other roles of ministry and service (Titus 2:1-10) he excludes women from pastoral leadership (I Timothy 2:12) to preserve a submission God requires because the man was first in Creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall (I Timothy 2:1 395.)

The remembrance of that act brings no exultation to many of us who wear the Anabaptist alias, Baptist. I have heard of no fifteen year old sons picking up the paper clips from the discarded resolutions which recommended the silencing of their mothers. Perhaps it is just as well. For that resolution will no more stop their mothers and sisters from declaring the mighty acts of God, with or without the laying on of human hands, than the tongue screws stopped those daughters of Sarah in the sixteenth century. Or my Mississippi grandmother who in 1932, and with no apostolic sanction, stood in the finest prophetic and priestly tradition and said to an angry band of men about to beat a black child with a gin belt, “He’s fourteen years old and you ain’t gonna beat him.” And they didn’t. Again, I exult.

Many, it should be said, deny the kinship between contemporary Baptists of twentieth century America and that tough and radical little band of left-wingers called Anabaptists. But increasingly the scholars acknowledge and affirm the nexus. Among them are William Estep of the Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Fort Worth, Eric Gritsch of Lutheran Seminary in Gettysburg, the late Roland Baintain of Yale, and Donald Armentrout of St. Luke’s Episcopal Seminary.

Last week I sat in a hot and crowded courtroom in Glasgow, Kentucky and watched the continuing persecution of Maeyken Wens’s people. A young Swartzentruber Amish

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man was on trial for not having the state mandated red emblem on his buggy. To do so, he testified calmly, would be a sin. To him it would be a violation of the second commandment, and he made it clear that he had no intention of doing so. He refused the oath, refused to hold his right hand up in obeisance to a court of human law, declined to say, “Your honor,” or respond in any fashion other than the Biblical yea or nay. There was no talk of racks, drowning, or burning. But the suspicion of the state of those who dare to be different was much in evidence. Testimony showed that the buggy, with the reflective tape designed by the Amish, could be seen at night for almost six hundred feet. The issue did not appear to be safety. The issue was Caesar’s prescribed emblem. I observed this tiny vestige of where I came from with gratefulness.

One week before that courtroom scene 45,000 Baptists convened in Dallas in an atmosphere of shame and held a four day shouting match over which faction of the denomination, the conservatives or the slightly more conservative, should be entrusted with the tattered coat of Christ. The duly ordained Reverend President was flanked by armed guards. They were not country dunces riding into the city on their watermelon trucks to fight over who would get their picture on next year’s Sunday School quarterlies. Baptists are now a middle class and accepted people. The preachers of the victorious faction, largely unaware and uncaring of their antecedent, preach from Hebrew and Greek texts. The laity come from the professional elite, the major protagonist being a prominent Houston judge. (In the days of Maeyken Wens he would not have been allowed membership by virtue of being a magistrate. In 1985 he lobbies on the Phil Donahue Show to take it over.)

Though there is considerable opposition to the resolution on the ordination of women passed by 58 percent of those voting a year ago, the effort to rescind it did not make it to this year’s agenda. To preserve the spirit of alleged harmony women are still adjudged unqualified to be ministers because they discovered sin first. One might think that since they have been at it longer they would be more competent in identifying and casting it out. But logic has never carried much weight where mischief and foolishness reign.

The percentage of women clergy in my holy mother church is less than one percent. But if those who did not spring from the left wing of the reformation are looking down their sophisticated noses at backwater Baptists and are gathering boulders they might first consider some relevant mote. Among Episcopalians and United Methodists the ratio is about thirty to one. And among Roman Catholics it is . . . well, never mind.

All of us might also hear some words of Kenneth Chafin, a Baptist seminary professor known for neither toadying to special interests nor knee jerk liberalism, words of both warning and hope. They should be heard by Nashville, Rome, Canterbury, and the rest.

The best students I have at Southern Seminary are women. They’ve got better minds and better backgrounds. They are better at preparing sermons than anyone else I have in the class. And yet the most ill-prepared, uncommitted, limited man I have has a better chance for ministry in our denomination than some of the most brilliant people I teach. Until the pulpits of this land begin to deal with that, we are wasting not just half of our gifts, we are wasting probably sixty percent of our gifts.

There are today almost sixty thousand students involved in some theological degree program. Twenty-five percent of them are women. Where will they go? The number being trained is multiples beyond the number of professional jobs currently open to them.

Of personal concern to me in all this is that my firstborn daughter entered Divinity School this fall. I don’t want her bruised by institutionalized tongue screws nor silenced by resoluted bigotry.

Of concern to the steeples should be some words of St. Paul:

. . . and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent?

The writer was ordained a Baptist preacher in Mississippi forty-four years ago this month. This essay is reprinted from Christianity and Crisis.