Authors: Garrison Keillor
Harvey cleared his throat and turned to me with a weak smile. “Speaking of school, how are you doing?” he asked.
There was a lovely silence in the Brethren assembled on Sunday morning as we waited for the Spirit. Either the Spirit was moving someone to speak who was taking his sweet time or else the Spirit was playing a wonderful joke on us and letting us sit, or perhaps silence was the point of it. We sat listening to rain on the roof, distant traffic, a radio playing from across the street, kids whizzing by on bikes, dogs barking, as we waited for the Spirit to inspire us. It was like sitting on the porch with your family, when nobody feels that they have to make
talk. So quiet in church. Minutes drifted by in silence that was sweet to us. The old Regulator clock ticked, the rain stopped and the room changed light as the sun broke through—shafts of brilliant sun through the windows and motes of dust falling through it—the smell of clean clothes and floor wax and wine and the fresh bread of Aunt Flo which was Christ’s body given for us. Jesus in our midst, who loved us. So peaceful, and we loved each other too. I thought perhaps the Spirit was leading me to say that, but I was just a boy, and children were supposed to keep still. And my affections were not pure. They were tainted with a sneaking admiration of Catholics—Catholic Christmas, Easter, the Living Rosary, and the Blessing of the Animals, all magnificent. Everything we did was plain, but they were regal and gorgeous—especially the Feast Day of St. Francis, which they did right out in the open, a feast for the eyes. Cows, horses, some pigs, right on the church lawn. The turmoil, animals bellowing and barking and clucking and cats scheming how to escape and suddenly leaping out of the girl’s arms who was holding on tight, the cat dashing through the crowd, dogs straining at the leash, and the ocarina band of third-graders playing Catholic dirges, and the great calm of the sisters, and the flags, and the Knights of Columbus decked out in their handsome black suits—I stared at it until my eyes almost fell out, and then I wished it would go on much longer.
“Christians,” my uncle Al used to say, “do not go in for show,” referring to the Catholics. We were sanctified by the blood of the Lord, therefore we were saints, like St. Francis, but we didn’t go in for feasts or ceremonies, involving animals or not. We went in for sitting, all nineteen of us, in Uncle Al’s and Aunt Flo’s living room on Sunday morning and having a plain meeting and singing hymns in our poor thin voices while not far away the Catholics were whooping it up. I wasn’t allowed inside Our Lady, of course, but if the Blessing of the Animals on the Feast Day of St. Francis was any indication, Lord, I didn’t know but what they had elephants in there and acrobats. I sat in our little group and envied them for the splendor and gorgeousness, as we tried to sing without even a harmonica to give us the pitch. Hymns, Uncle Al said, didn’t have to be sung perfect, because God looks on the heart, and if you are In The Spirit, then all praise is good.
The Brethren, also known as the Saints Gathered in the Name of
Christ Jesus, who met in the living room were all related to each other and raised in the Faith from infancy except Brother Mel who was rescued from a life of drunkenness, saved as a brand from the burning, a drowning sailor, a sheep on the hillside, whose immense red nose testified to his previous condition. I envied his amazing story of how he came to be with us. Born to godly parents, Mel left home at fifteen and joined the Navy. He sailed to distant lands in a submarine and had exciting experiences while traveling the downward path, which led him finally to the Union Gospel Mission in Minneapolis where he heard God’s voice “as clear as my voice speaking to you.” He was twenty-six, he slept under bridges and in abandoned buildings, he drank two quarts of white muscatel every day, and then God told him that he must be born again, and so he was, and became the new Mel, except for his nose.
Except for his nose, Mel Burgess looked like any forty-year-old Brethren man: sober, preferring dark suits, soft-spoken, tending toward girth. His nose was what made you look twice: battered, swollen, very red with tiny purplish lines, it looked ancient and very dead on his otherwise fairly handsome face, the souvenir of what he had been saved from, the “Before” of his “Before … and After” advertisement for being born again.
For me, there was nothing before. I was born among the born-again. This living room so hushed, the Brethren in their customary places on folding chairs (the comfortable ones were put away on Sunday morning) around the end-table draped with a white cloth and the glass of wine and loaf of bread (unsliced) was as familiar to me as my mother and father, the founders of my life. I had always been here.
Our family sat in one row against the picture window. Al and Florence and their three, Janet and Paul and Johnny, sat opposite us, I saw the sky and the maple tree reflected in my uncle’s glasses. To our left, Great-Aunt Mary sat next to Aunt Becky and Uncle Louie, and to our right were Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Faith, and behind them was Mel, sitting on the piano bench. His wife, Rita, was a Lutheran. She only came occasionally and when she did, she stood out like a brass band. She used lipstick and had plucked eyebrows and wore bright hats. Brethren women showed only a faint smudge of powder on their cheeks and their hats were small and either black or
navy blue. Once Rita spoke up in the meeting—Al had stood up to read from the Lord’s Word, and she said, “Pardon me, which chapter did you say?”—and we all shuddered as if she had dropped a plate on the floor:
women did not speak in meeting.
Another time, Sunday morning, she made as if to partake of the bread as it was passed, and Grandpa snatched it away from her. It had to be explained to Rita later that she could not join in the Lord’s Supper with us because she was not in fellowship.
We were “exclusive” Brethren, a branch that believed in keeping itself pure of false doctrine by avoiding association with the impure. Some Brethren assemblies, mostly in larger cities, were not so strict and broke bread with strangers—we referred to them as “the so-called Open Brethren,” the “so-called” implying the shakiness of their position—whereas we made sure that any who fellowshiped with us were straight on all the details of the Faith, as set forth by the first Brethren who left the Anglican Church in 1865 to worship on the basis of correct principles. In the same year, they posed for a photograph: twenty-one bearded gentlemen in black frock coats, twelve sitting on a stone wall, nine standing behind, gazing solemnly into a sunny day in Plymouth, England, united in their opposition to the pomp and corruption of the Christian aristocracy.
Unfortunately, once free of the worldly Anglicans, these firebrands were not content to worship in peace but turned their guns on each other. Scholarly to the core and perfect literalists every one, they set to arguing over points that, to any outsider, would have seemed very minor indeed but which to them were crucial to the Faith, including the question: if Believer
A
is associated with Believer
B
who has somehow associated himself with
C
who holds a False Doctrine, must
D
break off association with
A
, even though
A
does not hold the Doctrine, to avoid the taint?
The correct answer is: Yes. Some Brethren, however, felt that
D
should only speak with
A
and urge him to break off with
B
. The Brethren who felt otherwise promptly broke off with them. This was the Bedford Question, one of several controversies that, inside of two years, split the Brethren into three branches.
Once having tasted the pleasure of being Correct and defending True Doctrine, they kept right on and broke up at every opportunity,
until, by the time I came along, there were dozens of tiny Brethren groups, none of which were speaking to any of the others.
Our Lake Wobegon bunch was part of a Sanctified Brethren branch known as the Cox Brethren, which was one of a number of “exclusive” Brethren branches—that is, to
non
-Coxians, we were known as “Cox Brethren”; to ourselves, we were simply
The
Brethren, the last remnant of the true Church. Our name came from Brother Cox in South Dakota who was kicked out of the Johnson Brethren in 1932—for preaching the truth! So naturally my Grandpa and most of our family went with Mr. Cox and formed the new fellowship.
The split with the Johnsons was triggered by Mr. Johnson’s belief that what was abominable to God in the Old Testament must be abominable still, which he put forward at the Grace & Truth Bible Conference in Rapid City in 1932. Mr. Cox stood up and walked out, followed by others. The abomination doctrine not only went against the New Covenant of Grace principle, it opened up rich new areas of controversy in the vast annals of Jewish law. Should Brethren then refrain from pork, meat that God had labeled “Unclean”? Were we to be thrown into the maze of commandments laid out in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, where we are told to smite our enemies with the sword and stone to death rebellious children?
Mr. Johnson’s sermon was against women’s slacks, and he had quoted Deuteronomy 22:5, “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God,” but Mr. Cox, though he was hardly pro-slacks, felt Mr. Johnson failed to emphasize grace as having superseded the law, and when Mr. Johnson said, “An abomination to God under the law is still an abomination to God under grace,” Mr. Cox smelled the burning rubber of Error and stood up and marched. He and the other walkouts proceeded to a grove of trees and prayed for Mr. Johnson’s soul, and Mr. Johnson and those seated inside did the same for them. The split was never repaired, though as a result of being thought in favor of slacks, the Cox Brethren became death on the subject. My mother never wore slacks, though she did dress my sister in winter leggings, which troubled Grandpa. “It’s not the leggings so much as what they represent and what they could lead to,” he told her. He thought that baby boys should not wear
sleepers unless they were the kind with snaps up the legs. Mother pointed out that the infant Jesus was wrapped in swaddling clothes. “That doesn’t mean he wore a dress,” Grandpa said. “They probably wrapped his legs separately.”
*
Intense scholarship was the heart of the problem. We had no ordained clergy, believing in the priesthood of all believers, and all were exhorted to devote themselves to Bible study. Some did, Brother Louie and Brother Mel in particular. In Wednesday-night Bible reading, they carried the ball, and some nights you could see that the Coxes of Lake Wobegon might soon divide into the Louies and Mels.
One summer night, they set to over the issue of speaking in tongues, Louie arguing that this manifestation of the Spirit was to be sought earnestly, Mel holding that it was a miraculous gift given to the early church but not given by God today. I forget the Scripture verses each of them brought forward to defend his position, but I remember the pale faces, the throat-clearing, the anguished looks, as those two voices went back and forth, straining at the bit, giving no ground—the poisoned courtesy (“I think my brother is overlooking Paul’s very
clear
message to the Corinthians …,” “Perhaps my brother needs to take a closer look, a
prayerful
look, at this verse in Hebrews ….”) as the sun went down, neighbor children were called indoors, the neighbors turned out their lights, eleven o’clock came—they wouldn’t stop!
“Perhaps,” Grandpa offered, “it would be meet for us to pray for
the Spirit to lead us,” hoping to adjourn, but both Louie and Mel felt that the Spirit
had
led, that the Spirit had written the truth in big black letters—if only some people could see it.
The thought of Uncle Louie speaking in tongues was fascinating to me. Uncle Louie worked at the bank, he spoke to me mostly about thrift and hard work. What tongue would he speak? Spanish? French? Or would it sound like gibberish? Louie said that speaking in tongues was the true sign, that those who believed
heard
and to those who didn’t it was only gabble—what if he stood up and said, “Feemalator, jasperator, hoo ha ha, Wamalamagamanama, zis boom bah!” and everyone else said “Amen! That’s right, brother! Praise God!” and
I was the only one who said, “Huh?”
Bible reading finally ended when Flo went up to bed. We heard her crying in the bathroom. Al went up to comfort her. Grandpa took Louie aside in the kitchen. Mel went straight home. We all felt shaky.
It was soon after the tongues controversy that the Lake Wobegon Brethren folded their tent and merged into another Cox Assembly in St. Cloud, thirty-two miles away. Twenty-eight Brethren worshiped there, in a large bare rented room on the second floor of the bus depot. We had often gone there for special meetings, revivals, and now we made the long drive every Sunday and every Wednesday night. Grandpa fought for this. “It is right for brethren to join together,” he said. Louie agreed. Mel didn’t. He felt God had put us in Lake Wobegon to be a witness. But finally he gave in. “Think of the children,” Grandpa said. One fear of Grandpa’s was that we children would grow up and marry outside the Faith if only because we knew nobody in the Faith except for relatives. Faced with the lonely alternative, we’d marry a Lutheran, and then, dazzled by the splendid music and vestments and stained glass, we’d forsake the truth for that carnival down the street. Grandpa knew us pretty well. He could see us perk up on Sunday morning when the Lutheran organ pealed out at ten-thirty. The contrast between the church of Aunt Flo’s living room and the power and glory of Lutheranism was not lost on him. Among other Brethren boys and girls, nature would take its course, and in due time, we’d find someone and make a Brethren family. Grandpa was looking to the future.
The shift to St. Cloud changed things, all right, and not all for the better.
My mother hated the move from the start. She had no Scripture to quote, only a feeling that we had taken a step away from the family, from ourselves. We had walked to Flo’s house, we had sat in Sunday school class in her kitchen and celebrated the Lord’s death in the living room. The bread we broke was bread Flo baked, and she also made the wine, in a pickle crock in the basement. Flo’s two cats, Ralph and Pumpkin, walked in and out of the service, and along toward the end, having confessed our unworthiness and accepted our redemption by Christ, the smell of Flo’s pot roast, baking at low heat, arose to greet us. Before it was Flo’s and Al’s, the house had been Grandpa’s and Grandma’s—Mother had known this room since she was tiny, and though she bowed to Grandpa’s wishes, she felt in her heart that she was leaving home. Sunday in St. Cloud meant a long drive, and Mother was a nervous rider who saw death at every turn. She arrived at the St. Cloud assembly in a frazzled state. The second-floor room was huge and bare and held no associations for her. The long silences were often broken by the roar of bus engines and rumble of bus announcements downstairs. Waiting for the Spirit to guide us to a hymn, a prayer, a passage from Scripture, we heard, “
Now boarding at Gate One … Greyhound Bus service to Waite Park … St. Joseph … Collegeville … Avon … Albany … Freeport … Melrose … and Sauk Center. All aboard, please!
”