Andrew Himes blogs

Talk on Fundamentalism at TEDxRainier.com

Andrew Himes — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:54:57 +0000

Category:

Video

On November 12, 2011 at the University of Washington in Seattle, I was one of the speakers at TEDxRainier, a daylong event at which thinkers, entrepreneurs, academics, artists, environmentalists and engaged citizens gathered to speak, listen, reflect, and design better futures. My theme in this 12-minute talk was how my fundamentalist mom, who had died a few weeks earlier on October 4th, had begun to emerge before her life's end from a relatively narrow and rigid theology toward a greater capacity to love others, including my dear lesbian friends Cambrea and Robin. I learned from my mom that the pain and suffering we sometimes endure in our lives can break us open to a greater capacity for compassion.

I concluded my talk by saying that by the end of her life, my Mom would surely have agreed with the closing words of the Charter for Compassion, introduced at TED.com by Karen Armstrong in 2008: "Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensable to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community."

My Ebook: The 99 Cent Revolution!

Andrew Himes — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 01:31:47 +0000

My book, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family, was released in May as both a paperback and an Ebook, and it's done OK for a work of history by a relatively unknown author. We've sold approximately 2,000 copies, attracted almost 90 customer reviews on Amazon (overwhelmingly positive and averaging 4.5 stars), garnered lots of great blurbs from prominent writers, academics, and leaders across the religious spectrum, and made lots of excellent connections with networks of interested readers. Still, however, the book has not yet found the audience it deserves.

So today, I am reducing the price of the ebook to just $.99 ~ WAY down from its original price of $9.99.

My reasoning: I need lots of help to spread the word and reach a much larger audience, and the marginal cost of delivering another copy of an ebook ~ via download on my web site or from other sites like Amazon or Barnes & Noble ~ is slim to nothing.

My plan: For every ten people or so who buy the ebook, I will raise the price another penny, and when another 10,000 people have bought the book the growth in sales will have some momentum and my sales price will be back at its target of $9.99. So now is the time to get your copy before the price goes up!

Emerging from Fundamentalism: Conversation with Randall Balmer

Andrew Himes — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 01:26:32 +0000

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At the American Academy of Religion meeting in San Francisco in November, Chiara Press hosted a public conversation between Randall Balmer and me titled "Emerging from Fundamentalism," during which we discussed my recent book The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family. Randall was especially equipped to discuss my book because of our similar backgrounds -- growing up within strongly conservative and religiously fundamentalist families, and then looking for ways to retain or reconnect with the faith of our childhood. Randall's spiritual memoir, Growing Pains: Learning to Love My Father’s Faith, published by Brazos Press in 2001, was named “book of the year” (spirituality) by Christianity Today.

Randall Balmer is a prominent writer, Columbia professor, and student of American evangelicalism, author of other influential books such as Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America, and God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush.

Randall and I recounted our personal stories of growing up fundamentalist, discussed the modern history of evangelical Christianity and the relationship between John R. Rice and Billy Graham, and reflected on how Christianity is evolving in the 21st century.

Listen to our conversation!

Unconditional Love

Andrew Himes — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:59:58 +0000

Category:

Video published by the Inspiration and Spirit Channel of Call on Faith.

Excerpt from Chapter 27 of The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

For me, the death of my grandmother Lloys Cooke Rice in 1989 was a profound shock propelling me to deeply consider the fundamental question. Gram, as I called her, had a perpetually joyful spirit. She greeted everyone she met with compassion and cheerful affection. Through all my years of difficult struggle with my family, she displayed nothing but acceptance and uncritical regard for me. She was a key reason I returned to Murfreesboro, Tennessee every Christmas season of my life no matter where I lived or what I was up to. Over 1,000 people showed up at Gram’s funeral, and I am convinced that every one of them sincerely believed she was the best friend they had.

When I got on the plane to fly back to Seattle after the service, I began to cry, and I cried all the way home. The stewards and my fellow passengers kept looking at me with concern and offering me tissues, and they must have been convinced I was going through a mental breakdown or profound existential crisis. When I got home I continued to cry for days, huge wracking sobs that struck me at the most embarrassing moments—while sitting in meetings, ordering coffee, or buying groceries.

When I finally calmed down and was able to reflect, I realized that my Gram was the only person in my life who had truly loved me unconditionally. She was the only one who had never condemned me, never argued with me, never judged me. She was the only person who offered me absolute and boundless love no matter how stupid, arrogant, dogmatic, or contemptuous I was, no matter how ridiculous my haircuts got or how far I strayed from other people’s ideas of proper comportment and deportment.

The harshest criticism I remember getting from Gram came at Christmas time in 1977. At the time, I was a revolutionary communist working as a welder in a steel fabrication shop in Birmingham, Alabama and doing my best to overthrow the imperialist bourgeoisie. My hair was ragged, my jeans had holes in the knees, and I made a point of not shining my shoes in the belief that shoeshine was a bourgeois affectation. My grandmother gently pulled me into a private corner and said, “Andy, I hope you’ll consider polishing your shoes. I’m fearful that someone who doesn’t know you as well as I do might see your shoes and unfairly judge that you are not the kind, intelligent, and good-hearted gentleman I know you to be.” My grandmother was no one to trifle with, and I went off and shined my shoes.

After my Gram’s funeral, I began to wonder, What would my life be like if I started trying to show other people the same unconditional love she showed me? What if I acted that way toward my family members, my daughter, my friends? What if I acted that way toward fellow employees, toward neighbors, toward total strangers?

I began a series of experiments to transform my relationships with everybody in my life. The idea of God was way too big for me to consider at the time, so I set out to embody Gram’s love in my life.

Quite frankly, I still find this an incredibly hard thing to do. I found that my feelings and behavior often don’t match up. For example, I didn’t like or love either of my parents very much after struggling with them for a quarter century. I am sure they thought I was a pretty big jerk in addition to being a world-class prodigal son. However, they were getting old themselves and soon needed a lot of help from me. Figuring out how I could treat them as if I loved them, with all the respect and affection they were due, was a hard struggle. Eventually, I began to feel that maybe I did love them after all, a little bit, and my emotions began to conform to my actions.

In its simplest and most elemental form, the energy that drove the development of fundamentalism was at the heart of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. A scribe asked Jesus the fundamental question: “What commandment is the foremost of all?” His response was: “The foremost is, ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Jesus’s words, read carefully and in context, make it clear that the test of whether I am following these two commandments is not whether I am experiencing the proper emotions, not whether I feel good about my neighbor, or like my neighbor, or even know my neighbor. The true test is whether I allow the spirit of God to transform me and to transform how I act toward my neighbor.

Join me at Black Nativity in Seattle!

Andrew Himes — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:16:50 +0000

Category:

music

Black Nativity is a Christmas musical first performed on New York's Broadway in 1961. Described by its author, Langston Hughes, as a "gospel song play," Black Nativity is a rousing and deeply moving re-telling of the birth of Jesus from the point of view of African Americans, using the musical forms, rhythms, staging, and lively tradition of black gospel music.

The musical has been performed every Christmas season since 1998 here in Seattle, and is playing at the Moore Theater through December 24. The theatrical director is Jackie Moscou, the music director is Patrinell Wright, and the choreography was designed by Donald Byrd.

A year ago in August I got an email from my wife, Alix, who told me that auditions were open for the Black Nativity choir. There were lots of reasons for me to think it was crazy for me to try out. For one thing, I happen to be a white guy. Secondly, I had not sung in public since I was 17 years when I decided I no longer shared my family's fundamentalist Christian faith. Although I loved singing, I dropped out of my church -- and my church choir -- in 1967, forty-four years ago. I had felt like a fraud when I sang those old gospel hymns even as all around me I saw so-called "good Christians" defending racial injustice and the horrific violence of the war in Vietnam. Later, when I became an activist for social justice and civil rights, I noticed that black churches and black church people shared my religious heritage, but that those churches were centers of social change and personal transformation. Black gospel songs were far more exciting and emotional -- lively, rhythmic, spiritual, danceable, clappable -- and they came directly from the heart.

Over the past few years, as I've been writing my book The Sword of the Lord I have been on a journey to re-examine, re-imagine, and recconnect with the Christian faith I remember as a child. That journey has been both intellectual and deeply emotional, and an important part of it has been connected with music, both the liturgical music you can hear at Compline services at St. Mark's Cathedral and the black gospel music you can hear from the Total Experience Gospel Choir led by Patrinell Wright. I am not especially inspired by the style in which I learned to sing the old-time white gospel music of my childhood, but I am deeply drawn to, spiritually connected with, and emotionally inspired by these other forms of music that are also very old...but new to me.

To my astonishment and delight I was invited to join Black Nativity for the 2010 season, and then got a call back for the 2011 production, which opened on December 8th. I'm now in my second year as a tenor in the choir. In addition, I sing a small and simple solo for a single verse of This Little Light of Mine as an intro to the main performace of that song by one of the other soloists -- either the amazing Madame Evelina King or the astounding Tracy White.

You might have noticed that I have a hard time avoiding superlatives like "amazing" and "astounding" in writing this post. In fact, I have a hard time believing I am lucky enough to be allowed on stage with the talented singers, dancers and musicians who are part of the show in Seattle!

Buy tickets for any performance between December 8-24, 2011. (I will be singing my solo of This Little Light of Mine for all the performances on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday between now and Christmas Eve.) See you there, I hope! Have a lovely Christmas holiday.

<;-)

Kinyarwanda: Forgiveness is Freedom

Andrew Himes — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:11:35 +0000

Kinyarwanda: Forgiveness is Freedom, a new movie from talented African American director Alrick Brown, is not a movie about genocide, though it is set in Rwandan during the 100 days in 1994 during which over 1,000,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutus in an internecine bloodbath.

Instead, Kinyawanda is a story of the healing power of forgiveness and compassion, and the miraculous capacity of faith to transform intractable conflict into peace and hope. In particular, although the Rwandan genocide was marked by the murderous actions of so-called Christians, including many in the Catholic hierarchy, Kinyarwanda tells of a friendship between a Muslim mullah and a Catholic priest who collaborated to rescue thousands of Tutsis threatened by Hutu gangs. Although it takes place in the past, the film looks forward to a future in which all Rwandans are a diverse and healthy community in a unified democracy.

I was born in 1950, immediately after World War II in which over 60 million died worldwide, and after the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died. So I grew up in a world that had recently experienced death and destruction on an historically unprecedented scale. The earth's population was traumatized by those events. In my own family, the trauma revealed itself by the way my parents were shut down emotionally: they never spoke about the horrors of the war, but rather wanted to remember the war simply as a positive, heroic, and victorious struggle for freedom and democracy.

When I was a teenager, I grew up with the backdrop of the horrors of the war in Vietnam, which was accompanied by the carpet-bombing of Vietnamese villages and jungles by American bombers and the wholesale slaughter of civilians. By the time I was in high school, I had started to develop a loathing of war and violence of all sorts. I was the product of a Christian family. My dad was a fundamentalist Baptist preacher, and my mom was a daughter of John R. Rice, famous evangelist and editor of the influential Sword of the Lord newspaper. I struggled with a fundamental contradiction. I saw Jesus as someone who had preached, taught, and practiced a philosophy of nonviolence governed by love and compassion. And yet my own Christian family seemed to support and justify great violence and bloodshed, even against innocent civilians, when that violence was commnitted in service to a greater moral purpose.

One night at the dinner table, I asked why it had been necessary to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. My dad reacted with defensiveness and anger. He explained that the A-bomb allowed the US to end the war faster with fewer American casualties.

Later, when I read Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, I asked my dad about the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and many other German cities that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German civilians. Dad explained that innocent people die in a war, and it was unfortunate yet necessary for victory.

The problem, of course, with any general account of the consequences of war, or discussion of the statistics of horror, or the data of mass murder, is that war and genocide are easily sanitized. We easily avoid or forget the personal, human dimension of any event involving massive bloodshed.

Kinarwanda reminds us of the deep spiritual wounds inflicted on individuals human beings by their experience of violent conflict, but it also offers a haunting reminder of the power of love, faith, and forgiveness to heal our woundedness. As the Kanyarwanda web site recounts:

The Mufti of Rwanda, the most respected Muslim leader in the country, issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims from participating in the killing of the Tutsi. As the country became a slaughterhouse, mosques became places of refuge where Muslims and Christians, Hutus and Tutsis came together to protect each other. Kanyarwanda is based on true accounts from survivors who took refuge at the Grand Mosque of Kigali and the madrassa of Nyanza. It recounts how the Imams opened the doors of the mosques to give refuge to the Tutsi and those Hutu who refused to participate in the killing.

The theme of Kinyarwanda is not violence, savagery, death, and despair, although all of these are portrayed in stark terms. Rather, the film's theme is our surprising human capacity to reach out to each other across the boundaries of blood and belief, kinship and catastrophe, to find hope in our common humanity. The moral center of the film is expressed by actor Cassandra Freeman, who plays Lt. Rose, a Rwanda Army officer who helped to end the genocide and then presided over a re-education camp for Hutu soldiers who had taken part in massacres of Tutsis and who were seeking a way to return to citizenship in a united and democratic Rwanda.

To her audience of murderers, Lt. Rose says:

Forgiveness is not the suppression of anger. Forgiveness is asking for a miracle, the ability to see through someone's mistakes to the truth that lies within all of our hearts. Forgiveness is not always easy. At times it is more painful than the wound we suffered. And yet it is more painful than the wound that was inflicted. Attack thoughts towards others are attack thoughts toward ourselves. The first step in forgiveness is the willingness to forgive. So why am I talking to you about forgiveness? You are the ones who committed the crime. You are the ones people have anger and hatred and bitterness towards. You are the ones who have caused great suffering and pain. I talk to you about forgiveness because you, more than anyone else, must understand what it means to forgive you. You must understand the pain and suffering you have caused so many. You must take full responsibility for what you have done, and repent.

On the basis of full disclosure and moral clarity, Kinyarwanda is saying, we can arrive at a new truth. Enabled by compassion, we can take a new path in human history. On hearing the true stories of others, we can forgive them. On disclosing our own crimes and failures, we can be forgiven. By acknowledging the painful truths of the past, we can reconcile with our enemies and repair our broken society. We can create a new future, unbound from the past.

Kinyarwanda opens December 2 in theaters in Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Washington.

In Seattle, the film is part of the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center’s African American Film Festival. Read the schedule and buy advance tickets from the SIFF Cinema Box Office at the Uptown Theater.

My Schedule

Andrew Himes — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 04:42:22 +0000

From December 8-24, I am appearing in Black Nativity as a member of the choir in the Moore Theater in Seattle. Celebrate the holiday season with the joyful gospel song play by American poet, journalist, novelist, memoir and short story writer, Langston Hughes. Enjoy the retelling of the Nativity by way of gospel music, dance, poetry and narrative.

Last month, on Saturday, November 12, I was one of the featured speakers at TedXRainier. The event took place in Kane Hall at the University of Washington in Seattle. On Sunday morning, November 13, I preached at St Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle in three services. On Saturday, November 19, at the Academy of American Religion conference in San Francisco, I was hosted by Chiara Press for a conversation titled "Emerging from Fundamentalism" with Randall Balmer, author of Growing Pains: How I Learned to Love My Father's Faith.

Evangelicals & the Fight to End Slavery

Andrew Himes — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:43:50 +0000

Category:

Excerpt from Chapter 3 of The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

In the early 1800s, a principal leader of the revival movement in east Tennessee was Samuel Doak, the Presbyterian minister who had delivered his famous “Sword of the Lord” sermon in 1780 sending the Tennessee militia off to defeat the British. As the fires of revival flared up in the 1800s, Doak converted to abolitionism, freed all his slaves, and then traveled the countryside preaching that any true Christian would condemn and work to end the institution of slavery. Doak and other early abolitionists planted a host of Presbyterian churches and “log cabin colleges” that taught a strong antislavery doctrine. They laid the basis for eastern Tennessee to become the first true locus of the abolition movement in America. The Emancipator, the first newspaper in America devoted entirely to ending slavery, was published in Jonesborough, Tennessee in 1820, in the same year Dangerfield Rice moved his family from nearby Bedford County out west to Missouri in order to take advantage of new opportunities for owning slaves.

It’s important to note here that the Protestant traditions in America—the Puritanism imported to New England by English immigrants and the Presbyterianism of the Scots-Irish who settled the South—did not lead naturally to either abolitionism or to a defense of slavery. They shared revolutionary roots in the British religious wars of the 17th century. Both embraced a radical egalitarianism that saw all human beings as equals in the sight of God, and that would inspire movements for social and economic justice and worker rights, and against such evils as slavery and discrimination, child labor, the oppression of women, and the denial of democratic rights to various groups. The same radical egalitarianism, however, could just as naturally lead to the belief that any white person, made in the image of God, should have an equal right to own any black person, who was naturally less than human. The theological conclusions one came to seemed to be a function of where one lived and what one’s economy depended upon.

The Second Great Awakening, even more than the First, focused on the emotional and spiritual experience of salvation. To be truly saved, an individual had to have an intense, direct, and personal experience of profound guilt and “conviction” of sin, and then accept the death of Jesus as atonement for the sin and a way for sinners to escape the eternal punishment of Hell. Although all the Protestant denominations grew during this time of revivalism—including Congregationalists and Presbyterians—it was the Baptist and Methodist denominations in particular, with their emphasis on personal salvation, that underwent an extraordinary explosion of growth and influence. Thousands of Baptist and Methodist missionaries and circuit riding preachers traveled the country holding revival meetings and planting churches and religious schools. Though Methodists remained a tiny sect at the end of the Revolutionary War, by the middle of the 19th century they were the largest religious group in the country, and by 1868 General U.S. Grant could refer, only half-jokingly, to the three great parties in the United States: “The Republican, the Democratic, and the Methodist Church.”

As the Protestant denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and others—were carried into the slave states of the South, into the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas, their churches, pastors, and congregants were dipped in the culture and economy of the South, and increasingly found it necessary to defend and justify the practice of human bondage. As the same denominations moved west into the border states of Tennessee and Missouri, they displayed a profound ambivalence to slavery. When Presbyterians moved to the Missouri River Valley with its wide hemp plantations dependent on slave labor, they discovered that their Presbyterianism could justify slavery. But when they moved to another part of the state, away from the rich black bottomlands of the slave economy, they found that their Presbyterianism was opposed to slavery.

The revival movement was responsible for a tremendous spread of Christianity among slaves in the South. Slaves came in their thousands to camp meetings organized mainly by Baptists and Methodists, where they listened to the same sermons, succumbed to the same transports of emotion, and pledged themselves to the same spiritual renewal as white revivalists. At times white slave owners were known to undergo conversion at a revival meeting and then decide to free their slaves.

More commonly, though, the new black Baptists or Methodists found that their fellow white Christians expected the same unequal relationship between black and white outside the church to prevail inside the church as well. As early as 1774 the first black Baptist Church was founded outside of Augusta, Georgia, and in 1787 a group of black Methodists broke away from the white Methodists to found the African Methodist Episcopal (A. M. E.) Church. The evangelicalism of the whites was dramatically different from the evangelicalism of the blacks. For many white Baptists and Methodists in the South, salvation was a matter of an individual sinner coming to a deeply felt and personal sense of guilt, and then seeking a personal salvation and personal regeneration as a Christian. Slave-owning Christians were careful to separate their faith from any implications regarding the justice or righteousness of owning slaves. By contrast, black evangelicalism was based on a theology of liberation from the beginning. Slaves took heart not only from the Old Testament story of the Israelites escaping slavery in Egypt to find freedom in the Promised Land, but also from the radically egalitarian teachings of Jesus in the New Testament. The Kingdom of Heaven, for black Baptists and Methodists, was a place where the practice of human bondage had doubtless been ended forever.

The new evangelical movement in the early 19th century was strongly focused on social justice and social equality. The famous English preacher Charles Spurgeon saw some of his sermons burned in America due to his censure of slavery before the Civil War, calling it “a soul-destroying sin,” “the foulest blot" which "may have to be washed out in blood.” Spurgeon was also deeply concerned with social justice more generally, with the poverty, misery, and oppression of the lower classes in England. He was the founder of the Stockwell Orphanage, a leading institutional effort to address the needs of children, now known as Spurgeon’s Child Care, one of the largest international Christian children’s charities.

Charles G. Finney, known as “America’s foremost revivalist,” was a major leader of the Second Great Awakening. Finney was a fiery, entertaining, and spontaneous preacher, and was widely influential among millions of Americans. In addition, however, Finney was deeply concerned with social justice. He was an abolitionist leader who frequently denounced slavery from his pulpit and denied communion to slaveholders. He was president of Oberlin, the first college in America to educate black and white men and women in the same classrooms. Through his influence over several decades in public life, Finney helped lay the basis for the Civil War to be a crusade to end slavery, and not just a clash between two different economic systems. For many, at the heart of evangelicalism was a demand for deep integration between one’s private religion and public morality.

Roller skates and revivals: my mom talks about her life

Andrew Himes — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 22:00:35 +0000

Category:

Video

My mom, Mary Lloys Rice Himes, died on October 4th, 2011. This video, produced by my friend Daniel Hawke Roberts, who is married to my niece Sarah Lamb Roberts, was perhaps the only time my mom talked for a camera, telling stories from her life. It gave me a new look at who my mom was, from a point of view outside our family relationship, and as she appeared to many of her friends--a charming and intelligent story-teller with a serious sense of humor. With this new way of looking at her, I can see more clearly the gifts I have inherited from her.

Mary Lloys Himes from Daniel Roberts on Vimeo.

On the death of my mother and the nature of love

Andrew Himes — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 01:43:14 +0000

On Tuesday afternoon, October 4, 2011, my sister Faith called from Chattanooga and said, “Mom’s gone.” I heard a rushing sound in my ears and my heart thumped and I said the most profound thing I could think of, which was, “Oh my.” Then I leaned against the wall as Faith told me the details—our 86-year-old Mom was walking down the hall when she just fell down and was gone that fast, likely it was her heart that gave out—and Faith and I cried together for a minute before she hung up to call our siblings.

I had a concrete mixer full of contradictory emotions. Deep sadness, compassion for my sister who had cared for my mom and bore the brunt of her sickness and old age, and genuine relief that Mom’s struggle was over. Most of my life I’ve had a challenging relationship with my mom, and I never knew quite what to do with her. She could be funny and charming one minute and aggressively opinionated and insensitive the next. On one memorable occasion, my fundamentalist mom decided that my vegetarian daughter was disobeying the will of God by refusing to eat meat, so she pulled out her Bible to quote verse after verse, beginning with the story of Cain and Abel, purporting to show that God loved meat eaters and expected every human to eschew vegetarianism.

Mom sometimes seemed sad or depressed, yet rarely allowed her deepest feelings to show. When first married, she had claimed she wanted an even dozen children of her own, and she went on to have five children altogether. She had many friends whom she loved and who loved her, yet she had difficulty creating warm and affectionate relationships with her own children and grandchildren. So over my whole life she’s been a mystery to me. Only within the past few years have I begun to gain some insight into what made her tick—and to see her in a more compassionate light.

My favorite photo of Mom is one I found used as an illustration in a book written and published in 1940 by my famous fundamentalist granddad, John R. Rice. The book is titled Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers, and for better or worse it is probably the most well-known of his several dozen books and pamphlets. If you only knew him through this book you might think of him as somewhat crotchety or misogynistic towards women. In reality, however, he was surrounded by women whom he adored—his wife and six daughters—and who loved and cherished him in their turn. In the book, a photo of my beautiful, smiling mom—at the age of 14—is used to illustrate the proper hair length and style for God-fearing fundamentalist females: waist-long, uncut, braided, and piled atop her head. That was still her hair length and style when she died at the age of 86.

She had a delightful and funny side. When she was younger she loved to play games and sports of all kinds—tennis, softball, skating, bowling, and volleyball. At the age of 70 she challenged me to a yoyo contest and then asked me to give her a juggling lesson.

But she also carried a deep sadness. I sometimes found her sitting by herself with an expression of unutterable sorrow or exhaustion on her face. When I asked her what she was thinking she would just say, “Oh, nothing.” Behind her silence, however, lay some painful secrets from her past that helped to explain her present sadness. To hear her stories of distress, I had to encourage her to speak and then listen deeply.

I was born in Wheaton, Illinois, but when I was six months old our family moved to Kansas. There, my dad was the pastor of a string of poor, small-town Baptist churches. My dad’s salary was way less than needed to support his family of six, and the church-folk on occasional Sunday evenings supplemented our income by contributing a box of canned goods for the pastor’s family. At one point we had no money to pay the water bill. My mom was so ashamed of our poverty that she waited until dark, crept next door, and filled a bucket with water from the spigot on the side of our neighbors’ house.

Two years ago at Christmas we were reminiscing about the hardships of those Kansas days when my mom suddenly told a story she had never shared before. Less than 18 months after we moved to Kansas, Mom gave birth to my little brother John. She was still in her 20s but already had four children, the oldest of whom was under the age of six. “Then I was pregnant again with my fifth baby,” said my mom. “I was sick a great deal for the first four months, but I so wanted to have that baby. And then one night I lost it. The baby was stillborn. We had no money to pay for a doctor to come or for me to go to a hospital, and no money for a grave. So I wrapped that little body in a blanket and gave it to your father.”

My dad, she told me with tears coursing down her face, took the baby out into the backyard and buried it in a makeshift grave next to our ramshackle garage.

Our family soon moved back to Wheaton, Illinois, and through the next several years as I attended grade school my mom was often sick and confined to her bed. Years later I learned that she had three more miscarriages, spent months in bed trying to save her pregnancies, and then lost baby after baby. The next several decades were full of hard work for others and little time for herself. In later life when my dad had Alzheimer’s she almost killed herself being his full-time caretaker.

The year after Dad’s death in 2002, my mom came to visit me in Seattle. The day she arrived I took her to a fundraising party for a nonprofit organization I volunteered for. At the party I introduced her to my friends Cambrea and Robin, a lesbian couple who had been in a committed relationship for over a decade. Robin had been trying to have a baby for years, and four months previously she had finally gotten pregnant. But earlier on the day she met my mom, Robin had a miscarriage. Robin and Cambrea were both devastated. The three women—Cambrea, Robin, and my mom—sat on the couch talking softly, holding hands and crying together.

I realize now that during that evening on the couch my mom wasn’t trying to save, judge, convince, condemn, or convert anyone. Instead, she was just a woman who understood suffering, who loved Robin and Cambrea and shared their loss and sorrow. And ever since, both Cambrea and Robin have felt a powerful bond with my mom.

That’s the image of Mom that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. She was a woman who bore up through terrible pain, who was damaged by that pain and lived through it. Her heart was broken by her losses. But her broken heart opened to learn a deep compassion and love for others.

At the end of her life, I know she was comforted by that love, and by the faith that carried her through the misfortunes of her life and gave her hope and joy in her darkest hours. I am convinced that along with the three heartbroken women sitting on that couch years ago, there was a fourth, unseen presence—Jesus, who had promised my mom, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

My mom would have expressed it in the words of her favorite gospel song:

Why should I feel discouraged, why should the shadows come?
Why should my heart be lonely, and long for heaven and home?
When Jesus is my portion, a constant friend is he.
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.

Read my related essay: On the Death of My Father and the Nature of Love.

Mary Lloys Himes from Daniel Roberts on Vimeo.