Metaphysical Fundamentology

I have always known that I was raised in a fundamental church. Basic Baptist, way down south - hot sweaty Sunday nights in a Mississippi church in the late 1930s with old women crying and fanning their tears with funeral parlor fans and acknowledging themselves to be miserable sinners and “wretches”. Long altar calls, with a tired choir singing “just one more verse” and tearful grandmothers boldly walking up to you, squeezing your arm tightly, and asking again: “Are you SURE you’re saved, young man?”

After high school, I began drifting away from that Muggy Fundamental Ocean, and in my 25th year I sailed full steam into the Episcopal seas of Refinement and Contentment, and spent another 25 years riding those carefree and eloquent religion-cruise ships. But I slowly began to see the church less and less as a sanctuary, and more and more as some kind of a beautiful cage. Part of me recognized that feeling, but I repressed both it and its significance, and concentrated on the fine beauty of those glorious anthems and the solemn pulse of its ancient rituals.

However, one spring morning, while sitting up front, where lay readers sit after they have read, and while looking out over a sleepy and bored congregation which was pretending to listen to a new, young priest explain Paul’s message in II Corinthians (the “ ... wives, submit to your husbands” part), and while he was pointing out how that part of Paul’s message was generally misunderstood, because Paul was really, in fact, one of the very first “womens’ libbers”, I was paid a visit by Casual Question who walked up to me and asked “What are you doing here?” I was astonished that I not only had no ready answer, but could not even fashion one; in fact, my silent search for a rebuttal amazingly began turning into a soliloquy in which I found myself explaining to myself why I was going to leave the Episcopal Church. To my credit, I did not get up and leave at that instant, but when I did leave the church later that morning, it was for good.

Now, looking back from even further away, I can realize that my religious beginnings way back in that hot, sweaty Baptist church were really very metaphysical, even mystical, and for that matter absolutely occult! A lot was expected of a young man on those faraway southern nights, and little was graphically explained. “Are your garments spotless, young man? Ah, but are they white as snow? And how about you? Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?” Well, how metaphysical, mystical, or occult can you get? It was a puzzle. I remember wondering if one’s “garments” should be white or should they be red? I knew that blood was red, and also knew that it stained, and for a year or two I was shamed to realize that my “garments” probably were “white as snow” because I had clearly not washed them yet in any kind of blood. In fact, they probably weren't even spotted!

I finally asked someone in the church about this and thought I was going to be burned at the Baptist stake; at least I finally knew that white was good. But the mystery deepened: how could dirty garments be made white by washing them in blood? And then, there was the preacher: a man of enormous girth, jowls, and eyebrows; swept by wild winds of passion, given to slamming his bible onto the pulpit, and rising on his tiptoes, to shake clenched fists, and shout at the ceiling - it was hard to imagine him wearing garments white as snow; even when he smiled, he seemed wrapped in blood-bright crimson cloth. Well, I never asked another question in church again, even to this day.

“Rock of ages, cleft for me; let me hide myself in thee ...” That old song carried mystic worlds of meaning to a generation that was still only seventy years from the War between the States, and which was still sunken in the great depression and also quickly falling into a war whose outcome seemed likely to have already been secured by the Germans and Japanese. We didn’t sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, (that was for Yankee Heaven), and we didn’t sing “When the Saints Go Marching In “ (Negro Heaven), but we could march in place to “Onward Christian Solders”, “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name”, and “Holy, Holy, Holy!” And there was not a lot of mysticism in some of those songs. Others though, like: “ ... Crown him, ye martyrs of our God, Who from his altar call: Extol the Stem-of-Jesse’s rod, And crown him Lord of all!” Well, who knew what all that meant? I finally figured it out about 50 years later, but by then it really didn’t make any sense, because by then I also knew that Doctrine had inserted the Gabriel/Joseph hiatus in the Jesse/Ruth link with Jesus, so it never had been real to begin with, and what about Mary? From whom had she descended? Well, the Jesse link was mainly to show the Jewish connection, and I’ve seen Mary’s picture, hanging in a French gallery, and she was clearly a blue-eyed blond, probably from somewhere in Holland.

And what is the “saved” bit? In order to be “saved”, one must “believe ON the Lord Jesus Christ.” Well, I believed IN Jesus - did that count? Of course, by now I was afraid to ask, but it did sound awfully easy and simple. If you were not saved, then, when you died, your soul went to hell for all eternity. If you were saved, then your soul would go to heaven for all eternity. I can remember wanting to go to heaven, but not right away, because it sounded awfully boring. I began to envy those preachers who talked about the life of sin they had led before they were saved, and it seemed to me that if I had to be saved right now, I would miss out on a lot; such as why I would want to be saved in the first place. I was told that when I got to heaven I would have a harp and walk on streets of gold, and that if we all were saved, then we would all be reunited as a family after death. There would be my mother and father, and their mothers and fathers would also be there, and we would all live together. There would also be their mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers too, and so on. And then there would be my kids, if I ever had any, and in time, their children and their children’s children; and we would all live together in heaven as one great big family, walking on streets of gold with everybody else’s families and forever playing all those harps.

So heaven was not a major objective in my young life. It was better than hell, but still not much of a prize for an 8 year old. Besides, my mother had let the mystical cat out of the bag when she had convinced me that God loved me and would always take care of me. That made it hard to believe in hell, and even heaven didn’t look quite so bad.

©John Womack, 2006, All Rights Reserved

Earthright

It is indeed self-evident that all humans are created free and equal: free, because our souls are a gift from heaven; equal, because we are created equally out of the Earth; we wear it’s fabric on our faces, carry its breath within our lungs, its minerals are in our bones and its sea pulses within our veins. We have truly been endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights – and all that follows from that belief does appear to be soundly based.

But It also seems self-evident that there is a prior claim which takes precedent to that free-and-equal clause. That claim is the right of the Earth to sustain and renew itself, for if that sustain-and-renew right is ever denied or lost, then all other rights, privileges, grants, precedents, and pleas will sweep across empty spaces devoid not only of reason, but also beyond all recourse.

We now know that seen from a distance in space, the Earth does appear to be a spaceship. Where is it bound? What is its course and destination? When will it arrive, and where? How much is it worth? It carries a cargo of gold, and has silver trim, and zinc and copper and many things of value. But it also has precious things: owls and rivers, mountains and deserts, forests and frogs. We know that gold and silver and zinc and copper are scattered throughout the universe, but where else can you find an owl or a frog?

How can anyone think that the Earth belongs to them? How can they imagine that it is theirs to torment? Did a merciful God give us this great gift to destroy? That we may “own” it and sell it, and whip it and scour it and poison it and kill all that is on it and make it do our bidding and whim, that it should work for us until it fails? That we should shred it and rip it a part and squeeze its great wealth, converting that to money for us to put in out pockets or bank accounts and discard the rest?

Or could we pay it the least compliment possible and declare it to be a “person,” and thus protected by our constitution, be considered equal to commercial corporations and entitled to enjoy life, liberty and to pursue it’s own happiness?

Or shall we wait until the last owl is in a zoo, and the last wild river in an amusement park? And where will we keep the last human being?

Are we that dreadful creature?

© John Womack, 2006. All Rights Reserved.

GreatDaddy

Dad died in the waning crescent of the harvest moon during the year of his wife’s Lord, nineteen hundred and ninety two, and in the first week of his own ninetieth year. It was just before the election, but he had already voted - Absentee now, in the most emphatic meaning of that word. Fitting though, that he was still fixing and trying to make work, those things which to his mind, weren't working right.

He could fix anything. Even in his later years, when his physical abilities had somewhat diminished, he would apologize at not being able to help, then get that faraway look in his eyes and slowly, as if he were reading something, and with his crooked finger tracing steps in the air, he would tell you how to do what you needed to do. It was as if he could still see and do it in some kind of a close-up spiritual world.

He was a man of many names: Dad, Daddy, Grandfather, Granddad, Grandpa, the Big Cheese (from his grandson) the Leader of the Clan, Granpops, Sweetheart (from his wife), and of course, (to everyone else) Mister Womack; and then finally, Greatdaddy (from his great-granddaughter, Jessica).

He was a farm boy who left home. The farm was hard, and he always remembered that. He found everything was hard, but then he had to build everything he ever got, and he had to build most of it from scratch. There was never a desire to go back, everything else was better than the farm. The depression and the war, he took in stride; the farm had prepared him well for hard times. The later prosperity of the fifties, sixties and seventies were different; he wasn’t as well prepared for those as were softer men. They often did “better” than he; they were more malleable. But yet, he did very well in the stock market.

His few friends were real friends, and their friendship ran deeply; they understood each other, quietly, respectfully. He wasn’t much for small talk; he could do a little small talk if there was no work to be done, but then he would always go find something that needed fixing.

The lessons from the farm were strong. If you don’t work, you don’t eat. Money doesn’t grow on trees. The world doesn’t owe you a living. Hard work never hurt anybody. Daylight was always burning, the night was always coming.

He was tough, he was fast, and every job he ever started, he finished. And when he was through with it, you could tell he had done it. He left his signature on many things, mostly things that needed fixing. The Samurai and the Storm Troopers thought they were masters of the world, but then they had never met men who knew how to fix things that had gone wrong and could not only defeat their armies but would rebuild their countries.

When he was born, power came from horses and steam locomotives. He mastered those things when he was a young man, and then he made a living working on the railroad, showing the crews and men of the Roundhouse and the Train Yards how to make those overworked steam locomotives fit those tight wartime schedules. But when he was in his late prime, the only steam locomotives left were in museums; and horses were only found in zoos and rodeos. He probably didn’t see a horse during the last thirteen years of his life, and he was thirteen when he saw his first car. He could clearly remember when airplanes were rarer than spaceships were when he died.

He would rarely watch television because he was a child of the “radio set” era. He even remembered well those days before the radio set came along, back when people did all the talking and entertaining. Back then, everybody was expected to know some stories. Usually these were tales about things that had happened many years before, and everyone present not only knew about the event, but they also knew the story. Yet they looked forward to hearing it told again, and really expected to find that the telling of it had improved over the past year or two since they had last heard it. It was not completely unlike finding out that Aunt Lucille was going to fix her famous beef stew again, and you would prepare to savor the smells that you knew would come from the kitchen; so too, a good story was a savory tale that you needed to hear again: “Hey, tell about the time Uncle Fred fell off the . . .”. In this area Dad was sort of a hybrid, reflecting both the pre- and post-radio eras. He would tell long stories, and when he began telling them everybody was supposed to remain seated, be quiet, and listen attentively, and then he would scoot forward in his chair and sit hunched over with his crooked finger tracing steps in the air, while he looked at the floor in the manner of one who was listening to a radio set. So, in his later years, he was the teller of the stories and also the listener to the stories.

It’s hard to tell a long story to the sound-byte generation, but that didn’t deter him. The grandchildren would sit around the room and pretend to listen, looking like so many TV’ s themselves; quiet, impassive, blinking on and off. Staring at this man who was hunched over, looking at the floor and talking softly about living a different life in a different place.

©John Womack, 2006, All Rights Reserved