What Were They Thinking?
Part VI: Saul Gordon’s Story
“Grandma, Grandma, Grandma. Grandpa, Grandpa!” We’d heard the back door slam and footsteps rush into the family room. Brian Junior flew from one to another as he greeted Marilyn, Anna, and Evelyn, then Sly and me. “Hi, everybody!”
“My, you’ve grown so much!” I said.
“Grandpa, I haven’t grown any since Christmas,” he laughed. “I think this is it. I’m never going to be a basketball star like Dad.” At that, Brian Senior walked into the room with Hannah under one arm and Samantha under the other. Samantha immediately went to her father and gave him a hug and kiss on the cheek. Hannah seemed reluctant to let go of Brian but managed to quickly hug and kiss Evelyn and me. Both girls kissed Anna and Marilyn on the cheek and whispered soft greetings to the others in the room.
“It was stressful getting back,” Samantha explained. “Tyax is a beautiful place, but it took four trips in the float plane yesterday to get our crew and equipment off the mountain. We had to wait for the morning skim of ice to melt off the lake. Then there were hassles at the border when we drove down to Seattle. If it wasn’t for Betts giving us a place to stay last night, I think Hannah would have just kept driving all the way home instead of waiting for the plane this morning.”
“But it was great!” Junior broke in. “I’ve got to go tell Larry and Theresa about the riding up there. It’s way different than here. Some of the trails are so narrow and steep that you have to just close your eyes and hope the horse can pick his own way.”
“You didn’t!” Hannah exclaimed. Before she could get to Junior, Dani came into the room and wrapped her in a hug. I could see my daughter sigh and visibly relax in the embrace. Danielle and little Xan are still a calming influence on everyone they touch, even though Xan is often traveling these days.
“Hey, kiddo,” Brian said to his son, “Since you want to tell about the trip, why don’t you go ahead and find Carl. Larry won’t be back from the trail ride he’s on for a couple of hours. Carl is setting up the grills and could use the help. And there’s a horse in the pasture that’s been missing his rider for a month.”
“Yeah. I’ve gotta go see Frosty. See you guys all later!” he said. As quickly as he’d come into the room, he was gone. What an energetic young man!
Hannah was glued to Brian again, whispering in his ear. He nodded and they slipped out of the room. Hannah never let go of Dani’s hand and she followed them.
“Um… I should go… um… help,” Samantha said. “We’ll get a chance to talk at the fire this afternoon. It’s just been… a really stressful month. But the film’s in the can. We’ll get a few days off before we have to go into the studio and start viewing rushes. I made her promise.” Samantha left and hurried to join her cónyuge.
“She still suffers from it, doesn’t she?” Anna asked, turning to me. “She’s so competent and aggressive when it comes to directing a film that we forget the depression and anxiety are just below the surface.”
“It all came from living in the fishbowl,” I sighed. “And having a father who was a goldfish when she needed a shark.”
37 Living in a Fishbowl
THE STANDARD ROUTINE back in that time was to assign a minister to a church and, unless there were some kind of extenuating circumstances, to leave him there for four years. It’s part of the connectional system. We had nine District Superintendents and a Bishop. That was the cabinet. My DS was responsible for reviewing ministerial performance and recommending appointment. The bishop usually rubber stamped the appointments the cabinet recommended.
The connectional system ran all the way up through the levels of the church. The DS was just another ordained minister serving an appointment to the cabinet. Seldom if ever more than six years. The bishop was not ordained but was consecrated and appointed to serve a conference or area by the Council of Bishops. Unless something untoward happened, a bishop could expect to serve about twelve years in his first appointment and the rest of his life in the second.
I’d been ordained for eighteen years and served six different churches when I was offered the leadership of First Church in Indianapolis. I went to my DS and asked to be excused from an appointment of that type. What I loved was my work with youth and as senior pastor of First, I’d have an assistant pastor and youth director who kept the youth separate from the adults in the church. They even had a retired minister serving a part time appointment as a visitation pastor for the sick and shut-ins. The cabinet did a heavy sales job on the appointment as a place where I could make an impact by revitalizing a city church in a changing environment.
What I saw was a place where my daughters would be lost in an environment that would constantly judge the effectiveness of the minister by the behavior of his children. That’s what living in the fishbowl was like. In our first church after Evelyn and I were married back in ’65, members of the church and board of trustees thought nothing about just walking into the parsonage unannounced to make a repair or check on maintenance! They were shocked to find us making love in the middle of the day! Well, I was only twenty-five and Evelyn was twenty. I don’t know what they expected young newlyweds to be doing in the middle of the day.
I begged… literally begged the cabinet to give me an appointment where I could stay until the girls had graduated from high school. For Sarah, that would be four years. For Hannah, six. Eventually, we settled on the little church near Mishawaka. The cabinet considered it a demotion as the membership was much smaller than the church I’d been serving in Fort Wayne. Yes, even among the clergy there was an acceptable route of promotions to ever bigger churches and higher salaries. Coming to Mishawaka meant a cut in pay as well as a smaller church. But it was a cut I was willing to take in exchange for being left there for six years. The bishop agreed and I was appointed.
And God saw all He had wrought, and behold, it was very good.
Sarah made an instant friend in Jessica Barnes. Two girls so different that I couldn’t imagine what drew them together. Jessica had already begun modeling teen fashions and had appeared in several advertisements. She was gregarious and other students admired and respected her. Sarah was just relieved that she might be able to make friends that would last throughout high school.
Hannah was even shyer than Sarah. The first year at St. Joe Valley Junior High she had made no friends. Then Jessica came to the rescue again. I wasn’t sure I believed or agreed with what she was saying when I overheard their conversation.
“You need friends, Hannah,” Jessica said. “Not just Sarah and me. We don’t have the same classes and aren’t in the same grade. You need people to eat lunch with and to go to ballgames with.”
“Nobody wants to be my friend,” Hannah moaned. She’d just turned thirteen and still acted ten.
“That’s not true. There are friends waiting for you out there that you’ve been hiding from. I can even point them out to you,” Jessica declared.
“You can’t. There isn’t anyone.”
“You follow my instructions and if you don’t have a dozen friends by the end of the day, I’ll buy you a pony!”
“Jessica!” Sarah laughed. “Where will Hannah keep a pony?”
“I know where there’s a barn,” she laughed.
“Hannah-bear, Jessica’s right. If people don’t know you want to be their friend, how are you ever going to have friends?”
“I’ll just lose them when we leave.”
“Daddy says we’re going to be here till graduation. You won’t lose your friends.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“I’ll tell you. It’s going to take all your courage, but I promise that if you do one thing, you will have friends at the end of the day who will never let you down,” Jessica said.
“What do I do?”
The instructions were simple but would require every ounce of courage my daughter could muster. I wondered if Jessica really had the power to convince a group of kids to adopt my daughter. I prayed every day that Hannah would find the courage to make the attempt.
“Just walk up to the table where they are sitting, look straight at Brian, and say ‘Hi. Can I join you?’ That’s all you have to do.”
“But what if he says no?”
“How many friends do you have now?” Jessica asked.
“None.”
“If he said no, how many friends would you have?”
“None.”
“Net zero. No risk. Things can’t get any worse than they are now. I know you have courage. I watched you ride your bicycle down the hill behind the church and right through the trees and into the creek. Walking up and saying five little words can’t take that much courage. And you know the kids at that table, even if you haven’t talked to them. Have you ever seen one of them say an unkind thing to anyone?”
“Then what?”
“After you talk them for a while, suggest they all come to the game Friday night. You like sports. Show them what you like.”
“I’ll try.”
It was the first time that I saw the kind of courage my daughter really had. She followed Jessica’s instructions on Friday and came home bouncing off the walls.
“I have friends! I have friends!”
“Are they going to the game tonight?”
“Um… yeah. I think. At least one. Uh… what if they… he doesn’t show up? Can I sit with you and Jessica?”
“If they said they’d be there they will be. He,” she whispered. “He’ll call if he can’t get there. Maybe we can pick him up when we pick up Jessica.”
I met the boy in question for the first time that night when I picked the kids up after the game. It was a bit raucous in the car as they were still fired up over winning the game. Brian sat in the back seat between Hannah and Jessica with Sarah in front. There was a lively game of rock, paper, scissors. He got out at the same time Jessica did and went across the drive to the next house. So that was how Jessica knew they’d be friends. Her next-door neighbor.
Hannah bounced all over the back seat on the short drive home.
“I have a boyfriend! I have a boyfriend!”
“How did that happen?” I asked.
“We took a vote. My friend is a boy. We decided that made us boyfriend and girlfriend. We’ll have all kinds of fun!”
It was all I could do in the morning to restrain her from calling him before nine o’clock. I’d seen Hannah in manic times before but this was subtly different. This was genuine excitement over something new in her life. When she asked to go for a bike ride with him that morning I was happy to give permission.
“Reverend Gordon?” the woman on the phone said.
“Yes, this is he.”
“This is Marilyn Frost. I’m Brian Frost’s mother. It seems our children have become friends.”
“Boyfriend and girlfriend, from what I’m told,” I laughed. “By a vote of two to zero.”
“Are you okay with this?” she asked. “Brian is a good boy, but they are awfully young to be calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“Marilyn, I hope our families will get to know each other better. To start that off, let me say that to Hannah, having a boyfriend simply means she has a friend who is a boy. And being a girlfriend means that she is a girl and a friend. I think she would apply the terms to any girl or boy she was friends with,” I said.
“Oh, that’s such a relief. I don’t mind them being friends and playmates but some of the children in their group are a little more advanced and I didn’t want to have them thinking this was the romance of a lifetime and acting inappropriately.”
“I don’t think we need to worry about that for a while,” I said.
“Oh, I see they are riding down our driveway now. Do you mind if Hannah stays for lunch? I’ll toss her bike in the station wagon and drop her off after Brian makes his payment at the newspaper office.”
“That will be fine, Marilyn. It will give us an opportunity to meet each other and our children.”
That started three of the best years our family had ever had. There were emotional upheavals to be sure. Hannah was terribly depressed when she and Brian broke up but they both recovered quickly when they discovered that a bump in their personal relationship didn’t mean they lost all their friends. And Hannah became very close with Samantha—a bond they share to this day. I think Brian has a difficult time being a parent to Junior because he has two parents in Sam and Hannah already.
Hannah brought me the dating agreement in its first draft as soon as she got it. We read it together and talked about what each point meant. I offered a couple of suggestions that would clarify a sentence. Like every parent who read the agreement, I zeroed in on the no penetration clause.
“Honey, don’t you think that is allowing things to go a little too far for where you are now?” I said. “You’ve told me you find that kind of touching to be yucky and it caused you and Brian to break up last spring.”
“Daddy, look at article three. I think that’s the most important article in the whole agreement. It says that if a boy—or a girl—wants to even hold my hand, he has to ask my permission. Article four doesn’t say I have to let him touch me. But some of the girls and the guys are um… a little more mature than me. I’ve thought boys were kind of yucky since first grade. Brenda kind of wants to get naked with them. But no one wants to get pregnant. No one wants to feel like she has to go all the way if she loves him. When they sign the agreement they agree to a hard stop. And all I have to do is say ‘no’ and that’s it.”
“It requires a lot of trust that they’ll abide by the agreement,” I said.
“You taught me, Daddy. I have to be able to trust my friends and my family. Otherwise, I’d be back to being alone and depressed.”
Just two years later, I broke my daughter’s trust. I came back from Annual Conference just in time to watch Sarah graduate and surprise us with the announcement she was going to Oberlin instead of UIndy. That was going to be a shock to her sister. But my news was devastating. I was appointed to Evansville. As far away from her friends as I could ever move Hannah.
She blew up, screaming and beating at me with her fists, declaring she wouldn’t go. She’d run away. She’d kill herself.
I’d had almost the same response to the cabinet when the appointments were read. They’d promised. Well, I had a new District Superintendent and we’d just been assigned a new Bishop. He declared that the Conference didn’t make commitments like that and my assignment to Evansville was not negotiable. I’d shown growth in my church and needed to step up my responsibility. The new church needed someone who could turn them around and start growth. I was their choice.
I was forty-eight years old. I had to be moved out of the parsonage in ten days. I wouldn’t even be in the pulpit in Mishawaka the next Sunday as I was required to preach in the new charge immediately. My only other choice would have been to quit. Quit serving the church. Quit being a minister. Quit the United Methodists and try to find a position somewhere in an independent congregation or try to sell used cars. I would lose my pension. I would lose our home. I would lose our income. I had no choice but to obey.
For two years, I wished I had quit.
I won’t go through everything that happened in that time. The pregnancy. The attempt at suicide and resulting abortion. The poor grades in school and frequent truancy. The boyfriend that I forbade to no avail.
Evelyn and I nearly divorced that year. I’d driven a wedge between us and our daughter. I’d fully betrayed her trust.
I could hold that it was the church that betrayed us all but the responsibility of a parent is on the parent. My new District Superintendent was no help and the Bishop told me I needed to get my daughter under control. They recommended a church psychologist who recommended drugs. The daughter I saw each day, who would not speak to me, was a stranger.
When she was hospitalized Evelyn screamed at me. In all our years together, we had never raised our voices to one another. She unleashed the most unholy stream of invective on me that I had ever heard. I didn’t know she knew those words!
She wanted me to quit. Even my easy-going wife had made no friends in Evansville. The turnaround of the church had not happened and we had fewer in attendance than when I started. No youth attended our meetings. The church was behind in paying its apportionments. I was a failure as a husband, as a father, and as a minister.
And that brought me to the morning I sat at the kitchen table watching my daughter’s one-time boyfriend fixing coffee.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t hear you come in. May I pour you a cup of coffee?”
“Just hot water, please,” I answered. He poured me the hot water. “Spoon?” He handed me a teaspoon from the drawer as if he’d lived in our house with us. I took a spoonful of his black coffee and mixed it into my water. “Just right.”
“Does that actually count as drinking coffee?” he asked.
“I suppose not, but it lets me… be sociable.” He sat across from me. “You are always awake at this hour. So is Hannah. Back when she would still talk to me, she said it was her special time with you.”
“We’ve always kept it that way.”
“Even when you are sleeping with her sister?” I couldn’t help the bitterness in my voice. They’d all gone to a place I no longer understood. “Evelyn and I were a little older than you when we met. I was in seminary and she was the pianist at the church I served. From the day we met, we knew we were right for each other. We’d meet at the church to go over the hymns for Sunday’s service. I sat on the piano bench beside her and we sang as she played. Those Saturday mornings became our special time together. We still go to the church to play the Sunday hymns on Saturday morning, even though she is no longer the pianist for the church. It is the only peace I know these days.”
“I’m sorry to hear that but I’m glad you still have your special time together,” he said.
“It never once occurred to either of us in the past twenty-five years that there could ever be another in our relationship outside of each other and our children. Your—Do I understand you now call it your clan?—Your clan freely accepts multiple relationships. And I suppose you can’t imagine a different world.”
“I love the cousins in my clan,” he said. “I have a special love for the hearthmates of my casa. But there is always still that special time—respected by all my cousins and hearthmates—that I spend each morning with Hannah.”
“And now you want to take her away from me.” I looked into my coffee cup as he did. “No. She left me the day I told her we were moving. The day of Sarah’s graduation. The day you got her pregnant.”
“Reverend Gordon, pregnancy was an unintended consequence of an act that was sexual but, in a way, innocent. If I had been given the chance, I would have taken Hannah to me and done whatever was necessary to raise our child with the kind of love you have shown your daughters.”
“So many unintended consequences. So much innocence lost. Why? Why, after all she did to you and to us and to your… hearthmates, do you still want her? She is not the same person you knew two years ago.”
“I love her. I have no other answer. I will do whatever is necessary to care for and protect her.”
“I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.” I quoted from Hosea. Brian was one of the few young people I knew who could quote almost as much scripture as I could. I held my worn Bible in my hands but didn’t need to open it. “There I will give her back her vineyards and will make her valley a door of hope. There she will respond as in the days of her youth.”
“I’m no prophet,” he whispered. “No god commanded me.”
I took the neatly typewritten sheet of paper from the back of my Bible. I’d typed it from the faxed copy Hayden and Rex had sent. Another agreement.
“These are the terms. She has to agree to them as well as Evelyn and me. She might not. She might find it too restrictive or see it as a way we are keeping control of her. She won’t speak to me, so it is up to you to get her signature on the paper. Witnessed. If she signs it, both Evelyn and I will sign it.”
He read the agreement and nodded to me.
“If it is possible, Brian…” I could hardly go on. I could no longer see him sitting across from me through my tears. “If it isn’t too late, please try to help her not hate her parents.” He took my hand and gripped it firmly. I excused myself and went to my office.
I was appointed to the little church in French Lick that spring. Punishment. I left the Conference so I could be in the auditorium when Hannah graduated from high school, fulfilling her agreement.
“I’m Saul Gordon,” I said to the congregation on the first Sunday in our new church. “I’ve met a few of you already and hope to meet the rest of you in the days ahead. We’ll be moving to the parsonage later this week and then I’ll try to set time aside to visit each of you. If you don’t like the idea of the preacher coming to visit in your home, let’s stop at a café for fellowship.”
I want to start this morning by telling you a story that some of you might find disturbing but I assure you there is a point. And I need you to know who your new minister is.
The Methodist Church has a long history and an American tradition of circuit riders traveling from church to church on horseback. I did some research and when this church was founded it was part of a circuit that was served once a month by a circuit rider named Josiah Brooks. I want to tell you the story of another circuit rider—one I will leave nameless.
This preacher was no horseman, in fact, was scared of the animals. On the other hand, he had a beloved mule that carried him assuredly on his circuit. It happened that there were two churches on the circuit that were only ten miles apart and if the preacher left the first church’s early service during the final hymn, he could ride his mule to the other church and be there in time to preach for their later service. To accommodate this, he would tie his mule just below the window near the pulpit. When the sermon was finished, he would grab his notes, open the window and jump on the mule to ride to the next church.
I can see you are having doubts about the veracity of my tale. Bear with me.
One Sunday the preacher arrived at the first church and discovered the men had been digging a foundation for an expansion to the church. There was a big hole next to the church and the preacher tied his mule next to it.
He preached a fine sermon that morning. Inspirational. Motivating. He was at the top of his game. As soon as he was finished, he packed his notes in his satchel, smartly bid his congregation farewell, and jumped out the window.
Into the hole the men had dug for the new foundation.
The story ends there with just this footnote. Even if a preacher sounds good, he may not know his ass from a hole in the ground.
I’m not ashamed to use that word, even if you’re shocked. It’s in the Bible. It is also very true.
And when my younger daughter told me that story she looked me straight in the eye to let me know I was the ass.
I failed at my last church. I failed as a minister, unable to inspire or motivate. But what was worse, I failed as a husband and a father. I failed in the name of God because I placed a man-given responsibility above the one God gave me. My family.
The Bishop has sent me here to French Lick as punishment. I reject that. I’ve come here to beg your help in healing. And to share my pain that I might know how to share yours.
I was told once by Sarah that archeologists can look at a thousand-year-old skeleton and see the breaks in bones that were healed in the subject’s youth. Even if the bone knits together cleanly the break is still visible.
I love my daughters. They love me. But even though we healed, it has never been the same as the day she excitedly declared that she had a boyfriend or the time she brought me the agreement to discuss and interpret.
Does she still suffer from depression and anxiety? The seeds are still there. She controls it with exercise, meditation, and sometimes medication. She depends on the love of her cónyuge and her son—Samantha’s son. She is strong and capable, but the breaks are still visible.
I’m seventy-eight years old now. Have been retired and we’ve lived over at the United Methodist Retirement Community forty miles from here for eight years. We’re close enough to celebrate occasions and holidays with our daughters without being a burden on them. I think back on the history of the clan and thank God for the love and care that saw her through and the healing that continues.
End Part VI
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