STILL TRYING TO DECIDE IF… 

Here begins the confession of a theological vagabond:  When I was a child, my religion was a loosely held bag of assumptions about why there were churches in the town where we lived and what the churches had to do with me or with my family. I don’t remember thinking anything that I heard in church had anything to do with me personally.  Whatever notions I had about God and life and death were pieced together from scraps of overheard adult conversations among my relatives who were mostly Baptists or Methodists. Of course, I saw the pictures of Jesus, and I believed everybody, every adult, assumed the existence of a place called heaven and another place called hell, but I don’t remember considering those two places, one up there somewhere and the other down there somewhere, had anything to do with me.

I was ten years old when my Grand Dad Ezra Inlow died.  It happened near the end of World War Two, so I had heard a lot of talk about death; but I hadn’t had any experience of it in my family. Grand Dad had spent the night before he died with my family, and had slept in my bed with me.  In the morning he traveled from our house in Roseboro, Arkansas, to Pine Ridge a couple of hours away where he and Granny lived. I assumed they would live there forever, but in the middle of that afternoon he had a heart attack and died at home.  By the time I got there with my parents, the doctor had gone away already and Grand Dad’s body had been put into an undertaker’s van which was parked outside the house that had been a place of joy and comfort.  I didn’t see his body in the undertaker’s vehicle, but I saw it at the funeral. Three of my mother’s brothers were in the military, one was stationed somewhere in the States and the other two were in Europe. Everybody in the family except Uncle Dick who was in Italy and Uncle Bert who was in England gathered for the funeral at the Baptist Church in Pine Ridge. It was my first experience with unrestrained grief among some in my family and the first time I noticed with wonder the controlled stoicism among others.