Father's Day 1972 Revisited, Part 18: Only Half Way Across the River

It was the the fall of 1971 and the family had just come from the hospital where we'd said our last goodbyes to grandma Randall. I was still an atheist/agnostic materialist with a cynical view of all religious claims and a particular hostility toward Christianity. However there was one new complication in my personal world: I was dating--and deeply in love with--a young Christian woman--one of the "Jesus People," an emerging subgroup within the evolving cultural landscape of the late sixties. Her freshly minted faith and my agnosticism made for interesting, and occasionally tense, conversations. We were about to have one of those now. After my hospital visit at my dying grandmother's bedside, she had said to me, "I'm praying for your grandmother, and so are some others at my sister's church--we put her on the prayer list." That was something I was not in the mood to hear and which flew in the face of my coldly rational outlook on things. I got angry with her and spit out suddenly, caustically, "What is it with you Christians? Didn't you hear what the doctor said? The woman is dying. She'd old, her time is up, and she's dying--d-y-i-n-g. Your silly prayers aren't going to do her one damn bit of good. You and your Christian friends can pray all you want; biological reality says that old woman will be dead by this time tomorrow. Damn it, there's nothing to do. Get over it! Face reality--stop pretending your prayers can change the hard facts of this uncaring material world. Damn, just don't give me any more of that crap about God and prayers and all that spiritual mumbo-jumbo! Let's just drop the subject!"

I think I even surprised myself at the emotion behind the words I'd thrown at her. She hadn't done anything to deserve my Mr. Rational mini tirade. As I recall, she didn't argue back, but had simply said, "Well, we'll pray anyway." and left it at that.

The call from the hospital the next day was that our grandma had somehow made it through the night and so had survived for one more day. Her condition however remained unchanged. The following day my dad gave us the news that grandma was somewhat improved. Perhaps this would be one of those long drawn-out deaths that only came after a weeks-long or, God forbid, months-long series of family-fatiguing ups and downs. The day after showed surprisingly good improvement and, to everyone's amazement, grandma was alert and talking. The following day saw grandma walking the halls and telling the nurses about Jesus. The doctors had no explanation. They were as dumbfounded as was the family.

Now the family trooped back to the hospital, this time to visit the same woman we all thought we'd be burying about now. As we had done before, we each took turns sitting by her bedside. When my turn came and I entered her room, I could hardly believe the change in her appearance. Was this really the same old woman who, just four days ago, was at death's doorstep? It didn't seem possible. Yet there she sat, smiling, and her eyes now full of light and life. She seemed anxious to talk to me. "It was all so beautiful," she said with an air of wonderment, as if still seeing something fresh in her mind's eye. "What was beautiful gramma?" I asked. "The rainbow, and the river and, well, just everything--it was all so full of light and the colors--my!--the colors were so vivid. I've never seen anything like it! There were so many more colors than I even knew. The beauty of it all just took my breath away," she said with her eyes closed as if remembering and relishing it afresh in detail. Then her voice took on a different, almost matter-of-fact, down-to-earth seriousness as she reached out, took hold of my hand and said, "He told me I could not stay--that it was not my time--that I wasn't finished yet and would have to go back." "Who told you, gramma?" I asked. "Why Jesus did," she replied and continued, "I wanted to stay with him more than I could say, and I somehow knew he knew it, but he kept saying to me, 'no, you must return, just for a little while' and I didn't want to, but knew I had to because it was not my time yet." She went on, "We were right in the middle of the river. I could see the other side and the hills and beautiful sky and oh, all the colors, but he just turned me around, very gently, and I knew I had to go back to my side of the river. That's the last thing I remember until, until I woke up here--was it yesterday?" "I don't know gramma, maybe, I said. "I just know you were really sick and we didn't think you would make it." I was dazed by what I was hearing from her. I didn't believe it was real in any sense of the word--just something that happens sometimes when people are very sick and on medication and things--but I could not deny the tone of absolute certainty in her voice as she was telling me about what she'd seen. It was clear to me that she had been genuinely deeply moved by the whole experience--or hallucination, or whatever it was.

I had no idea what to make of it all. My girlfriend could have really needled me now about my earlier scoffing at her prayers, but I don't recall her doing so. She probably just said something like, "Praise God--he is so good!" when I told her the news. I wasn't about to admit to anything supernatural having been at play in my grandma's recovery or any prayers having anything to do with it. Yet somewhere inside of me the perfect steel architecture of my starkly rational understanding of the universe creaked and shifted. One key rivet had popped and now the whole taut and steely structure was not quite as snug and inflexible as it had once been. Grandma may have beaten the Grim Reaper, but the Hound of Heaven was still at my heels.

Postscript:
Grandma Randall went on to live a full twelve years more, from 1971 to 1983. During those years she travelled twice to Alaska, bought a house in Chino Hills; did lots more gardening; painted pictures; blended more Green Drinks and taught Sunday school and crafts. As she had done in her previous eighty-six years, grandma always received, with humble gratitude, all the "gracious plenty" God had to give her. She lived a full and blessed ninty-eight years.

Father's Day 1972 Revisited, Part 17: Grandma Randall Crosses Over

Even health food nuts die, eventually. It seemed grandma Randall's time had come. My dad used to drive out to visit and check on her on her little 5-acre place in Romoland, an undeveloped rural area not far from Hemet. There she lived alone, grew all her own food, and played her favorite hymns a little Hammond organ. On one of those visits, dad noticed she was quite jaundiced. He took her to see a doctor who promptly admitted her to the Circle City hospital in Corona for tests. Nothing was found in the first set of tests, so more were scheduled. I should mention that our dad was the administrator of this small private hospital and so grandma got the best of care. Further tests were inconclusive and could not pinpoint a source of her problem. Meanwhile, grandma was going downhill, getting weaker by the day and losing weight rapidly. X-rays were taken to check for anything which may not have been detected by the other tests. Everything looked OK. Nonetheless, grandma condition kept worsening. Finally, for lack of anything to do, it was decided to do exploratory surgery to see if the doctors could find any explanation for her rapidly failing health. Finding nothing they sewed her up and sent her back to her room.

The doctor attending her said our grandma didn't have any disease, cancer had been ruled out, no infection could be found--in fact no medical cause for her worsening condition was apparent. The nurses monitored her vital signs and kept her comfortable. Another week passed by and her condition continued to deteriorate. The day came when the doctor suggested to my dad that the family be called in because, "Your mother's time has come. She is eighty-six and her organs are simply shutting down. Your mother is dying of old age, nothing else. The family should see her this evening--I don't think she'll make it through the night." I went to the hospital accompanied by my girlfriend and soon-to-be fiance', Cher, to say goodbye to my grandma. This was all new to me. I knew next to nothing about dying people or what to do around a dying person. I met the family in the hospital cafeteria where they had gathered. My dad filled us in on what the doctors had said about her condition. There was nothing to be done. She was comfortable, not in pain, but failing fast. It was after nine o'clock. We each ate our chosen comfort food from the cafeteria vending machine and chased it with coffee which was overly strong, being left on the hot plate much too long.

We held our little family meeting there at a round table in the nearly empty cafeteria. It was a small hospital, after visiting hours, and there were only a few others in the cafeteria, mostly hospital staff. As my toddler cousin entertained herself pouring piles of sugar on the tabletop, we each took turns acknowledging the inevitable along with our sadness and agreeing that grandma had had a long and full life. It was decided we would take turns privately saying our goodbyes to grandma in person, one at a time. My turn came and I walked tentatively down the dimly lit hallway, not knowing quite what to expect. What I found was a woman who looked much too small and already dead. Her face looked only vaguely familiar, for her teeth were not in. But more than that, her face looked starkly skeletal, her cheeks and eye sockets sunken to an extreme degree. There were the obligatory tubes and wires and things still dripping and monitoring while doing their own death watch. Besides the occasional soft beep of of her heart monitor, the only other sounds were the rattles and gasps which came at unnervingly long and infrequent intervals. The time between them was so long I would get myself poised to spring out of the institutional bedside chair and go call into the hallway for the nurse. Just when I was about to do this, her chest would heave and noisily draw in another gurgling gulp of air. This happened several times in the few minutes I spent with her and it set my nerves on edge. I didn't say anything to my grandma's form and didn't even know what I could or should or wanted to say. I just kind of did my duty--a nightmarish duty it seemed--by spending those minutes in her room. I felt at a loss for what to even to think about during those minutes. I felt out of place, embarrassed at my own awkwardness. To myself I seemed like an intruder, even as her grandson. I escaped back to the cafeteria in the briefest time decency would allow in order to show I had done a proper farewell and had not just stuck my head in the door of her room. I felt a little guilty for not knowing how to say goodbye to a dying loved one. They hadn't taught us that in vacation Bible school. It being late, and all of us having taken our turns, we hugged one another and each headed home. Someone from the hospital would call in the morning with the news.

Father's Day 1972 Revisited, Part 16: Wrinkled Faces and Grandma Randall's Green Drink

Matilda Randall, my grandma, was a Baptist Mother Teresa. At least she shared a good many character traits with the little Albanian saint. She also had Mother Teresa's deeply wrinkled and leathery brown face. From both faces, with their shining deep-set dark eyes--radiated a deep goodness--a grace--a love which was both kind and gentle, but which was certainly not soft and marsh-mellowy. In contrast, this gracious loving radiance was solid, rock-like, even severe, if that term can be connected with the concept of love. This was a love that one sensed came from beyond the individual and her personal particular emotions. Instead, it emanated from, and was entwined with, her life's mission. Both these women of God were indeed on a mission: Saint Teresa to bring God's loving embrace those dying alone in the world's gutters, and Saint Matilda to bring that same embracing love to the little sphere of her family's world.

That's why Grandma Randall started Riverside Christian Day School in her own home for her first grandson and a few neighbor kids. She went on to Shepherd that school as it--and her grandson, Tony--grew. That is why she saw to it that us kids were enrolled in Vacation Bible School each summer. That is why she tried to get us to eat the good, wholesome, organic food which she grew in her very own garden where she spent a good deal of her time.

The food she fixed for us was one aspect of grandma's love we least appreciated at the time. We considered grandma a health-food nut. We loved Swanson's frozen dinners and Tater-Tots. We really did not care for chard or kale or wheat germ or millet. Topping our list of least appreciated health food was her infamous Green Drink. Grandma Randall's Green Drink was her own concoction of every healthy item known to humankind blended up all together in a big Hamilton Beech blender and served--not chilled with ice, no: cold drinks were not good for you--but at room temperature with a little green foam still bubbling on top of your glass. We hated that stuff. When we complained about the taste, she acted amazed: "Don't say that; why, it has chlorophyll--very good for your liver-- and wheat germ; which has lots of vitamins and fiber; and millet, and celery and..." she would go on to list a half-dozen of the who-knows-how-many ingredients, all found in her Green Drink--as if this somehow answered our complaint. In her fixation with health food grandma Randall was way ahead of her time!

Grandma Randall played a significant and unusual two-part role in my conversion. Part one was that she prayed for me, the black sheep of the family. Not so unusual, that. I suppose all grandmothers pray for their grandchildren--at least I know all Baptist grandmothers do. Come to think of it, praying grannies may be God's most effective below-the-radar force in his dogged and unrelenting campaign to draw a lost world back Home. The other part Grandma Randall played in my conversion was truly an unusual one. She died. Sort of...

Father's Day 1972 Revisited, Part 15: Grandma Randall vs The Episcopalians

I have mentioned that the three of us kids were raised in the Episcopal church. My brother was an acolyte, helping the priest by performing ceremonial duties during worship such as carrying the processional cross and lighting alter candles. As a young child witnessing the worship ritual and hearing the recited prayers, the impression that settled upon me was that these adults were mostly bored with the whole matter and were personally uninvolved in the motions they were so deliberately and carefully walking themselves through. I felt a little resentful at being made to share in their boredom. All the robed people up by the alter doing their important tasks of positioning this or that object exactly here or there seemed to me to move way too slowly. Not only that, but they would unnecessarily drag out what they were saying to make it take as long as humanly possible to drone out the required words. This slow-motion performance seemed very tedious to my young, wandering and restless mind. I'd sit there next to my sister on the hard old oak pew in my white starched long-sleeved shirt and clip-on bow tie and crane my head back as far as it would go until I was looking straight up. I'd let my eyes wander in among the big dark brown wood beams which crisscrossed the high ceiling and intersected with one another in mid-air. Meanwhile, the distant voice of the priest droned on and on as it read, in that sophisticated and practiced high-church monotone fashion, from a prayer book or perhaps some mimeographed sheet.

This Episcopal tradition came to us through my mom and her parents, who presumably had received it from their parents. My dad's mom, whom we called grandma Randall, was a Southern Baptist and worked to deliver us from Episcopalianism by exposing us to Baptist influences whenever and however she could. I don't think we ever attended any Baptist Sunday services, but us kids were packed off to VBS--vacation Bible school--every summer. There we would make things such as real leather wallets on which we tooled designs such as eagles or crosses or pine cones and then we'd finish it off with shoelace-sized leather stitching all around. We made Indian beaded bracelets from kits and pictures pounded onto copper sheets and then mounted on wood plaques we had stained ourselves. Grandma Randall was in charge of the craft component of her church's VBS and she saw to it that we had good quality materials and tools to work with.

I'd have been happy to do crafts all day, but the gospel lessons could not be overlooked. We'd needed to hear a Bible story and most often that meant the giant flannel-board was brought out. As I recall, the flannel-board stories were done by missionaries who were home on furlow. The story might be Daniel in the loin's den or Jonah and the wale, but what ever it was, it ended with a miniature Billy Graham crusade-style plea by the missionery for us to invite Christ into our hearts to become our Lord and Savior. Heads would be bowed and all eyes closed (except for some curiosity-inspired peeking). You'd raise your hand if you wanted to, "answer the knock of Jesus and open the door of your heart." Did I ever raise my hand? I don't know. I can't say I remember ever doing so, yet I wouldn't be surprised if I were to find I had. Nothing even remotely similar to this ever went on at the Episcopal church. That might be the reason that VBS felt kind of like spiritual contraband. I felt a vague guilt, at being involved in something a bit clandestine, something we were not really suppose to be doing. It was, on the part of my grandma, perhaps a kind of "sneaky" evangelism--sneaky for the sake of the kids. Grandma Randall was trying to steer us away from the spiritually sterilizing and stultifying influence of the Episcopal church.

Don't miss the next episode: Grandma Randall goes to meet Jesus.

Father's Day 1972 Revisited, Part 14: A Good Dad, and Loved

Meanwhile, While my buddy and I were chasing dreams of striking it rich as crab-catchers in Alaska, my dad, at the age of forty-eight, was entering the newly created Medex program. It had been pioneered at Duke University in the late 60's to meet the projected future demand for health care. In 1971 California was getting aboard this new health-care train. Dad heard about the program because he had been a Navy corpsman during WWII. In signing up, he joined the first class at UCLA of those who would go on from there to become "PA's"--Physician Assistants. This new category of medical professional was created by an act of congress and UCLA was chosen as the institution in California which would train the first new recruits--drawn mostly from the ranks of retired Navy corpsmen.

My dad's career path was, in a number of ways, an unusual one. He had joined the Navy in order to get away from a stern, cold demanding father, Dr. George Borand Randall Sr. [A Google search of his name shows him listed in Senate records from 1918 as a "Randall, George Borand, Noncombatant Commissioned Officers of the Army."] From all accounts, he had left private medical practice to become an Army physician during World War I. He saw combat in Europe and had suffered lung damage due to inhalation of German mustard gas. It seems he spent the rest of his life on a military disability pension and never returned to full time private practice.

As near as I can tell, my dad never received any fatherly warmth or affection from this man and never--in words I ever heard him express--mourned his passing. In 1940, at age 17, dad made his move to leave home and escape the icy presence of this man for good--he joined the Navy. Both his parents signed the required permission slip for this underage young man to join the military--his father willingly, his mother reluctantly. He came to the Naval Training Center, San Diego for boot camp and, later, as a corpsman, to Camp Elliot with the U.S. Marines. From there he shipped out with the Marines to the South Pacific shortly after Pearl Harbor. Like most of the men of his generation, dad never offered up stories of the war years. One had to pull them out of him with direct questions. In his later years I spent time in conversation with him about these events and can recall just the basic outline of his story. [I now regret not getting an audio recorder and documenting those conversations.]

Dad saw combat in many of the South Pacific theaters, as they are called in military terms. He was aboard ship convoys when kamikaze raids rained down on them. He vividly described the frantic ship-board efforts at putting up smoke screens so the Japanese suicide pilots diving down at full speed from straight overhead could not see their intended targets. He also told of the charming life of the natives on the island of Samoa and how he became a special favorite of a local chief after circumcising the Chief's infant son. Dad picked up a number of Samoan phrases which we kids heard often growing up: Saweela peesa, fi moly moly! Roughly translated, "Shut your mouth--keep quiet!" Another was a song the Marines had made up which was set to the tune of Deep in the Heart of Texas." I would put the Samoan lyrics to it here, but I suspect, though I am not sure, they may be "R" rated.

After the war, dad was reunited with his wife, Olive, a Navy Wave. They began a family soon thereafter and my brother, "Skipper" was born in 1946. I followed four respectful years later, being born in Minneapolis in the middle of 1950. Two years later, when our parents moved to Southern California, our sister, Lauren was born. A couple of years were spent in West Riverside and then we moved into a new tract home on Gertrude Street in Riverside proper. The tract of middle-class stucco homes had been carved out in the middle of hundreds of acres of orange groves, and was still virtually surrounded by many of them. In spring the fragrance of orange blossoms filled the night and was sometimes nearly overwhelming. In winter it was the pungent odor of the smudge pots alight along with the sound of hundreds of wind machines keeping the air moving and the oranges from freezing.

One thing I came to learn--to deduce really--about my dad was his deeply felt inadequacy at not living up to the expectations that he become a physician like his father. Whether his father had imposed this on him or whether he had imposed it on himself, I never did learn. It was, I thought, too personal, too delicate a question for a child, even a grown one, to broach with a parent. Perhaps it could have been tactfully done, but I never did pursue this line of inquiry with him. This insecurity expressed itself in any number of ways. One was that, in the late fifties, dad signed the family up to a local country club there in Riverside--Azure Hills. That was the club where all the doctors, Attorneys and wealthy businessmen belonged. Being a surgical supply salesman, it made a certain amount of sense to join the club, but even as a nine-year-old I could tell we didn't really belong there. We didn't really fit in. It was nothing you could quite put your finger on--one just knew. Dad also didn't really mind when, in later years, people mistook his references to, "being in the medical profession" as meaning he had been a doctor. He didn't mind and often would not correct people's mistaken impression. Perhaps he challenged this inner dynamic later in life when he self-published a book about his experiences entitled, Don't Call Me Doctor.

My dad was a great guy who grew closer and closer to God in his later years. Because of that primary and spiritual relationship he was changing and becoming more Christ-like up unto the very end of his life. He was dearly loved by his family and by everyone who ever met him. People who, decades ago, had only known or worked with him a few months sent notes of great fondness and deep regret at the news of his passing in 1999.

I will write more about him in some future post on some future Father's Day. I know where you are dad. Thanks for all you did to raise me and try to get me on the right road--even when, early on, you were not sure yourself where it was. You left this world with grace, dignity and deep love. You are missed.

Father's Day 1972 Revisited, Part 13: The Best Laid Plans of Pot Heads

As summer came to a close, I made a visit back you see old friends in Seal Beach. That is where, not long after high school, I had shared an apartment with my brother, who was a biology major at Long Beach State. It was in Seal Beach from 1969 to 1971 that my political radicalism and general anti-establishment outlook were nurtured beyond what they had been during my high school years. This may have been partly due to the fact that virtually everyone I knew and hung around with in Seal Beach were pot smokers and most of us also dabbled in the "recreational" use of other drugs, such as Peyote, Mescaline, LSD, Hashish and uppers. The last on that list, Benzedrine--which nearly everyone in the restaurant business used in order to accomplish our very fast-paced work--I used from time to time while working as a seafood chef at a local restaurant called Walt's Wharf. I lived near both the beach and the restaurant and could walk to work. I handled every kind of seafood all afternoon and evening long. Cats would follow me home at night.

One of my pot-smoking buddies, a close friend, was a moody and very philosophically-minded misfit--a lot like me. Barry and I would spend time together alternately complaining about the way society was arranged, how shallow it and its people were in general, and brainstorming alternative ways of arranging society so life would be less "plastic" and superficial and become more "real." We both fiddled around on guitar and knew a few cords and a few folk and bluegrass songs. One old bluegrass song we sang went like this: Ceegar-eets 'n whusky 'n wild wild women, they'll drive a man crazy, they'll drive him insaaaayne / Once't I was married and had a good waf, I had enough money to last me for laf / I met with a woman, we went on a spree / She taught me to smoke and dree-ink whus-key / Oh, ceegar-eets and whiskey..."

Barry had heard from a mutual friend who'd recently come back from working a crab boat in Alaska. He'd worked for something like two months straight and had made about five-thousand dollars--which in those days was very big money for guys our age. It was difficult and dangerous work, but that dangled jackpot of money was strong incentive for us just then. Barry and I talked it over and decided to North and give it a shot. We collected our resources and came up with enough money to get his old '55 Plymouth station wagon road worthy. Beyond that, we had enough for gas money to get us there--and even a couple hundred to spare. After packing the car with all the provisions we'd need--canned sardines, peanut butter, two cartons of cigarettes, a lid of carefully-hidden pot and some books by Krishnamurti and Dostoevsky, we set out from Seal Beach on a beautiful and mild mid-October day. We hopped on the 405 north and caught the I-5 in San Fernando. Once on the 5 we felt we were truly on our way. It just happened that, this being fire season in southern California, there were several major fires ravaging the foothills north and east of the city. This filled the horizon with billows of reddish brown smoke and darkened the sky. It felt to us like we were escaping a city which was doomed to some long-foretold apocalyptic end. We talked about this as we drove away from L.A. But soon, taking the place of those thoughts, were youthful testosterone-fueled dreams of doing dangerous and manly feats of gritty ocean courage aboard some rugged ship in those deep cold Alaskan waters. We would come back all buffed, sinewy and flush with cash!

One tactical concern of ours was my somewhat unresolved draft status. A year-and-a-half before I had refused induction into the Army and was told my formal indictment would soon follow. It never did--and, as it turned out, never would. Because of this unresolved legal matter, we felt it would be wise to try our crossing into Canada from a minor border town rather than a major one. Our plans had us driving across a good portion of British Columbia in order to get to Prince Rupert, from where we would take a ferry to our destination, Sitka. We decided to skirt a crossing at Vancouver and instead go east via Hwy 546 to where Hwy 9 heads north. We would attempt our crossing at the little border town of Huntingdon, near Abbotsford. Our thought was that the border guards there would be less diligent and watchful for draft-dodgers than at Vancouver. Although I prided myself in being a draft fighter, and not a draft dodger, I knew that my coming into Coming into Canada might look suspicious to the authorities.

As it was, our plan failed on all counts. We were turned away for "lack of financial resources." In short, the Canadian government felt that, should we have a mechanical breakdown, or for any other reason, have problems in reaching Price Rupert, we would have insufficient funds to assure we did not become an undue burden to Her Majesty's Sovereign State. What was required was proof of a U.S. bank account, in one of our names, with at a current balance of least $2,500. That we did not have. Consulting the good old Drawing Board, we decided to look for work in the nearby farming communities bordering Sumas. We felt sure some farm or business could use at least one--if not two--strapping young men as laborers. We approached this and that farmhouse--no luck. We tried getting dishwasher jobs at every little restaurant we could find--no help wanted. We tried gas stations and auto repair shops. We looked in the local paper. No jobs were to be had anywhere it seemed. Reluctantly, and in utter defeat, we pointed Barry's '55 Plymouth wagon back south and headed for home. Sometimes the best laid plans...

Father's Day 1972 Revisited, Part 12: It Soothes the Soul of the Savage Skeptic

As the summer of 1971 was nearing it's still warm--and to me almost magical--glowing end, everything in my immediate world seemed to enter of period of transition. One change, the most significant to me, and the news of which I welcomed as if I'd won the lottery, was that Cher, the seventeen year old young woman I had fallen in love with that summer, broke up with her boyfriend. I had been hoping this would happen and felt our budding relationship could now deepen and grow. I had told her as much in poem form. We began to see each other more regularly now, spending time together horseback riding and often just talking for hours.

Our conversations were most often about Jesus, the Bible, and spirituality as well as current events such as civil rights and the war in Viet Nam. Earlier that summer, she had given me a copy of the album her sister had recorded with her church group, Konoinia. That was the first "new" Christian music I'd heard--except perhaps for a couple songs, spun off from the Jesus Movement, that made it to radio such as Put Your Hand In the Hand of the Man From Galilee and Norman Greenbaum's Spirit in the Sky. Attending church with her on Sunday evenings, I had begun to become familiar with contemporary Christian music--the Jesus-People music. I remember Debbie Kerner was the song leader and a soloist at All Saints Episcopal, leading the newly formed congregation of former hippies in choruses of, We Are One In The Spirit, which included the lines, "We will work with each other / We will work side by side / And we'll give up our dignity and crucify our pride / And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love / Yes they'll know we are Christians by our love." This revolution in Christian music seemed to burst upon the late-sixties/early-seventies scene in a rapid proliferation of Jesus People music, composed and performed by groups such as, The Way, Mustard Seed Faith, Love Song, Selah, Blessed Hope and Children of the Day.

This new musical expression of the gospel message, with styles from folk to hard rock, was very controversial and much debated within the "mainline" churches, but had a profound effect on me and many in my generation who had written Christianity off as irrelevant. When we heard our music, we were much more receptive to the message it brought. That message was the same orthodox come-to-Jesus message you'd find at any Billy Graham crusade, only to us much more palatable when filtered through Fender or Peavey amplifiers and accompanied by familiar, contemporary music played by very hip/hippy looking twenty-somethings with joyful abandon and enthusiasm. This music, with its gentle-as-a-dove gospel lyrics about the love of Jesus, cleverly snaked its way, serpent-like, into my soul. This served to contemporize the dusty two-thousand-year-old message of Jesus in a way my twentieth-century mind could grasp and identify with on some level.

Here I should make it clear that, although I had come under what seemed a veritable barrage of Christian influence from every angle, I was, in fact, not any where near being or becoming a follower of Jesus. I was very much a skeptical "outsider"; observing the Jesus People as they gathered, listening to their music, and continuing to read the modern English New Testament I'd been given and challenged to read. At this point, the "alter calls" I sat through at the conclusion of every Sunday evening service were as irrelevant to me as a Don Adams TV commercial for "twenty acres of beautiful pine-covered God's-country mountain property in Big Sky Oregon." Wait. On second thought, I'd have been a much more likely potential customer for that TV-commercial property than for the Jesus gospel acreage they seemed to be offering me on Sunday night.

Father's Day 1972 Revisited, Part 11: Of Brooms and Baptists

It was becoming clear to me now this would not be the easy and quick sale I'd hoped it would be. This seemed confirmed as my gaze drifted from the picture on the wall of the giant Jesus at the U.N. building to the big black Holy Bible atop the buffet keeping company with the family photos. To the woman's question about how my day was going, I observed that it certainly was hot outside today and I sure appreciated the cold lemonade. I didn't want to admit to her this was my first day as a Fuller Brush salesman and that I had yet to make a sale. I think she sensed this though. As I reached down in to my sample bag and brought out a slim catalogue of our latest products, she said, as if making a further comment on the weather, "Do you know that God loves you very much and sent his son Jesus to die on the cross for you?" There followed a moment of awkward silence as she waited for my answer and I tried to think of something to say which wouldn't blow the sale. "Um, yes" I said, "my grandma is a Baptist and I know they told us that at vacation Bible school." I figured this acknowledgment of mine might put this topic to rest and we could get on with discussing our new line of products made especially for the modern kitchen. It was not to be.

She reached over and, before I could draw my hand back from the table, she placed hers on mine. She tried to make eye contact with me but I saw it coming and turned my head as if I had just heard something in the distance which called for my attention. Anything to avoid what I was afraid would come next. She gave my hand a little squeeze and said softly, almost confidentially, as if just between us, "I'm glad you know about Jesus, but do you believe in him? Have you placed your trust in him and asked him to forgive your sins and come to live in your heart?" Another even more awkward silence ensued. I no longer cared about making a sale, I just desperately wanted to extract myself from this embarrassing inquisition as soon as possible and get back to knocking on doors where no one was home. The problem was that this woman had my catalogue under her other hand and the unspoken one-sided agreement seemed to be that, if I would just listen to what she had to say, she was willing to buy something from me afterwards. The odd thing was that her teen-aged daughter had taken a seat at the table with us as if we were going to have a little family discussion. She may have been a mute for all I knew, for she never said a word the whole time. I suspected though that she was praying, with her eyes open, the whole time. I somehow got the impression that I was not the first salesman to fall into the snare of this mother-daughter evangelical tag-team. "Well," I began, "I think Jesus was kind of a revolutionary and said lots of things about love and peace and brotherhood sort of like Woody Guthrie did and the establishment just couldn't take his radical ideas and so they had him killed as a rebel." With this answer I had managed to move things to slightly safer territory. I didn't really mind speculating about Jesus' political troubles in some abstract fashion, but to discuss my sins and how Jesus had died to forgive them was beyond the pale. "The Lord has called us," she said, mercifully letting go of my hand, "to tell everyone the good news of the gospel and promised that his Spirit would help them to see the truth and come to Jesus. I will pray for you that God will lead you to the path of salvation." With that, it seemed she'd done her duty and would soon free me to go on my way. I felt our tension--mine and hers--dissipate somewhat and she asked if I would like some more lemonade. "No, thank you," I said, "I need to be going and so..." She opened the catalogue and pointed to the Easy-Breezy kitchen broom with matching dust pan. After filling out the order form I collected my things and she showed me to the door. I wished her a good day and she in return said, in a sincere tone, "God bless you." Before I turned to go I saw her daughter, still seated at the dining room table, now with her head slightly bowed. I continued up the street in an odd daze of unreality at what had just happened. I'd never forget my first sale as a Fuller Brush man.

This encounter was just one of a number of them I seemed doomed to experience in the next ten months. I would come back to the car where it was parked downtown to find a gospel tract tucked under the wiper. I'd absent-mindedly give the radio dial a spin only to have it stop on a station blaring some preacher. I'd bump into an old acquaintance from high school and they'd start witnessing to me about being "born again." I'd go into a public restroom and there would be a psychedelic sticker saying One Way--Jesus! Mostly these things irritated me, but in tandem with my reading the gospel accounts, they felt "aimed" at me by I knew not whom.

Father's Day 1972 Revisited, part 10: Death of a Salesman

A person can't spend all his time falling in love and thinking about God--one has to make a living. My dad was letting me, his 21-year-old grown son, stay with him but he also expected me to find a job and pay some for my upkeep. I began pouring over the classifieds in our local newspaper, the Riverside Press Enterprise. I had been a paperboy for them back in the early sixties. The day after Kennedy was shot, I rode my route with my big canvas handlebar bags stuffed full with the papers I'd folded and banded that afternoon. As I peddled to my customer's neighborhood, people were stopping me left and right pleading with me to sell them a paper. They pull their cars along side me, waving a dollar bill in offer for a ten-cent paper! Unfortunately, I had not had the entrepreneurial foresight to stock up with extras before starting my route that day. But I digress. That was in 1963. It is now eight years later and I am living with my dad on a little horse ranch and trying to find a job.

I ran down the columns of minuscule type: Auto mechanic; Bartender; Carpenter; Drill-press Operator; Estimator; Fork lift Operator; Fuller Brush Salesman... Hmmm... Career opportunity for motivated person. No experience necess--will train. Base pay draw against commissions for first 3 weeks, straight commission after. Apply in person, Mon thru Wed. In the late-fifties, the Fuller Brush man used to come by our house twice a year. Dad would always buy something--whether he needed it or not. Being a fellow salesman, they shared a special kinship which would not let dad send the poor guy away without an order or some sort, if only for a whisk broom or two. Perhaps the Fuller Brush man was a fellow Mason and had given dad the secret handshake. Then again, dad had nearly zero sales-resistance himself and so perhaps would have bought something no matter what. I think the man came by our house as regularly as he did because he knew 2982 Gertrude Street was a sure sale.

I put in my application to become a Fuller Brush Man and aced the interview--which probably everyone did--and then, after being shown how to fill out an order form, was given a big Fuller Brush sample briefcase, a catalogue and a territory to work. Off I set, a spanking new salesman with shiny black slacks, white shirt and tie and with my long curly hair carefully rubber-banded and tucked up at the nape of my neck. The mustache had been allowed, but not the beard. It had been reluctantly sacrificed to The Man in the interest of gainful employment.

There were fewer and fewer housewives these days so I'd often have to knock on five or six doors before finding someone home. Then, it would invariably be either an elderly couple, or a middle-aged woman in her forties or fifties. In the course of an hour, I'd found a few folks home, but no one in need of any of our well-made and handy products. I was beginning to get discouraged when, at the next house where someone was home, I got invited in. This seemed a good sign. The woman who'd greeted me with a friendly smile looked to be about forty. Being late July it was quite hot out, perhaps in the mid-nineties, and as she ushered me to the big maple Early American dining room table she called out, "Cynthia, please bring some lemonade for this young man." As I seated myself I noticed, on the wall near where I sat, a large framed picture of a giant half-transparent Jesus standing outside the U.N. building. He had a concerned look on his face and was rapping a knuckle on one of the upper floors. This Jesus had sandy blond hair, a neatly trimmed beard, and was draped in Ben-Hur-like first-century robes. I began to feel an itch under my white collar. As Cynthia smiled and handed me a big glass of lemonade and her mom, with a note of concern in her pleasant voice asked me, "How have your sales been so far today?" I already didn't like the direction the conversation. I could see I'd have to try for a quick sale and, I hoped, a speedy escape...

Father's Day 1972 Revisited, Part 9: Transitions, Trying on New Lenses

At some point--I only had a very vague self-awareness of it at the time--I began moving from being a skeptic looking for problems with the Bible, into someone with a different frame of mind--one fraught with peril for any atheist or agnostic: I was becoming a "seeker." I was certainly not there yet, but I was moving steadily in that direction. I was beginning to genuinely want to know, if possible, what was ultimately True--about existence, God, self, life. I was just beginning to let go of the need to find the answers I wanted to find and to start seeking whatever answers there really were there to be found--whether those answers suited me or not. In short, I was beginning to embrace the mind-set that led to the recent downfall of that great and influential atheist, Anthony Flew: I was beginning to follow the truth wherever it might lead. The serious agnostic/skeptic, when considering the possible existence of God, must be ever vigilant to maintain an appropriately detached and cynical eye. One must carefully guard oneself against any undue influence (charming or persuasive people, books or arguments) which may be attached to the subject under examination (in this case, the Bible, Jesus, Christianity) lest one be led into accepting unwanted premises (there is a cause for the existence of the universe), and as a result, perhaps find oneself stumbling into inconvenient or even disastrous conclusions (I must owe my existence to the same Cause to which the universe owes its existence. Or: there must be some universal moral right and wrong--it can't all be a matter of personal opinion and taste).

This gradual transition from sincere cynical skeptic to sincere seeker was critical to the way I was assimilating the information I was gathering from my reading of the Bible and my observations of Christians. From my mid-teen years on I had been/become a pure materialist, not believing there was--or could be--anything beyond the material world. Now I was beginning to be willing to consider evidence for the possibility of a spiritual dimension to existence. This was a thousand football fields away from Jesus, Christianity--or any religion at all--but it was, for my part, a new openness that would set the stage for the experiences and thinking that were to shortly follow.

Father's Day 1972 Revisited, Part 8: Smitten and Searching

I continued to read the gospel accounts in the modern English paperback Bible I'd been given. In my search of the gospel accounts I had found many things, such as walking on water and miraculously feeding five-thousand people, that I rejected outright and some other things, like the parables, that I didn't understand too well, but I was still in search of a good, glaring contradiction I could use. besides keeping my eye peeled for contradictions, the other thing I kept in mind, as I read about Jesus and his teaching, was my friend's challenge that, if Jesus was not all he claimed too be, then he must, logically speaking, be a liar or a lunatic. I was withholding judgment on that score until I'd finished reading the four gospels.

I was now taking the Jesus girl to church every Sunday evening and I was beginning to fall in love with her as well. Although an unabashed atheist and revolutionary, I would sit there with her and her friends during the service, enjoying the music, observing the people and trying to take in the content of the sermon. Being in this particular church--All Saints Episcopal--seemed a strange thing to me on several levels. One was that this was the very church I'd come to with my family when I was a little boy wearing a starched white shirt and a little bow tie. Essentially, nothing about the building had changed in the least since back then. It looked exactly the same. I found myself staring up at those same great big heavy wood beams in the ceiling--just as I'd done as a boy (only now, instead of that starched shirt and plaid bow tie, I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and had long hair and a beard). But if the building was still the same, the service could not have been more different. Instead of an organ and choir, there was a Christian rock band. Instead of a man with a collar intoning and droning on about Gawd, there was a one of the Jesus People--Lonnie Frisbee--in a muslin smock, with shoulder-length hair, beard and sandals passionately preaching like some modern-day John the Baptist. The sermons seemed completely extemporaneous and not done from notes.

Each week the routine was basically the same: the band would do a set of Jesus music for about a half hour, then someone would get up with a guitar and lead everyone in praise choruses interspersed with old hymns, such as, Nothing But the Blood of Jesus. After the music and singing, the hippy-preacher would tell an Old or New Testament story and then he'd explain what this meant to us as individuals living here and now. He might tell the story of David and Goliath and then, coming out from behind the lectern, and with the Bible either still in his hand or tucked under one arm, he would make the transition by saying, "Some of you are just like that little shepherd boy, David--you're facing Goliath-sized problems in your life right now--problems which seem to big for you to handle alone. You may be strung out on drugs or totally bummed out about your messed up family or maybe you're so lonely you just want to curl up and die because you have this giant-size hole inside you and your heart is empty or it's hard as stone--well only God can give you the boldness, the courage and the hope, like David, to come up against your Goliath. Only God's spirit can enable you, by his spirit, to stand up to your giant and put and end to him like David did. And God knows how to take care of giants 'cause he took care of the biggest giants of all--sin and death--that means he took on the sin of the whole world, including yours. He did it by sending his only son, Jesus, to die there on that cross two-thousand years ago. He loved you that much, that he bled and suffered in your place and he died so you could be set free and conquer your giants, and he didn't just die, but he rose up from the grave--he did it to prove he'd conquered death and really was the the son of God, the Messiah, the savior of the world, and you can know him tonight, you can come to him and he will forgive all your sins and cleanse you from the inside out and make you a whole new person--no matter what you've done and no matter how many sins you've committed or how bad they are--he died to pay the penalty for each and every one--and not only that, but he promised to remove them as far as the east is from the west, that's infinitely far, and that means they're totally gone forever--completely forgiven--and forgotten. When you accept his gift of salvation he'll create a new heart in you--he can do it, he has the power to do it--through his spirit--if you'll just come to him tonight, because the Bible says today is the day of salvation, and now is the time to be born again--so just come to him, admit you are a sinner, and ask him to come into your heart and life and forgive all your sins. He wants to set you free from the power of sin and change your life, to make you a new person. Don't put it off. If you are ready to do that tonight--to come to Jesus and be forgiven and start a new life--I just want to pray for you that God would really do a great work in your life and meet you right where you are. You don't have to get yourself all cleaned up first, he loves you just as you are and you can come to him just like you are--with all your sins and junk and he'll do all the changing--he'll do it by sending his spirit to live inside you, so if you want to have a brand new start and if you really want to know the love of God and know you are going to heaven and you want to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, then I invite you to show that by raising your hand and I'm going to pray for you right now that God would do a mighty work in your life--by his Holy Spirit--that he would transform you and give you a whole new life--and if that's what you want tonight, if you are hungry for God and spiritually thirsty, then just raise your hand and I'll pray for you. Jesus said, 'If you confess me before men I will confess you before my father in Heaven, but if you deny me before men I will deny you before my father.' The Bible says, 'the angles rejoice over just one sinner that comes to repentance', so raise your hand if you want to be born again and begin following Jesus tonight. I see your hand brother, I see that hand too... and you, sister, I see your hand also."

Each Sunday evening there would be similar program of music and preaching, followed by the inevitable Billy-Graham-style alter call. Each week ten to fifteen or more people would raise their hands to "receive Christ." The preacher would then ask them to come forward and stand at the front of the church to declare their commitment to Jesus. Then he would lead the group in saying, out loud, the "Sinner's Prayer." He would then give them a Bible and say, "Welcome into the family of God." He'd tell them that now, as new believers, they should pray, read their Bible, fellowship with other believers, and tell their family, friends and others about Jesus.

Every week more and more young people would flock to the church to hear the music and the preaching. Each week a number of them would walk forward to pray the sinner's prayer. For my part, I just took it all in and tried to figure out what--if anything--really happened to those who went forward and why all these young people were always hugging each other and saying things like, "Praise the Lord" to one another. I did have to admit that there was an undeniable and palpable atmosphere of joy and exuberance among them. They also seemed to share a deep bond and sense of strong camaraderie with one another. For someone like me, who was somewhat of a loner, it was both a little weird and a bit attractive at the same time. The Jesus girl--and my own questions about Jesus--would keep me returning to this strange scene week after week. I had however no way of foreseeing the strange and unusual events which awaited and would confront me in the months ahead.

Father's Day 1972 Revisited, Part 7: Altered States

I wasn't buying the miracles I was reading about in the Bible, but the fact that my father and I were getting along seemed to defy, if not any Law of Nature, then at least the laws of our natures. It's not that we had settled any of our our differences, it was that we had an unspoken agreement, for the time being, not to raise them. So we didn't talk about politics or any social issues. I still held very radical views and he still held very conservative ones. Considering our past seven years of anger and estrangement, it seemed to me a minor miracle that my father had invited me to come live with him and his new family. Dad had married Shirley three years back and had acquired four children--three young boys and a little girl--in the bargain. This in itself was completely out of character for a man who liked to quote W.C. Fields, "A man who hates dogs and kids can't be all bad." When we were growing up, dad would sometimes amuse himself and his guests by saying in our presence, "Why don't you kids go play on the freeway?" Now my father had a house full of rug-rats and had softened toward me as well.

This surprising change in my father was, I believe, one of the effects wrought by his new love relationship. His love for Shirley was so life-alteringly profound that, in spite of his antipathy toward children, I'm convinced he'd have married her if she had come with a whole tribe of pygmy headhunters. Not only was he willing to accept her four children as part of the marriage package, but he was genuinely trying to be a father to them as well. Their own father had died of cancer four years before--in the hospital where my dad was administrator. That is how he met Shirley, then a grieving widow. Although dad was trying to be a good father-figure to Shirley's children--ranging in age from three to thirteen--parenting was not something he was very adept at.

His two big disabilities as a parent were that he had next to no patience for children's horse-play and its attendant noise, and that his own father had been distant, cold and even at times cruel. I believe my dad was seeing, in these children, his second chance at parenting, of getting it right. And although his efforts were often awkward or faltering, he was giving it the best effort he was capable of. It was a little odd for me, a product of his first effort at parenting, to watch him try to relate to these kids while being both a loving father-figure and a disciplinarian as well. One minute he'd be taking the little girl tenderly in his arms after she'd skinned her knee but then the next he'd be snapping sharply and loudly at one of the boys for running in the house, "Dammit, I said stop that!" Although it was a bit painful to watch him struggle in his new father-figure role, I was feeling, for the first time, real sympathy for him as a parent because these kids were a very big handful at their ages and, on top of that, the youngest boy, Jimmy, was over-the-top hyperactive. If Jimmy came up to say anything to you he'd be on his tiptoes, rapidly bouncing and shaking his hands in the air. And he was already on Ritalin.

A psychiatrist I recently heard on a radio show said that we'd all be doing a good job as parents if we only passed on half the hang-ups our parents had passed on to us. I am not certain just where I'd stand by that criteria. I suppose this calls for an honest self-evaluation. My fathering may have been marginally better that my father's, but I don't know if I can claim it to be fifty-percent better. I know my father did much better than his father. My father, later in life, made a good and successful effort to get closer to us kids. I hope I can be as successful as he was in this.

Father's Day 1972 Revisited, Part 6: The Hunted Hunter Sets Out

To briefly recap, I had been released from Banning Road Camp (a Riverside County Jail facility) in May of 1971; went to live with my dad in Mira Loma, a rural area of Riverside; met an attractive 17-year old girl who was one of the new Jesus People; had gone with her to one of their gatherings; had been challenged by and old school acquaintance regarding Jesus and the Bible; and had determined to look into the issue for myself.

I had never seriously considered the teachings of Jesus or the claims of Christianity. Now I had been challenged to do so. I imagined this exercise would be an intellectual slam-dunk and that I'd easily find confirmation for my already formed opinions. After a day of job hunting, followed by late afternoon chores around my dad's place, such as cleaning out the stalls and putting the horses' hay in their crib, I was ready to take my first crack at reading the Bible. Shutting the door to my room, I sat on the bed, put the Moody Blues on the turntable and pulled off my dusty boots and sweaty socks. As the first notes of Nights In White Satin bagan to play, I laid myself out across the bed, dropped the paperback Bible I'd been given onto the floor and tentatively peeled back the front cover. I had a pencil at the ready, there for putting check marks in the margins whenever I found a contradiction, flaw or logical fallacy.

The first thing I encountered was a long listing of names of all the ancestors of Jesus, afterward summed up by Matthew saying, "The genealogy of Jesus Christ may thus be traced for fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the deportation to Babylon, and fourteen from the deportation to Christ himself." No contradiction jumped out at me there--and I wasn't about to read all through the Old Testament looking to see if this Jesus family tree I'd just skimmed over was accurate. I'd have to take Matthew at his word on that one. But, how'd he get all this genealogical information anyway? That too was not something I really cared to look into just now. I wasn't out to nit-pick, I was on the hunt for big, fat obvious contradictions.

Next I came to the Snoopy Christmas Special birth of Jesus story. Angels appear to people and you're told an unbelievable virgin birth story, but then I already knew these unbelievable miracles were in the Bible. I had bigger fish to fry. In the Baby Jesus story I found mention of a king named Herod. Here might be a possibility. If there were no historical record such a king ever existed, I suppose that would be a pretty major flaw. I'd have to look into that. Already, in five-minutes of reading I'd discovered that this Jesus character wasn't portrayed as having lived once upon a time somewhere in some vague Middle East, but in a real and specific place at a particular time in recorded history. Certainly skeptics and historians before me had done some serious fact-checking of the gospels. What had they found? I'd have to look into that as well.

Every other verse in Matthew I found him saying that this or that incident fulfilled some prophecy from somewhere else in the Bible. Here was something else for me to check out--at some point anyway. By the time Jesus got himself baptized I'd had enough reading for one session. In this my initial Bible excursion I hadn't bagged any good contradictions, but then again, I'd just begun. There was always tomorrow...

It was getting late, and before going to bed I went out to the back of our half-acre horse ranch, lit a cigarette--a habit I'd begun at around age 14--and put one bare foot on the bottom railing of the corral. Taking a deep inhale of the Marlborough, I began to think about the beautiful young guitar-strumming girl down the street. She said Jesus was her personal savior and Lord and that his love was real and could change a person's life. As I very slowly exhaled the soothing smoke, my horse, Joplin, looked up from the last bits of her hay and began to amble over to me.

For anyone just tuning in, I am doing a multi-part series, Father's Day 1972 Revisited. For several years now, inspired by St. Augustine's Confessions, I have written or rewritten my conversion experience afresh each year. Since this radical turning point in my life had its focus on Father's Day (1972) I am now in the habit of having my thoughts turn back that direction each year as June arrives. This annual writing ritual helps me reflect anew upon God's amazing and magnetic love and how he so marvelously crafts his call to each individual soul.

This little blog--and my small band of loyal readers (all three of you!)--have inspired me to write in a little more detail this year than in years past. Father's Day is on the 21st, so in the weeks prior I will try to progress my story a little ever day or two. Feel free to leave comments or questions as we go along and I will try to answer them. Perhaps you will help me see or think about something I've overlooked.

My father is no longer living. If your father is still with us, I wish you the blessing of appreciating and enjoying him while he remains. On a higher plain, I am reminded how good it is to be loved by the great Father and Shepherd of our souls!

Note: Scroll to bottom to begin with Part 1.