Two Grandmothers

    Share the gospel at all times. Use words if necessary.
                              Variously attributed to St. Francis of Assisi

     Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? ...
     Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
                                Baptismal Service, Episcopal Book Of Common Prayer 


     In my boyhood years, a child's experience of family life was largely matriarchal. Thus I remember my two grandmothers, especially, as bookends on early lessons in the difference between doctrine and faith.
     My father's parents lived in a middle-sized southern town. My grandfather was an accountant, my grandmother a housewife.
     She kept one foot in old ways and another in the fresh ones emerging in  the  New South of the 1950's.  Long after electric refrigerators were commonly available, she preserved food in an old-fashioned icebox. The iceman came regularly with his huge tongs to put in a fresh block, remove the remnant of the old one and empty the drip pan.
     On the other hand, she was quick to adopt a then-newfangled cooking device -- the pressure cooker. People said it was the equivalent of putting a bomb on your stove-top. She nonetheless used it early and often, and clucked at those who worried with the loving smile that was her hallmark.
     I loved spending after-school time with them. They were by nature gentle, nurturing people. And having reared three sons, they had a houseful of books that were made for me. I spent hours with an old encyclopedia for children called The Book of Knowledge. Through adventure tales of all kinds (the westerns were best) I nourished my love of storytelling.
     Much as I loved them and their house, I avoided spending weekends there if I gracefully could. They were strictly disciplined churchgoers.  This meant that I could not go on Sunday afternoon to attend any of my beloved movies. One had to keep the Sabbath. And it meant that I had to go with them to services on Sunday morning.
     They were old-timers at an historic, mainline protestant church. It was for me a tedious place. Also I was bothered, in a vague, pre-adolescent way, by sensing there a disconnect of word from deed.  As I experienced the behavior of the burghers in the pews, hallways and classrooms, it seemed that in matters of loving-kindness they might be longer on precept than example.
    Thus my grandparents' devotion to the place was a puzzle.  Loving-kindness was their stock in trade.  The dour atmosphere of the church didn't square with my grandmother's cheerful, charitable strength -- much less with the saucy love of life she displayed when she made my grandfather blush by flirting with him in public.
     Meanwhile, my mother's parents were small farmers and country storekeepers.  They kept pigs and chickens. They kept what they called a garden, though it must have covered nearly an acre. From these resources they obtained much of their own food. Each season had its mainstay purpose: planting, tending, harvesting, butchering, canning, curing, storing.
     Here again, my portion of life was largely matriarchal. This grandmother was the wiry, hard-working product of a hand-to-mouth rural upbringing. She helped with the animals and the store, tended the garden, reared four children, kept the house.
      Preparation of each day's meals could be a chore of many hours for her, as much of the food might have to be harvested before it could be prepared. A Sunday chicken dinner routinely meant catching, killing and cleaning the birds, from the feathers onward. Though her kitchen was fully equipped, she also kept there a relic of her childhood ways -- a huge, iron coal-burning stove. It helped to heat one end of a house that had no central furnace. And she said it was the only proper thing for making her cornbread.
     Her days were chock full of work. Yet there was always time to exemplify loving your neighbor. No need of friend or family was too small -- or too great -- for her to extend an offer of help. She was a regular visitor to my grandfather's lonely and reclusive spinster sisters. She kept grandchildren while their parents worked at getting a start in life. When a black employee fell ill, she moved across the tracks -- literally -- to live in the woman's home, nurse her to health and take care of her children.
     This was the sharpest kind of departure from the segregated racial norms of the time and place. I had earlier learned the hard way how much my grandmother hated them. In those days, the n-word was such a commonplace that I didn't realize it was an epithet. One day, as little boys will do, I decided it might be time to try out some grownup words. I used the n-word in front of her. Without a hint of warning, this woman I loved and admired backhanded me across the face.
     My grandmother was an unusually fine human being. Yet apart from weddings and funerals, I never knew her to enter a church or even speak of one.  As I grew up, we became especially close, and eventually I decided I could risk crossing a private, personal line. I asked her point blank if she ever thought about going to church. "Sometimes," she said with a small smile that amounted to changing the subject.
     And so my two grandmothers represented both example and puzzle to me.  My city grandmother was observant of doctrine yet above it.  Among my country grandmother's personal qualities was something special. Everyone who knew her said so. If required to name it now, I would call it a workaday manifestation of the proper spirit of the Christian gospels. But I don't think she would have called it that, or agreed for anyone else to.
     Along my own search for a path I have learned that the church, being filled with human beings, can behave well or badly. I have learned that those who involve themselves in the church may there find faith, lose faith, or go through motions but be unaffected. And I have learned that the most faithful among my friends call that aspect of their lives a journey.  By this, I think, they mean to note that true journeys involve work and struggle, and  that among the discoveries of a true journey are questions as well as answers.
     My grandmothers would not have put so many words to it. At the heart of their wonderful grace they were simple people. But I think they would have agreed with the idea of the thing.
     And I think St. Francis would have liked them.