C of S 1972-76
After the first year the Cutting Edge lessened in meaning, and I became frustrated with it. I wanted to go further. But virtually everyone was already a member of an existing church, and none felt like coming out, and I didn't feel like attempting to start another church on my own. Bob Pinkston was especially frustrating. A lovely man, he and his wife Olga had done tremendous
things with their lives--missionaries to Korea and to Brazil and a host of other such things. But they were in the twilight. He found the group wonderful just as it was.
Nevertheless I was getting frustrated. I wanted to move on to a deeper experience. I really wanted a church, but the others (for the most part already had a church and our group was kind of extra-curricular. These feelings I had and the split between my needs and those of the others was enhanced by our experiences in Washington, beginning in April of 1972. This was some two years or so after the Cutting Edge had begun.
In addition I was getting pretty frustrated with my job. I never expected to be there ten years, but we were so nicely fixed, nice house, good roots for the children, Ellie very happy, that I stalled about doing anything. However I was beginning to think about taking a year to travel. I suppose I thought we would all become nomads and look over the country for a year, and maybe decide where we wanted to live next. But before this vision could gestate, another fate intervened.
Miriam had been a member of the C of S, and Chris had some experience with it. I had read of it years before. But it seemed like fate or destiny when we met some folks who were especially interested in it, and they in fact invited us to go up for a weekend visit. That weekend changed our lives in an emphatic way.
This group was primarily from First Baptist Church. The only one I remember vividly was the associate pastor, an elderly man, probably a true minister who had served God rather than the banker chairman of the board, and was therefore the associate rather than the chief minister. Like me he was jaded and disillusioned about a number of facets of society. For example he asked me how much the judge charged to get a man off from drunk driving. I was shocked at his cynicism, but knew there was much truth in his attitude.
It was a bitterly cold day as we drove up. They wanted to stop about every hour for a break, so it seemed like it took twice as long as it should have. It began to snow; the windshielf wiper stopped working. I remember someone (was it me?) driving at a low speed with his head stuck out the front window for vision. We finally found someone who could make temporary repairs, and we got to Washington pretty late that night or early in the morning. We got rooms in the Fairfax hotel, across the street from the C of S.
The church had assigned a task force to introduce us, including Betty O Connor, Kathryn Campbell, Mary Jo Cook, and Paul Coggins. We met around the dining room table for a number of hours. They scheduled some free time for Saturday afternoon, and we managed to lose Ellie's purse in a cab. (It came back some weeks later minus the money.) We convened again in the evening. I don't remember much of the conversation around the table, but I do remember about ten o'clock when Paul came over to our room and the three of us joined in prayer. It began a friendship that survived for many years..
The next morning, Sunday,we went to the early service. I instantaneously felt like I had come home. These were my kind of people. They were committed to God, and they were acting out their commitment in very tangible, concrete ways. I don't think I had ever felt quite like that, until that Sunday morning. This is what I had been looking for all my life. When we all sang The Lord's Prayer, it put a lump in my throat.
(Years later Auntie used to ask me to sing the Lord's Prayer the way we used to sing it at C of S, but I never would do it for her.)
Kathryn Campbell must have been the church treasurer. During the second worship service we joined her somewhere upstairs where she was counting the money. We helped her in fact. The upshot of all this was that Kathryn and Paul became intimate friends. I was amazed at the gift of intimacy that these people had. They were ten feet tall, but they were still able to allow me to minister to them. They affirmed me and recognized my identity in a way that no one else ever had.
On the way back we were all rather tired and subdued. The only conversation I remember came when all our Baptist friends agreed that the people at the church were not very friendly. Ellie and I emphatically disagreed. We had made two close friends and made plans to continue the friendship. Looking back on it I can only surmise that these Baptist folk simply didn't have our gift for intimacy. They had their tribal customs, and they didn't find the C of S folks to meet their standard of Southern Baptist hospitality. They didn't hear their 'sound', and found the people foreign. We definitely did hear our 'sound' and felt great kinship with the folks we had met.
After the first year the Cutting Edge lessened in meaning, and I became frustrated with it. I wanted to go further. But virtually everyone was already a member of an existing church, and none felt like coming out, and I didn't feel like attempting to start another church on my own. Bob Pinkston was especially frustrating. A lovely man, he and his wife Olga had done tremendous
things with their lives--missionaries to Korea and to Brazil and a host of other such things. But they were in the twilight. He found the group wonderful just as it was.
Nevertheless I was getting frustrated. I wanted to move on to a deeper experience. I really wanted a church, but the others (for the most part already had a church and our group was kind of extra-curricular. These feelings I had and the split between my needs and those of the others was enhanced by our experiences in Washington, beginning in April of 1972. This was some two years or so after the Cutting Edge had begun.
In addition I was getting pretty frustrated with my job. I never expected to be there ten years, but we were so nicely fixed, nice house, good roots for the children, Ellie very happy, that I stalled about doing anything. However I was beginning to think about taking a year to travel. I suppose I thought we would all become nomads and look over the country for a year, and maybe decide where we wanted to live next. But before this vision could gestate, another fate intervened.
Miriam had been a member of the C of S, and Chris had some experience with it. I had read of it years before. But it seemed like fate or destiny when we met some folks who were especially interested in it, and they in fact invited us to go up for a weekend visit. That weekend changed our lives in an emphatic way.
This group was primarily from First Baptist Church. The only one I remember vividly was the associate pastor, an elderly man, probably a true minister who had served God rather than the banker chairman of the board, and was therefore the associate rather than the chief minister. Like me he was jaded and disillusioned about a number of facets of society. For example he asked me how much the judge charged to get a man off from drunk driving. I was shocked at his cynicism, but knew there was much truth in his attitude.
It was a bitterly cold day as we drove up. They wanted to stop about every hour for a break, so it seemed like it took twice as long as it should have. It began to snow; the windshielf wiper stopped working. I remember someone (was it me?) driving at a low speed with his head stuck out the front window for vision. We finally found someone who could make temporary repairs, and we got to Washington pretty late that night or early in the morning. We got rooms in the Fairfax hotel, across the street from the C of S.
The church had assigned a task force to introduce us, including Betty O Connor, Kathryn Campbell, Mary Jo Cook, and Paul Coggins. We met around the dining room table for a number of hours. They scheduled some free time for Saturday afternoon, and we managed to lose Ellie's purse in a cab. (It came back some weeks later minus the money.) We convened again in the evening. I don't remember much of the conversation around the table, but I do remember about ten o'clock when Paul came over to our room and the three of us joined in prayer. It began a friendship that survived for many years..
The next morning, Sunday,we went to the early service. I instantaneously felt like I had come home. These were my kind of people. They were committed to God, and they were acting out their commitment in very tangible, concrete ways. I don't think I had ever felt quite like that, until that Sunday morning. This is what I had been looking for all my life. When we all sang The Lord's Prayer, it put a lump in my throat.
(Years later Auntie used to ask me to sing the Lord's Prayer the way we used to sing it at C of S, but I never would do it for her.)
Kathryn Campbell must have been the church treasurer. During the second worship service we joined her somewhere upstairs where she was counting the money. We helped her in fact. The upshot of all this was that Kathryn and Paul became intimate friends. I was amazed at the gift of intimacy that these people had. They were ten feet tall, but they were still able to allow me to minister to them. They affirmed me and recognized my identity in a way that no one else ever had.
On the way back we were all rather tired and subdued. The only conversation I remember came when all our Baptist friends agreed that the people at the church were not very friendly. Ellie and I emphatically disagreed. We had made two close friends and made plans to continue the friendship. Looking back on it I can only surmise that these Baptist folk simply didn't have our gift for intimacy. They had their tribal customs, and they didn't find the C of S folks to meet their standard of Southern Baptist hospitality. They didn't hear their 'sound', and found the people foreign. We definitely did hear our 'sound' and felt great kinship with the folks we had met.
I was never really content at Winston-Salem after that weekend. The people were so slow thinking, their accents so banal, their thoughts so banal. Even the Cutting Edge became frustrating.
We planned another visit a couple of months later, and this one almost ended in disaster. My tires were slick, and I knew I shouldn't try to go in the rain storm that was coming. But we pushed on. I got tired of driving and turned the wheel over to Ellie. She drove longer than I should have let her. On an oily slick patch just south of the James we got rear ended by a truck. The car was totaled; Ellie was cut on the face a bit. Otherwise we escaped. It was a traumatic experience. We got a motel that night, and I got very little sleep. Paul had come with us, half reluctantly, and I told him I was glad he was with us. I think he understood. We rented a car and come on home.
Since we couldn't spend much time at the C of S, we tried to bring the C of S to Winston-Salem. Kathryn came down for a few days and visited the Cutting Edge. Then Paul and Kathryn came, and conducted a retreat for us, which we had at the First Presbyterian. We also took a lot of our friends up to the church. Once a large party of us stayed at the farmhouse at Dayspring. We also had Margaret Johnson to Winston-Salem once and Myra Thompson;they both had a special relationship with Dayspring. Louise Baker also came with us for a weekend although this may have been after I went to Washington for my sabbatical.
In August of 1973 I spent a couple of weeks up there. I stayed at Hartnett Hall, an old fashioned type of boarding house two blocks from the church, where Paul Coggins lived. Paul spent a tremendous amount of time with me on that trip. He introduced me to a multitude of people in the church; he had long conversations with me about the life of the church. I thought it was a very good experience for him and for me. Paul gave me a valuable lesson in the meaning of friendship. He extended himself the entire time I was there to make my experience with the church all that it could be.
Paul had had a distinguished career in the Navy, a wife and family, and then met the C of S. As he said, the Pentagon was a jealous mistress. He was trying to go in two different directions. His professional and domestic life unraveled, and when we met him, it appeared that the church was largely his life. He worked at Washington Mill as an inspector 16 hours a week at 4 dollars an hour. Even back in those days that was a modest income, certainly less than a tenth of what he had earned. He lived at Hartnett Hall very modestly. He was flirting with the idea of being a homeless Christian, except that he had a raft of books he hadn't disposed of.
1973-5 My First Year at Washington:
I had come to Washington to explore the idea of spending a sabbatical up there. Paul gave me an excellent introduction to the life of the church, and I felt like my plan would be feasible. I still had quite a problem making up my mind to go through with it. It involved the possibility of uprooting my family from comfortable circumstances, venturing into the unknown with the risk of financial adversity, etc. I labored with this for some time. Two people helped me to come to a positive decision about it. Auntie understood immediately when I presented the problem to her. (God knows she had been through many an upheaval with her husband.) She felt it was perfectly right for me to seek additional meaning in my life in this way. And Joe Petree also gave me affirmation: when I laid before him my quandary he said, "Larry, don't you know that you can't make any mistake that the good Lord can't fix up." That was it! It was a risk; it might be costly, but it promised more than life at Winston-Salem had to offer!
I felt a push from my job as well as the pull to Washington. We had a new Republican administration that proposed to shake us up and make big changes. It meant opportunity for some and disappointment for others. I soon saw that I would be in the second category; junior men would likely be promoted over me. I had been "supervising" alcoholics for over seven years and finding it more and more mechanical.
I remember the dynamics of these feelings vividly. One weekend I was leading a group of friends up to Dayspring, where the excitement was, and I was leaving a dismal scene at the courthouse. I saw the past blowing up in my face and the future opening up.
About this time I heard about the Royal Oak Project Misdemeanant. Judge Keith Leinhouts, lacking adequate institutional resources to address the problems of his community, organized a sort of amateur probation department. I was quite interested in that, informed myself about it, got sent to a couple of conferences, at one of which I met the judge and had a good conversation with him. He was a beautiful man; he had had a great idea, made it work, finally resigned as judge and spent all his time going around the country encouraging others to try it.
Congress had recently passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Program, and the government was shoveling out money to local law enforcement agencies to fight crime. All the P.O.'s of the district were gathered at a Holiday Inn somewhere (we always got a good free feed at these occasions). They set us down and asked us to come up with some plans for new programs in our area. The other P.O.'s hadn't the slightest interest. I wrote a proposal for a volunteer program in Winston Salem. We immediately got an allotment for maybe $100,000 to implement the program.
As in the army, it never pays to volunteer. My proposal won for me a personal trip to Raleigh with my supervisor. When I got to Raleigh, I discovered that the only thing my proposal meant to the state director was that he thought I was trying to cut in on his own proposal. I fell in with the idea to make the WS project a part of his state program, which was the only thing that I could do. The other P.O.'s were right to sit on their hands. I felt like there was no real interest in helping people in the department, just ambitious politicians and time servers.
The department allowed me to go to Memphis for a large conference on the Project Misdemeanant idea (I can't remember whether I got use of the state car). It was dogwood time, and Memphis was super-beautiful. First time I had been in Memphis (Mother's birthplace) since I was about three. I don't remember much about that trip, not much in the way of relationships. The assistant director and someone else found me there to their surprise. So it goes.
David Jones, a wealthy contractor, was named director. It turned out they meant to combine probation, parole and prison. I sensed that this would lead to considerable deterioration, and in retrospect I'm pretty confident that it did.
I wrote Raleigh requesting a year's leave of absence to pursue other activities in Washington. I intimated it related to my regular work, which was half true: Dr. Creswell had led some sort of alcohol rehab work, and quite a few members of the church had recovered from the illness. They might have taught me a good bit, but actually their work was over (or seemed so) by time time I got up there.
A short time before my year was to begin we must have done a weekend up there. At this time we brought Paul Coggins home; he was on his way to St. Petersburg to look after his parents. It wasn't clear at that point that he wasn't going back to Washington. I took him to Oak Ridge to meet Joe Petree; they were two of the men I thought most highly of, and I wanted them to meet. I doubt that either was terribly drawn to the other. I guess we put Paul on a plane for Florida, and we didn't see or hear of him again for a long time.
(In fact it wasn't until 1991 that we looked Paul up in St. Petersburg Beach and reestablished a cordial relationship with him. We began visiting him every winter while we were spending a month in Ocala.)
People at the church felt that Paul had left under mysterious circumstances without clearing his plans with them, and they (especially his mission group) seemed to resent what he had done.
That was true of the whole church community in fact. His associates in mission seemed incensed that he had left like that without a 'by your leave'. I was always surprised at the negative feelings of the good church folk when someone of the in group violated their sense of rightness. The same thing happened a while after with Andy Ringle, a beautiful young man, protege of Paul's, who had become church mouse. He left suddenly, missing some kind of responsibility and they (including Mary Cosby) expressed real hard feelings about it.
About the end of November I began my sabattical. I went first to Hartnett Hall, a large boarding house behind the Fairfax Hotel where Paul Coggins had been living. Through Kathryn Campbell I had met Doug Kelly, a very uncharacteristic Texan. He planned to spend a couple of weeks in Texas, so he lent me his apartment while he was gone. It was just down the hall from Kathyrn's on Florida Ave near the Friends' Meeting.
Kathryn was dying; Mary Hitchcock, the manager of Potters House, came to look in on her every day. They encouraged me to spend some time with her. This was rewarding at first, but we had a sudden, bad misunderstanding. Kathryn was a terrible man-hater (Word was that she had been left at the altar many years before, which soured her on the male sex). Anyway she was 'bad-mouthing' Jack Sargeant or Burt Hitchcock, or Paul Coggins or some one of my male friends, and I told her that she and I were guilty of the same things. She became furious and I excused myself and never went back. She probably had me scheduled to attend a gala dinner at her passing, but of course she cut me out of that. I didn't feel any sense of loss about that, but of course I was sorry to part with a dying person on such a negative note. I trust if she is reading this that she can now laugh about it.
Doug Kelly was one of my earliest friends at the C of S. He was in a kind of quasi-therapy group, actually a Bible study group, that Kathryn conducted. It also included these other men I mentioned above as well as several women. She had invited me to attend probably back in the summer, and I had met all these people.
Doug had been the secretary of Laubach, the great initiator of the adult literacy program. He, Laubach, Fern Edwards and Thelma Hempker had all been at Koininia (as also were the Pinkstons). In fact Doug and Fern were married, but the marriage soon aborted, and thereafter Thelma and Fern shared an apartment. Doug felt that Thelma was guilty of alienation of affections. I don't know anyone else who ever expressed any negative feelings about Thelma; she seemed like a true saint to most of us.
Doug introduced me to the Catholic charismatic prayer meeting of Georgetown (with another one at Catholic U). He referred to them as Catholic 'holy-rollers', a rural south expression of bygone days. He was very fond of them, and probably went to live with a group of them a year or two later, leaving the C of S.
I shared Doug's enthusiasm for this group. I had met quite a few 'neo-pentecostals' through my friendship with Joe Petree, including several Methodist ministers. I always felt great admiration for Joe, but never was very attracted to his neo-pentecostal friends; I tried to share their experience, but simply couldn't feel quite like they felt. But I did feel great about these Catholics. Sort of like the Mexican Baptists in Guadalajara I admired them greatly without belonging to them.
At Georgetown you found about 300 people in a large room sitting in a circle (with quite a few rows). No one seemed to be directing the activities. We sat in silence until someone was led to speak--or sing, or sometimes we'd all give a kind of melodic harmonious 'hum'. These people were worshiping God as best they understood just like the primitive Christians. I could believe it, and found it very moving. Their music was superlative. They borrowed the songs of the Ann Arbor communes, adaptations of Psalms, an eclectic mix of blues, rock, jazz, hymns, etc., some of it very moving. Later I was able to introduce some of it to the C of S worship through our friend Kip Landon, who married Nona Beth Creswell.
The Church of the Saviour was a beautiful place, full of beautiful people. I went there for the relationship with the beautiful people, and I always knew that was the primary attraction for me. Anything that had attracted and gathered so many beautiful people must be worthy of close study. That was my original evaluation of the church. I was fully prepared to give the church my allegiance, such as it is.
As God would have it, one of the first sermons I heard Gordon preach was a report on William Stringfellow's book on Chrstians and Other Strangers in an Alien land. His thesis, reiterated with a lawyer's zeal, was that all principalities (a biblical word by which he seemed to mean institutions) are dedicated to the idolatry of death. Strong words!
I didn't want to hear such a message at that time. I wanted to believe in this beautiful new institution to which I had been newly exposed. But I never forgot it; it has in fact loomed larger and larger in my consciousness since that Sunday in 1973. It's such a big reality there that it's no longer possible for me to view churches in the way most good church people do. The life of the church is contaminated by the 'way of the world', under the 'dominion of the prince of this world'. It's the emperor who is wearing no clothes. Why does no one else see this?
Perhaps I am simply under the dominion of a negative spirit. Perhaps my psyche is just as flawed as the bishop's. His in one way, mine in another. Perhaps we're both lost souls in need of salvation. But I cling to the idea that people exist in a different dimension from institutions (this obsession continuously gets me in trouble with certain people, generally establishment types).
Nevertheless my first year at the C of S (on sabbatical from the probation job) was perhaps the most exciting and fulfilling year of my life. (No doubt the release from the tedium of routine work had a lot to do with that!). I decided, with much fear and trembling to take an apartment at the Ritz; a white girl from the church had just moved into the Ritz, and we were the only whites there. The first night I was nervous, but gradually I got used to it.
I hoped to develop relationships with the other tenants, but it didn't work out that way; I was really too interested in relationships with the church people. So I lived among the blacks and committed my time to making friends with a large number of C of S people. One night I was coming across East Washington, and it seemed like a completely foreign city, and it came to me that if I wanted to help the people there significantly, I would have to become black. And I knew that I had no such desire or intention.
When I first heard about the Ritz/Mozart project, I thought "oh boy, they're going down there." I thought the church was on the point of moving into the area. It didn't happen! The church was a group of upwardly mobile middle class people with liberal inclinations. They wanted to devote an evening each week to helping the poor. I came to feel rather strongly that such help accomplishes little.
I had met Byron Marsh and his daughter, Martha. Byron was a former Lutheran minister; he had gotten too much religion for the Lutherans and more or less lost his place. Like so many of us idealists he was attracted to the church, and he made a commitment to work for a month doing maintenance work on the apartments. Well I went to the Jubilee office to pay my rent, and Terry Flood, the manager, had the understanding that I wasn't supposed to pay rent, so I told her to give the money anonymously to Bryon. He became the paid maintenance worker, a job he had for a year or so. I heard him tell that story about the strange gift he had received often, but I always kept my mouth shut about it.
Byron and I became close friends. We had a strong spiritual affinity. I took my family to visit his at Linthicum, just south of Baltimore. We even considered briefly joining our two families into a sort of intentional community. Unfortunately he and his wife of 20 years or more were at loggerheads, and they eventually split.
I had joined the Thursday night Potters House mission group with a special dispensation from Gordon to become an intern without the usual preparatory classes. The group at that point consisted of Louise Baker and Thelma Hemker. It had been the power house of the church with Gordon Cosby and about 15 others, but Gordon and the 15 others had changed their mission to Jubilee Housing. He had a vision of providing decent housing for the poor of the city. The Thursday night mission group was left with two old ladies. Thelma sounded a call at the morning worship service, and I responded. I also began working one or two days a week as cashier at Potters House, alternating in the role with Thelma. Due to my special credentials as an ordained minister Gordon allowed me to become an intern member without the usual pre-requisite indoctrinations.
Very early in my experience at the C of S I had gotten acquainted with Louise Baker and attended a sharing group she had started. This group was made up of younger people, interested in the church, but not at the point of making the kind of serious commitment the church required. Louise was willing to be present to them and provide hospitality. This fit in very closely with my own values and interests, and Louise and I became partners in a common mission called Gateway. (For the first year or so it had no credentials as a mission group; to be a mission group you had to have two full church members as a minimum, and we had only Louise Baker, a single old lady more or less avoided by most of the members.
Louise was a dear old semi-pixilated lady from Macon Georgia, the beloved daughter of a country doctor. She had married briefly very early in life, came to Washington as a government girl, spent her life there, and when I met her she was well up in her late seventies. She had been one of the earlier members of the church; nevertheless she came through to me as something of a wallflower.
From this role she discovered a calling to the new people, as did I. We were together on mission to the 'new people' for several years although most of the time with a strained relationship. I found it hard to be patient with her 'tapes', a disability of age, and when I organized the 'Second Step', she took this as an affront and never could quite forgive me thereafter. She went back to Macon a couple of years before she died to live with her niece, a lovely, caring person.
I worked hard to rehabilitate the Thursday night Potters House group with what I thought was considerable success. I recruited a number of younger people previously uncommited to the church's activities. Not eligible to be intern members, they nevertheless came to help with the work, and I felt an obligation to give them pastoral and spiritual guidance. It was an incipient mission group, but without meeting the formal qualifications for such.
The third or fourth weekend I went back to Winston-Salem. I was beginning a two year commute between the two cities. During this period Ellie was very patient, kept the family going, and in fact learned that she could handle things very well by herself.
When I returned from that first trip home, I learned that Gordon and his most bosom friends, such as Terry Flood, had come back to the Thursday night group, and that it had become a silent group. I was free to remain and encouraged to leave if I didn't like the silence.
This was a bitter pill for me and began a misunderstanding with Gordon from which we never recovered. I remained, but I became something of a subversive. I had already recruited a pretty good group of younger people to operate Potters House and was looking forward to providing them with guidance and spiritual direction. After a few weeks I began meeting with them during the mission group hour, after which we would join the mission group and assist them in the operation of the coffee house for the next four hours. In the C of S jargon such a group was called a task force.
A couple of friends helped me over this trouble. In particular John Clagett, a flaming liberal who had become a close friend, helped me to see the situation in a way that drew some of the pain. He said "Larry, you're person centered; Gordon is program centered." A few short words, but it told the whole story.
John was what I called a true poet, not in words, but in his life. At one point he and his wife, another Eleanor, virtually invited us to move our family in with them, providing us shelter in very difficult circumstances. It was an impractical idea, and of course we didn't puruse it very far.
John was another one of the those people for whom the romance of the C of S ideas disrupted his life in radical ways: his marriage broke up; he made a valiant attempt to live as a radical Christian.
So early in my year of sabbatical at the Church of the Saviour I became a sort of Peter Pan, relating to the new people on the periphery who were interested in the church and looking for spiritual values. This ministry was to some extent a consequence of the earlier experience with Louise Baker's little sharing group. Louise and I actually had little in common. But we were both deep southerners, and we both had a strong call to hospitality to the stranger.
We planned another visit a couple of months later, and this one almost ended in disaster. My tires were slick, and I knew I shouldn't try to go in the rain storm that was coming. But we pushed on. I got tired of driving and turned the wheel over to Ellie. She drove longer than I should have let her. On an oily slick patch just south of the James we got rear ended by a truck. The car was totaled; Ellie was cut on the face a bit. Otherwise we escaped. It was a traumatic experience. We got a motel that night, and I got very little sleep. Paul had come with us, half reluctantly, and I told him I was glad he was with us. I think he understood. We rented a car and come on home.
Since we couldn't spend much time at the C of S, we tried to bring the C of S to Winston-Salem. Kathryn came down for a few days and visited the Cutting Edge. Then Paul and Kathryn came, and conducted a retreat for us, which we had at the First Presbyterian. We also took a lot of our friends up to the church. Once a large party of us stayed at the farmhouse at Dayspring. We also had Margaret Johnson to Winston-Salem once and Myra Thompson;they both had a special relationship with Dayspring. Louise Baker also came with us for a weekend although this may have been after I went to Washington for my sabbatical.
In August of 1973 I spent a couple of weeks up there. I stayed at Hartnett Hall, an old fashioned type of boarding house two blocks from the church, where Paul Coggins lived. Paul spent a tremendous amount of time with me on that trip. He introduced me to a multitude of people in the church; he had long conversations with me about the life of the church. I thought it was a very good experience for him and for me. Paul gave me a valuable lesson in the meaning of friendship. He extended himself the entire time I was there to make my experience with the church all that it could be.
Paul had had a distinguished career in the Navy, a wife and family, and then met the C of S. As he said, the Pentagon was a jealous mistress. He was trying to go in two different directions. His professional and domestic life unraveled, and when we met him, it appeared that the church was largely his life. He worked at Washington Mill as an inspector 16 hours a week at 4 dollars an hour. Even back in those days that was a modest income, certainly less than a tenth of what he had earned. He lived at Hartnett Hall very modestly. He was flirting with the idea of being a homeless Christian, except that he had a raft of books he hadn't disposed of.
1973-5 My First Year at Washington:
I had come to Washington to explore the idea of spending a sabbatical up there. Paul gave me an excellent introduction to the life of the church, and I felt like my plan would be feasible. I still had quite a problem making up my mind to go through with it. It involved the possibility of uprooting my family from comfortable circumstances, venturing into the unknown with the risk of financial adversity, etc. I labored with this for some time. Two people helped me to come to a positive decision about it. Auntie understood immediately when I presented the problem to her. (God knows she had been through many an upheaval with her husband.) She felt it was perfectly right for me to seek additional meaning in my life in this way. And Joe Petree also gave me affirmation: when I laid before him my quandary he said, "Larry, don't you know that you can't make any mistake that the good Lord can't fix up." That was it! It was a risk; it might be costly, but it promised more than life at Winston-Salem had to offer!
I felt a push from my job as well as the pull to Washington. We had a new Republican administration that proposed to shake us up and make big changes. It meant opportunity for some and disappointment for others. I soon saw that I would be in the second category; junior men would likely be promoted over me. I had been "supervising" alcoholics for over seven years and finding it more and more mechanical.
I remember the dynamics of these feelings vividly. One weekend I was leading a group of friends up to Dayspring, where the excitement was, and I was leaving a dismal scene at the courthouse. I saw the past blowing up in my face and the future opening up.
About this time I heard about the Royal Oak Project Misdemeanant. Judge Keith Leinhouts, lacking adequate institutional resources to address the problems of his community, organized a sort of amateur probation department. I was quite interested in that, informed myself about it, got sent to a couple of conferences, at one of which I met the judge and had a good conversation with him. He was a beautiful man; he had had a great idea, made it work, finally resigned as judge and spent all his time going around the country encouraging others to try it.
Congress had recently passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Program, and the government was shoveling out money to local law enforcement agencies to fight crime. All the P.O.'s of the district were gathered at a Holiday Inn somewhere (we always got a good free feed at these occasions). They set us down and asked us to come up with some plans for new programs in our area. The other P.O.'s hadn't the slightest interest. I wrote a proposal for a volunteer program in Winston Salem. We immediately got an allotment for maybe $100,000 to implement the program.
As in the army, it never pays to volunteer. My proposal won for me a personal trip to Raleigh with my supervisor. When I got to Raleigh, I discovered that the only thing my proposal meant to the state director was that he thought I was trying to cut in on his own proposal. I fell in with the idea to make the WS project a part of his state program, which was the only thing that I could do. The other P.O.'s were right to sit on their hands. I felt like there was no real interest in helping people in the department, just ambitious politicians and time servers.
The department allowed me to go to Memphis for a large conference on the Project Misdemeanant idea (I can't remember whether I got use of the state car). It was dogwood time, and Memphis was super-beautiful. First time I had been in Memphis (Mother's birthplace) since I was about three. I don't remember much about that trip, not much in the way of relationships. The assistant director and someone else found me there to their surprise. So it goes.
David Jones, a wealthy contractor, was named director. It turned out they meant to combine probation, parole and prison. I sensed that this would lead to considerable deterioration, and in retrospect I'm pretty confident that it did.
I wrote Raleigh requesting a year's leave of absence to pursue other activities in Washington. I intimated it related to my regular work, which was half true: Dr. Creswell had led some sort of alcohol rehab work, and quite a few members of the church had recovered from the illness. They might have taught me a good bit, but actually their work was over (or seemed so) by time time I got up there.
A short time before my year was to begin we must have done a weekend up there. At this time we brought Paul Coggins home; he was on his way to St. Petersburg to look after his parents. It wasn't clear at that point that he wasn't going back to Washington. I took him to Oak Ridge to meet Joe Petree; they were two of the men I thought most highly of, and I wanted them to meet. I doubt that either was terribly drawn to the other. I guess we put Paul on a plane for Florida, and we didn't see or hear of him again for a long time.
(In fact it wasn't until 1991 that we looked Paul up in St. Petersburg Beach and reestablished a cordial relationship with him. We began visiting him every winter while we were spending a month in Ocala.)
People at the church felt that Paul had left under mysterious circumstances without clearing his plans with them, and they (especially his mission group) seemed to resent what he had done.
That was true of the whole church community in fact. His associates in mission seemed incensed that he had left like that without a 'by your leave'. I was always surprised at the negative feelings of the good church folk when someone of the in group violated their sense of rightness. The same thing happened a while after with Andy Ringle, a beautiful young man, protege of Paul's, who had become church mouse. He left suddenly, missing some kind of responsibility and they (including Mary Cosby) expressed real hard feelings about it.
About the end of November I began my sabattical. I went first to Hartnett Hall, a large boarding house behind the Fairfax Hotel where Paul Coggins had been living. Through Kathryn Campbell I had met Doug Kelly, a very uncharacteristic Texan. He planned to spend a couple of weeks in Texas, so he lent me his apartment while he was gone. It was just down the hall from Kathyrn's on Florida Ave near the Friends' Meeting.
Kathryn was dying; Mary Hitchcock, the manager of Potters House, came to look in on her every day. They encouraged me to spend some time with her. This was rewarding at first, but we had a sudden, bad misunderstanding. Kathryn was a terrible man-hater (Word was that she had been left at the altar many years before, which soured her on the male sex). Anyway she was 'bad-mouthing' Jack Sargeant or Burt Hitchcock, or Paul Coggins or some one of my male friends, and I told her that she and I were guilty of the same things. She became furious and I excused myself and never went back. She probably had me scheduled to attend a gala dinner at her passing, but of course she cut me out of that. I didn't feel any sense of loss about that, but of course I was sorry to part with a dying person on such a negative note. I trust if she is reading this that she can now laugh about it.
Doug Kelly was one of my earliest friends at the C of S. He was in a kind of quasi-therapy group, actually a Bible study group, that Kathryn conducted. It also included these other men I mentioned above as well as several women. She had invited me to attend probably back in the summer, and I had met all these people.
Doug had been the secretary of Laubach, the great initiator of the adult literacy program. He, Laubach, Fern Edwards and Thelma Hempker had all been at Koininia (as also were the Pinkstons). In fact Doug and Fern were married, but the marriage soon aborted, and thereafter Thelma and Fern shared an apartment. Doug felt that Thelma was guilty of alienation of affections. I don't know anyone else who ever expressed any negative feelings about Thelma; she seemed like a true saint to most of us.
Doug introduced me to the Catholic charismatic prayer meeting of Georgetown (with another one at Catholic U). He referred to them as Catholic 'holy-rollers', a rural south expression of bygone days. He was very fond of them, and probably went to live with a group of them a year or two later, leaving the C of S.
I shared Doug's enthusiasm for this group. I had met quite a few 'neo-pentecostals' through my friendship with Joe Petree, including several Methodist ministers. I always felt great admiration for Joe, but never was very attracted to his neo-pentecostal friends; I tried to share their experience, but simply couldn't feel quite like they felt. But I did feel great about these Catholics. Sort of like the Mexican Baptists in Guadalajara I admired them greatly without belonging to them.
At Georgetown you found about 300 people in a large room sitting in a circle (with quite a few rows). No one seemed to be directing the activities. We sat in silence until someone was led to speak--or sing, or sometimes we'd all give a kind of melodic harmonious 'hum'. These people were worshiping God as best they understood just like the primitive Christians. I could believe it, and found it very moving. Their music was superlative. They borrowed the songs of the Ann Arbor communes, adaptations of Psalms, an eclectic mix of blues, rock, jazz, hymns, etc., some of it very moving. Later I was able to introduce some of it to the C of S worship through our friend Kip Landon, who married Nona Beth Creswell.
The Church of the Saviour was a beautiful place, full of beautiful people. I went there for the relationship with the beautiful people, and I always knew that was the primary attraction for me. Anything that had attracted and gathered so many beautiful people must be worthy of close study. That was my original evaluation of the church. I was fully prepared to give the church my allegiance, such as it is.
As God would have it, one of the first sermons I heard Gordon preach was a report on William Stringfellow's book on Chrstians and Other Strangers in an Alien land. His thesis, reiterated with a lawyer's zeal, was that all principalities (a biblical word by which he seemed to mean institutions) are dedicated to the idolatry of death. Strong words!
I didn't want to hear such a message at that time. I wanted to believe in this beautiful new institution to which I had been newly exposed. But I never forgot it; it has in fact loomed larger and larger in my consciousness since that Sunday in 1973. It's such a big reality there that it's no longer possible for me to view churches in the way most good church people do. The life of the church is contaminated by the 'way of the world', under the 'dominion of the prince of this world'. It's the emperor who is wearing no clothes. Why does no one else see this?
Perhaps I am simply under the dominion of a negative spirit. Perhaps my psyche is just as flawed as the bishop's. His in one way, mine in another. Perhaps we're both lost souls in need of salvation. But I cling to the idea that people exist in a different dimension from institutions (this obsession continuously gets me in trouble with certain people, generally establishment types).
Nevertheless my first year at the C of S (on sabbatical from the probation job) was perhaps the most exciting and fulfilling year of my life. (No doubt the release from the tedium of routine work had a lot to do with that!). I decided, with much fear and trembling to take an apartment at the Ritz; a white girl from the church had just moved into the Ritz, and we were the only whites there. The first night I was nervous, but gradually I got used to it.
I hoped to develop relationships with the other tenants, but it didn't work out that way; I was really too interested in relationships with the church people. So I lived among the blacks and committed my time to making friends with a large number of C of S people. One night I was coming across East Washington, and it seemed like a completely foreign city, and it came to me that if I wanted to help the people there significantly, I would have to become black. And I knew that I had no such desire or intention.
When I first heard about the Ritz/Mozart project, I thought "oh boy, they're going down there." I thought the church was on the point of moving into the area. It didn't happen! The church was a group of upwardly mobile middle class people with liberal inclinations. They wanted to devote an evening each week to helping the poor. I came to feel rather strongly that such help accomplishes little.
I had met Byron Marsh and his daughter, Martha. Byron was a former Lutheran minister; he had gotten too much religion for the Lutherans and more or less lost his place. Like so many of us idealists he was attracted to the church, and he made a commitment to work for a month doing maintenance work on the apartments. Well I went to the Jubilee office to pay my rent, and Terry Flood, the manager, had the understanding that I wasn't supposed to pay rent, so I told her to give the money anonymously to Bryon. He became the paid maintenance worker, a job he had for a year or so. I heard him tell that story about the strange gift he had received often, but I always kept my mouth shut about it.
Byron and I became close friends. We had a strong spiritual affinity. I took my family to visit his at Linthicum, just south of Baltimore. We even considered briefly joining our two families into a sort of intentional community. Unfortunately he and his wife of 20 years or more were at loggerheads, and they eventually split.
I had joined the Thursday night Potters House mission group with a special dispensation from Gordon to become an intern without the usual preparatory classes. The group at that point consisted of Louise Baker and Thelma Hemker. It had been the power house of the church with Gordon Cosby and about 15 others, but Gordon and the 15 others had changed their mission to Jubilee Housing. He had a vision of providing decent housing for the poor of the city. The Thursday night mission group was left with two old ladies. Thelma sounded a call at the morning worship service, and I responded. I also began working one or two days a week as cashier at Potters House, alternating in the role with Thelma. Due to my special credentials as an ordained minister Gordon allowed me to become an intern member without the usual pre-requisite indoctrinations.
Very early in my experience at the C of S I had gotten acquainted with Louise Baker and attended a sharing group she had started. This group was made up of younger people, interested in the church, but not at the point of making the kind of serious commitment the church required. Louise was willing to be present to them and provide hospitality. This fit in very closely with my own values and interests, and Louise and I became partners in a common mission called Gateway. (For the first year or so it had no credentials as a mission group; to be a mission group you had to have two full church members as a minimum, and we had only Louise Baker, a single old lady more or less avoided by most of the members.
Louise was a dear old semi-pixilated lady from Macon Georgia, the beloved daughter of a country doctor. She had married briefly very early in life, came to Washington as a government girl, spent her life there, and when I met her she was well up in her late seventies. She had been one of the earlier members of the church; nevertheless she came through to me as something of a wallflower.
From this role she discovered a calling to the new people, as did I. We were together on mission to the 'new people' for several years although most of the time with a strained relationship. I found it hard to be patient with her 'tapes', a disability of age, and when I organized the 'Second Step', she took this as an affront and never could quite forgive me thereafter. She went back to Macon a couple of years before she died to live with her niece, a lovely, caring person.
I worked hard to rehabilitate the Thursday night Potters House group with what I thought was considerable success. I recruited a number of younger people previously uncommited to the church's activities. Not eligible to be intern members, they nevertheless came to help with the work, and I felt an obligation to give them pastoral and spiritual guidance. It was an incipient mission group, but without meeting the formal qualifications for such.
The third or fourth weekend I went back to Winston-Salem. I was beginning a two year commute between the two cities. During this period Ellie was very patient, kept the family going, and in fact learned that she could handle things very well by herself.
When I returned from that first trip home, I learned that Gordon and his most bosom friends, such as Terry Flood, had come back to the Thursday night group, and that it had become a silent group. I was free to remain and encouraged to leave if I didn't like the silence.
This was a bitter pill for me and began a misunderstanding with Gordon from which we never recovered. I remained, but I became something of a subversive. I had already recruited a pretty good group of younger people to operate Potters House and was looking forward to providing them with guidance and spiritual direction. After a few weeks I began meeting with them during the mission group hour, after which we would join the mission group and assist them in the operation of the coffee house for the next four hours. In the C of S jargon such a group was called a task force.
A couple of friends helped me over this trouble. In particular John Clagett, a flaming liberal who had become a close friend, helped me to see the situation in a way that drew some of the pain. He said "Larry, you're person centered; Gordon is program centered." A few short words, but it told the whole story.
John was what I called a true poet, not in words, but in his life. At one point he and his wife, another Eleanor, virtually invited us to move our family in with them, providing us shelter in very difficult circumstances. It was an impractical idea, and of course we didn't puruse it very far.
John was another one of the those people for whom the romance of the C of S ideas disrupted his life in radical ways: his marriage broke up; he made a valiant attempt to live as a radical Christian.
So early in my year of sabbatical at the Church of the Saviour I became a sort of Peter Pan, relating to the new people on the periphery who were interested in the church and looking for spiritual values. This ministry was to some extent a consequence of the earlier experience with Louise Baker's little sharing group. Louise and I actually had little in common. But we were both deep southerners, and we both had a strong call to hospitality to the stranger.
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