Dispatch #36
Sunday afternoon, October 13
Princeton, Illinois

And what a remarkable worship service we attended this morning! First Lutheran of Princeton is a congregation with great age, approaching its 150th anniversary; the building itself is something over 100 years, the nave remaining spacious, but the members worshipping in the "Praise" service at 10:30 can fill it nonetheless and represent mostly the younger ages, young families, youth, children.

I sat in the front pew, my extreme left, in order to lay my crutches down and pick them up with some ease, poking no one in the process. I had the pew to myself. More than twenty children plowed forward for the Children's sermon: a lad in a motorized wheelchair, another lad (name Carl Anderson) led forward by his father despite the boy's tallish appearance (whose gait was somehow slurred, causing me to wonder at his motor coordination). Most of the children sat silently on the chancel steps and answered obediently as the sermon went forward before them.

But one child, between three and four years old, knelt erect on the step directly in front of the story-teller, and answered her every question with a crack intelligence and a pressing need to tie all things in his own life to this story and this moment. "Your parents have never starved," said the adult woman, trying to make a point about starvation elsewhere in the world.

"No," the boy said with great earnestness, "and my grandpa never starved, but if they did starve"--and here his eyes grew more solemn than ever--"they would ... die." He said, "Di-i-i-ie."

Over and over again he offered information most personal, never off the adult's major point of the sadness of starvations and of dyings, of life and of death--but she began to ignore him, because her point after all was to the parents, that they give to the Lutheran World Hunger Appeal. Soon the boy was speaking to himself. And to me.

He reminded me of my grandson, Noah, and how much I want to hear his questions, and how trenchantly I want to answer them all. It made me also think that the child's home life must affirm him in all his whims, for clearly he assumed his dialogue to have been accepted and necessary to the progress of the worship of First Lutheran this morning.

At the end of the sermon, this boy skipped back to his parents with the expression of having finished an important word. His father, standing, lifted him up, locking his greater hands under his son's butt. His mother began to scratch his back with her long nails. In a while he saw something of devastating interest to the right of the chancel. He whispered it into his father's ear--then, as his father did not turn to look that way, the child pressed two hands on either side of his father's head, and forcefully turned the man's head to make him see.

After the service the kid performed a straight shot to the back of the nave where drinks and snacks waited. But I raced on crutches after his father to say, "What a kid! Oh, what a marvelous kid!"

Cody Workman is that kid's name. How inquisitive the thrust of his small neck forward! But how fragile in this world is such bright seeking, for any number of things might silence his sharp interrogations: teachers who will make points in spite of the small fountain of comments and questions directly in front of them; adults who will not recognize the gift before them, or else who will take the gift for babbling interruption and squelch it.

But Cody's is a congregation welcoming to those who don't conform to social expectations. Perhaps this is the best place for him.

For the tallish, bespectacled boy whose father had led forward, then led back to the pews again after the children's sermon: that lad broke into a solo of the most perfect pitch. The congregation had sung, "Humble thyself in the sight of the Lord ... And he shall lift you up, higher and higher..."

Into that song we incorporated another: "Our God is an awesome God, Who reigns from heaven above...."

But as soon as we had sung these through several times to completion and to silence, before the preacher could rise to read the Gospel, a beautiful voice took flight among us, and the entire nave of the faithful held its breath. The voice sang the final line as purely as if it were the living flame of a Christ Candle, slowly, a fragrant scent ascending unto God:

"And He shall lift you uu-u-up."

Oh, it hushed my heart, so unanticipated and so pure.

And I asked and I found out that the boy's name is Carl Anderson; that he is autistic; that he will regularly serve by interrupting the worship service with his perfect voice--and who knows, therefore, the full meaning and the depth of his song?

"But," said a gentle man after the service, "whenever he interrupts, well, it just isn't interruption. It fits."

Carl fits. It's likely that Cody will continue, too, to fit.

Oh, and when the pastor stepped into the pulpit to read the Gospel, she accomplished the reading through her fingers. Pastor Barbara Ollila is completely blind. She read the text by braille; by braille she had written her sermon; and by touching braille in a simple notebook she found the words she delivered with an almost grandmotherly consolation unto us.

"I started the seminary late," she said to me smiling, this white-haired woman of ample affections. She is but two years into her congregational ministries, as the "Care Pastor" at First Lutheran--yea, though she was trained in the United Church of Christ.

And there was a man who beat a hand-held drum to the guitars that led us in our singing, a man whose muscle control was constantly interrupted by mischance in his brain, whose rhythm knew almost nothing of the music, but whose spirit knew everything about the gladness of the verses of the music. He wore hearing aids. He smiled to the breaking of his face. He grinned at the congregation. And when the music stopped long enough that the musicians had to sit down, he was led by two women down the chancel step to the pew.

And I had feared that I might, with my two crutches, be conspicuous before such a gathering of Christ's people!

Yes: Cody in this particular family will do well. One doesn't even speak of "tolerance" in a place like this. That's the language of the secular world which drives it home like a spike in human hearts, a command, a shame, a morality as thin as a dime. Rather one speaks of the model of Christ. One lives and loves as the Prince of Peace who shows no partiality. In this place, one speaks merely (grandly) of God.

Walt