Dispatch #8
Wednesday, August 28
Sugar Creek Camp, Wisconsin

From mile 317 to mile 378 today. Overcast, which was fortunate, since the ridges and hills between Mauston and this place are a constant taxation: long, curving, exhausting. (Is this becoming a theme?) Downhill I hit speeds, for the first time, of 38 mph. Uphill, in my granniest gear, I pumped between 4 and 8 mph. Left Mauston at 8:30, and arrived here 2:35. Now (about 4 p.m.) I sit to write you.

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Yesternoon, while I was discussing things with the clergy (Lutheran, Methodist, Nazarene, Baptist) who serve in the Mauston area, Intern Susan Montgomery asked an excellent question.

"When we preach," she said (I'm paraphrasing), "we have the pericope and our people as word and context for our sermons. But you don't have an immediate congregation for shaping your material on Lutheran Vespers. How can you know that your words speak to everyone else's experience? How do you choose topics?"

First, I praise her sense of the sources of sermons and the garden wherein its topics grow.

Second, I explain something of my methods: I study, I pick, I present the experiences that all humanity cannot help but encounter. It is the same, I said, as with any sort of artistry: that work can speak across cultures and ages and classes, which seizes, for example, upon the relationships which must shape a human in the first place.

If I wave to the Amish who share the road with me--they behind four to eight legs, I upon a bare two, and those unhooved--and if the mother and her children wave back to me, how much of that event is experienced differently between us, and how much is experienced the same? I believe that the percentage of similarity is vastly greater than the percentage of difference--the difference that would make a wave an alien thing for one of us. I live and act and write and speak in that belief.

When Thanne and I were spending some time, discharging some duties, in Cameroon, West Africa, one of the congregations of Garoua Boulai invited me to preach on a Sunday. There would, of course, be translation since the tribal language was Baya and the language used by all people of that country together was French. Differences.

And the way in which these congregations received at least one of their money offerings was an oddness, too, to me. A woman might begin to dance in the chancel area, dance beautifully, dance sinuously, dance strenuously enough to raise a moist glow upon her skin. While, then, she is dancing, members of the congregations, male and female alike, will come forward with coins, their offerings, which they then stick to the dancer's humid flesh, wherever flesh was visible. A little more exciting, perhaps, than brass plates or woven baskets or purple plush pockets at the ends of poles.

Yes, and the way the worship service at which I was to preach began could have made me feel alien and different at the root from these folks.

There were three choirs. Each choir's instrument was a single drum, but one drum in the back of their glorious train sounded to me as if four people were playing at different, integrated rhythms, different strike-tones. These three choirs began the service ... they outside while the rest of us waited inside. One after the other, they danced their ways into the building, slowly, with full voices singing, three steps forward, two steps backward and buckling at the waists at the back-step; down the aisle they came, past my elbow at the aisle-side end of the very front (backless) bench.

The last of the choirs to enter was composed of children whose line was lighter, happier, raggedier than the other two. As she passed me, a girl-child not more than seven years old brushed my elbow--whether on purpose or by accident, I know not. But I turned and looked and saw a child of a light beechwood complexion, her face rounded and tender, making perfect dimples in the center of each cheek. She fixed her eyes on me, even when her choir stepped up into the chancel to take singing positions. Then, just as soon as her line was established and made straight, she smiled! The child bestowed upon me the sudden bloom of a smile which, to me, was marvelously familiar. The smile made her, as it were, my daughter; and then nothing she did thereafter could make her seem foreign to me again. When I preached through the interpreter, I made a joke which forced that poor fellow to repeat in Baya words which must make the speaker of them seem straightway silly--and the child opened her mouth with a bark of sudden laughter. It astonished her and delighted me, for these things are universal. Relationships even but lately engaged, between people who cannot even speak the same language, are genuine and a perfect union of God's Images wherever the meetings occur.

And when all the parishioners began to sing, in Baya, "What A Friend We Have In Jesus," well, I wept. Their harmonies were not mine; yet I learned them instantly, and in several languages we trusted in one being, sharing weakness and our heavy burdens, our cumbered lives, our cares. One song, one music, one Christ, and every difference vanished and she and I smiled at one another at a lengthening, marvelous "Amen."

Know relationships, parental, grandparental, filial, fraternal, marital, familial, friendly, neighborly, cross-generational; know generations as you have yourself experienced them; learn how to read and to discuss and to re-present them in story, and you have learned how to speak to the entire family of God, who is creator of all.

No: differences are presumptive. And the more we but presume them to exist, the more they do, and the deeper entrenched they become. But presume similarities and union, and that presumption will straightway be a truth to live by.

In my town of Valparaiso a man wrote a letter to the editor in which (magnanimously, as surely he saw it) he said that people of Gary could certainly come and live in his city--if only they would first learn our ways, and act uprightly and choose a moral existence. Behind this sentiment was his unspoken presumption of the differences, between himself and the citizens of Gary, who are predominantly African American. He might have started with the similarities and it would have been impossible to give offense. For, more than presuming mere differences, he also presumed his own superiority, and could see no other solution to the breach between himself and others than that others must conform to his standards. And the corollary to that thought is this: that any such difference is more than a various behavior: it is a moral failing on the part of these others! He, my dear letter writer, is right and they are wrong. Deadly is this attitude.

But if he had watched for the smile of a child and extrapolated from that simple similarity; if he had presumed the sacred sameness of all God's people, he would be less fearful, less scolding, less inclined to demand walls between himself and others, between Gary and Valparaiso, and community would spring up where ditches had been dug.

This is what I start with when I conceive of my topic for Lutheran Vespers: that similarities allow the sharing of many stories, and that differences make an art of us all, a weaving. For if Eve had been precisely like Adam, there would have been neither growth nor love, but pretty mirrors and a vast boredom.

Walt