Kidnapped: from Baptist to Catholic

I grew up a fundamentalist Baptist in 1950s Freeport, Illinois. Although I was allowed to play basketball with Mikey Pohill, I couldn't go inside his house. The Pohills were Roman Catholic. If I saw a priest or nun walking toward me downtown, I crossed to the other side of the street. Priests and nuns were known to kidnap Baptists and force them to become papists.

Every August, Guy Libby came through our town and gave a tent revival. The final Saturday night, hosted at the First Baptist Church, was called "Pack-the-Pew Night." Each family was assigned a pew to pack with sinners. I was seven years old when my family won "Pack-the-Pew Night," overflowing into the Vosses' pew behind us, all on account of my inviting Miss Damier, my principal, and Miss Elgin, my sister's fourth-grade teacher, and almost all of our neighbors in a zealous door-to-door campaign. I did not invite the Pohills.

Guy Libby played two trumpets at the same time. A clear part of my calling to become a tent evangelist would be to play two trombones at the same time. Competitiveness is one of the gifts of the Spirit apparently edited out of Saint Paul's list, but I possessed it in abundance notwithstanding.

The prize for winning "Pack-the-Pew Night" was that Guy Libby and Strat Shoefelt, his song leader, would come to your family's home for Sunday dinner the next day. You can't imagine my thrill at meeting these sacred celebrities in person. In truth, I can't imagine the thrill my mother felt hearing the prize announced in front of a packed sanctuary. Could any cook have been more pleased, except, perhaps, Martha and Mary?

I'm afraid the dream of becoming a tent evangelist rivaling Guy Libby proved short-lived. By fourth grade, I'd heard the call to play second base for the Chicago Cubs. (I would skip all Sunday games, of course, as a testimony.) This ambition took deep root until I came face to face with the sobering statistic of going 0 for 4 (years) in Little League. Even for an aspiring Cub, this probably placed the bar too low.

From Christian baseball player, I advanced to Christian trombonist (only one trombone by then, with loads of vibrato, along the lines of Mr. Bill Pearce, whose sacred trombone renditions could be heard over the airwaves of WMBI from Moody Bible Institute), Christian composer, Christian attorney, Christian missionary (preferably some place with plumbing), and, finally, Christian playwright. This last was a turning point. Notice in each instance how the statement of my ambition asserted a parallel reality. In the lexicon of my Baptist boyhood, "Christian" was a magical adjective capable of transforming a professional noun into a vocational calling.

I was a theater major in college, unlikely as that might sound on a fundamentalist campus. I got a good education, performing in eighteen plays over three and a half years, including Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, Chekhov, and O'Neill. I planned on going to the University of Minnesota for graduate school on a McKnight Fellowship in conjunction with the Guthrie Theater.

That's when it hit me. I was rehearsing Creon in Anouilh's Antigone. Walking back to my dorm room around midnight after a grueling rehearsal, I suddenly realized, "I'm not becoming an actor after all. What I'm actually becoming is a writer." Much as I enjoyed performing, I loved rehearsal even more. The best part of acting for me was those six weeks of ingesting another's words, letting the speech, thought, and behavior of a character shape my own language, thinking, and attitudes. (Later, I would come to think of Saint Paul's admonition to discipleship--"Put on the mind of Christ"--as, essentially, a performance metaphor requiring an actor's rigor and discipline).

One of the great things about growing up Baptist is the reverence one develops for individual words. From earliest childhood, I can recall forty-five-minute sermons, twice each Sunday, on the eternal consequences of understanding a single noun, verb, or preposition. Preachers held forth on the authoritative interpretation of a biblical phrase, and I believed that salvation depended on the orthodoxy of one's grammatical parsing. I've been reading as if my life depended on it, ever since.

For a fundamentalist, the act of writing, if engaged in at all, was thought to be more of a righteous crusade than an artful expression. The "word" served as an instrument of evangelism, as in preaching the word or teaching the word, and not as material for poetic, dramatic, or narrative discourse. And even if one wrote for the purpose of evangelism--witness today's bestsellers by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins--the idea was to do it quickly. A fundamentalist had little motivation to perfect one's prose or to revise a phrase; utterance was propelled by apocalyptic urgency, eschatological giddyup.

Pursuing the writer's vocation put me into a theological quandary. As an aspiring novelist--I switched from the dramatic mode to the narrative under the influence of English novelist Charles Williams--I would join the fellowship of those sentenced to myriad tribulations in transit between the capital letter and the period, who weren't finished with a thing until it was done right, even if that meant forgoing the Rapture. The fundamentalist paradigm didn't provide any vocabulary for understanding narrative art.