My mother maintained a reverently religious household and is convinced to this day that I teeter on the razor’s edge of falling from grace. While I admit that I do not actively attend church, if I did, Mom is certain that world balance would be restored in myself, and potentially the universe; the slight wobble in the earth’s rotation known to scientists might even correct itself. What my mother does not realize is that despite living miles and years from my younger days of church in a small farming community, the upbringing had a strong and lasting effect.

To my knowledge, alcohol only touched my mother’s lips twice in her life, and only in her later years when she was a widow during an “experimental phase”. Even then, and I was a witness for one of the events, she only took a sip of alcohol when somebody else repeatedly insistence, declining a second sip through puckered lips. Mom was the daughter of very religiously devout parents who never drank and eyed dancing suspiciously due to the slippery slope of such social functions in general that were outside of the watchful eye of church elders. Whenever The Lord was mentioned in my grandparent’s home, the palpable weight of a somber reverence entered the room. Meals did not happen without slowly and deliberately taking time for a prayer. Family prayer happened whenever it was thought that God’s help was needed. And the same went for Mom’s house. Dad skirted the edge of blasphemy by keeping a case of Heineken in the basement, which took him two years to drink. Most people in our farming community never admitted to “drinking”. Each town in the area had exactly one “Pool Hall” where those of lower repute would visit, but discretely. People vaguely implied their dissatisfaction over a liquor store on the outskirts of town (but secretly admired the new truck the owner drove). Public parties rarely had alcohol, unless it was “one of THOSE parties” at the legion hall.

It only made sense that my home town was still divided about alcohol after 70 years. In the early 1900s, the town literally was two separate towns, one “wet” and one “dry”, with a block wide No-Mans-Land down the middle. Each town had its own name. When alcohol won out, the town became one, the deep trench down the middle of No-Mans-Land was filled in, and the land sold as town lots. The church I would attended decades later was built on property in No-Mans-Land, a small windfall from alcohol having triumphed (for now).

My father was the great grandson of a Methodist minister from the Oklahoma Territories, but you would not know it by his ability to turn the air blue with the swearing required to be a farmer. This put him at odds with my mother, despite his efforts to swear out of earshot. Dad, like many farmers, had determined that attending Sunday church was counter productive to him being the steward of the land that the Bible talked about. After all, God did command Adam to “subdue the beasts of the Earth”, which meant that Dad was off the hook on going to church on Sunday, right? Not in Mom’s book. For my mother, the expression, “come hell or high water” described the only things that would keep her from church. On one particular winter Sunday, it had showed heavily for two days prior and the roads were covered with at least a foot of snow. Being 23 miles in the country from town, my brother and I thought it would be a cozy morning of playing at home and no church. Besides, the family sort of attended church before the actual church since the TV on Sunday mornings was dedicated to Pastor Billy Graham’s morning program. Mom did not see things that way. My mother was ready for church in her best navy blue pant suite, persistently staring at my father with expecting eyes as he drank coffee at the kitchen table. Under a dark, but wisely silent, cloud of protest, my father loaded us into a closed-cab tractor and slogged us through snow banks across the roads to church. Too scruffy to enter the building himself, he magically appeared after services to take us home. One Easter Sunday, heavy rains turned the roads to deep and slippery mud. Mom could not part the Red Sea like Moses, but she had a husband with a four-wheel drive pickup truck. After a roller-coaster like ride that flung mud and required prayer to keep us on the road, we made it to church.

The only event marginally acceptable with the minister for missing church was harvest. The hymnal board, a marque that listed the hymn numbers to be sung from the hymnal book during Sunday church, also identified the attendance and total dollars in church offerings from the previous Sunday. It was the equivalent of the modern CEO’s corporate dashboard and gave a pulse of how each service went. The numbers peaked at Christmas and Easter, but tanked from July 4 through potentially mid August. Normally, you would note the count from last week, and knowing the current count, could mentally speculate between the main points of the sermon whos names were among the difference in tallies. But you didn’t need the dashboard to tell you that during harvest. Each Sunday during harvest, it must have looked to the minister like he had a church full of widows. Wheat harvest claimed all of the men, and like one of the plagues where God took the first born from across Egypt, so was the case for sons age 14 and above. Except for my brother and I. In this eternal battle between our immortal souls vs money for the next year in the form of cut wheat, my mother won out. The instant the services concluded, we raced to be first in line to shake the minister’s hand on the way out, commenting on how powerful the sermon was, and made a beeline for home. With a rapid change of clothes that would make Superman envious, Mom was driving to the front lines of the harvesting battle with hot food for those already working, and my brother and I as relief troops to renew the push to beat time and the weather to harvest the crops. We were so fast that as we drove to the harvest fields, people might have heard faint refrains, drifting in the air, of the last hymn we just sang earlier.

During times other than harvest, Mom spent significant time at the church and as a requirement, we did too. The church might depend on the minister’s words to carry them forward until the next gathering, but in the mean time, coffee was needed for each Sunday social hour after the service and Mom, my brother and I, supplied it, readied in two great stainless electric percolator coffee tureens. My religious denomination did not have the same legendary status as the “church of the eternal coffee” like that of the Lutherans, but we must have been cousins. My brother and I helped prepare bread and grape juice (unlike with the town, prohibition did not win in this case for Communion) and we helped her prepare food for the church dinners. Mom’s specialty was deviled eggs and the entire congregation knew it, so much so that I knew to eat an egg or two prior to serving the rest as they would magically disappear within five minutes!

As a small church, it was mostly empty other than for Sunday services, which I took advantage of in my high school years to practice for public speaking competitions while using the church pulpit and sound system. Today, after many decades of public speaking, I still recognize it as a different feeling altogether than speaking from the pulpit of a church with the weight that comes with each spoken word, knowing that you are in a house of The Lord saying them, even if it is to no perceptible audience except Him.

Years after I graduated from school and left the community, my father took his turn at sharing the same pulpit to give not speeches but sermons. Severe and chronic illness overcame my father and likely more than one polite chat with the Grim Reaper on a courtesy, but not final business, call persuaded him to hedge his bets and attend church. I never saw my father give a sermon, but years later when sifting through family papers I found his notes for several Sunday congregations. His selections of scripture and talking points often touched on the love, and hope, awaiting for each who followed a truer path. I am sure that Mom was pleased to see his turnaround. One husband down, and two sons left now for her to guide to The Light.

This year my mother entered an assisted living facility and I was left to manage the home and life she left behind. Working through the length of her life in the form of her home, I encountered 10 complete New/Old Testament bibles, two New Testament bibles, five portraits of Jesus in various poses, two of an angel watching over children crossing a rickety bridge without parental guidance, and several Last Suppers. Vampires would have never stood a chance with at least one cross on the wall in each room with what seemed a host of ceramic angels to see over and protect Mom. Everything from crosses to bookmarks to paperweights and kitchen magnets contained a reference to her faith and what she held so dear, but was now beginning to fade from her now dimming consciousness.

However, the reminders of my mother’s faith in her house did not shock, jolt, or bring to me a sudden revelation. What reminded me of faith in an almighty being, and the knowledge that in the end we are all joined in a journey together that needs kindness and love, was found in an unexpected and simple song. While sorting through Mom’s things and listening to a music station at Christmas time, the song, Holy, Holy, Holy! played. An old church hymnal from the 1700s, it was not sung as a loud, strong, and vigorous traditional hymn, but as a more humble, reflective, and quiet expression. I had sung it at times as a child in church next to my mother. My wife recognized it as well from her own traditional church upbringing to give the two of us a shared experience.

That simple hymn adopted new meaning to tie together the things that I learned along the way of growing up with a religious mother. In a world that often revels in our failures, we are not alone, but are instead in this life, and its struggles, together. And at times, if we seek it, a power greater than ourselves or as lowly as a homeless person, can give us the direction or at least the comfort for things to work out in the end. In the end, all that really matters is the decency and kindness that we as humans are capable of. We should seek out understanding from a world greater than ourselves, a truth from wherever we find it. This belief likely falls short of my Mom’s hopes for salvation, but she should take heart. I found in her home the bible of my great-great grandfather, a Methodist minister in the Oklahoma Territories, and it now gently whispers for me to pay attention to it from a drawer at my home.

~ Mason