Billy Graham Is Still Dead

 

February 2018

I was shocked to hear news of Billy Graham’s death today.  He’s been dead to me for years.  In fact, he never made it into my adulthood.

I grew up in two neighborhoods that could not have been more different from each other—the first was predominantly Black and the second predominantly Jewish.  The only thing they had in common is that neither group would have been welcome in the mainstream evangelical churches I was taken to as a child. 

And this was confusing because nearly every week my Sunday School class sang:

Jesus loves the little children,

All the children of the world.

Red and yellow, black and white,

They are precious in His sight.

I took that song to heart.  It was—still is--the essence of my idea of Christianity and the touchstone against which I tested every single word I heard in church.  Pure love, and nothing else.

Why was it so elusive in the churches I knew best?  What was the tension I sensed between the call to love and the hard, often angry expressions I encountered in church?  Where were the red, yellow, and black children in my Sunday School class?

Those churches gave me nightmares.

Where was the peace that passed understanding? 

I’d get a glimpse of it sometimes when I sneaked off to the Methodist church on the corner of the street I lived on.  I loved that church because it had stained glass and a choir with actual robes that sang beautiful music.  That’s where I heard “How Great Thou Art” for the first time.  And there was such a solemn reverence in the sanctuary.  No one jumped up and danced around waving hankies in the air; no one shouted out random things or acted like they were about to have a fit.  No one threatened anyone with hell and damnation. 

There was only serenity.

So when I first saw Billy Graham preaching on TV, I knew very well what I was seeing.  It was the angry gospel I encountered so often in church.  It was judgment and dire predictions about a future that threatened to be very different from the past.  An evil future where people who had known their places in the past now ran rampant over tradition.  It was a clenched jaw and a scolding finger pointed at everyone who dared to envision a different, more inclusive society.  We were in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement then with the Women’s Movement on the horizon while Graham gave bitter voice to the anxieties of white patriarchal America.

I hate to hear him called “America’s pastor.”

Because there was another preacher who spoke a truer gospel to us--all of us.  In Martin Luther King, I heard the rhetoric of love for red and yellow, black and white.  I heard the poetry of scripture so rich it moved my very young soul.  And I watched him move that gospel out into the streets:  Beautiful words became beautiful actions.  His vision captured what a truly Christian society would look like, how we would treat each other as the daughters and sons of a loving god.

The spiritual fullness of Dr. King’s sermons made Graham ring hollow even to a child’s ears.  And when I consider Graham’s legacy of greedy, grasping, ghoulish televangelists selling salve for white working-class souls and giving cover to bigotry in the seats of power, I can’t grieve for him.

Whenever I picture what lies under the Grim Reaper’s hood, it is always Billy Graham’s face I see.  He’s been dead to me for decades.

It Will Bring You Peace

There are two dead mothers in my house.  The first was cremated against her Mormon bishop’s wishes, but we were so afraid of being haunted that we followed her instructions to the letter.  The second arrived yesterday in a plain brown box my sister sent to our US post box.

When we crossed the border coming home, I didn’t declare the box.  I wasn’t in the mood to learn the legalities of importing dead people into Canada.  The less said, the better.  There is always a hitch somewhere. 

I emailed my sister to let her know the box had arrived but I didn’t have the heart to open it.  I thanked her for sending it.  She wrote back one line:  “It will bring you peace.”

As she recovers from her own health crisis, she says the easiest thing that comes to mind, whatever seems most normal when a mother dies.  Don’t question it.

There are four boxes in total, one for each of my mother’s children.  Ask us what’s inside and we will tell you.  Some of us will answer freely; some of us require truth serum.  Honesty was always our worst alternative and last resort.

My first memory of my mother is in a portrait studio that was running a special:  a free 8” x 10” portrait for any child 3 or under.  I was posed precariously on a table that seemed a mile high.  My mother was combing my hair. “How old is she?” the photographer asked. 

“Three,” my mother said curtly. 

“No, Mommy,” I corrected her, raising four fingers in proof.  “I’m FOUR!”

I remember being snatched off the table, the sickening stomach-sense of falling, and the abject fear of my mother’s sudden and dangerous anger.  The selfsame slipping down that precedes a panic attack, I learned later.

From that experience, she must have learned to coach me in advance of trouble.  When I went to kindergarten that same year, I was trained to say my father was self-employed in the likely event he was between jobs.  (No one ever asked.)  Whenever we had bean soup for dinner, I was reminded not to tell anyone because they would think we were poor.  (No one ever asked.)

It was the same for the big kids except they were assigned more and bigger lies to tell.  We felt collectively responsible for the reputation of our family while our parents continued down their reckless paths.

When I was nine, we moved into a new neighborhood, and I thought I’d reinvent myself as I’d always wanted to be:  an orphan like the Boxcar Children and Toby Tyler.  I was drawn to stories that assured me children could be strong and smart enough to withstand and survive on their own.

That’s why I told my Girl Scout leader I was adopted.  I’d always felt it in my bones—this couldn’t possibly be my real family.  It was all too easy to invent the back story to explain why no one seemed to be taking care of us the way I saw my friends cared for by their parents in ordinary, everyday ways.

Then my mother met my Girl Scout leader, who ratted me out:  “She looks so much like you that I just knew she couldn’t possibly be adopted.”

I don’t remember my mother being angry or embarrassed by this.  She thought it was funny, and she told the story for years afterward.  I don’t think it ever occurred to her to consider why I might prefer to be an orphan.  She had many stories like this, stories in which she accidentally told the truth about our lives while making fun of us.

She always said she wanted a New-Orleans-style jazz funeral.  She didn’t actually like jazz, but she’d been captivated by the climax of the 1959 film Imitation of Life in which a selfish, ungrateful daughter chases the hearse carrying her long-suffering mother’s coffin down the street calling, “Mama!  I DID love you, Mama!”  My mother would reduce me to tears by threatening that someday I’d be chasing her coffin down the street.  And then she’d laugh.

The hard truth is that at the moment our mother died, my sister and I were emailing between two countries, joking about funeral arrangements because we had no idea that our mother was in danger of imminent death.  My sister had just written “No jazz band.  No parade.  No lying in state.”  When she got word that our mother was “unresponsive,” she had to ask if that meant dead.

In our house there is a room for each of our mothers, decorated for their comfort and enjoyment when they came to visit.  One room is furnished in 1930s style, stocked with antiques, Depression-era quilts, and objects from my husband’s family that his mother enjoyed seeing and touching again.  The other room is blue, my mother’s favorite color, and on the wall there’s an art print of a mother and daughter.

Now there are two dead mothers in my house.  Their residue is inescapable.  I wait for the peace my sister promises, but I still feel like a foundling.  It was a lie, but it was the truest lie I ever told.