CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

THE HAMILTON BROTHERS & WHAT THE CHURCH IS FOR  [M, 9-6-21]

 

The recent memorial service for The Rev. Richard E. Hamilton brought to mind a two-part PBS TV documentary from a couple of years ago, interviewing Indiana’s famous Hamilton brothers, Dick and Lee.

Dick was one of Indiana’s leading clergy persons for the last half of the 20^th century—liked, loved, respected, and appreciated by all who knew him, as a leader in the church and as a person.

He had the added distinction of being the pastor who officiated at our wedding, at St. Mark’s in Bloomington, a brand-new church at the time, of which he was the founding pastor. We were the first couple married there, and after many years in foreign places, like Illinois, we attend worship there now.

His brother, Lee, became a lawyer, probably because their father, Frank, was a distinguished pastor in Indiana, and his brother was carving out a leading role in that profession, too. You don’t really want to be the third wheel on a bicycle.

Besides, all the way through high school and college, Lee’s only interest was basketball. His family moved to Evansville from TN when he was about ten, for his father to accept a pastoral appointment in Methodism’s Indiana Conference. He discovered basketball! He grew tall, he had some natural talent, he loved it. It was his only interest, so much so that he won the 1948 Trester Award for Mental Attitude, which carried some weight in Indiana that it might not anywhere else.

In fact, it may have been more impressive back then than the Mr. Basketball award for the state’s best player. [1] Mr. Basketball can be fairly easily established by which kid scores the most points and wins the most games. Mental attitude is not quantifiable, and a whole lot of people have to take note of a whole lot of mental attitudes before they can declare that yours is better than everybody else’s.

It probably helped Lee a whole lot when he discovered, as a partner in a firm in Columbus, that practicing law is really boring, and so decided to run for Congress from Indiana’s 9^th District, which might well be the most conservative district in a most conservative state. Being a basketball star undoubtedly helped him win his first election, and every other election for the next 34 years, even though he was a liberal Democrat. His mental attitude, for which he was already known, helped him earn the respect not only of the 9^th District voters but of all his colleagues and the other folks he had to deal with as a congressman, such as reporters and academics. He earned that respect because he gave respect, to everyone. He never assumed anyone was unworthy of respect, or even of likeability, regardless of their politics.

He learned that respect-full attitude as a PK, preacher’s kid, and also as a PB, preacher’s brother. He watched the way his parents and brother treated people from the time he was little.

When the interviewer asked him about the problems that might come from being a PK, his father the pastor of a large church, so that there were many people watching him to see if he lived up to the standards expected of a parsonage family, he said that he never thought it was a bad thing to have all those people watching him. Instead, it gave him a feeling of security, that there were so many folks watching and wanting him to do well, to be good.

I think that’s always what a church is for. What a family is for. What a world is for.

John Robert McFarland

Happy Labor Day

1] Strangely, the first Mr. Basketball award, in 1939, was to George Crowe, a black boy. [We called boys and girls back then, regardless of race, boys and girls, not men and women.] I say it was strange because Indiana has always been and still is the most racist state in the North. But high school sports, especially basketball in Indiana, especially back when every little hamlet [like Milan, the inspiration for the town of Hickory in the movie, “Hoosiers,”] had its own high school, is a different world. There are always some people who want to be racist about high school students, too, especially where dating is involved, but when it comes to beating your brother-in-law, who lives in the next town over, you don’t care what the skin colors of your players are if they can win bragging rights for you.