CATCHER WITH NO HANDS [F, 8-4-23] {Not exactly a repeat}

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Fait & Life for the Years of Winter—CATCHER WITH NO HANDS [F, 8-4-23] {Not exactly a repeat}

 

Even though book-banning is not new, it has reached a new sort of frenzy in this day. Nonetheless..

 

According to Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanack, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was published on 7-16-51. Keillor notes that it is one of the most banned books in history. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is also one of the most read and most influential.

Despite it’s notoriety and influence, I did not hear about it until I was in seminary, and did not read it until I had graduated seminary and was in campus ministry, in 1964.

For a small school in a backward town, I had a very good high school education, but it was classic, not modern. We did not read Hemingway and learn French. We read Beowulf and did tree years of Latin. Not surprising, then, that I had not heard of Salinger. I’m sure Catcher was not in the school or public library. When I was an undergrad at IU, English majors must have studied it, but I was a history major, and preached at 3 churches. I had time only for text books for my classes and stuff that might get me a sermon illustration… [1]

…and, there, of course, is a strange story. Catcher gave me one of my best sermon stories ever. [And, thus like all my other sermon stories, I’m sure I’ve written about it here before, too.]

Catcher gets its title from a dream that 17 year-old New Yorker Holden Caulfield often had. He is in a large rye field on the edge of a precipice. Children are playing in the rye, and sometimes, without noticing, they get too close to the abyss. Holden has to run along between the rye and the edge and catch them before they can plunge over the side, and push them back to safety.

He is disillusioned by his world and the people in it. Everyone is a phony. Except for his twelve-year-old sister, Phoebe.

Holden decides to run away, to get away from the phoniness. He sends a message to Phoebe to meet him so that he can tell her goodbye.

Phoebe shows up at the appointed time and place. But not to say goodbye. She is dragging her suitcase. She intends to go with her brother.

That, of course, is the last thing Holden wants. He explains that she can’t go with him. She refuses to listen. Finally, in desperation, he just walks away. But she follows, resolutely, dragging her suitcase. He yells at her, tells her to leave him alone. She plods on. Block after block.

Finally, he gives up. He takes her to the park and buys her a ride on the carousel. As she rides, she tries each time she goes by to grab the brass ring, the almost out-of-reach token that will get her a free ride. He wants to play Catcher, to tell her to be careful, that she might fall off and get hurt. Finally, he says, “If a kid is going to grab for the brass ring, I guess you’ve just got to let ‘em grab.”

Holden wanted to be the catcher, the savior, by protecting everyone. But Phoebe is the real catcher. The real catcher, the savior, the Christ, does not say that you can’t grab for the ring, that you can’t play near the edge, that you can’t run away, but says, “Regardless of where you play, regardless of how far you reach, regardless of how far you run, even if you go over the edge, I’m going with you.”

The deeper I go into life, into old age, the more I understand the story of The Catcher in the Rye, and the more I believe in it.

Jon Robert McFarland

1] Everyone in the 1950s referred to the stories preachers told in sermons as “illustrations” of the points. I learned fairly early that the stories were actually the points and that what the preacher said about them was the illustration.