LETTERS TO THE EDITOR [W. 1-17-4]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter--LETTERS TO THE EDITOR [W. 1-17-4]

 

I received a nice note from the columnist, thanking me for my letter to the editor, correcting his mistake. He had written that it was Reinhold Niebuhr who composed what has become known as “The Serenity Prayer.” God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. That wasn’t the mistake. I thanked him for giving Niebuhr credit, for often folks act like that prayer just appeared out of nowhere. But he had gone on to say that Niebuhr had been a Nazi U-boat captain who had later become a theologian. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In his thank-you note, Lee Truman acknowledged that he must have gotten Niebuhr confused with someone else.

That was only one of my several “correcting” letters over fifty years of “letters to the editor.” I even once corrected the Hebrew of a Bible professor! [And the editor noted under my letter that I was right.]

I know all this because I’ve been going through my file of clippings, and copies of those letters, that I wrote to a lot of different editors. It’s a thick file, but as I count them up, I see that I was not as prolific a letter writer as I remembered. Only two or three letters a year. Of course, I had a lot of other outlets for my ideas, as a preacher and speaker and writer, so Letters to the Editor was not a primary way for me to go.

Sometimes, though, it was the best way. I’m only slightly surprised that I never wrote about specific politicians. My concerns were issues—apartheid, Viet Nam, the treatment of veterans, guns, booze, dope, capital punishment, Nicaragua, funding.

And approaches, especially hypocritical and illogical approaches and arguments. I was really bothered by hypocrisy and illogic, and was more than willing to say so.

I doubt that my letters did much good, changed many minds. But they did something for me. They reminded me that I had a choice. I could stay silent in the face of injustice, or I could oppose it, in my own small way.

We may not have much power or influence, but still, however small, we have a choice. In the lovely words of Bonaro Overstreet, “…I am prejudiced beyond debate, in favor of my right to choose which side, will feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.”

John Robert McFarland