CHRIST
IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter…
©
Joe
Frazier died yesterday, March 28.
Joe was
the baritone in The Chad Mitchell Trio, and the vicar at St. Columba’s
Episcopal Church in Big Bear, CA. We were working on a book together, although
most of the work was me cracking the whip to try to get him to write, without
much success.
Helen
and I were in Oakland City, Indiana, there for my 60 year high school class
reunion. In the afternoon before the evening banquet, we turned down the narrow
gravel road to go see the little hard-scrabble farm where I grew up. We had
made the turn before we realized it wasn’t really narrow anymore, or even a
road. There was just a hard scraped, totally barren, yellow wasteland where the
farm fields of the Steeles and Heathmans and Wades had once been. We topped the
little rise to our farm. It was gone. Just gone. The big maple trees, the
orchard, the barn, the chicken house, the pond. Only the house remained,
abandoned and neglected, holes in the roof, trees growing out of the windows.
The entire neighborhood had been strip-mined.
We
managed to turn around and get back to the road that would take us to Forsythe
Methodist Church. It was a hot day, especially in the open part of the Forsythe
cemetery, where my parents are buried. Since we live 750 miles from Oakland
City, their grave stone had been set in our absence. Backwards. Every other
stone in the cemetery faced west. My parents faced east, looking across the
field to our farm, except there was nothing there now. The strip mines had come
right up behind the cemetery. Looking the wrong way, at nothing. I don’t think
I had never felt so sad.
We were
driving out, past the church building, when my phone rang. Helen answered it,
as she always does when I am driving. She listened for a moment and then said,
urgently, “Pull over in the shade. It’s Joe Frazier, of The Chad Mitchell Trio.
He wants to talk with you.”
Joe had
read my book of stories about my ministry, THE
STRANGE CALLING. He wanted to write something similar about his own life
and wondered if I would help him. I said I would, but how could we get
together, since he lived in California? Well, the trio was going to perform in
Wisconsin at Labor Day, not too far from the UP. We could get together then.
But they wouldn’t be there long, had to leave right after to start a
performance cruise from NYC up the Canadian coast. Helen could hear only my
side of the conversation, but when she did, she said, “Hot damn, we’re going on
a cruise.” It was the perfect call, the perfect invitation, at the perfect
time.
The CMT
performed formally several times on the cruise, but I enjoyed most the personal
conversations, and the informal times late in the evening, when we sat around,
Paul Prestipino and Bob Hefferan and Ron Greenstein and anybody else with a
guitar or banjo picking, Chad Mitchell and Mike Kobluk and Joe singing, the
rest of us humming along. Joe and I led a Sunday morning worship service
together, him doing the liturgy and me preaching, typical of an Episcopalian
and a Methodist.
We first
saw The CMT when they came to Indiana State University in Terre Haute, when I
was the Methodist campus minister there. Others will say that The Kingston Trio
or Peter, Paul, and Mary were the best musical group of what Dave Van Ronk
called “the great folk scare” of the 1960s, but for us, it was always The Chad
Mitchell Trio, later just The Mitchell Trio, when Chad left to pursue a solo
career and an unknown singer named John Denver replaced him.
It was
the 1960s, and Joe got into the drug scene, dropping out of the trio and of
life in general. I think it was Tennessee Williams, in whose pool Joe used to
go swimming, who recognized something in Joe that he had not quite realized
himself and said to him, “Have you ever considered the priesthood?” He went to
Yale Divinity School, was ordained an Episcopal priest, and practiced “the high
calling” right up to the day of his death. I’m pretty sure he’s the only
professional musician with whom I have discussed the theology of Karl Rahner.
He was of the “radical priest” school, protesting every injustice, advocating
for the poor and neglected and abandoned.
We’ll
never get that book written. I regret that. Joe had so many great stories to
tell, of taking Pete Seeger’s daughter to her first arrest, of demonstrating
for justice with Yip Harburg, who wrote “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” of being
in Miriam Makeba’s dressing room when a couple of South African diplomats, in
the apartheid days, said they hoped she would come home soon and she said,
“Why? Do you need another maid?”
Helen
and I decided not to say anything to the gravestone people. Mother never saw
things the way other people did. It’s okay for her to be eternally looking in
the other direction. But I’m eternally grateful that Joe Frazier, another one
who looked in a different direction, called that day.
The CMT
introduced almost all the songs of the great Tom Paxton. In his words, “Come
along, won’t you come along home now, night is fallin’ and the path is steep.
Come along, won’t you come along home now, water’s runnin’ and the river is
deep.”
John
Robert McFarland
The
“place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!
I am
able to email CIW posts only occasionally now. I rely on my readers to check
the website, http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/
once in a while. You don’t have to bookmark or favorite the CIW URL to
return here, though. Just Google Christ In Winter and it will show up at the
top of the page.
I
tweet, occasionally, as yooper1721.
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