CHRIST
IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter…
Harley
Woolridge almost destroyed my marriage before it started. It was my first date
with Helen, if you can call it a date, and it’s surprising there was a second.
Harley
was the pastor at Worthington, IN, but was preaching a two-week revival at
Garrison Chapel, 10 miles or so outside Bloomington, worship each night. I was
the preacher at Solsberry, Koleen, and Mineral, even though I was just an IU
undergrad, so Harley and I knew each other a little, through District programs
and clergy meetings.
Harley
was an old-fashioned preacher, doing an old-fashioned thing, preaching a
revival in a little country church. I thought it would be good for my fellow
student city friends in The Wesley Foundation [Methodist Campus Ministry] to
experience something so foreign to their sophisticated urban church
experiences. Also, I wanted to get better acquainted with the quite cute Norma
Sullivan, and I figured she would fall for something like that.
She
did, and she got three or four other students to agree to go along, or at least
she said she did. By the appointed evening for us to drive out to Garrison
Chapel, everybody had backed out, so Norma told me, for one reason or another,
except for Norma and her roommate, Helen Karr. Helen was getting ready when she
noticed that Norma was sitting on her bed in her pajamas. “Shouldn’t you be
changing your clothes?” “Oh, I can’t go. I have a big test to study for.” So
poor Helen had to come out to my old green Chevy and say, to a boy she barely
knew, that she was the only one going.
I
was disappointed by Norma’s absence, and Helen, who was from Gary--about as urban
as it was possible to get--was ill at ease having to go out into the country,
to an experience she knew about only from hearing about its excesses, with a
guy she barely knew. But we made the best of it, and were having an okay time, sitting
in the back row, singing along with the revival hymns, until good old Harley
spied us.
“Let’s
have this young preacher and his wife come up here and sing a duet,” he
shouted.
That
sort of free-wheeling was typical of what happened at a revival, so Helen got
what was promised, but neither of us had ever been so shocked. There in the
back row, we were isolated from the rest of the whole world, with only each
other to share our embarrassment.
I’ll
always be grateful to Norma and Harley. Norma realized I was interested in her,
but she didn’t return that interest. She wanted Austin Ritterspach. [And she
got him.] But she set things up so that she could not only deflect my attention
but so that Helen and I could discover each other. And Harley Woolridge started
us out with an experience no one else could share.
But
we still have not sung a duet in church.
JRMcF
“All
we ask [in old age] is to be allowed to remain the authors of our own story.”
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal, p. 140.
“If
a story is not willing to tell itself, it probably should not be told.” [Should
you use quote marks if you’re quoting yourself?]
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