MARY ALBERS [SAT, 3-28-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Good Memories of an Old Campus Minister—MARY ALBERS [SAT, 3-28-26]

 

I’m thinking this morning about Mary Albers, because I listened this morning to the Peter Paul and Mary recording of “500 Miles.”

Mary was the soloist on that song when our Wesley Foundation [Methodist campus ministry] student choir sang it as the anthem for a worship service at First Methodist Church of Normal, IL, on the campus of Illinois State University, during Homecoming weekend.

First Methodist had three Sunday morning worship services in those days. The middle service was considered to be the “student” service. Usually the only differences between the three services was the music—a soloist at 8:00, the Wesley Foundation choir at 9:30, and the Chancel Choir [including ISU music faculty] at 11:00. Well, the liturgists were different, too. Not many churches used lay liturgists in those days. Clarence Young, the associate minister of the church, was the liturgist at 8 and 11, leading the worship except for the sermon, and I was the liturgist at 9:30. Gordon White, the senior pastor, preached at all three services.

Occasionally I was allowed to preach at the student service, since I was “the minister to students.” Students came to worship in large numbers in those days, because they had done so at home, but also because speech and English professors at ISU assigned them to do so when I preached. When it was announced ahead of time that I was preaching, a lot of “regular” church members came at 9:30 also, The 500-person sanctuary was packed on those occasions.

For some reason he probably regretted later, Dr. White let me preach that Homecoming Sunday in 1967. I asked Duncan White, the music professor who was conductor of The Wesley Foundation Choir, to have the choir sing “500 Miles.” He had never heard of it, but he listened to the PP&M recording I lent him and reproduced it very faithfully as a choir number.

It was a large choir, about 30 students, but Mary sang the first verse by herself: If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone, you can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles… And she sang the last line by herself, unaccompanied, If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone…

It was poignant, and a perfect setup for my sermon about the prodigal son and homecoming. It was even more poignant for those who knew Mary’s story then, and who knew it only a few years later.

When she was a teen, Mary felt God’s call to be a preacher. But that was in the early ‘60s. People, even the Methodist university where she started college, told her that girls can’t be preachers. So she transferred to IL State U, to become a special ed teacher.

None of us had any idea that Mary--beautiful and intelligent and called and whole--would be dead before she was 25, dying of cancer in the Philippines, where she went as a Peace Corps volunteer. She was a lot more than 500 miles from home.

 

Every time I hear that song, I think of Mary, and I know that she was called by God—called to live, and called, across those 500 miles, to home.

John Robert McFarland