RELIGION AS METAPHOR, by Russ Chenoweth

We have a photocopy of the ornate Erinnerung an den Tag der Confirmation which certifies that my great grandmother Louise “Lisa” Roesemeier was confirmed at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Red Bud, Illinois in 1875.

I knew “Grandma Jennemann.” in the 1940’s as a large, taciturn presence in my grandmother Chenoweth’s house. We have home movies of her wearing a shapeless black dress and standing like a stone. She liked my father when other family members found him difficult, and evidently she liked me. One day I was being my normal overactive self, and my mother tried to squelch me. “Eva,” Lisa said sternly, “let the kid have fun!”

Although I knew her at the middle of the 20th century, she was born into a world that was almost medieval. Red Bud was an isolated German speaking, Evangelical Lutheran, farming community, thirty miles southeast of St. Louis. When my parents visited it in the mid-1980’s it was still small and smelled strongly of manure. Red Bud made the national news in the 1990’s when the Levi Strauss Company, in accord with a new policy of selling only in clothing stores, tried to remove their overalls from the Red Bud General Store. They had to back down in the face of rural wrath.

The bold German text at the center of the Confirmation Certificate is from Isaiah 54, 10. In the King James translation, it says: “For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee.”

This is the kind of moral support that was needed Redbud in 1875, where the inhabitants could count only on themselves and God. Lisa slaughtered the pigs, made the blood sausage, and rammed grain down the necks of the geese with a stick so they’d weigh more for market. A barrel of blackstrap molasses was refilled each summer and kept on the porch over the winter as a source of sugar. One spring, the children complained of hair in the molasses. Lisa took a rake and fished out the remains of an old barn cat that had been missing since the previous fall. She was earthy & profane. One of her favorite epithets, particularly as applied to men, translates as “a horses rosette.”

She married Peter Jenneman, a Roman Catholic from Alsace. Peter opened a saloon in Red Bud, and Lisa cooked the free lunch. They raised 5 children as good Lutherans and were doing well until the town of Red Bud burned down on Christmas Eve 1899.

Peter saved the saloon but died several days later of pneumonia. Lisa had to sell everything to pay their debts. She loaded the children, and Peter, into a wagon and took him to St. Louis to have him buried in a Catholic cemetery. The Catholic Church refused to bury him, because he’d allowed his children to be raised as Lutherans. For ever after, Lisa had a deep hatred of Catholics.

She went to work as a cook, and ultimately became chief cook, for the Busches of Anheisser-Busch. Her daughter Lulu, my grandmother Chenoweth, was their scullery maid. Lulu was very intelligent. She spoke fluent English and German and later became a champion bridge player and a master mechanic although she had only a 3d grade education. Like her mother, she despised Catholics, but she had many black friends and was sixty years ahead of the rest of St. Louis in her opinions on race relations.

Lulu was quite plump, and pretty and popular. In 1908, at the age of 22, she met Martin Engle on a moonlight Mississippi riverboat cruise. Martin was a large, handsome, and charming older man, a successful building contractor, a Methodist lay preacher (whose preaching was said to “wake the dead”), and a boxing promoter. Lulu married him, against all advice.

She named their son, my father, Russell Martin Engle, after his father Martin Engle and her former boyfriend, Paul Russell Chenoweth. Martin was displeased at this and called my father “Billy,” the name of the old blind horse that pulled a junk wagon through their neighborhood.

Martin didn’t smoke, drink, or curse, but he chased women, and Lulu divorced him two years later. She immediately married Paul Russell Chenoweth. Paul had promised to adopt my father, but he didn’t.

My father was a rebellious youth. He was voted by the relatives as the kid most likely to end up in Leavenworth. In desperation, Lulu took him and his younger half-brother to the Lutheran Church and sat them each side of her five feet, one hundred eighty pounds of solid muscle, in the front pew where Reverend Peters could preach hour long hellfire and damnation sermons directly at my father.

As a result, my father said, he became inoculated against evangelistic religion. He was able to blank out the noise and think his own thoughts, which he did in church for next seventy years, surfacing only for the rare good sermon.

My mother was raised an Episcopalian. She claims to be an “emotional Christian,” meaning she enjoys the music and trappings but pays little attention to doctrine.

With my father a free thinker and my mother, although highly intelligent, choosing not to think about religion at all, I was on my own.

We lived in Ferguson, Missouri from 1935 to 1947 and regularly attended St. Stephens Episcopal Church. I have no memory of this. I have only a few religious and philosophical memories from before age of 12.

When I first started school I was often sick. I used to play to Lady Luck that I might have just enough of a temperature to stay home. It was never clear that this was effective. I didn’t call on Her for any other purpose.

I remember standing with my father at the kitchen sink. He pointed to the faucet and said, “That may not be there.” He explained sense perception and philosophical idealism. I was sent to Presbyterian bible school one summer, chiefly, I imagine, to get me out of the house. I remember little other than that the teacher was a nice man. He owned a local electrical supplies store. One day he told us what had inspired him to teach a bible class. His wife and been deathly ill. He and his daughter had prayed to Jesus that she would live, and she did. I understood prayer. It’s just being honest about your needs and wishes. But by this time my sense of justice had rejected the idea that our prayers, or those of others, could give us an advantage over those un-prayed for.

In 1947, when I was twelve, my grandparents took me on a six week, seven thousand mile auto tour of the West. On the third day out of St. Louis, we stayed at the Pahaska Teepee Resort at the eastern entrance to Yellowstone Park. I went outside alone very early the next morning. The air was cold and pure. The sun was just touching the snow-covered peaks of Sylvan Pass. The only sounds were wind in the trees and a stream running fast over rocks. I suddenly became aware that the Universe is One and that we’re all part of it. I went back inside but said nothing about this.

Later that year, my father was transferred to New York City. We lived in a garden apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens. I loved it, the smells, the elevator and dumbwaiter, the kids. I enjoyed walking home the few blocks for lunch and having a hot dog and Campbell’s soup while I read The Hardy Boys. Compared to the city kids, I was even something of an athlete for the first time. We had fun throwing snowballs from the roof, until someone complained. The best part, though, was the Episcopal Church.

The rector, Mr. Schofield was a nice young man. I joined the choir, although I couldn’t sing, and used to daydream and draw fighter planes on my program during the service. I was in the Young People’s Fellowship, which I loved. We had square dancing with a live caller twice a month, and I got to walk home with our janitor’s pretty daughter.

This was when I first thought of the ministry as a career. I knew I wanted to do something “useful,” and I thought Schofield’s job looked pretty good.

My parents didn’t like the city, so we moved to Westfield, N.J., a wealthy bedroom community where I was once again not an athlete. We attended St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the largest in the Diocese of New Jersey. I remember little about it The rector was a pleasant older man. I daydreamed and drew fighter planes in choir until I was kicked out because I couldn’t sing. I went to the Young People’s Fellowship. I remember clearly only the time we threw the main circuit breaker and enjoyed a half hour of darkness, and a trip to Washington, on which the President of the YPF showed me how to poke straight pins through the wires and bypass the box that took quarters to play the TV. I don’t remember anything else.

I never went to church while I was in college, but I decided to be a minister. I had to be interviewed by The Right Reverend Alfred L. Banyard, the Bishop of New Jersey. Bishop Banyard was always gracious to me, but he was a strange man. He was a member of FRASCO, a Goldwater style anti-communist organization. He founded the College of Love, which gave Doctor of Love degrees. I regret to say that a number of clergymen in the Diocese of New Jersey acquired them and called themselves “Doctor”.

The bishop sent me to the Berkeley Divinity School in New Haven. My roommate, John Hall, and I had a large room with a working fireplace on the second floor of a huge old Victorian house. We used to break up furniture we found in the attic to burn in the fireplace and invite guests for sherry. When stressed, the students used to dress a clothes tree in a hat and coat and kick it down the large central staircase. John Hall was great guy. He’d won the Greek and poetry prizes at Trinity College and wrote his papers the night before they were due. He always got A’s. He spent his career as Episcopal Chaplain at the University of Rhode Island.

I have pleasant memories of New Haven, the fall foliage, George and Harry’s Pub, and a bar where we listened to live jazz, but I have no memory of the school, the faculty, or what the chapel even looked like. Not surprisingly I was feeling some doubts about my calling by summer.

The old rector had left One of his staff members had gotten another staff member pregnant and abandoned her, and the rector, being a widower and a good man, married her and went to another church. The new rector had been a fighter pilot in World War II and had been shot down in the South Pacific. As he floated in his life jacket he prayed to God, “Lord, if you save me, I’ll become a minister.” This seems risky to me, particularly in his case. Why not just ask for help? But he survived and became a successful corporate style clergyman.

The chemistry between us was poor, but we were stuck with each other, and I agreed to work with him that summer. I lasted a month and joined the Army, which turned out to be the second best decision I ever made. It had no religious significance except that I read Paul Tillich’s three volume Systematic Theology in the snack bar at Graffenwohr, Germany, and I had many good talks with my fellow enlisted men. I decided to return to seminary.

Bishop Banyard sent me to the Philadelphia Divinity School in West Philadelphia near the Penn campus. I remember everything about PDS. The classes were interesting, (although I see now that they should have been taught in a broader historical and philosophical context), the faculty were excellent, and I liked my fellow students.

Much of the learning took place outside of class. Every evening at ten, many of us went across forty-second street to Mothers, also know as Walsh’s Bar and Grill, where we had a beer and a cup of chili and talked shop. Occasionally we stayed later, drinking boiler makers and talking shop until Mother Walsh kicked us out at 3am. There was a good deal of drinking at PDS. We could have liquor, although not women, in our rooms, but we had to sneak around the neighborhood and put our empties in someone else’s trash.

We talked shop at meals. The faculty had to eat one meal a day with the students. My favorite professor, Richard Norris, was a bachelor and ate most of his meals with us. I sat at his table for two years. Norris was a brilliant scholar. He had a Double First and a Ph.D. from Oxford and spent most of his career teaching at the General Seminary in New York, the “West Point of the Episcopal Church,” and writing books.

Our chapel was a beautiful collegiate gothic building, very tall and narrow, and built of cut stone and exquisitely carved wood. Daily morning prayer and sung evensong provided a remarkable framework for our days. One day a week we had a sung Eucharist at which one of the faculty preached.

Dr. Norris preached the best sermon I’ve ever heard. I can’t reproduce the effect, but it was based on the gospel text in which the women come to Jesus’s tomb and find that stone has been rolled away. The message was that we are “saved.” Period. No need for agonizing or being “born-again.” We can give thanks and try to live good lives. If faith means the courage to live the best life you can, that sounds good to me. If it means blind acceptance of a particular doctrine or story, this makes no sense. Why creating thinking beings and require them to stop thinking?

I was assigned to be the Assistant Minister at Grace Church in Plainfield, N.J. On my first day on the job, the Rector took me with him on a parish call to the Coates family. We were having tea with Alice Coates and her mother when daughter Nancy came home. Nancy and I were married almost exactly a year later.

I enjoyed preaching, leading the services, and making parish calls. The Young People’s Fellowship was a pleasant surprise. I’d been nervous about this, as I’d had little experience with younger children, but I had thirty of the sweetest kids who ever lived. I don’t know what planet they dropped from. I particularly remember our lively discussions of faith, sex, love, death, race, movies, books, etc.

As the year went on, I began to feel that “something was not right.” I wasn’t making the contribution I felt I should be. A clergyman is expected to be a counselor, a facilitator, an ombudsperson. I was glad to try, but I realized that I was neither professionally trained for this nor endowed with supernatural powers.

This came out most in hospital visits. I didn’t mind hospitals or sick people, and most of the visits were quite pleasant, but I had to ask myself: What am I doing here?

For the majority of Americans, their religion is a simple fact, a reality. Relgion was never this for me even as a child. I was too aware that there were many religions and no reason why mine should be the only true one.

For me, religions were always metaphors for our varied experiences of life. Why not? I knew that everything else was metaphorical: the atom, the brain, tables and chairs, God. We saw or touched nothing-in-itself, only its effects.

The seven principles of the Unitarian/Universalists are as solid as anything I know. A friend of ours, going into the church in Provincetown and reading the list, said, “This is exactly what I’ve always believed!” But these are metaphors, too. Take the first: “The inherent worth and dignity of every person.” I believe this, but there are 6 billion people on just our planet, and they include dictators and serial killers as well as saints. A lot to explain.

Religion as metaphor is a humanistic view. I’m not a theist myself, but I don’t think believing in human values precludes belief in a personal God.

Religion as metaphor worked for me, but some of the folks I visited in the hospital were more literal believers. I felt like an imposter with them. R.W. Emerson’s older brother, William, studied theology in Germany. He lost his faith through studying German biblical criticism, which taught that the bible had multiple authors and included much oral tradition and myth. He went to Goethe for advice, and Goethe told him to become a clergyman if he wanted to. His private thoughts and doubts were no one else’s business. William couldn’t do this, and neither could I. I went to Library School and enjoyed it. I got a job at the Crane Theological School (Unitarian/Universalist) at Tufts University. We tried the local Episcopal Church and found it uncongenial. We attended the Follen Unitarian Church in Lexington, where Nancy sang in the excellent choir and I daydreamed with the congregation. They had a “bullion hour” after the Sunday service.

The GI Bill was revived, and, with the help of my parents, I went to the University of Pennsylvania to study religious thought. I did well academically but didn’t really know what I was doing and gradually dropped out. I was pleased to have gotten to know Claude Welch, the head of the department, a clergyman himself and a wonderful all around human being.

My father had a heart attack and retired, and I decided I’d better get a job. I was hired by the University Library and worked there for 32 years. I loved it. We moved to the Philadelphia suburbs and found the local Episcopal Church uncongenial. We went to a Christmas pageant at St. Paul’s, Chestnut Hill. It was a beautiful church. The music was superb, and the people were warm and friendly.

The Rector, Tom Edwards was a tall, handsome, patrician, with a voice like Dick Cavett’s. He was an excellent tennis player, a fine water colorist, and he had a Ph.D. from Harvard in 18th century French Literature. On top of this he was good pastor and a thoroughly nice man.

He enlisted me. Among other things, I preached a series of children’s sermons. Nancy joined the terrific choir. It was a good 6 or 7 years. I did briefly explore returning to the parish ministry. I flew to Sioux City and was considered for a congregation of Native Americans. The Indians and I liked each other, but the diocese decided, probably rightly, that I wasn’t enough of a Shaman for them. The whole family went for an interview in West Virginia and was overcome by agoraphobia. I was offered a job by a wealthy alcoholic parish in North Jersey, but by this time we had more children and excellent benefits that couldn’t be matched.

Tom Edwards moved on. The new rector was an evangelical who wanted nothing to do with me. Our children were not happy with Sunday school, so we stopped going to church and for the next quarter century rediscovered the joys of Sunday morning.

We retired to Eastham in 1999. We loved the Cape but found the local Episcopal Church uncongenial and joined the Nauset Fellowship, which was very congenial.

I consider myself a sound fellow fallen-away Unitarian, a heretical but sympathetic Episcopalian, a humanist, a pantheist, an amateur evolutionary biologist, and a seeker. Nancy and I have been pushing the works of Karen Armstrong, the British writer about religion, for the past few of years. She used to call herself a “freelance monotheist,” but now she calls herself a “seeker.” It seems to be a need in her case. In mine, it’s more a matter of insatiable curiosity.

I discovered something strange two years ago. I was looking in the Cape Codder to see if the chapel program had been announced, and I noted that I had to look for our listing under “Worship Services,” although we Unitarians do little formal worship in our chapel. It suddenly came to me that I’ve never truly worshipped anything or anyone in my life. The whole concept of worship is foreign to me. I did, long ago, have conversations with God as a fellow concerned citizen. And I do think paying proper attention, even musically and liturgically, to what Paul Tillich calls our “ultimate concern,” our responsibilities as humans and our place in the universe, can be sensible and helpful.

And that’s it, except to say that I’ve mentioned John Hall my intelligent and talented roommate who became chaplain at the University of Rhode Island, Richard Norris the brilliant scholar, Claude Welch the kindly department head, and Tom Edwards, the Renaissance man. They were all career clergymen and lifelong practicing and believing Christians. Presumably they had their own metaphors, perhaps more literal than mine, but who can say what’s in another’s mind. I can’t be them. I have to be me. But I very much respect and admire them and the good lives they lived.