Pastor: A Fictional Reminiscence--With Conversations on Religion and Society

By James Stanley Barlow

This lively narrative presents some provocative thinking about the role of religion in society.

Looking back from nowadays, the minister, Robert Staten, tells the story of his own struggle with the question while he was working in a southern parish in the nineteen-fifties. His stance is that of a progressive, who nevertheless grew up in fundamentalist pietism.

Pastor, like the Church-of-England based novels of Susan Howatch, is both sympathetic and realistic. The first-person narratives by the minister and others important to the story draw you right into their skin. Hence, the book is somewhat like Marilynne Robinsons Gilead.

The impacts of Billy Graham, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other religious leaders are not neglected in chapters like Vocation and Religion on the Midway.


The narrative gets to the heart of social and religious issues that are very much with us today. The young minister is a WWII air force veteran, and his wife is a former social studies teacher from upstate New York.. They work together to help make the church succeed. All the while, the protagonist is being urged by his big brother friend, Charles, to kick the traces and change his vocation. The antagonist friend represents about every negative criticism of organized religion one can imagine.

The book vividly describes various aspects of parish life as the conscientious pastor goes about his duties, which include counseling and consoling, marrying and burying. All the while he is wrestling with his own misgivings about his role and his faith. Then, suddenly, catastrophe hits in the form of a mysterious church fire. This and other revealing episodes broaden his understanding of religion in our pluralistic world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481711883

James Stanley Barlow

James Stanley Barlow grew up in Johnson City, Tennessee. He and his wife Nell live in Leonia, N.J. and Bradenton FL. They have four children and eight grandchildren. A retired professor of philosophy (City U. of NY), he looks back on careers as air force navigator during WWII, Presbyterian minister, and college educator. His Ph. D. is from the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland. His collection of poems Swimming Laps in August . . . was published In 2001. Besides poetry, his writings include The Fall into Consciousness: "An Essay on Religion and Psychology."

Book preview

Chapter One

Vocation

Early on that Monday morning Helen, the secretary, called out to me, Bob, I think the church is on fire; smoke is pouring out of this floor vent. The hopper-fed coal furnace was in the basement directly under her office.

Horace, is the hopper empty? I asked the janitor.

I just filled it up when I came in.

Quickly we made sure everyone got out of the building. Mildred, our director of education, and the pre-school children she taught were already on their way to the park two blocks away. As I made the telephone call I was saying to myself, I hope I won’t have egg on my face. Terrible if it’s a false alarm. But if it isn’t…

Within minutes of my hesitant call, four fire trucks were on the scene. The sound of their sirens had become music by then as flames were leaping out of bursting windows and up through the high arched roof behind the tower. Alas, it was too late to save anything in the main building. What a bonfire! I still dream about it!

You’ve caught me looking through these neat scrapbooks Sally has put together through the years. This one is about our time in Alabama during the 1950s.

The snow was piled three feet high along the streets of Rochester, New York, when Presbyterian elder Bill Edwards and his pals arrived by train from Alabama.

Sixty years ago!

Takes me back, and how! I wouldn’t be me without Rochester and then Ensley Hills, Alabama.

The six members of that Alabama search committee checked into a downtown hotel and within a few hours met in Bill and Edith Edwards’ suite to plan how they would spend the next day, Sunday.

They had to get back home after the weekend. Bill was the hydraulics engineer for a large steel company. He and his wife co-chaired the committee sent out from Memorial Church, Ensley Hills, in metropolitan Birmingham. Other members of the team were Don Crawford, a busy lawyer, who had to be in court Tuesday, his wife, Mary, an instructor in the state university branch in Birmingham, and two younger members of the church, Ruth Thompson, a librarian, and Ben Rush, an insurance broker.

They pored over my letter of application and the reference stuff they had gathered. I was the candidate they had come to look at. At that time I was on the collegiate staff of the large Presbyterian Church that stood a few blocks from their hotel.

They walked to the church in time for classes at 9 o’clock the next morning. Ben Rush and Ruth Thompson each attended one of the young adult classes and visited with folks afterwards, casually learning how they felt about me and my wife, Sally Irwin Staten.

Mary and Don Crawford came to a large class taught by me. The Edwards’ each went to one of the other adult classes.

As usual, the spies posed simply as visitors. By 11:00 a.m. they dispersed themselves among the congregation in the sanctuary during the worship service. Of course I had talked—long-distance—with Mr. Edwards. They had to choose a weekend when I was scheduled to preach. To this day, I don’t know whether the senior minister, my boss, Bill Hudson, even knew they were coming. I had told him I was looking for a new assignment; young assistants usually did that after a while in harness. It was time for junior to get on with his life and destiny as a pastor. Actually Hudson took that particular day to be away, as guest speaker at a university chapel.

I had met the girl of my dreams in Rochester. Hudson tied the knot for us. That’s when Sally met my college pal, Charles. I’ll tell you about him as I go along. I wouldn’t be me without him either! And of course I certainly wouldn’t be me without Sally, I can convince you.

Charley was my university roommate and constant friend. Naturally he had to be my best-man even though I knew he would not feel at home in a church service. Luckily he saw a wedding as only coincidentally occurring in a church. He had, almost irrationally it seemed to me, opposed my choice of vocation. I respected and sometimes envied his choice for his own life work as a teacher although I knew he could go farther than high school teaching. As a mathematician and physicist he was a whiz. I’ll tell you a lot more about Charles later.

Now, back to the Alabama search committee:

Before lunch on that Sunday, the six visitors from Alabama met again at the hotel to compare notes. Sally and I had lunch with them. With their bundle of material, they had something to go on. However, after almost a year of searching, they expected some disagreement among themselves. Bill’s diary tells the story:

As Crawford, a heavily scheduled lawyer, sees it, we have already spent more valuable time than he bargained for when he agreed to serve on the search committee. He thinks we have let two or three perfectly good candidates slip though our fingers because we could not get a unanimous vote. All of us realize that the congregation’s mindset is that the Reverend Dr. Smathers is almost irreplaceable. Now, after a year of being supplied by interim pastors, perhaps the church can afford to lower its sights a little. Privately, Crawford, and to some extent, Edith and I, thought that the applicant from Oregon, Mr. Groom, was exceptionally good in the pulpit, perhaps even better in that department than the sainted Louis Smathers. However, both of the younger members of the committee, Rush and Thompson, had heard negative comments about Groom’s approachability and his manner as a pastor.

The committee always had a meal with the candidate before they ended their visit.

After the morning in Rochester, they first talked among themselves, using the sofa and chairs in the Edwards suite.

We got off to a promising start when Ben Rush said, The folks I chatted with seem to like the Statens.

Ruth Thompson, the librarian at the branch nearest our church in Alabama, said, The first person I talked with happened to be a visitor herself; so she wasn’t any help. But I had a long chat with two others who knew the Statens. They went on about Sally, whom they seemed to know better than Robert. But they spoke well of him too. They said, ‘We’re sure you will be happy here’.

The Crawfords also had heard positive things about both Statens, and about the wide range of activities provided by the church. They both said that Mr. Staten taught his class effectively and entertainingly.

What about the sermon? Edith asked everybody.

Not bad, I like the fact that he is a reader. Obviously he is pretty well educated, said Ruth.

Ben, who had recently taken a job with the church’s insurance mogul, Regis MacDonald, said something like this, The talk was okay, I reckon; I’m no judge of sermons; as you all know by now, they’re not my favorite part of the service. I found myself studying the stain-glassed windows, the organ. Quite a place, this Rochester church! Too bad we can’t transplant it to Birmingham. He read the Scripture well; I like his voice, his manner. I didn’t nod off. I think I got the drift of his remarks. Some good thoughts; he is easy to listen to.

I reacted to Ben, as I always do. I happen to put a lot of weight on sermons. The person we nominate, no matter who, has to have something to say! I thought that Robert Staten was well above average, and he has a good sense of humor. His sermon was informative, concise, and it gave me a lift. Not quite the sermon we heard from William Groom out in Oregon, but sermon-wise, Staten is in the same league; and on balance, he seems to come across as a nicer guy.

Don Crawford agreed with me, as did Mary, who, like me, is a member of the church Session. The four of us oldies had voted for Groom. However, the committee had decided early on that we should be unanimous when we recommended someone to the whole congregation. Most candidates tell us that they won’t accept ‘a call’ unless the congregation votes unanimously to issue it. Of course the Presbytery then would have to sign on too.

Mary Crawford said she especially liked one of Staten’s yarns illustrating how a short person feels when she can’t quite see the action. The Gospel lesson was from Luke, about Zacchaeus, the little guy who climbed a sycamore tree so he could see the parade when Jesus came to Jericho, his town. Petite though she is, Mary teaches physical therapy at the University branch in Birmingham—she is an excellent therapist herself.

The lunch with the Statens went rather well. There was some healthy small talk, a little discussion about Alabama and the congregation at Memorial Church, not half the size of the one in Rochester. We answered the Statens’ questions about living costs in the South compared with those in New York and about the financial status of the church. We spoke frankly about the people’s love for our former pastor, Louis Smathers and his wife Lois, who, after thirty years, had left us for a parish in Denver.

Crawford outlined the terms of the offer that the church would be making to the successful candidate. I was frank in telling the couple that we might have other candidates under serious consideration. Of course, I didn’t add what I really felt. I hoped we had struck gold at last. We all felt that somehow new friendships were born that day.

Later when we on the committee sat alone to discuss the meeting, Edith’s words were, A handsome couple!

Mighty big shoes to fill, folks back home would remind us, I added, making sure to make a little use of the wet blanket we carried along.

Here is another diary note Sally has included in this scrapbook: It’s by a staff writer for the newspaper, Elmer George.

Slow day for news! I got a release from a large church here in Rochester. It was on a Wednesday in August. A young minister on the staff had resigned in order to take a church in Alabama. I decided to drive over and interview the guy, and managed to get about four column inches on a back page of Thursday’s paper. Although I wrote up the interview, the editor left most of it out. She included this throw-away line: The Reverend Mr. Robert Staten looks like he could be in most any profession: medicine, law, engineering, teaching, law enforcement, or even journalism. Too bad she left out what he said when I asked him, Why Alabama? I try to get the reader to see what I see as I look at a person. The little article did include my attempt to describe the man: Staten, a WWII veteran, is of medium build, with light complexion, expressive eyes under dark brown hair.

I am flattered by that description. Look at me now, balding, gray and half-blind. With my good eye I can read these things to you. I don’t recall the interview with Mr. George too well. I did feel flattered that he came to the church to talk to me about the news release. How Sally got that note about the newspaper article I don’t know.

Why, Alabama? Indeed! I have asked that myself many times. Sure, I did wonder what it would be like working in ‘steel town south’? I grew up near Pittsburgh.

Of course I already knew that my good friend Charles Brunson had taken a job teaching math in a high school there. That could have had a subconscious effect on my thinking. Like many other young ministers I had several lines out. That’s the way we listened for ‘the Lord’s call’. Ha-ha! If any clerics say differently, you had better question their veracity. Or, at least study the glossary they’re using. We did talk about the call; I liked the term providential call—it fits with the more secular sounding vocation. After I sent out my application papers through the denomination’s Philadelphia office, the committee from Alabama was the first one that got back to me, and they followed through quickly. To my pious mother, Muriel Staten, it would help for me to use the word call—as indeed I did, providential call. She said it had to be a call from on high. Legally speaking it was an offer of employment from a church and a presbytery in Alabama.

Sally has organized these neat scrapbooks for every move in our career. Here is one for Michigan. After Ensley Hills, we moved there, where I conducted an action study for a commission related to the Detroit Council of Churches. We were in southeastern Michigan in1963 during the celebrations of the hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Ann Arbor, where we lived, was visited by President Johnson. He gave his War on Poverty speech in the University of Michigan football stadium, two blocks from where we rented. Sally and I went to hear him. I commuted to an office in the Broderick Tower in Detroit near the river when I was doing an action study on theological education. I remember shuttling between there and the Council of Churches office on the day JFK was assassinated.

One day, the media man invited me into the limo that drove him and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to a television appearance sponsored by the Council. I was in the small group standing behind him in the studio as he again presented his narrative on the slow progress we were making in civil rights. Afterwards I got to visit with him as we took him back to his hotel. I remember saying a few words about my stint in Birmingham. Just two weeks after that conversation, MLK was in a Birmingham jail writing that great piece published in The Christian Century—"Letter from the Birmingham Jail"!

The Michigan scrapbook is over there on the bottom shelf with the others, including more than one on New York and New Jersey. They are among the few things we could cram into our cottage in this retirement community.

Right now this one on Alabama has me going. As I read you those flattering descriptions in what the reporter said and in what Bill Edwards included in his journal you can see why I like these scrapbooks. Looking at this one makes our time in Alabama seem like yesterday. I see it as in-service training.

Here’s a scrap, maybe from a letter she wrote, by Sally Irwin Staten. I doubt that she ever intended that I see it. Don’t ask me how I came across it. Anyway, here it is. If you understand human nature you’ll know why I keep it. As Robert Burns says to ‘Louise’:

Oh wad some power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!

It wad monie a blunder free us,

An’ foolish notion.

This is probably the way Sally chatted over the telephone with her sisters in New York. They probably returned the favor as they talked about their spouses.

Bob sometimes frets about how he comes across. The other day he said, I’m afraid I am not at my best trying to work with people. Maybe I’m just not a people person.

He wants me to be honest with him; I told him that often he looks solemn like a judge or someone lost in thought. But I tried to assure him that he is personable enough to qualify as a people-person. I really do think that. Of course he said, as he often does, Most folks see you, Sally, as genuinely a people person. Does he really know me? How I really feel about some people and how quick I am to avoid certain types? I know that first impressions can be wrong, but, as you know, I have judged too quickly sometimes.

As we said goodbye to Bill and Edith Edwards and the other members of the search committee from Alabama, I was thinking hard and trying not to be too optimistic. I wondered about Sally. Had I read her correctly as I looked at her while we were all talking? She is such a keen judge of character. I hoped she was feeling as warm toward these folks as I was. I wanted to do the right thing by Sally. I had resolved that I would not rush into anything unless she wanted to do it.

Edith Edwards, Bill’s wife, told us how Mary Crawford first reacted. Sally! She is Lois Smathers thirty years younger, even if she is a Yankee! No problem with that. Some of the leaders in our church came to us from the Nawth, take Paul and Shirley Roberts, for example. I hear Nawth because I hear Mary Crawford.

Someone back then described Sally as athletic, also feminine, and short enough to make her medium-height husband look tall beside her. Her friendly blue eyes stay right with you. People would say, It’s like she’s known me all my life. I was lucky that these folks were willing to consider Sally’s man good enough to nominate him to be their pastor.

By the way, I should tell you that Muriel, my mother, was impressed by Sally’s looks. She admired her thick blond hair and said, Sally has good coloring. That, from Muriel, was a real compliment. Mother prided herself, somewhat narcissistically, in not having to use lipstick or rouge. I grew up thinking that she must be about the only woman in the world whose coloring was all natural. No one could miss that she was colorful. She braided her long wavy auburn hair.

Sally was not like Judy; Judy couldn’t take Mom at all, made no bones about it. What a hell life would have been if I had tried to get along with both Judy and Muriel Staten! I think I would have just upped and left ‘em both. I think now of Mark and Marie Matthews, in Alabama, whose marriage got wrecked because of his mother. I may tell you more about them later, that is, if I go on talking about our days in Alabama so many years ago. When I saw what happened to Mark’s marriage, I winced as I remembered how close I had come to marrying up with Judy.

But why do I go on about Judy at this late date? What’s wrong with me? I suppose that old girl friends never really leave you. I can still hear her heart beating against my ear as we nestled on a moonlit summer evening.

My ardor for Judy began to cool one day in Princeton, when I was up making a talk. Hoping she was enjoying my performance, I looked at her sitting in the audience. I caught her face in repose. What had happened to that pretty face? Suddenly the woman I loved to kiss looked like a witch. And after the meeting all she could say was I’m hungry. I decided that her ardor had cooled. Certainly it could not brook living with a wordy theolog.

Thank you, God, for Sally!

I grew up in a fuss. Sally is serene. She can be unflattering when she is talking to me in private. She calls a spade a spade. She’s, shall we say, candid! Even about my sermons. But she doesn’t scowl, or seldom does even nowadays as we both try to adjust to our aches and pains.

She has loved me flaws and all. I heard Ruth Bell say something like this, when she was asked about her relationship with Billy [Graham]. Have I ever wanted to divorce him? Never! Have I ever wanted to kill him? Yes, a few times. Like her folks before her, Ruth had beauty, charm, and wit. Sally can recite those lines. But the murderous thoughts quickly vanish, at least from her pretty blue eyes.

I have to admit that her frankness about me as a speaker hurt at first, but now I thank God she told me, Speak a little faster. I could turn our car around while you’re trying to turn a phrase.

Every time I speak? I gasped. I had to take it on the chin: No, dear, but sometimes, too often! I know you think you can speak without notes, but, honey, you’ve got to read your sermons. I’d much rather hear someone who has crafted his remarks beforehand. People will go to sleep while you stand there waiting for the phrases to come out right. Sorry, Bobby, just having some notes is not enough. The Bobby helped, the way she said it.

Even in those early days—I should say, especially in those days—I had to reckon with the fact that sermons are a big part of the pastor’s ‘stock in trade’. So I worked hard on my ‘delivery’, as we call it.

Sally had more to say. And while I’m at it: do you have to quote the theoretical guys, Kierkegaard, Barth, Tillich? Who is going to stay with you when you do that?

I had to salvage something. I thought I did pretty well reading poetry so people would love it the way I do. I try to let it go through my head as I form the words and keep to the rhythm. I thought I could do this as well as Peter Marshall, and I was reaching for Charles Laughton, who I thought was the absolute master in reading aloud. So I asked Sally, How about the poetry?

You quote it well; just don’t overdo it, was all I could get as consolation.

When I tried to defend my style, telling her to consider the virtues of an extempore, conversational manner, I had to endure her priceless imitation as she played back some of those thoughtful stretches. She did it with such skill that I had to agree that they sounded like foggy thinking and were just plain boring.

I also got feedback from other listeners. For example, in New York, when old Josiah Green took out his pocket watch, looked at it, and then put it to his ear to see if it was still ticking.

Sally slowly was making me a better speaker. I like to think she was making me a better person, who knows?

Ah, Sally! Here is some more from her:

Memorial Presbyterian Church stands at the corner of Washington Avenue and a four-lane street. A handsome stone tower in front faces the thoroughfare. The church buildings take up almost a whole block.

We make our home in the manse, next to the church. Our residence takes up two floors and an attic. The finished basement houses a large Sunday school room for adults. The manse is connected by a breezeway to the main church building. Architecturally they blend, with their gray stone foundations and occasional dark cedar-shake siding. There is a rosy stained glass window on the second floor of the manse, angled toward the Church tower. It came from an earlier church building destroyed by fire in the late 1800’s. The window was the only salvageable object from that fire.

The world loves a lover, especially two lovers. Even though they were devoted to the memory of Louis and Lois Smathers, the people seem excited to have Bob and me on board. They gave us a house warming—a pounding. Soon I was writing my folks in New York about the warm southern hospitality. Nothing like it, these people are unbelievable.

Within a year, Sylvia was born. Now there were three of us.

Chapter Two

In-Service Training

I remember even into old age, a vivid scene. In a large cheap-art picture, Jesus is coming right toward me from the dining room’s gray wall. My eyes focus on the pretty bare feet that touch the blue water of the Sea of Galilee. Atop the black wooden frame hangs a gnarled switch cut from a tree in the back yard. Sometimes a fiercely angry woman snatches it and lashes my bare legs; her auburn hair is flowing down to her waist unless it has already been neatly braided and wrapped around her head.

My legs bleed and look like barber poles. They feel the way the bottom of my foot did when a stingray struck me twenty years later when I waded into the Gulf of Mexico.

A sequel always was the taunting when the kids saw me at school. Bobby’s had a switching—ha-ha-ha! Of course they knew the feeling too, many of them. My mother was not the only one who spared not the rod.

In time she only had to glance toward Jesus’ flowing hair and pretty feet as he walked on water and I would run out of the house.

The only girl, Mother grew up with four brothers. Although her father was a skilled physician, who divided his practice between western Pennsylvania, which his wife did not want to leave, and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, Muriel Miller Staten proved to be fair game for religious enthusiasts after she was hit hard by the sudden death of her school teacher husband, my father.

Soon she was in financial straits when there was no longer an income except for the depression wages she could pick up by occasionally working in a small town department store. She was at further disadvantage because her older child, Clara, was retarded.

She had distanced herself from her family and their Episcopal church to team up with an exciting fundamentalist Presbyterian congregation near where she lived. Strong emphasis was placed on certain phrases from the Bible suggesting that everyone is a sinner deserving eternal punishment. She would preach to me that the only escape for me was by exchanging my Adamic nature for Christ’s, whose righteousness saves us from Hell, a doctrine that I never managed to assimilate. I thought of him as the keeper of the switch.

The best grade I ever got from her was an Incomplete. I longed to have it replaced with a clear letter grade saying whether I had passed the test of saving faith. Maybe by the time she died at ninety-six, she was calm about my possible soul salvation. I hoped that somehow in her troubled imagination her son had been saved by grace.

After years of study and experience, including three years in the Air Force during the war, I looked back on the switching days as my mother’s way of controlling me and perhaps of getting back at her brothers, from whom she had become estranged. I was the only male she ever tried to raise.

Despite all, I loved her. Sally actually liked her, finding her a fascinatingly complicated person.

Yet one day I overheard Sally talking over the phone with one of her sisters, in a characteristically candid mood: After all, Bob’s dad, who might have provided a corrective to Muriel’s neurotic methods, departed this life before his namesake had reached the age of seven. She added, Besides, can you imagine what his life with her was like; maybe that has something to do with his early death. Who knows? I wished I hadn’t been listening, but hearing her helped me with my self-therapy.

Here is how I thought about me as The Reverend Robert Staten: he desperately wants to be Mr. Integrity, to be authentic. I liked to read Jean-Paul Sartre, whom I had heard speak when I was in France toward the end of the War. Of course, I didn’t need Sartre’s atheism, but Be authentic became my self-exhortation. Even while I was in the Air Force, I tried to live by a practical rule: Never kid yourself about your true feelings. If you feel anger, envy, or desire, recognize it for what it is and don’t tell yourself it is something else. Always be the real you to yourself. The worst thing you can do to yourself is to fool yourself about your actual feelings. You can work on changing them, but don’t falsify them to yourself.

’To your own self be true. Yes, I know it is chatterbox Polonius to Laertes, in Hamlet, but it is sound advice.

With Sally’s help I came to recognize that maybe I suffered more than a healthy person should when I failed to measure up to