Memoir of the Life and Religious Labors of Lloyd Lee Wilson

By Lloyd Lee Wilson

This memoir tells the story of a man's life, particularly his spiritual journey as a minister in the Religious Society of Friends. Lloyd Lee Wilson began keeping a journal when he was eight years old, and he has kept journaling his entire life. This book contains descriptions of events taken from the journals, including recountings of vocal mini

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inner Light Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737011255

Lloyd Lee Wilson

Lloyd Lee Wilson has been active in the public ministry since his youth on the eastern shore of Maryland, becoming a Methodist certified lay speaker at age fourteen. He encountered Quakers while attending MIT in the late 1960s and soon became fully committed to the faith and practice of Friends. His service to Friends includes time spent as general secretary of Friends General Conference, serving on various Friends United Meeting boards and commissions, and yearly meeting appointments in New England, Baltimore, and most recently North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative), where he has been presiding clerk and clerk of the yearly meeting of ministers, elders, and overseers. Lloyd Lee has written a great deal on Quaker faith and practice as well as given talks and lectures and led workshops and retreats. He has been a recorded minister in four different monthly meetings of the Religious Society of Friends.

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Memoir of the Life and Religious Labors of Lloyd Lee Wilson,

a Minister of the Gospel of the Religious Society of Friends, Particularly of North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative),

to describe the workings of the Lord in the various stages of my life, showing how God is at work in all things for good, whether we perceive it so or not, and how our surrender to divine providence allows God’s work to be done in and through us for the advancement of the Realm of God

Lloyd Lee Wilson

Inner Light Books

San Francisco, California

2021

Memoir of the Life and Religious Labors of Lloyd Lee Wilson

© 2021 Lloyd Lee Wilson

All Rights Reserved

Except for brief quotations, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission.

Editor: Charles Martin

Copy editor: Kathy McKay

Layout and design: Matt Kelsey

Published by Inner Light Books

San Francisco, California

www.innerlightbooks.com

[e-mail]

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021948189

ISBN 978-1-7370112-3-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-7370112-4-8 (paperback)

        ISBN 978-1-7370112-5-5 (eBook)

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org.

Scripture quotations marked NRSV are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked RSV are from Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked BSB are from The Holy Bible, Berean Study Bible, copyright © 2016, 2020 by Bible Hub. Used by Permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

A modified version of an essay in this memoir was published as Lloyd Lee Wilson, Confidentiality and Community, Friends Journal 46 (October 2000): 24–25.

An essay in this memoir was published in two places: A Statement of Christian Pacifism, Friends Journal 49 (December 2003): 18–19; Lloyd Lee Wilson, Christian Pacifist, Quaker Life (April 2003): 15.

An essay in this memoir was published as Lloyd Lee Wilson, A Deeper Unity, Quaker Life (March 1988): 21–22.

Contents

Memoir of the Life and Religious Labors of Lloyd Lee Wilson,

Editor’s Note

Introduction

Chapter 1:  Laying the Foundation: Maryland, 1947–1965

Chapter 2:  A Severe Left Turn: Cambridge/Boston, 1965–1970

Chapter 3:  Beginning Again: Cambridge and Virginia, 1971–1979

Chapter 4:  Vocation and Competency: Virginia, 1980–1988

Chapter 5:  Among Conservative Friends: North Carolina and Virginia, 1989–1993

Chapter 6:  Faith, Witness, and Community: Virginia, 1993–1998

Chapter 7:  Exercises in the Gospel Ministry: Woodland, North Carolina, 1998–2013

Chapter 8:  New Fields of Service and New Challenges: North Carolina, 2013–2019

Epilogue: 2021

Appendix 1:  A Deeper Unity

Appendix 2:  Who Have Been the Most Important Spiritual Friends in My Life?

Appendix 3:  How Do You Define Ministry?

Appendix 4:  On a Group Lectio Divina—Luke 5:1–11

Appendix 5:  How Do I Wait for God in My Life, in Prayer and Devotion?

Appendix 6:  Aspects of Prayer

Appendix 7:  Reflecting on John Woolman

Appendix 8:  On a Personal Rule for Daily Life

Appendix 9:  What the Sabbath Means to Me

Publications by Lloyd Lee Wilson

Glossary

Footnotes

Also available from Inner Light Books

Editor’s Note

This book tells the story of a man’s life, particularly his spiritual journey as a minister in the Religious Society of Friends. When Lloyd Lee Wilson and I first discussed his intentions to write a memoir, I learned that he had begun keeping a journal when he was eight years old and that he kept journaling his entire life. The content of the journals changed over the years, transitioning from mainly recording life events to a greater exploration of his spiritual state. The journals, along with notes for talks and workshops he has led, various articles that he wrote for publication, written assignments from his seminary studies, as well as letters written and received, are the material used in compiling this book. To create the text, Lloyd Lee transcribed the materials into a digital form making up nearly 1,300 pages when converted to the 6x9 book format. This material was edited down to create the current text.

This book contains descriptions of events taken from the journals, including recountings of vocal ministry and prayers; other writings by Lloyd Lee (and the writings of others); and Lloyd Lee’s reflections on events and his inward journey as well as his inward state today as he looks back on his life. The book is essentially a chronological narrative, although there are at times digressions and discussion of the future when he is investigating certain themes.

This book is written in Lloyd Lee’s voice and can be read as his being in conversation with the reader. Other voices that appear are noted in quotations to help the reader distinguish whose voice is being read. To help understand whose voice is being presented, the following format is used: long quotes from Scripture are indented in both the right and left margins and are in italics; long quotes from other sources are indented in both the left and right margins but are not italicized; and long quotes from Lloyd Lee’s journals and his other writings are indented in the left margin only and are in plain text. All quotes from the Scriptures appear in italics without quotation marks if they are taken from a published translation, and book, chapter, verse, and translation are cited. If the quote is from memory such as in vocal prayer, it appears in quotation marks in plain text; this also occurs when it is a paraphrase of the Scriptures. In such instances, book chapter, and verse are usually cited. If there is a need for clarification or explanation of some part of the text, endnotes are used. The endnotes are grouped by chapter in the back of the book. Some of Lloyd Lee’s longer writings that were published or circulated in one form or another are in appendices at the back of the book.

At times, Lloyd Lee uses archaic wording, such as the term auditory for audience. This is not just a quirk of the writer or editor but is an aid in portraying the language of the traditional faith and practice of Friends. This is also true for the use of numbering instead of names for the days of the week and months. A glossary in the back of the book conveys Lloyd Lee’s understanding of certain terms, both secular and theological; his understanding may vary from conventional norms.

Capitalization of words is another area where editorial choices in this memoir sometimes do not follow conventional norms. When denoting God, Christ, or the Spirit of Truth in any of the multitude of names used for all three, the word or phrase is capitalized, such as Teacher, Counsel, Divine Presence. The Realm of God and Kingdom of God are capitalized to emphasize the Lamb’s War conflict between the Kingdom of God and all parts of the domination system.

Abbreviations or acronyms are used for certain words that are used often in the text. These are:

CO conscientious objector

FGC Friends General Conference

FUM Friends United Meeting

MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MEO Meeting of Ministers, Elders, and Overseers

NCYM(C) North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative)

In each case, the name is spelled out in full the first time it appears in a chapter and then usually is given as an abbreviation when it appears later in the text.

It is the intent of the publisher to bring this book into print for the benefit of the reader so they might use it in reflecting on their lives and discerning choices and possible calls laid before them. The spiritual journey that leads to putting God at the center of one’s life is the beginning point for doing good works in the world.

Introduction

A wise Friend once said that since Friends have no creeds to define us, we have to tell our stories in order to remember who we are as a particular people of faith. These stories from my own life are shared as insights into who Friends have been in the places and times I have occupied, to help us remember. They are an account of my trying to be faithful to a call into public ministry among Friends and others and of my consequent struggles to find the support and accountability among my faith community to answer that call faithfully.

Jacob wrestled with the angel for a night; I have wrestled with God’s call into the public ministry for my lifetime. That wrestling has taught me three lessons: God’s call to individuals is persistent and perceptible; the call is to a life of surrender, not to a particular mission; and one’s vocation in ministry is meant to be lived out in the threefold relationship of individual, God, and the faith community. Sometimes that call has been more perceptible to others than to me; sometimes I have resisted it openly. Acknowledging and surrendering to God’s persistent call has been life-giving to me. I have not been called to a specific ministry or equipped with a specific set of gifts. The call I have heard is a call to a relationship, to total surrender to the will of God, to a complete reorientation of my life to do God’s will.

I share this testimony of my life in the same Spirit as public Friend and minister Barbara Blaudone, who wrote in 1691:

I speak my Experience of the Dealings of the Lord with me, in my Travels and passings through my Spiritual Journey, for the benefit of those that Travel rightly after. And I can speak it to the glory of God, he never moved me to any thing, but that he gave me Power to perform it, and made it effectual, although I [passed] through much Exercise in the performance of it. And the Power of God wrought in me long before I knew what it was; and when Friends came, that my understanding was opened, I soon took up the Cross and came into the Obedience, and the Lord cleansed me by his Power, and made me a fit Vessel for his Use.

Chapter 1:

Laying the Foundation: Maryland, 1947–1965

I was almost born on board a sailboat becalmed on the headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay. My soon-to-be parents, Clifton and Betty Wilson, were enjoying themselves on a weekend afternoon in their little sailboat when the wind died. This did not present an immediate problem as they had no schedule to meet and enjoyed each other’s company. Then my mother said quietly, Clif, do you want to deliver a baby? No! my father declared. Then you’d better start paddling, Betty calmly advised.

Some time later, the young couple made it to shore and on to the hospital in the county seat of Elkton, Maryland. Betty presented herself to the receptionist and explained that she was about to have her baby. Is this your first child? asked the woman at the desk. Yes, replied Betty. Then don’t worry, nothing is going to happen for quite a while. You can even go home. Looking down at the liquid pooling at her feet, Betty responded, No, I think I’m going to have the baby now—my water just broke.

This persuaded the hospital staff to get a gurney for Betty to lie on, but there was no doctor at the hospital to supervise the delivery. Now convinced that Betty was indeed about to deliver any minute, the head nurse wrapped a sheet around her legs to hold them tightly together and delay delivery until the doctor arrived. This did nothing to slow the natural progression of her labor, of course, and by the time a doctor did arrive to oversee the birth, my head was grossly deformed. The doctor simply stood at the bedside and massaged my newborn skull back into a roughly normal shape.¹

This story is archetypal of life as my parents perceived it. They often faced challenges with few resources other than their own effort and determination and no one around to help them; when they did encounter persons of authority, those people were as likely to be obstacles as to provide needed help. They depended on each other and their own hard work and perseverance and were distrustful of other people, even those who appeared to be friendly and helpful.

My parents’ worldview was to have both benefits and drawbacks for me as I grew up. The values they believed would lead to success were integrity, loyalty to self and family, maintaining a constant vigilance against the suspect motives of anyone outside the family, high moral standards, constant hard work, and personal standards for performance in all areas of life that they themselves set and that exceeded those of anybody else. They felt that their own lack of education had raised real barriers in their lives and were determined that their children would get a college education. Church was an important part of their lives, and they were constantly engaged in service to the church.

My parents’ stories are the raw material for the beginnings of my own story, as are the rural setting and isolated culture of the area I grew up in and the culture of the people who were to be my mentors, classmates, and friends. Eventually, each of us must mold our own story, becoming more or less the person God has yearned for us to become, through personal effort and God’s continual assistance. The stories into which we are born are the initial foundation on which our own stories are built—but not the ultimate determiners of the lives we lead.

Born to tenant farmers on an orchard in northern Delaware, Clifton Wilson, along with his mother and siblings moved to nearby Elkton, Maryland, when his father was killed in a train wreck (Clifton was three). His mother (who was functionally illiterate) opened a boarding house there and raised her four children. For reasons now unknown, the girls were raised in the Episcopal church but the boys were raised Methodists.

Betty Raye Bare was born to subsistence farmers in the Blue Ridge mountains of Ashe County, North Carolina. Her mother died of complications of childbirth soon after Betty was born. Her father resisted the pressure to place his six children with other families and raised five of them to adulthood. Their Primitive Baptist faith was a strong support for the struggling family.

The Depression hit both families hard, but by the time World War II started, Clif had found steady employment as a telephone installer/repairman and Betty had come north to Elkton to work in an ammunition plant. Over the course of the war, Clif tried three times to enlist in the Army, but each time the telephone company found out and intervened; his job was considered essential to the war effort by the government, and he was not allowed to leave it. The couple began married life with 2x4 boards resting on two sawhorses as a table, two empty nail kegs as chairs, and a steady determination that their children were going to have all the opportunities they had missed themselves.

When I was three years old, in 1950, my parents began taking me to Sunday school at St. John’s Methodist Church in nearby Charlestown, Maryland. Charlestown was a village of about 350 persons, reputed locally to be the only incorporated town in the nation that had no taxes. Like the town it served, St. John’s was small and working class. Average attendance on Sunday morning was about twenty-five persons. In order to support a pastor at all, St. John’s had been grouped with three other small churches into a four-church charge, in keeping with the Methodist circuit rider tradition. In this case, though, the pastor was expected to preach at all four churches each Sunday and to play a full role in the life of each congregation. Even together, the churches in our charge could not support a regular pastor, so the parsonage was filled with a succession of seminary students and their families, interrupted occasionally by the retired pastor called back into service by the prospect of a supplement to what surely was a minuscule pension.

My father had been sent to Methodist Sunday school as a child, but my sense was that it was only after his marriage that he became serious about his faith. The Methodist way of life suited him well in adulthood. The methodical approach to faith and worship, with its organized, somewhat repetitive structure for life both in and outside of the church, made religion logical and understandable. There was a procedure for everything. Follow the procedure in all things every day, and everything would be all right. An organized approach to worship, personal prayer, and personal behavior would protect one from the primary dangers to salvation: alcohol, sex outside marriage, dishonesty, and foul language.

Mom had left behind her Primitive Baptist roots in her early teens after she left the family farm to work in nearby West Jefferson, North Carolina. The boarding house where she worked and lived was across the street from the Methodist church there, and she was attracted by the beautiful singing on Wednesday nights when the choir practiced. (Her childhood Primitive Baptist church had no instrumental music in their worship services.)

Primitive Baptists in the United States share many of the historic values of the Religious Society of Friends: a sense of being Primitive Christianity Revived (or preserved), a sense that seminaries are poor preparation for the ministry, a congregational polity, and a sense of not really being Protestants. However, the differences are also striking: a deep sense of original sin, a reliance on Scripture as the only rule of faith and practice, and the importance given to such ordinances or practices as immersion baptism (and only in living water), the Lord’s Supper, and foot washing. Senter Primitive Baptist Church, where my mother’s family had belonged for generations, met for worship only about once per month in her childhood because of a lack of elders available to bring a message. Foot washing and Communion were observed once per year; my grandfather Lee Bare made the wine the church used for Communion. Full immersion in living water was and still is the standard for baptism. When it came time for my grandfather to be baptized, church members chopped a path in the ice so he and the elder involved could wade out into the New River to a place deep enough for him to slip easily below the water.

A major theme of the preaching at Senter over the years was absolute predestination—the belief that individuals are slated for heaven or condemned to hell before they are born. For this reason, church leaders felt there was little point in putting up a sign or otherwise advertising the church—those who were destined to find it would do so without a sign, and those who were not so destined would not find it even if they were offered a ride to the church door. I shared responsibility for my step-grandmother’s funeral and graveside services with an elder from Senter several years ago, and I noted then that in his remarks he offered no assurance that Cordie Bare was or would ever be in heaven—though he did say he was sure we all hoped that was the case. In Primitive Baptist theology, there is just no way to know; one can assume unbelievers will not make it to heaven, but not all believers will be admitted.

My parents steadily moved into leadership positions in the Methodist church in Charlestown. My father served as lay leader of the congregation, and Mom was active in church suppers and other fundraising activities and served on the local Official Board. They didn’t have a lot of money, but they gave of what they had regularly and faithfully to support St. John’s.

My brother Damon was born in the fall of 1952. The five-year difference in age was enough to keep us in separate schools and separate youth activities for most of the time we were growing up but not enough for Damon to escape being called Lloyd too many times by teachers and other adults. It was hard for him to escape the expectations others placed on him because they had known me.

I began journaling my experiences quite early; the first journal I still have in my possession begins on June 1, 1956, when I was eight years old. Our family took a trip cross-country that year to visit cousins in Idaho, and I recorded the events of each day in succinct fashion. There is little of an overtly spiritual nature in these early journal entries. I noted one foreshadowing event the following summer (June 15, 1957), when our vacation to visit my mother’s family in North Carolina was delayed because my father had burned his eye with cigarette ash and needed to go to a doctor to get it treated; my father’s smoking was a factor in his death in 1976 of lung cancer. I continued to journal, and as my spiritual life deepened the nature of my journal entries changed as well, recording my faith experiences and reflections as well as the outward events of my life. Going through those journals decades later, I can identify several themes that have been influential throughout my life: church, schooling, and my relationship with my father.

Church

I attended Sunday school regularly and began acquiring what became a large set of perfect attendance pins. As I got older, the imagined events of adult worship on Sunday mornings became more and more interesting to me, and when I was about eight years old I began pressing my parents to allow me to attend. Once I showed during a trial period that I could be quiet and relatively still for the hour of worship, I was allowed to attend every week. Some of the hymns quickly became my favorites, such as Holy, Holy, Holy and I Love to Tell the Story. The weekly responsive readings, when the congregation spoke our beliefs in unison, impressed me. Sermons, on the other hand, were very much a mixed experience. From time to time, a sermon made a deep impact on me, but more often the sermon was for me a period of learning to sit patiently until it was over.

After I had been attending worship for a while, I was sometimes allowed to help collect the offering, passing the collection plates from pew to pew. One never-to-be-forgotten morning, when the ushers carried the plates up to the front of the church, our pastor looked at their contents and announced to the congregation that the collection was so small that he was going to send the plates back around again—and he wanted to see some folding money in them that time.

In 1959 my parents allowed me to become an adult member of our Methodist church. They felt (and, looking back, I agree) that I should wait until that year, when I turned twelve, before becoming a member. I took the membership class with several adults, was baptized, and then was accepted into membership. The membership class was held in the furnace room on the first floor of the church building. The teacher presented a lot of new material about Methodist doctrines and teachings but nothing that contradicted the basic beliefs that Mom and Dad had taught me.

In the Religious Society of Friends, the meaning of membership changes for both the individual and the meeting as the individual moves from infancy and youth through young adulthood and on into the fullness of life. I have been favorably impressed by the Advices of my yearly meeting (North Carolina Conservative) on this topic, which say (paraphrased) that while our children are clearly a part of our meeting fellowship, they can become members only through an intentional personal commitment to our shared Quaker faith tradition along with the changes in life that such a commitment implies.² One can accomplish this, it seems to me, by a three-stage progression. Very young children are members of our meeting community by virtue of the desire of their parents. Older children (say, below twenty-one or some other arbitrary age) become associate (or junior) members, on their request, through some clearness process that seems appropriate to the community. Sometime before an associate member reaches another limit (twenty-five years old, for example), they must request to become an adult member of the monthly meeting. Again, some clearness process that seems appropriate to the monthly meeting community should be followed. If an associate member does not make this request, their membership would cease at the stated time.

When I was very young, being a part of my family in the church community was all I needed. Later, I began to feel a desire to make a commitment on my own, but in their discernment my parents delayed action on that desire until they felt I had some understanding of the mutual commitments that membership entailed. As I grew into adulthood, those initial commitments proved to be inadequate. What I needed was a deeper understanding of the membership relationship between individual and faith community and a new commitment to that relationship. This didn’t happen for me for another ten years, when I encountered Quakerism.

One of the greatest shortcomings of the non-pastoral branches of Quakerism (Liberal and Conservative) is the lack of an effective intentional adult religious education program. This lack has many roots, but its effect is that many Friends have not been exposed to or explored for themselves the deep foundations of our faith and practice. Without teachers to help us understand, many of us make up reasons for why Friends do this or don’t do that, and those reasons are often inadequate or misleading explanations of Quaker faith and practice.

The Methodists in our little church started with the assumption that there was a body of knowledge that explained what we believed and why we behaved together as we did, that this body of knowledge was important for each member to learn, and that it was important to teach this to prospective new members before they made the commitment to membership. They made the intentional effort to organize a program to teach that body of knowledge to all who wanted to learn, and especially people who expressed a desire for membership. Their teaching styles and skills may have been open to criticism, but they made this conscious effort, year after year.

Friends in the nonpastoral branches generally don’t do this, for several reasons. One common reason is that we are too diverse a community to encompass all the varieties of faith and practice, even within our local monthly meeting. A less healthy expression of this is the feeling that one can’t teach any single person’s understanding of Quakerism without offending several other members. Another is the surprising resistance of many Quakers and prospective Quakers to admitting that they need to be taught anything; yet another is the overreliance on the Holy Spirit as the only reliable teacher.

Whatever the identified reason is, the result is an increasingly fractured Religious Society of Friends. We do not understand one another’s faith because we don’t talk about what we believe and why, and every distinctive aspect of Quaker practice seems like an arbitrary invention to be discarded at a whim. Adult religious education as an ongoing, intentional practice makes it clear to newcomers that Quakerism did not begin the first time they attended meeting for worship and that there is a reason why Quakers do each of the unusual things they do. Change is at times good, but we need to know why we’ve been doing things a particular way before we can tell whether a suggested innovation is a good idea or a bad one.

Baptism was an unexpectedly disappointing experience for me. I remember kneeling at the Communion rail, listening to the pastor go through the ritual words, feeling the drops of water sprinkled on my forehead—and wondering why I felt no different at that moment or afterward than I had felt all my life. Had the baptism not taken? Did something go wrong?

In contrast, becoming a member of the church felt important. Unlike baptism, something had changed in me or my relationship to the church when I went through that ceremony. One practical change came from my realization that because I was a member, our local church now owed a sum of money each year on my behalf to the Methodist conference to which our local church belonged, and my current level of weekly giving did not match that amount. So, for the first time, I asked my parents for an increase in my weekly allowance—an additional 10 cents per week—which they granted. I added all of the increase to the weekly donation I was already making to the church. With that increase, I was meeting my minimum financial responsibility as a member.

By now I was beginning to notice that the person who was leading the worship service had a perceptible influence on how well the worship was perceived and received by the congregation. My journal for that summer includes numerous entries comparing the current minister, Rev. Abbott, with his predecessor, Rev. Simpers, as well as critiquing Rev. Abbott’s sermons (preaches too much of a ‘dead Amen’ sermon). I was meeting with Rev. Abbott one weekday afternoon each week as part of the Boy Scouts’ God and Country program, and over time I began to like him more and more.

I also began teaching Sunday school about this time to what would today be called middle schoolers. Unlike those who had been my Sunday school teachers, I did not have the students read our denominational Sunday school pamphlets aloud paragraph by paragraph. Instead, I summarized the topic for the week and tried to engage the students in a discussion of what it meant and how we could incorporate that principle into our daily lives. Three of my students were my younger brother Damon and his two best friends. I soon learned that they were watching me closely all the time. If my behavior the rest of the week did not seem to them to be consistent with a churchgoer, our Sunday school discussion would be about that behavior, not about the planned lesson.

Christian faith seemed to me, and as far as I could tell to my fellow churchgoers, an intellectual assent to the death and resurrection of Jesus and a personal commitment to certain standards of behavior. For boys becoming men, that meant going to church on Sunday morning, no smoking or drinking, no messing around with girls, no cursing, and no telling lies. An unquestioning national patriotism was expected, both in the church and in the world outside the church. Separation of the races and subordinate roles for women were so much a part of the accepted way of things that they weren’t even talked about. Each day in public school started with a Bible reading followed by the recital of the Lord’s Prayer and the pledge of allegiance, all led by a student over the school’s loudspeaker system. In our classrooms, we learned to duck and cover in case the godless Communists launched a sneak attack.

My exposure to different patterns of faith was limited. One of our schoolteachers asked for a show of hands one day on our religious affiliation. Most students in my class were Methodists, as we already knew, and we had a small number of Episcopalians. There was one Nazarene, and one girl described herself as half-Jewish, half-Baptist, but not practicing either. In high school, a lone Catholic boy transferred into our school. At this time, although I was not consciously aware of it, there were only white students in my classes.

As I grew older, more of the content of the adults’ conversations around me began to penetrate my consciousness. It became clear that my parents were not simply the sort of people that were in church any time the doors were open; they were often the people who made sure the doors could and would open. When the church was broke and the oil tank was empty, it was my parents who arranged to pay for an oil delivery to keep the parsonage and the church warm. When the pastor’s wife called to say they had run out of money and she had nothing except some boxes of macaroni and cheese to feed her family until their next check, it was my mother who assembled a care package and took it to the parsonage.

Pastors and their families regularly came for Sunday dinner at our house, and I soon realized this was a multipurpose event. It was good for the pastor to get to know members of the congregation more closely, for sure, but a bountiful meal for all the pastor’s family was also very important for practical reasons. Conversation with my parents away from the church was also a chance for the pastor to let down his hair and vent about the stresses and strains of his position and circumstances.

At age twelve, in response to my growing realization of how difficult life was for these pastors who served St. John’s and possibly in recognition of something calling me toward that life, I came downstairs from my bedroom one day to the kitchen where Mom was working, slapped my hand on the table, and said with emotion, "I’m never going to be a minister!" and walked out. She never forgot that moment and has often reminded me of the irony of my remark, given the way my life has turned out since.

I certainly never did become a minister in the model that I had seen up to that point in my life: a paid pastor serving as the one-stop shop for all the needs of one or several small congregations, balancing the financial needs of his family against the expectations of his parishioners. I disliked the financial neediness our pastors experienced, the long hours of work, and the church politics (the feuds were so intense because the stakes were so small). As I grew older, I realized I did not have the gifts in pastoral care that are so important in that role. I also became aware of the lure and dangers of what I’ve come to call the golden shackles of paid ministry. Desiring to devote one’s entire life to service to God, one accepts employment in or for a church. Once there, one realizes that there are things one can’t do or say without threatening that very employment that had seemed so liberating. Many times, I’ve heard a pastor (Friend or non-Friend) say, That won’t preach in my church.

Over the course of my life, I have tried deliberately to minister, to organize myself and my activities to serve God, in both religious and secular settings. As I predicted, I have avoided the paid pastorate. Except for a few years with Friends General Conference, none of my employers were specifically religious organizations; but even there I found the golden shackles to be all too real.

As a Boy Scout, I had the opportunity to speak during worship services on several occasions and filled in once or twice for our pastor when he had to be absent on a Sunday and no supply minister was available. In my fourteenth year, these experiences led St. John’s to recommend to the DelMarVa Conference that I be recognized as a certified lay speaker. No one did a search of the records, but fourteen was the youngest anyone present could remember anyone being certified as a lay speaker. Nowadays, such certification includes formal training provided by the Methodist Church, but at that time people like me were on their own.

And on my own I was. I soon learned to prepare several sermons ahead of time and keep them in a loose-leaf notebook as the call to fill in for a pastor somewhere in the area could come unexpectedly and at the last minute. The prime example of this was the Saturday night our own pastor called up and explained, in a voice barely intelligible, that he had had all his wisdom teeth removed that afternoon and would be unable to preach the next morning. Luckily, I had a sermon prepared and was able to fill in for him the next day in all four of the churches on our charge. Of course, I was too young to drive, so Mom or Dad had to take me from church to church so I could preach the sermon.

In high school I became aware of a phrase we used from time to time in worship services that said Jesus Christ was the propitiation for our sins. Not knowing what this might mean, I asked our pastor about it one day when we were alone in the sanctuary. He was doing some cleaning; I don’t remember why I happened to be there. What does it mean to be the propitiation for our sins? I asked. He was silent for several seconds, paying attention to his cleaning. Finally, he said, I don’t know. This disappointed me on two levels. First, I thought that our pastors were supposed to know everything about religious stuff. Second, I thought it upsetting that our whole congregation was saying it believed something when in fact no one knew what it meant (clearly if the pastor didn’t know, no one did.) I didn’t say anything to anyone else at the time. Like my disappointment with baptism, though, it lingered in the background and played a role later on when I broke my ties to Methodism.

School

I spent the first grade in a two-room, six-grade elementary school in Charlestown, across the street from St. John’s Methodist Church and next to the volunteer fire department. My classroom held the first three grades, with the teacher rotating from one group to another to teach us reading, writing, and the rudiments of arithmetic. Mom had already taught me to read and to add and subtract, so I was a bit ahead of the other first graders and wanted very much to be able to read in the second- and third-grade books. This, however, was not allowed.

My parents recognized that the school in Charlestown was not going to meet their expectations and made arrangements for me to attend the second grade in the nearby town of North East, Maryland. The new elementary school there had six classrooms—one for each grade. This school too soon became seriously overcrowded, but it was much better staffed and equipped than the one in Charlestown.

As the overcrowding grew worse year by year, my parents seriously considered putting me in a private school, which would have been quite a challenge considering their limited financial resources. After investigating a couple of schools that would have been within commuting distance, Dad decided that it was more important that I learn to live with all sorts of people as schoolmates than that I get more advanced academic preparation. This put some challenges in my path in my college years, but I believe he made the right decision.

When I was about twelve years old, I qualified to be on a local quiz show aired on a Baltimore TV station. The show aired live, and during the introductions the emcee asked what I wanted to do in life. Go to MIT and become an engineer in nuclear physics! was my enthusiastic reply—much to the surprise of my parents sitting off-camera nearby. They never questioned my choice, however. My college selection was based on my asking many adults which was the best college in the world. More people said MIT than any other institution, so I decided I wanted to go there.

Entering seventh grade meant attending the junior-senior high school in North East. The school library had few new books, but I was allowed to check out any book I wanted, whether it was grade-appropriate or not. I found several old books about the Greek orators, and I read each one carefully. Like Demosthenes, I practiced speaking with small stones in my mouth. but I did not continue that exercise very long as the stones felt very uncomfortable against my teeth. During this time, the school held an oratory contest in which participants delivered a short speech before a panel of judges. I won the contest, which seemed like a good return on my investment of time and effort in that skill.

In the fall of 1963, my junior year of high school, all the county’s schools were integrated. This occurred peacefully and largely without incident. We children had been playing baseball in an integrated Little League for several years, and the white children looked forward to having some very athletic black kids added to the school basketball and baseball teams. This is not to say that integration was an entirely smooth process. The next year, when our class put on the traditional senior class play, the white community learned both that there was a local NAACP chapter in town and that there was something offensive about white folks putting on blackface for a stage performance.

Looking back at our community during this period, I see that our rural community was so racist it was ignorant on a conscious level of its racism. The black and white populations were so completely separated from one another that we whites were literally unconscious of the existence of the black population. Racism was pervasive all around us, both formally in our institutions and in the very structure of the culture, yet nobody I knew thought very much about it, one way or another. When racial barriers began to fall, most white people in my community seemed to accept the changes without very much fuss. More than angry or threatened, my remembrance is that they were genuinely surprised and confused when their racism was exposed. Change came about in my town with less pain and suffering, emotional and physical, than in many other communities around the nation. The changes were not universal or complete, as I experienced several years later when dealing with my county’s Selective Service board about getting classified as a conscientious objector (CO).

Two or three of us around this time became aware of Mensa, an organization whose only qualification for membership was to score in the 98th percentile or higher on an IQ test. Dad drove me the fifty miles to Baltimore to take the test, which was scored on the spot when the test was completed. As I got in the car for the drive home, Dad asked how I had done. I scored in the 99th percentile, I replied proudly. Dad’s immediate response—Why aren’t you in the 100th percentile?—took away my sense of achievement. I explained the concept of percentiles to him, pointing out that to be in the 100th percentile would mean that I had scored higher than anyone else who took the test. When I finished the explanation, I had the sense that he still wanted to ask the same question. No matter what I achieved, he wanted and expected more, so I felt I was a constant disappointment to him.

I was in Mrs. Morris’s geometry class when the news came over the high school public address system that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. My immediate reaction, expressed out loud, was that now there was no way he could lose the upcoming election. The possibility that he might have been killed was totally outside my realm of imagination.

Two days later, I was with a group of people at the church, gathered in the first-floor furnace room/meeting room for a reason I cannot now recall, when our neighbor Claude Grace came in and announced that Lee Harvey Oswald had been shot. I could see that all the adults were becoming a little frightened, wondering what was happening and when the killing would end. I myself became a little frightened and confused; apparently the world was not as stable and well arranged as I had believed up to that point

My senior year in high school was a time of constant tension between myself and my teachers. I had taken the SAT exam the previous spring, the morning after the junior prom. When the scores arrived at our school, the administration sent mine back, announcing publicly to my classmates and to me that they must have been misprinted. There was no misprint; they simply did not believe I could have achieved the scores reported.

My teachers generally discouraged me from even applying to MIT, saying that the disappointment of rejection would be too big a shock for me to handle. (The previous year’s valedictorian had not been able to gain admission to the University of Delaware and had enrolled instead at the University of Maryland, which automatically admitted anyone with a Maryland high school diploma.) My music teacher in particular discouraged me, saying MIT accepted only the cream of the cream. The guidance counselor refused to cooperate with the MIT application unless I applied to his alma mater, Carnegie University, and one other school. I chose Lehigh University as I had attended a two-week junior engineering and science institute there one summer and knew where it was.

I filled out the applications to Carnegie and Lehigh in a rote sort of way, not even bothering to look up where Carnegie was located other than somewhere in New York. Eventually, the admissions offices began to reply, and first Lehigh, then Carnegie offered me admission. When the MIT offer of admission came in, I felt like running up and down the school hallways, waving the letter and shouting, See! See! I did it after all!

I did not know this at the time, but the general opinion among both faculty and classmates, after they learned I had been admitted to MIT, was that I would attend for one semester, realize I was out of my league, and return to the University of Maryland to continue my schooling.

Boy Scouts

My father was of the opinion that the Boy Scouts had saved him from a life of delinquency, though he never rose above second class rank. Consequently, he was intent on seeing that I had the full Scouting experience as soon as I was old enough to join. There was no Cub Scout troop in Charlestown, so he and Mom started one. He was cubmaster and my mother was den mother for my group of Scouts. They made sure that I did everything required to attain all the ranks: Wolf, Bear, Lion, and Webelos. When it came time for me to move into Boy Scouts, Dad started a troop in Charlestown; we met in a room of the school building where I had attended first grade that was now being used as the town hall.

All of us in the Charlestown troop enjoyed Scouting activities: camping out, tying knots, building campfires, and the like. What was different for me about Scouting was my father’s consistent pressure on me to advance up the ranks. Every activity was a time for me to meet the requirements for some new merit badge or other requirement for the next rank. When my father decided my progress toward Eagle rank was slowing down, he transferred me from the Charlestown troop he had established to an older, more active troop in North East. Several of my classmates were in this troop, and they were making steady progress toward the Eagle. When they finally earned it, they would be the first Scouts in memory in that part of the county in memory to do so. Changing troops did speed my progress up the ranks, but because of the minimum time in grade requirements at each rank, I could never catch up to my classmates. They received their Eagle awards a few months before I became eligible. My father was quite displeased that the families of the other boys would not delay receiving their Eagle badges for several months until I became eligible. As I look back, it seems perfectly understandable and reasonable that those parents would not want to delay the moment when their children received recognition for all their hard work.

In addition to the Eagle rank, I had earned my God and Country award and been initiated into the Order of the Arrow, the Boy Scout national honor society. My father saw that I was entered into consideration for Boy Scout of the Year. When I came to him to say that I had been selected Scout of the Year for Cecil County, he asked why I wasn’t Scout of the Year for the entire Del-Mar-Va Council (which included all of Delaware and the Eastern Shore areas of Maryland and Virginia).

Earning My Way

My parents had bought some land across the dirt road that ran past our house, and each year they planted a garden there, about one acre in size. This provided most of our vegetables and other produce for the year, either eaten fresh or put up by canning or freezing. I helped with planting and harvesting, but what I did most (as did Damon, as he grew older) was weeding and hoeing. When someone says, That’s a long old row to hoe, I know experientially just what they mean. We sold door to door any produce we could not use ourselves. In the summer months, numerous families from urban areas moved into nearby summer houses for all or part of the season. When I was very small, Mom drove me from house to house and stood behind me as I made my sales pitch. Later on, I rode my bicycle from customer to customer.

Mowing lawns (and the money I earned by doing so), church, and Boy Scouts are the most frequent journal entries of my twelfth summer. At that age, six lawns were the maximum I could handle, as that meant a different lawn each afternoon, with the gasoline push mower. Dad provided the mower and the gasoline. Finishing a lawn meant another one or two dollars in my savings, which I carefully watched grow till I could buy the AM/FM/shortwave transistor radio of my dreams. Daily, I would record in my journal whether I spent the day cutting grass or waiting out the rain, and in the back of the journal I kept a careful account of income and expenses. Two breaks in the lawn-mowing routine came when our family took a trip to New England and eastern Canada and the week I spent at Boy Scout camp.

Our New England trip was typical of our family vacations. We packed up the car, drove to the first paved road, and stopped. My father asked my mother, Which way should we go? She said, North, and north we went. In Canada, we stopped at a roadside picnic table and made friends with a local resident who happened to walk by, and he took us to visit a French Canadian farm family a short way down the road. They spoke no English and we spoke no French other than what little Mom remembered from one year in high school, but they had a large album of photographs from their daughter’s recent wedding, and the adults spent the afternoon looking at them. There were several other children roughly my age, and I remember we found games to play that required little in the way of language skills.

One of my lawn-mowing jobs was in Charlestown itself, about two miles from home. I was riding my bicycle through town when I noticed an old lady sitting on her front porch. Without thinking about it, I tipped my straw hat to her as I passed by. She took the trouble to find out who I was (not hard in such a rural area) and called my parents to offer me a job cutting her lawn. This added about $2 per week to my income, which was welcome. On the downside, two miles was considered close enough for me to push my lawn mower and gasoline can when neither parent was around to drive me, so I feel I can say I earned every cent I was paid.

I had a full-time summer job after my freshman year in high school helping paint the county schools, earning good wages at $1.00 per hour. When we came to a school that I had never heard of before, I realized for the first time that the school system was segregated. Of course, I’d never seen black children in my classrooms, but I had never before thought about what that meant—that they must have been going to school someplace else.

The income and expense record I kept in the summer of 1963 shows I cut eight lawns on a weekly schedule, earning about $2 per lawn. My weekly allowance was now 85 cents, of which 40 cents went to the church collection. I duly noted additions to my modest coin collection as expenses, along with purchases of Pepsi (10 cents), a slide rule ($5), and a contribution to the Best Teacher contest at school (25 cents). On a regular basis, I purchased a $25 savings bond to go toward my college education, recording the $12.50 expense each time.

Local Culture

Rifles, shotguns, and pistols were part of Eastern Shore culture when I was growing up. My father had several of each at home. We grew up understanding that they were to be respected and that they had good and proper uses. I can remember bringing in my great-grandfather’s converted flintlock long rifle, unannounced, to an elementary school show and tell event. The rifle was of great interest because it was so big and so old, but there was no comment at all about my just walking into school carrying it.

My own experience with firearms was ambivalent. When I was ten years old, I discovered an old, broken BB rifle at my Aunt Nellie’s. When my father found me playing with it, he fixed it and took me to a store where I could buy some BBs. I walked all the way around Aunt Nellie’s pond, shooting every tadpole and young frog I could find. I felt joy and a sense of accomplishment with each one I hit, watching it sink to the bottom of the pond. When I went back to the house, I proudly announced my accomplishment. Aunt Nellie, in her quiet way, said she would miss the bullfrogs croaking their songs later in the summer since I had killed them all. I was struck hard by the unforeseen consequences of my actions and have never been able to forget that day. I cannot hear frogs around a pond without thinking of that incident. I realized that killing even a tadpole had consequences and was not to be undertaken lightly and without real need or adequate reflection.

Hunting was an important part of Eastern Shore culture, and the first year a boy went hunting was a rite of passage into young manhood. When the time came, my father introduced me to hunting, buying my first county resident hunting license and taking me to hunt ducks, squirrels, and rabbits. He bought me an over-under combination .22 rifle/.410 shotgun, which was a good multi-use weapon for a young boy unlikely to hit very much anyway. What I remember most about duck hunting is sitting very still out on the water for long periods of time, very cold and miserable. I had to borrow someone else’s bigger shotgun, and I don’t remember ever getting the opportunity to fire it. Squirrel hunting was much more comfortable since it was possible to move around and get warm, but again I never succeeded in hitting one. Rabbits were the most interesting game to hunt since they ran away in order to escape, but they often ran in a big circle so that if the hunter stayed in one place they came back. I got one unsuspecting rabbit before he began to run, and together Dad and I skinned and butchered it for eating. I had had no qualms about pulling the trigger before the fact, but as we skinned the animal I was struck by the finality of the death I had caused. My experience around Aunt Nellie’s farm pond kept nagging at me, and I never went rabbit hunting again after that first time.

My father decided to raise rabbits in order to provide some meat for our table. He brought two home, of which one was pregnant. Before very long he was ready to start killing some to eat, but I protested so strongly he held off. This continued until we were feeding 114 rabbits, at which time he relented and sold them to someone whose children presumably had fewer scruples about killing rabbits. Interestingly, although we also kept chickens at this time, I had no problems with killing and eating chickens. I went fishing for bass, netted herring when they were running, and went crabbing whenever I could without feeling any reservations about eating my catch.

Each of these activities of my childhood had qualities that set me apart from other children my age. Being a preacher at church, my academic achievements in school, the pressure to rise ever higher in rank in the Boy Scouts, working six days a week from a very young age—each of these made me feel and be treated differently from other boys. My parents made these differences feel even more stark as they drilled into me that, as a Wilson, I was different from everyone else, held to higher standards of behavior and performance. No one liked me for myself, according to my parents—only for what they could get from me. My father forbade me to open the hood of any car or be around an exposed automobile engine for fear it would tempt me away from attending college. My mother lectured me that boys were out to make themselves feel better by derailing my plans for college and girls were only interested in getting pregnant by me so they could keep me in Cecil County as their husband. All this talk had its effect on me.

I spent the summer after graduation (1965) as a counselor at Caesar Rodney Boy Scout Camp near home. Some of the other counselors were college students, and one day I came into their cabin and heard them talking about an aerial dogfight that had taken place somewhere called Vietnam. The United States had apparently shot down more planes than it lost, which was reported with cheers and laughter, much like a home team victory on the athletic field. This was the first time I was conscious of the existence of Vietnam or that American soldiers were fighting a war there; I wondered where it was on the world map.

Chapter 2:

A Severe Left Turn: Cambridge/Boston, 1965–1970

Arriving in Cambridge to begin my college career seemed to me like one more accomplishment in what had been, to that point, an unbroken series of accomplishments throughout my life—a journey of ascents. My sense of self was robust and confident; I expected that my life would continue to be a series of steady accomplishments.

As a brand-new freshman, I felt the arc of