A Book of American Martyrs(29)
Nor was I finding my courses so interesting. In the years since leaving school I had fallen out of the habit of reading books—any kind of protracted reading, that required concentration, made my eyes ache. Studying the Old and New Testaments for “The Minister’s Bible” mostly involved reading Bible verses, many of which I had already memorized as a boy. Though I could not have recited the verses aloud yet, when I tried to read them silently, my mind knew the words beforehand, as a monkey might, and so I had trouble comprehending almost anything I was assigned to read in the Bible, out of restlessness and boredom.
In the school library where I spent time between classes, and tried to work on my assignments, often I felt very sleepy, and yet restless. It was difficult for me to take notes on my assignments for I kept reading and rereading the same passages, as they did not seem so very different from other passages, on other pages and in other books. Sometimes I found myself sitting slumped at a table with my head lowered, my face against the tabletop as if I had fallen asleep and had been there a long time and could not remember where I was.
Luth-er!
Our instructors were retired ministers from St. Paul Missionary churches in the Midwest. Once, like Reverend Dennis, they had been missionaries in Africa, as well as in China and Central America, but now they were elderly and slow-speaking, and often seemed not to know how to answer questions put to them by students. (Not by me: I had no questions for my teachers and was surprised by the questions my classmates thought up, for instance where had Satan been, before God had created the Garden of Eden? Had there been dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden, or flying reptiles? And had God created lice, ticks, parasites, and germs as well, and were all of these species to be herded onto Noah’s Ark, and saved? But why?) Not one faculty member at the Toledo school was half so engaging and exciting as Reverend Dennis, even those who were middle-aged and not elderly.
It was something of a shock to me (as it should not have been) that the course titled “The Craft and Art of Preaching” would involve actual preaching on my part. Though I imagined myself preaching like Reverend Dennis in the pulpit one day, to a rapt audience of believers, I could not imagine preparing an actual sermon for that day. I believed that I could speak as well as, or better than, most of my fellow students, but when I began to speak I often stammered and lost my way, and broke out into a sweat. I could not bear the others staring at me, and taking note of the birthmark on my cheek.
Sign of the beast. Luther Dunphy.
My instructor Reverend Lundquist was patient with me, and tried to praise me, but I did not seem to know how to “compose” a sermon except by recalling what other preachers had said. The sample sermons in our textbook How to Prepare Sermons by Williams Evans—(“Jesus Is Your Closest Friend,” “The Joy of the Resurrection,” “Satan’s Bid for Your Soul,” “Meet the Holy Spirit,” “False Gods in America,” “The True Meaning of Christmas,” “The Second Coming: Will You Be Prepared?”)—were very familiar, for everyone used them as models, and were not inspiring. When I could, I attended church services at the church attached to the school, but the preachers there lacked the fire and joy of Reverend Dennis, and as I was very tired much of the time, I would nod off to sleep in the midst of their preaching. It was utterly baffling to me, how a minister might “think up” a subject about which he could preach, without another minister to imitate.
Sermons were meant to be on diverse subjects, and for special occasions—Christmas, Easter, weddings, baptisms, funerals. On the subject of baptism, for instance, I did not know what to say that had not already been said many times, and would be familiar to any congregation; I had no knowledge of this subject apart from what my instructors had told us, which were mostly quotations from the Gospels. (The favorite being John 3:5. Jesus answered, Truly, truly, I say unto you, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.) But if I tried to repeat what others had said, the words were flat and unconvincing, taken out of my spiral notebook, and my “sermon” was very short.
Even the subject of abortion, which was in the newspapers often since President Reagan had vowed to make abortion illegal again in the United States, and which roused such passion in others, did not seem to inspire me. When I tried to imitate the words of Reverend Dennis, who preached against abortion as it was a slaughter of innocents, my words did not sound convincing though I knew them to be absolutely true.
It was told to us that the St. Paul Missionary Church like other evangelical churches through the United States was united in opposing what was called abortion on demand, as they were united in opposing socialism, communism, atheism, and homosexuality. There were legislators friendly to our cause in all the states, and many groups organized to take cases to the Supreme Court of the United States, to determine that abortion might be declared illegal once again, as it had been before 1973, and abortion clinics shut down. When I heard Reverend Dennis preach on this subject I felt my heart pound dangerously hard for the words slaughter of the innocents were terrible to contemplate; but still, when it was my turn to stand at a pulpit at the front of the room and “preach” on this subject in our class in Toledo, my voice quavered, and my knees, and I spoke so softly and so rapidly, Reverend Lundquist had to interrupt—“Luth-er! Slow down, son. Please.”
My face reddened. I dared not glance up to see the other students exchange smirking glances.