My first novel, A-Tumblin’ Down, soon to be serialized—subscribe now before the train pulls out of the station on June 6!
Below, an excerpt from chapter 1.
Donald rose with the sun, whatever the time of year. At the summer solstice that meant quarter to five and by Christmas nearly seven. Late August was a comfortable sort of time with a reasonable wake-up call of six o’clock. He made his own coffee. Carmichael scoffed at the “swill,” as she called it, that fueled him, and would not suffer her own coffee, brewed from beans dutifully toted northwards by her discriminating City parents or purchased at no small expense from the Shibboleth Co-op, to be wasted on his tastebuds. He was amused by her snobbery and made a point of smacking his lips on his “ditchwater” (another term of disapprobation) whenever she saw him drink it.
On this particular morning, the pleasure of sunrise, coffee, and quiet vanished the moment Donald flipped open his pastoral agenda to find the next Sunday’s lessons.
He should have seen it coming. It’s not like he hadn’t come across it before. Donald was on his fourth trip through the three-year lectionary, a curiosity that remained unfathomable to his assorted cousins and uncles, for whom there was no preaching but expository preaching, straight through one book of the Bible at a time, one verse at a time. Donald had in fact always taken wary note of this particular Sunday, the Fourteenth after Pentecost in Year B, for its distinction of featuring the one and only passage from the book of Joshua in the whole cycle.
Lucky for Donald, there were four texts in all to choose from any given Sunday, so the first time Joshua reared its ugly head he instead manfully shouldered his way through a fifth consecutive sermon on the bread of life from John 6. Three years later he tackled the almost-as-impossible text on husbands and wives from Ephesians 5; impossible for 1982, anyway, or whichever year that was. Another spin of the cycle brought him to Psalm 34. Only gradually had Donald realized that his fellow Lutheran pastors never preached on the Psalms, however dutifully they forced their congregations to chant through one each and every week. Donald remembered his own childhood pastor giving three solid years to the Psalms, one per week, except for Psalm 119, which got a few extra Sundays.
So now the only passage for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost that Donald had not yet preached on was this very one from Joshua chapter 24. In all honesty, he could recycle a previous sermon on a different lesson and get away with it; he’d been at Mt. Moriah only three years and its members had never heard the other sermons. But Donald’s relentless conscience told him he couldn’t put it off forever.
Anyway, just the sight of the Joshua lesson set in motion the same old argument in his head, and he was powerless to stop it. He watched it unspool in his mind like a filmstrip.
“Choose this day whom you will serve.” Joshua issued the charge to the Israelites on their way into the promised land. And the Israelites, in turn, chose the Lord. Simple enough.
That was the crux, the foundation, the fountainhead of everything Donald’s grandfather had believed. Wilkinson Abney: preacher, evangelist, revivalist, convicter of sinners, uplifter of penitents. He was terribly tall, with huge rangy bones nearly poking out of his joints, whiskers like Lincoln’s but white. He was powerful and gentle at the same time. As a child Donald never feared him but admired him desperately. He knew by the time he was six years old that he would grow up to be a preacher, too. Grandfather Abney detected the call early on, which made him all the more gentle and loving toward the boy.
Even then Donald had perceived that some of his grandfather’s affection served a double purpose, directing barbed arrows at the heart of Grandfather Abney’s son, Donald’s father. Jimmy Abney grew up with religion but, as far as Donald could tell, got bored with it. He didn’t hate it. He didn’t tell stories about crazy clergy, hypocritical moralists, or shocking extortions. He just got his lifetime dose of religion a little too soon and spent the rest of his life patiently making good money as a general contractor. Donald’s mother Dot grew up among poor and disorderly folks, for whom church was the one slender tether holding them back from total dissolution. Jimmy rescued her from all that and honored his wedded wife like a princess. She took Donald and his two siblings to church most Sundays because her in-laws expected to her to. Jimmy brooked no objection and attended with the rest of the family rotely on holidays. But in a family like the Abneys’, Jimmy’s disengagement was practically to trumpet unbelief.
Donald knew his father had shrugged off his father easily, but Grandfather Abney still sat enthroned in Donald’s heart. And this was the one who had said, time and again, “Choose this day whom you will serve.”
“I have chosen, Grandfather.”
“Have you handed it all over, Donald? Is it all truly laid down before the Lord? What are you holding back? In what corner of your heart have you not chosen? Think, grandson, before the time runs out for thinking.”
The Donald of the present hour sighed. He knew his line in the liturgy. He couldn’t turn the argument away, not even in his imagination. He couldn’t submit to it, either.
“Grandfather, it doesn’t matter that I choose God. It matters that God chose me.”
“Is that so?” rejoined Grandfather Abney. He rose up to his full height in Donald’s imagination, the ratio the same as in childhood: the man stood eleven feet tall. “Does not Joshua command the Israelites to choose? Are those not his very words? Is Joshua not chosen a model and exemplar for all the Israelites? And yet you will not choose! Woe to him who evades the choice.”
“But look,” Donald said desperately. “So the Israelites chose. They said they chose the Lord. But did they cleave to it? Did they abide by their choice?” Something about Grandfather Abney called forth archaic verbs from Donald’s deeps. “No. They failed the Lord again and again. They were a stiff-necked and faithless people. What good did it do them to choose?”
Grandfather Abney did not answer the question directly. Donald had never been able to force him to answer it, not even in his own mind. “We must choose again and again, Donald. Every day. Every noon. Every night. Every moment of the day is the Lord’s. Choose to whom this minute will be offered in spiritual worship. Does it belong to the Lord? Or to the sinner hankering after the fleshpots of Egypt?”
“Of course we choose every day.” Donald was exasperated. “But that’s—that’s not the good news. Choice is death for us every time.”
“‘I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.’ Donald, if the choice is death, is it not because you choose death?”
Donald shook himself free of the scene. He could never win, not even if he pointed out Grandfather Abney’s illegitimate switch from Joshua to Deuteronomy to make his point. The old preacher would never concede the objection’s relevance anyway. To him it was all the Good Book and all of it spoke the one good Word of God and that was that. A command to choose would not cease to be a command to choose, even if the very next verse demonstrated the choice to be impossible.
The irony of the thing was that Donald actually had made a choice, and not a small one. A choice, made with eyes wide open, to which he cleaved like a lifeline.
Donald, Jimmy, and Wilkinson Abney all came of age in a branch of the Holiness movement that had chosen, in addition to the Lord, to be separated from another branch of Holiness whose speciality, to hear it told, was Unholiness. This much and no more Donald had gleaned from his grandfather’s passing remarks. Jimmy Abney exited the quarrel, mentally if not denominationally. Donald Abney remained within the fold in his youth, and after finishing college he doubled up on Bible school and ministry at a sister congregation, thereby pleasing one but not both of his forefathers.
During his third year of Bible school, sitting in a quiet corner of the small library, inhaling the sweet scent of mildew, Donald glanced up from his Greek homework and espied The Journal of John Wesley. He tugged it off the shelf and, paging through, came across the passage where Wesley described his conversion, how his heart had been strangely warmed. The anecdote was famous enough, a favorite retold from the pulpits of Donald’s youth. But in reading Wesley’s own account, Donald was surprised to discover that what warmed his heart was not Scripture but Martin Luther—his Preface to Romans, to be exact. Luther, that distant hero of old who got the ball of restoration rolling but failed to see it through. What a curious collision of worlds.
Donald followed the trail through the library till he located a shelf-long sequence of volumes, half in ruby-red, half in sherbet pastels. He tracked down the heartwarming Preface and settled back in his chair to read but promptly found himself unsettled. Luther rang familiar notes when he praised faith as a “living, busy, active, mighty thing,” but then undermined his case just a page later with the assertion that, “as no one can give himself faith, neither can he take away his own unbelief.” But was that not the very point of prayer and worship and discipleship? To generate and build up and secure one’s own faith? To annihilate the whispers of unbelief and quite possibly the unbelievers? That was the very stuff of salvation. What game was Luther playing at?
With fifty-five volumes at hand, Donald did not lack for answers. He all but abandoned his Greek in the weeks ahead. By the end of his unauthorized binge, he discovered God’s choice, a choice that lay beyond the vicissitudes of Donald’s own slippery, insubstantial choices. Before the year was out, Donald chose to align himself with a tradition where his own choices were no longer of cosmic consequence and to enroll in one of its seminaries. If Grandfather Abney was neither heartbroken nor suspicious, it was only because he was dissonantly confident that Donald would see the error of his ways and return home where he belonged. Choices for God were subject to constant scrutiny; choices for church, by contrast, were supposed to be easy and absolute.
Carmichael slipped into the sunny office facing out over the saddle between the hills. “Morning,” she said brightly, rubbing Donald’s shoulders and setting her chin atop his head and its thinning mousy blond hair. “Working?”
“Arguing,” said Donald. “Same as always.”
“What over?” She peered down at his yellow legal pad, the scriptural citation written boldly, even a little angrily at the top. “Joshua? Really? In a sermon?”
Donald nodded.
“Can’t you just skip it? There’s three others to choose from.”
The lightness with which she said it was salve to Donald, but only to treat the symptoms, not to cure the root cause. It was all so easy for her. She’d grown up religionless, then fallen into faith like she fell into love with Donald, and nearly at the same time. The chasms between faith and understanding that threatened to swallow Donald whole were just wrinkles in the linen to her—natural to the subject, useless to try to eliminate, part of the charm.
“It’s in the lectionary,” Donald said, feeling stubborn and stupid. “It’s canonical Scripture. I’ve always skipped it before. I can’t in good conscience do it again.”
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” and she kissed the top of his head.
Once she was gone he looked back at the scrawl on the page. His handwriting was atrocious and he had never learned to type; the clacking of typewriter keys annoyed him. But illegibility posed no problem. His procedure was to write up notes on the lesson, organize an outline for his thoughts, internalize it, and finally preach the message without either paper in front of him or absolute certainty of what he was going to say. He found that his sermons came out dead, lifeless, and unconvincing if he did otherwise.
The parishioners of Mt. Moriah had not realized that about him at first. When they did, they were shocked. A pastor was supposed to come equipped with a manuscript. A Lutheran pastor, anyway. Donald grew up with preachers who would no more bring a manuscript into the pulpit than a feather boa. Eventually the congregation became accustomed to its eccentric pastor, though Donald was pretty sure that no one heard a word from the pulpit during the first six months of his pastorate. They’d spent the whole time worrying he’d forget what he had to say.
Commander of his own mind again, Donald flipped open his well-thumbed Revised Standard Version (another shock to his clan, that he had abandoned the King James and even dared to say it contained errors. As if God Almighty could make mistakes!). He laid one index finger on the agenda’s listed range of verses and another on the corresponding page of the Bible.
“What fresh hell is this?” Donald’s gut spoke ahead of the emendations of his brain. The appointed reading cut short just after Israel’s pious poppycock, deleting from the record Joshua’s sarcastic rejoinder, “You cannot serve the Lord!”
Improbably and unbelievably, the Lutherans were in cahoots with the revivalists. Donald settled down to his sermon with a passion, if not quite a message, that would have made his grandfather proud.