Through Fear to Faith: A Spiritual Journey

© 2006 Thomas Cowan Starnes. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 9/28/2006

ISBN: 1-4259-6505-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-9071-1 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2006908283

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

For Wave,

Who, for all but eighteen of the years written about,

Has been by my side

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to my sister Jane for filling me in on the Tennessee years – those long ago rough years most of which I missed, and all of which my brother Luther missed, save for a few months. I am further indebted to Jane for accepting, maybe reluctantly, the care of me when I came home from the hospital to begin making my way in this world. Mama made these care assignments, my older sisters tell me, whenever a new baby came along, and Jane made me my first rattle: a Calumet Baking Powder can containing a few pebbles.

I am also indebted to those others who lived under the same roof with me. Florine, the oldest child, who, like the rest of us sports a few psychic scars, yet, at eighty-seven, on most days, enjoys life and whose humor reminds me most of Mama. Ruth, child number five, my playground protector, and the one who introduced me to Eugene Field’s, Little Boy Blue, just passed the four score year mark having battled her way through cancer, and is making the most of living with the little bit of sight that macular degeneration hasn’t destroyed. Luther, the last of mama’s brood, who gets a fair amount of copy in the upcoming pages, simply because we have been buddies for a very long time, just got his biblically allotted three score and ten. Although the subject never comes up, it has to cross his mind because it crosses mine, which one of us will be left standing to say a few last words over the other one.

If Elizabeth had lived, child number two, she would be eighty-five, and, no doubt, still a member of the church that the rest of us chose to leave. She worried a lot about the state of our souls, but family ties held us together, and we were all with her when cancer took her away at fifty-five. Benton, child number four, would have been eighty-one, had muscular dystrophy not cut his life short at age twenty-seven. His life was such a gift to the family. And Lucille, child number six, my playmate and sparring partner, would be seventy-eight had not cancer gotten the last word just about this time ten years ago,

And, of course, there’s Mama and Daddy – which is what we Tennesseans called our fathers and our mothers – to whom I am deeply indebted. There is little doubt that not a single one of the eight of us was a part of any parenting plan. But none of us ever felt unwanted. We were loved and cared for and nurtured in the faith.

Any list of people to whom I owe a lot would have to include those who have sat in all those pews out there in front of me for all those years. Some of them I mention in the pages to follow, but an awful lot I do not. There is a decided trade deficit between me and all these saints: they gave me more than I ever gave them.

Finally, there are those that now make up my family. Wave, to whom this book is dedicated and about whom I write a great deal, is the love of my life and who packed an over abundance of commitment into that simple I do she spoke in front of that Ohio church altar fifty-two years ago. Vicky, our eldest, who will reach the half century mark this year, has the scars that all new parents, of necessity I think, inflict on their first born. I had a cracker organist who said that first children were like first waffles – they needed to be thrown away. Vicky was a keeper, and her granddaddy Starnes would be so proud. She preaches, and lives, the faith that held him steady: God is faithful and will provide. Tommy, ever the middle child, never comfortable with conflict, settled on the law as a way for him, I suppose, to make a living working at reconciliation. His faith is a search, yet deep down, he, too, believes that this is his Father’s world. And darling Floyd, the baby, who will be forty-six come October, never met a person he didn’t like, simply because the gospel he heard growing up said that we ought to love everybody, regardless, and if there were more like him in this world there would never be another lie told and we would all find a way to just get along.

These three of ours have brought John, Barbara and Carlos into my life, and they in turn have blessed Wave and me with Keott, Rachel, Hannah, Jacob, Dylan, Joe and Danny. All those bumper stickers about the joys of grand parenting that always seemed a bit overblown, are now my sentiments, exactly. What a treasure these precious gifts from God are. And if Hannah’s thirteen year old heart is really picking up intimations from above, one day she will join her Mama, her great uncle Luther, her second cousin Patricia, and her two granddaddies and find her own way to tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love.

Introduction

This book got its start almost twenty years ago. A book, though, was the farthest thing from my mind when I sat at my desk that May Monday morning and began to write. All I knew was that I had to fashion some sort of response to a question one of Washington, D. C.’s more notable talking heads had asked on a local television news panel: and just what is a Nazarene, anyway?

The topic that Saturday night on Agronsky and Company was the presidential candidacy of Gary Hart. This was just days before Donna Rice became a household name, so Senator Hart was still a major player in the race for the Democratic nomination. Some non-sex character questions were already rumbling around: he had changed his name as well as his age, and had slightly altered the name of his college. It was this bit of past doctoring – making Bethany Nazarene College be, simply, Bethany College – that caused James J. Kilpatrick to ask the question that prompted me to put pen to paper.

I had heard of Gary Hart long before his name was in the news. He was one of us: us being a rather large group – spread out all over the country – of persons who had made the decision to leave the church that had nurtured them in the faith.

The church in question was the Church of the Nazarene, a relatively small – but fast growing – conservative denomination that was established in 1908 by a group of people – mostly Methodists – who felt that the then contemporary followers of John Wesley had strayed a bit from the teachings of their founder.

I had no idea of my audience that Monday morning; I just wrote. My opening line was a suspicion that it just could be I was the only guy in town (I was pastor at Capitol Hill Methodist Church at the time) who could understand why Gary Hart might not want to dwell on his religious past, because I, like him, was a backslidden (their word) Nazarene.

What followed was a mini spiritual journey centering on what it was like growing up in a restrictive religious environment, the pain of not being able to go to movies or school dances, and always feeling a bit out of it socially. I also wrote of the joy in finding a church that gives one room to grow.

This was pre-word processing days for me, so I gave my long hand scribbles to the church secretary to transcribe, and, when that was done, I had no idea what to do with them.

To this day, I find it hard to believe that I stuffed those words into an envelope addressed to the editor of the Washington Post. Aside from a sermon and an article or two, I had never had anything published. Who did I think I was just throwing something over the transom at the prestigious Post? If anyone there was assigned to open such unsolicited stuff, I had visions of Meg Greenfield and company splitting their sides over this small time Methodist preacher presuming to think that they had time for such pious drivel.

Then, while that missile was en route, the flash bulbs went off behind the shrubs in front of Gary Hart’s Capitol Hill town house, and his presidential bid was toast. Not only was his candidacy out of the question, so also was any notion, however slight, I might have entertained that my piece would ever see the light of day. Or so I thought.

But Thursday, I got a call from the Post. They would like to run the article Sunday. Would I be around? They wanted to send a courier over with some suggested editing. I have cherished this next comment: the suggested changes are minimal. Since I had not re-written anything, it surprised me to hear that.

The article ran on Sunday, and the calls started coming. Wire services picked it up, it appeared in papers all over the country, and it was selected for The Best of the Post. It was pretty good writing, but not that good. What helped it along was Gary’s fall from grace. One southern paper ran it next to a cartoon that showed Gary’s pants down around his ankles, his boxer shorts had hearts on them, and a bimbo was clutching his ankles. They titled my piece, What’s in Gary’s Hart.

Notoriety aside, my best guess is that what grabbed a fair number of people was that little snippet of my faith journey that had me moving out of, what was, for me anyway, a restrictive religious environment, so that I might find a faith that was my own. At least this is what most of the letters and calls indicated.

Since that time, high on my to do list has been the stretching of that article into a more fully fleshed out recounting of my faith journey. The public response to my article had something to do with this desire of mine to tell a bit more of my faith story. But other factors have been at work egging me on.

One is the reaction I used to get from my congregations when I would go public with some of my wrestling matches with God. Even before it became good homiletical form for preachers to stick pieces of their story into their sermons, I would do so, and invariably these were the sermons that elicited the most positive feedback.

Another factor working on me concerns the comments I get from those who, like me, left the church of our childhood, but who, unlike me, left the church altogether. And, to be honest, can’t understand how on earth I have managed to live out my life feeding at the trough of organized religion, as one of them has not so delicately put it. This is what one of my friends from those long ago years said in a recent e-mail.

I would truly like to know about your journey from growing up as a Nazarene and then moving into the Methodist Church. How did you keep from just throwing it all out? I certainly struggled for years over religious beliefs after I left seminary, and while the morals remained, I finally just gave up on religion … . I do not mean to pry into your private life but if you ever get the urge to write about the transformation of your own beliefs, I would be very interested. I have simply contented myself by thinking, well, I am here, and do not do the things that would be destructive to myself and to others and if there is something out there after this life, then okay, but I do not believe that there is.

This book is for Herb and some of those others I sojourned with years ago who can’t quite figure out why I am still, as we used to sing back then, pressing on the upward way.

This book is also for me. Faith is a journey not a destination. We never really arrive. The best we can hope for is that dimmed view that Paul likened to peering through a darkened glass. Many of the questions that shoved me into a denomination that would give me room to roam remain unanswered. But I have kept at it – this seeking – and hoping against hope that the way will become clearer.

Perhaps this is best stated in my email response to Herb.

You asked about how I have kept at it. I sometimes wonder. I have never been comfortable with the concept of ‘call.’ It is something I have from time to time questioned; spent a fair amount of time in therapy wondering about. But there has been something going on inside me that has kept me at it. Part of it, I think, has been my search for my own faith. Do you remember reading about John Wesley’s struggle – how he felt that he didn’t have the necessary faith to do what he was doing? He shared this with a Moravian named Peter Boehler who told him, ‘Preach faith until you have it, and then because you have it you will preach it.’ Maybe that is what I have been doing – trying to find my own way by preaching it out.

Maybe this is what I am doing now – still trying to find my own way, by writing it out.

Chapter 1

We are all of us what we are to be by the time we are ten years old.

Soren Kierkegaard

Ancient wisdom says that the longest journey begins with the first step. The first step on my journey of faith was actually taken by my father. And he took it down the center aisle of the Cowan, Tennessee, Nazarene Church on a balmy summer night in 1936.

I think it was balmy, because an early memory of mine is being on a front porch swing with Ruth, one of my five older sisters, and listening to the singing coming through the open windows of the church across the street. My four year old ears couldn’t make sense of the words being sung, which, I guess, is the reason that this hazy memory is of my sister and me coming up with a lyric of he’ll eat my bones. Perhaps ten-year-old Ruth was already doing what I would later do by singing such things as, On a hill faraway stood an old Chevrolet.

My Dad, seated in that church across the street, had no trouble hearing clearly the words of at least one song that summer evening. Actually, the song that moved him out of his seat and down the center aisle of that church to give his heart to the Lord wasn’t sung at all. Rather, the evangelist who had come to this little railroad town church to conduct its annual summer revival played it on a slide trombone.

"There were ninety and nine that safely lay in the shelter of the fold,

But one was out on the hills away, Far off from the gates of gold."

There was no question in my Dad’s mind that night; he was that one lost sheep.

If you were to construct a time line for our family, it would not be stretching it to mark the years before 1936 as B.C. and those after as A.D. The Before Christ part does not mean that we were pagans. Not at all. We came from a long line of church people. In my father’s farm family, after the evening chores were completed and the supper dishes cleared, Papa Starnes would read from the family Bible and lead in prayer. Church continued to play a role in my father’s life as he and Mama worked to establish their own family. During those family forming years my Dad sang in the choir and taught a Sunday school class in the local Cumberland Presbyterian Church, and all of us children were baptized.

But in the summer of 1936, the Starnes’ family was in trouble. This was before dysfunctional was a word attached to families. My guess is that if the word were used at all in the Tennessee hill country, its reference point would be some piece of farm equipment. Given what we know now, it would not be a stretch to label our family as dysfunctional. My younger brother, Luther – child number eight – had been born in March. My father did have a steady job – not an insignificant accomplishment in those depression years – albeit a low paying apprenticeship. My mother’s family was keeping us in food and clothing. We were moving from rental house to rental house. And more and more of the little bit my father was able to earn went to the local bootlegger.

Not only were we dysfunctional, we were an embarrassment to both the Cowan and the Starnes families. When Papa Cowan was told that Mama was pregnant with child number eight, he said, My God, they haven’t paid for the last one yet. Papa had signed a note for the hospital bill when I had been born four years earlier. He then said, Are they running a race with Mary Doll Hornbuckle? The Hornbuckles were white trash – a necessary designation, I suppose, since in those days, trash was usually reserved for blacks. We were an embarrassment to two well-respected, proud families. And we lived in a town named after our Cowan ancestors.

Troubled families were not at all uncommon during those depression years. My parents had married quite young – on the same day that Mama graduated from high school. Early marriage wasn’t that uncommon then, and a fair number, like my father, didn’t even wait to finish high school. But families like the Starneses and the Cowans had higher hopes for their children. My mother’s family had planned for her to take a state test and be certified to teach school for a year, with the obligation to attend summer school and work toward a degree. It is unclear what my father’s family had in mind for him.

Whatever plans the two families had for their children, notwithstanding, on May 18, 1917, Grady Duncan Starnes and Mary Lucille Cowan were married, and moved into a small farmhouse on some land that Papa Starnes had bought. Papa’s plan was to build a larger house on this property and farm it. Which is what he did a few years later, forcing my father and mother to find another place to live, not only for the two of them, but also for Mary Florine and Elizabeth Duncan.

The father on the other side of the family became the port in this storm. Papa Cowan, an engineer on the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railroad, had recently bought his family’s farm, and asked my Dad to farm it for him. However, just one year later, Mama’s father sent the family packing, having decided to mix a bit of farming with his railroading. So, the five of them – Anna Jane having joined the mix – moved into one side of a rental house, and my dad – burying his pride – helped his father-in-law run the farm.

Since farming didn’t pay very well, never mind the insecurity of it, and with his growing family, my Dad did what quite a few other southern men were doing, including his younger brother, James Rowe: he headed to Akron, Ohio to work in the rubber shops. Grady Benton, the first son, was born there.

The work in Akron was steady and my parents made new friends, but wanderlust struck again; this time of their own making. Lucille was homesick, was my father’s take on the reasons for the move. The fact that she was expecting child number five probably had something to do with her wanting to be near her extended family. So it was back to Tennessee and home.

My mother’s family, however, wasn’t all that welcoming. She had written, telling of their eminent return to Cowan – no doubt including the announcement of another Starnes baby on the way – and asking if they had a few extra rooms where our family might live until we got settled. Her family said no.

The Starnes side of the family did have some room, so after a couple months shy of two years in Ohio, Mama, Daddy and their four children returned to Tennessee, and moved in with Papa and Nannie Starnes, in the very same big house on the Starnes farm – the house where Daddy and Mama had lived for a brief period five years before. It was there sister Ruth was born.

None of my sisters remember where my father worked in those immediate post-Akron years. Their best guess is that he fell back to his agricultural dependency. They do remember that it was not long before he signed on as an apprentice machinist with the Cumberland Portland Cement Company in Cowan. He was working there when Lucille Cowan was born in May, 1928. It is a source of mild astonishment that even though the family moved a lot, they have no recollection of ever doing any packing. What they do remember, though, is Mama reminding them in the morning not to come back to that house after school, and if they didn’t remember where the new house was, they should go by Nannie Cowan’s; she would direct them.

Added to the family’s economic insecurity was concern over Benton’s health. It had become increasingly evident that something was not quite right about his walking. He had not walked as early as the other children and when he did start to take a few steps, his gait was strange and he fell a lot. Although, he started to school on schedule, he became easy prey for childhood cruelty, and even though his older sisters tried to defend him – chasing away the kids who would push him over – my parents thought it best to keep him at home.

Muscular dystrophy at that time was a mysterious disease. The doctors at first speculated that he might have had polio as a child. One of my mother’s aunts took him to the Shriner’s Hospital in St. Louis. Even there, as it turned out, notions about this disease bordered on the primitive: the doctors said that Benton had an hereditary muscle disease that would eventually cripple all of the children. And worse even than those prospects, no child with this disease had ever lived beyond the age of 21.

My sister Jane