Redneck Mystic
Active Member
My grandparents on both sides were Southern Baptists. They attended Southside Baptist Church in Five Points South, in Birmingham, Alabama. My grandfathers were deacons in that church. My parents attended that church when they were children.
I maybe recall being at that church a time or two in my childhood, but otherwise I do not recall going to church, or my parents attending church, until Mountain Brook Baptist Church was built a few blocks from my our home on Montevallo Road in Mountain Brook slightly south of Birmingham. Mountain Brook was a upscale white community.
Every Sunday morning before Sunday School class, which I really enjoyed, my father took me me on a drive into the undeveloped southern part of Mountain Brook. We talked about things, and when he drove us back to the church, he attended Sunday school and I attended Sunday school. As we drove home from the church, he asked me what we had talked about in Sunday School, and I told him.
I recall attending two or three church services at Mountain Brook Baptist Church, which I hated, especially the long monotonous sermons.
When I was 12, my mother, who never attended church, discovered a small Episcopal church in and old farm house in the Crestline Village part of Mountain Brook, which had been started by a young pastor named Lee Graham.
After a while, my mother told my father, if he didn’t get more involved in church, she would take her children to St. Luke’s in Crestline.
My father and I continued our Sunday morning ritual, and my mother made me go to St. Luke’s with her on Sunday mornings and sit with her through the church service, which I hated.
My mother caught bloody hell from her parents, my father’s parents, and their minister at Southside Baptist Church, and the minister at Mountain Brook Baptist Church. But she was resolute.
My mother had me, my younger brother and our younger sister christened at St. Luke’s, attended by my father and his and my mother’s parents.
One Sunday evening dinner, my father asked me what the church sermon at St. Luke’s that morning was about? I had no answer, because I was off somewhere in my mind fishing and hunting during the entire church service.
My father gave my mother the look, and my mother gave me a look that would kill, and she enrolled me in confirmation class at St. Luke’s.
Confirmation classes were led by the young associate pastor, Ben Smith. He was nice, I liked him, but I hated being penned in the confirmation class for two hours every Saturday afternoon. I hated elementary school and felt I was sent to prison five days a week. Saturday was my one day off during the school year.
At nights, my mother drilled me in what I needed to learn in the Bible and the Episcopal Catechism to pass the class. I hated being drilled with stuff that didn’t interest me in the least and was ruining my Saturdays.
After the required number of confirmation classes, the Episcopal Bishop of Alabama came to St. Luke’s to confirm the members of my class. I sat in a pew in the church nave with my mother and father and their parents.
The bishop spoke for a while to the people sitting in the pews, and after some Episcopal rituals were recited or read by the members of the the congregation, and some Christian songs, were sung by the choir and people in the audience, the time came for my class to go to the communion rail to receive our first communion.
The bishop passed us one at a time and gave us the wafer representing the body of Christ. He passed us again one at time and gave us the silver chalice containing the communion wine, the blood of Christ.
When I took a sip and swallowed the wine, my first ever alcoholic drink, it went down my throat wrong and I felt like I was choking to death. It took every ounce of my will to be still and say nothing.
After the bishop gave everyone in my class the wine, I stood up from the communion rail and willed myself to walk back to the pew and pull out the kneeling bench on which I kneeled with my eyes closed, pretending to pray, until I felt like I wasn’t going to die after all.
It wasn’t long before my mother starting trying to persuade me to become an acolyte, who would walk down the aisle before church carrying a cross on a long pole before the service began, and then light the candles on the altar, and after the service ended would snuff out the candles and carry the cross on the pole out of the church, followed by the paster and associate pastor.
There was no way I was going to do that, but my mother kept trying.
One day after a church service, she tried to get the new curate John Fletcher to talk me into being an acolyte, and when he saw me blanch, as if I had been bidden by a scorpion, he told my mother that it didn’t seem I wanted to do it and he was going to let me be. The look of distress on her face caused me to feel awful, but no way I was going to be an acolyte.
I actually liked John Fletcher’s sermons, because they were short and made sense. But I wanted to do other things on Sundays than attend church, such as fishing, hunting and playing golf, and in college that’s what I moved toward doing, and it really distressed my mother. I felt guilty, but I really didn’t want to spend time in churches.
Later in my life, I sometimes attended a church for a while, but it never stuck and took hold, and eventually I stopped attending church altogether.
By then I had been stood before endless mirrors looking at me. My perspective about everything had been changed.
I knew for fact that God by some name existed, Jesus and angels known in the Bible, and deities in other religions, and the Devil by any name, and demons, and beings from other planets existed, and I knew there was no way I could prove any of it to anyone, and I didn’t know when I was ever not in church.
After my father and I became estranged in the fall of 1995, principally because of what I was experiencing, which he could not possibly fathom, he started coming to me in dreams and advising me in ways any son should want to be advised, even if some of his advice didn’t sit well with me.
Maybe I dreamed twice about my mother, after she died in early 1967, and I don’t remember what those dreams were about.
My father didn’t like to fish, and my mother didn’t understand why I loved to fish, but she knew that I would die if I didn’t get to fish, so she found men to take me fishing, and she took me to lakes with a sack lunch and left me there all day, and when she came back, I was happy if I had a catch or not, because I had gotten to fish. She wanted me to be a priest, but she did not understand priests catch souls for the church, while fishermen catch souls for God. She did not know the lake was the church, the fish were angels, and when they taught me how to fish, they sent me forth to fish.
What most impressed me about Lee was, when his vestrymen wanted to hire Mountain Brook police officers to stop blacks from worshipping at St. Luke's, he told them, if blacks could not come to worship, he would close St. Luke's. He also did not like preaching on tithing to the church, and he only did it once a year, when the Episcopal Diocese required that he do it. Not long after Lee stood down his Vestrymen, he announced his work was done at St. Luke’s and he left to pastor a small Episcopal church near Tallahassee, Florida.
The New Testament Letter to the Hebrews provides some insight into Melchizedek, an order of angel, and the Melchizedek priesthood, and its ordeal training, in which Jesus is high priest. I never once heard that mentioned in a Christian church, although every Episcopal minister is ordained by that Church as a priest forever after the order Melchizedek.
The Letter to the Hebrews was addressed to Jews who had accepted Christ and were going back to their old ways. The unknown author tells them that they should be teaching, they should be eating meat, but they are still drinking milk, and the author urges them not to turn away from the chastening of the Lord.
Being trained by the Melchizedek Order is nothing like being baptized by water and accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior. Being trained by the Melchizedek Order is being burned alive for the rest of your life.
But then, John the Baptist said in the Gospels that one whose sandals he was not worthy to latch would come, who would baptize in fire and in spirit. In the Gospels, Jesus didn’t baptize anyone in water. He said his baptism was in fire and he was anxious to get on with it.
Jesus did not mean for parents to use their children to prove they are okay. He meant for parents to live as he lived and taught others to live in the Gospels. I came to tell Christians they are saved by Jesus to the extent they live as he lived and taught in the Gospels, and in that way they incrementally deliver themselves from Evil and walk ever closer to God.
I maybe recall being at that church a time or two in my childhood, but otherwise I do not recall going to church, or my parents attending church, until Mountain Brook Baptist Church was built a few blocks from my our home on Montevallo Road in Mountain Brook slightly south of Birmingham. Mountain Brook was a upscale white community.
Every Sunday morning before Sunday School class, which I really enjoyed, my father took me me on a drive into the undeveloped southern part of Mountain Brook. We talked about things, and when he drove us back to the church, he attended Sunday school and I attended Sunday school. As we drove home from the church, he asked me what we had talked about in Sunday School, and I told him.
I recall attending two or three church services at Mountain Brook Baptist Church, which I hated, especially the long monotonous sermons.
When I was 12, my mother, who never attended church, discovered a small Episcopal church in and old farm house in the Crestline Village part of Mountain Brook, which had been started by a young pastor named Lee Graham.
After a while, my mother told my father, if he didn’t get more involved in church, she would take her children to St. Luke’s in Crestline.
My father and I continued our Sunday morning ritual, and my mother made me go to St. Luke’s with her on Sunday mornings and sit with her through the church service, which I hated.
My mother caught bloody hell from her parents, my father’s parents, and their minister at Southside Baptist Church, and the minister at Mountain Brook Baptist Church. But she was resolute.
My mother had me, my younger brother and our younger sister christened at St. Luke’s, attended by my father and his and my mother’s parents.
One Sunday evening dinner, my father asked me what the church sermon at St. Luke’s that morning was about? I had no answer, because I was off somewhere in my mind fishing and hunting during the entire church service.
My father gave my mother the look, and my mother gave me a look that would kill, and she enrolled me in confirmation class at St. Luke’s.
Confirmation classes were led by the young associate pastor, Ben Smith. He was nice, I liked him, but I hated being penned in the confirmation class for two hours every Saturday afternoon. I hated elementary school and felt I was sent to prison five days a week. Saturday was my one day off during the school year.
At nights, my mother drilled me in what I needed to learn in the Bible and the Episcopal Catechism to pass the class. I hated being drilled with stuff that didn’t interest me in the least and was ruining my Saturdays.
After the required number of confirmation classes, the Episcopal Bishop of Alabama came to St. Luke’s to confirm the members of my class. I sat in a pew in the church nave with my mother and father and their parents.
The bishop spoke for a while to the people sitting in the pews, and after some Episcopal rituals were recited or read by the members of the the congregation, and some Christian songs, were sung by the choir and people in the audience, the time came for my class to go to the communion rail to receive our first communion.
The bishop passed us one at a time and gave us the wafer representing the body of Christ. He passed us again one at time and gave us the silver chalice containing the communion wine, the blood of Christ.
When I took a sip and swallowed the wine, my first ever alcoholic drink, it went down my throat wrong and I felt like I was choking to death. It took every ounce of my will to be still and say nothing.
After the bishop gave everyone in my class the wine, I stood up from the communion rail and willed myself to walk back to the pew and pull out the kneeling bench on which I kneeled with my eyes closed, pretending to pray, until I felt like I wasn’t going to die after all.
It wasn’t long before my mother starting trying to persuade me to become an acolyte, who would walk down the aisle before church carrying a cross on a long pole before the service began, and then light the candles on the altar, and after the service ended would snuff out the candles and carry the cross on the pole out of the church, followed by the paster and associate pastor.
There was no way I was going to do that, but my mother kept trying.
One day after a church service, she tried to get the new curate John Fletcher to talk me into being an acolyte, and when he saw me blanch, as if I had been bidden by a scorpion, he told my mother that it didn’t seem I wanted to do it and he was going to let me be. The look of distress on her face caused me to feel awful, but no way I was going to be an acolyte.
I actually liked John Fletcher’s sermons, because they were short and made sense. But I wanted to do other things on Sundays than attend church, such as fishing, hunting and playing golf, and in college that’s what I moved toward doing, and it really distressed my mother. I felt guilty, but I really didn’t want to spend time in churches.
Later in my life, I sometimes attended a church for a while, but it never stuck and took hold, and eventually I stopped attending church altogether.
By then I had been stood before endless mirrors looking at me. My perspective about everything had been changed.
I knew for fact that God by some name existed, Jesus and angels known in the Bible, and deities in other religions, and the Devil by any name, and demons, and beings from other planets existed, and I knew there was no way I could prove any of it to anyone, and I didn’t know when I was ever not in church.
After my father and I became estranged in the fall of 1995, principally because of what I was experiencing, which he could not possibly fathom, he started coming to me in dreams and advising me in ways any son should want to be advised, even if some of his advice didn’t sit well with me.
Maybe I dreamed twice about my mother, after she died in early 1967, and I don’t remember what those dreams were about.
My father didn’t like to fish, and my mother didn’t understand why I loved to fish, but she knew that I would die if I didn’t get to fish, so she found men to take me fishing, and she took me to lakes with a sack lunch and left me there all day, and when she came back, I was happy if I had a catch or not, because I had gotten to fish. She wanted me to be a priest, but she did not understand priests catch souls for the church, while fishermen catch souls for God. She did not know the lake was the church, the fish were angels, and when they taught me how to fish, they sent me forth to fish.
What most impressed me about Lee was, when his vestrymen wanted to hire Mountain Brook police officers to stop blacks from worshipping at St. Luke's, he told them, if blacks could not come to worship, he would close St. Luke's. He also did not like preaching on tithing to the church, and he only did it once a year, when the Episcopal Diocese required that he do it. Not long after Lee stood down his Vestrymen, he announced his work was done at St. Luke’s and he left to pastor a small Episcopal church near Tallahassee, Florida.
The New Testament Letter to the Hebrews provides some insight into Melchizedek, an order of angel, and the Melchizedek priesthood, and its ordeal training, in which Jesus is high priest. I never once heard that mentioned in a Christian church, although every Episcopal minister is ordained by that Church as a priest forever after the order Melchizedek.
The Letter to the Hebrews was addressed to Jews who had accepted Christ and were going back to their old ways. The unknown author tells them that they should be teaching, they should be eating meat, but they are still drinking milk, and the author urges them not to turn away from the chastening of the Lord.
Being trained by the Melchizedek Order is nothing like being baptized by water and accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior. Being trained by the Melchizedek Order is being burned alive for the rest of your life.
But then, John the Baptist said in the Gospels that one whose sandals he was not worthy to latch would come, who would baptize in fire and in spirit. In the Gospels, Jesus didn’t baptize anyone in water. He said his baptism was in fire and he was anxious to get on with it.
Jesus did not mean for parents to use their children to prove they are okay. He meant for parents to live as he lived and taught others to live in the Gospels. I came to tell Christians they are saved by Jesus to the extent they live as he lived and taught in the Gospels, and in that way they incrementally deliver themselves from Evil and walk ever closer to God.
