I did not mean to criticize the trustees. I do understand the reluctance to make any substantial investment in the church building at this point. But if I were a little younger, I tell you, I’d be up on that roof myself. As it is, I might drive a few nails into the treads on the front steps. I don’t see the point in letting the old place look too shabby in its last year or so. It’s very plain, but the proportions of it really are quite pleasing, and when it has a fresh coat of paint, it’s all the church anyone could need, in terms of appearance. It is inadequate in other ways, I recognize that.
I did remember to mention to them that that weather vane on the steeple was brought from Maine by my grandfather and stood above his church for many years. He gave it to my father on the day of his ordination. The people in Maine used to put those roosters on their steeples, he told me, to remind themselves of the betrayal of Peter, to help them repent. They really didn’t use crosses much at all in those days. But once I mentioned that there was a rooster on the steeple, which most of them had never noticed before, they became a little uneasy with the fact that there wasn’t a cross up there. I believe they will put one up, now that it’s on their minds. That’s the one thing they’ll get around to. They said they will mount the weather vane on a wall somewhere, in the foyer,” probably, where people can appreciate it. I don’t care what they do. I only mentioned it at all because I didn’t want it to be discarded with everything else. It is very old. This way at least you can get a good look at it.
It has a bullet hole at the base of its tail feathers. There were a good many stories about how it got there. I was told once that, since my grandfather had no bell or any other respectable way to call a meeting, and almost nobody had a working timepiece, he would fire a rifle in the air, and one time he wasn’t paying enough attention where he pointed it. There was a story, too, that a man from Missouri who was passing by just as the people were gathering fired one shot and set the rooster spinning around to try to dishearten them a little, since he knew they were Free Soilers. And there was a story that the church had taken delivery of a crate of Sharps rifles and somebody wanted to find out if they were really as accurate as they were said to be.
A Sharps is a very fine rifle, but I suspect the first story is the true one, because in my experience that degree of precision is only achieved accidentally. My grandfather could be very quiet about his embarrassments, so he might just have let people speculate, invent. I told my committee the story about the Missourian because it has a certain Christian character dinging the weather vane would have been an act of considerable restraint, because feelings ran high in those days. That story has the most historical interest, too, I think, and it could well be true, for all I know to the contrary. It is hard to make people care about old things. So I thought I should do what I could for that poor old rooster.
Often enough these settlers’ churches were only meant to keep the rain off until there were time and resources to put up something better. So they don’t have the dignity of age. They just get shabby. They were never meant to become venerable. I remember that old Baptist church that my father helped to pull down, all black in the rain, looking ten times as formidable as it would have before the lightning struck. That was always a major part of my idea of a church. When I was a child I actually believed that the purpose of steeples was to attract lightning. I thought they must be meant to protect all the other houses and buildings, and that seemed very gallant to me. Then I read some history, and I realized after a while that not every church was on the ragged edge of the Great Plains, and not every pulpit had my father in it. The history of the church is very complex, very mingled. I want you to know how aware I am of that fact. These days there are so many people who think loyalty to religion is benighted, if it is not worse than benighted. I am aware of that, and I know the charges that can be brought against the churches are powerful. And I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, sheltered and parochial. In every sense, unless it really is a universal and transcendent life, unless the bread is the bread and the cup is the cup everywhere, in all circumstances, and it is a time with the Lord in Gethsemane that comes for everyone, as I deeply believe. That biscuit ashy from my father’s charred hand. It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for. If I could only give you what my father gave me. No, what the Lord has given me and must also give you. But I hope you will put
