I said, “Well, I don’t know quite how to approach it in this case. Do you want to be persuaded of the truth of the Christian religion?”
He laughed. “I’m sure if I were persuaded of it, I would be grateful in retrospect. People generally are, as I understand.” “Well,” I said, “that doesn’t give me much to work with, does it?”
He just sat there for a while, and then he said, “A friend of mine — no, not a friend, a man I met in Tennessee — had heard about this town, and he had also heard of your grandfather. He told me some stories about the old days in Kansas that his father had told him. He said that during the Civil War Iowa had a colored regiment.”
“Yes, we did. And a graybeard regiment, and a Methodist regiment, as they called it. They were teetotalers, at any rate.”
“I was interested to learn that there was a colored regiment,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought there were ever that many colored people in this state.”
“Oh yes. Quite a few colored people came up from Missouri in the days before the war. And I think quite a few came up the Mississippi Valley, too.”
He said, “When I was growing up, there were some Negro families in this town.”
I said, “Yes, there were, but they left some years ago.” “I remember hearing about a fire at their church.”
“Oh yes, but that was many years ago, when I was a boy. And it was only a small fire. There was very little damage.” “So they’re all gone now.”
“Yes, they are. It’s a pity. We have several new Lithuanian families. Of course they’re Lutheran.”
He laughed. He said, “It is a pity that they’re gone.” And he seemed to ponder it for a while.
Then he said, “You admire Karl Barth.” And I believe it was here he began to speak out of that anger of his, that sly, weary anger I have never been able to deal with. He was always smart as the devil, and serious as the devil, too. I should have known he’d have read Karl Barth.
I said, “Yes, I do admire him. Very much.”
“But he seems to have very little respect for American religion. Don’t you agree? He is quite candid about it.”
“He has been very critical of European religion also,” I said, which is true. And yet even at the time I recognized that my reply was somewhat evasive. So did young Boughton, as I could tell by his expression, which was not exactly a smile. He said, “He takes it seriously, though. He thinks it’s worth quarreling with.”
“Granted.” That is certainly true, too.
Then he asked, “Do you ever wonder why American Christianity always seems to wait for the real thinking to be done elsewhere?”
“Not really,” I said, which surprised me, since I have wondered about that very thing any number of times.
Now, at that point I did feel that Jack Boughton was, so to speak, winning the conversation, and furthermore, that he was no happier about it than I was, maybe even a little disgusted. Certainly I found myself in a false position yet again. I felt like pleading old age. But I was sitting there in my church, with the sweet and irrefragable daylight pouring in through the windows. And I felt, as I have often felt, that my failing the truth could have no bearing at all on the Truth itself, which could never conceivably be in any sense dependent on me or on anyone. And my heart rose up within me — that’s exactly what it felt like — and I said, “I have heard any number of fine sermons in my life, and I have known any number of deep souls. I am well aware that people find fault, but it seems to me to be presumptuous to judge the authenticity of anyone’s religion, except one’s own. And that is also presumptuous.”
And I said, “When this old sanctuary is full of silence and prayer, every book Karl Barth ever will write would not be a feather in the scales against it from the point of view of profundity, and I would not believe in Barth’s own authenticity if I did not also believe he would know and recognize the truth of that, and honor it, too.”
I was tired and I was feeling more beleaguered than a man my age should feel, and that is the only way I can explain the tears. I was almost as surprised as young Boughton.
He said, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” and he said it convincingly.
There I was, wiping tears off my face with my sleeve, just the way you do it. It was embarrassing, believe me. He said something that sounded like “Forgive me,” and he went away.
Now what? My present thought is that I will write him a letter. I have no idea what it will say.
***
There have been heroes here, and saints and martyrs, and I want you to know that. Because that is the truth, even if no one remembers it. To look at the place, it’s just a cluster of houses strung along a few roads, and a little row of brick buildings with stores in them, and a grain elevator and a water tower with Gilead written on its side, and the post office and the schools and the playing fields and the old train station, which is pretty well gone to weeds now. But what must Galilee have looked like? You can’t tell so much
