Mr. Carlson also adored General Douglas MacArthur, so we listened to tapes of his farewell address to Congress over and over again. At the conclusion of one such session, Mr. Carlson passionately ex claimed, “And remember, above all else, ‘Better dead than red!’ “ Ricky Ricketts, sitting in front of me, started laughing, and I caught the contagion.
Mr. Carlson sternly asked, “What do you think is so funny?” And Ricky replied, “Gee, Mr. Carlson, I’m only fourteen years old, and I’d rather be alive than anything.”
My active involvement in the First United Methodist Church of Park Ridge opened my eyes and heart to the needs of others and helped instill a sense of social responsibility rooted in my faith. My father’s parents claimed they became Methodists because their great-grandparents were converted in the small coal-mining villages around Newcastle in the north of England and in South Wales by John Wesley, who founded the Methodist Church in the eighteenth century. Wesley taught that God’s love is expressed through good works, which he explained with a simple rule: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” There will always be worthy debates about whose definition of “good” one follows, but as a young girl, I took Wesley’s admonition to heart. My father prayed by his bed every night, and prayer became a source of solace and guidance for me even as a child.
I spent a lot of time at our church, where I was confirmed in the sixth grade along with some of my lifelong buddies, like Ricky Ricketts and Sherry Heiden, who attended church with me all the way through high school. My mother taught Sunday school, largely, she says, to keep an eye on my brothers. I attended Bible school, Sunday school, and youth group and was active in service work and in the altar guild, which cleaned and prepared the altar on Saturdays for Sunday’s services. My quest to reconcile my father’s insistence on self-reliance and my mother’s concerns about social justice was helped along by the arrival in 1961 of a Methodist youth minister named Donald Jones.
Rev. Jones was fresh out of Drew University Seminary and four years in the Navy. He was filled with the teachings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr. Bonhoeffer stressed that the role of a Christian was a moral one of total engagement in the world with the promotion of human development. Niebuhr struck a persuasive balance between a clear-eyed realism about human nature and an unrelenting passion for justice and social reform. Rev. Jones stressed that a Christian life was “faith in action.” I had never met anyone like him. Don called his Sunday and Thursday night Methodist Youth Fellowship sessions “the University of Life.” He was eager to work with us because he hoped we would become more aware of life outside of Park Ridge. He sure met his goals with me.
Because of Don’s “University,” I first read e. e. cummings and T S. Eliot; experienced Picasso’s paintings, especially Guernica, and debated the meaning of the “Grand Inquisitor”
in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. I came home bursting with excitement and shared what I had learned with my mother, who quickly came to find in Don a kindred spirit. But the University of Life was not just about art and literature. We visited black and Hispanic churches in Chicago’s inner city for exchanges with their youth groups. In the discussions we had sitting around church basements, I learned that, despite the obvious differences in our environments, these kids were more like me than I ever could have imagined. They also knew more about what was happening in the civil rights movement in the South. I had only vaguely heard of Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, but these discussions sparked my interest.
So, when Don announced one week that he would take us to hear Dr. King speak at Orchestra Hall, I was excited. My parents gave me permission, but some of my friends’
parents refused to let them go hear such a “rabble-rouser.”
Dr. King’s speech was entitled, “Remaining Awake Through a Revolution.” Until then, I had been dimly aware of the social revolution occurring in our country, but Dr.
King’s words illuminated the struggle taking place and challenged our indifference: “We now stand on the border of the Promised Land of integration. The old order is passing away and a new one is coming in. We should all accept this order and learn to live together as brothers in a world society, or we will all perish together.”
Though my eyes were opening, I still mostly parroted the conventional wisdom of Park Ridge’s and my father’s politics. While Don Jones threw me into “liberalizing” experiences, Paul Carlson introduced me to refugees from the Soviet Union who told haunting tales of cruelty under the Communists, which reinforced my already strong anti-Communist views. Don once remarked that he and Mr. Carlson were locked in a battle for my mind and soul. Their conflict was broader than that, however, and came to a head in our church, where Paul was also a member. Paul disagreed with Don’s priorities, including the University of Life
