Wrestling with Religion

Five years ago, I was playing Sir Wilfrid Robarts (the Charles Laughton role) in the Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution and went directly from dress rehearsal to the Recreation Center, a downtown bar where I often played the open mic. I was still costumed as Sir Wilfrid--a dark suit, a blue bowtie, dark-rimmed glasses, a pocket handkerchief, and a buttonhole flower--dressed far more formally than I ever do as myself, along with a neatly cropped beard and hair.  Apparently, I clean up well. A young blonde, a stranger, asked me if I wanted to dance. I say young. She was the kind of fifty that passes for thirty in dim light--twenty years my junior, and I assume she was drawn to Sir Wilfrid's distinguished aura and would have ignored my open-collar norm. Her assertiveness was pleasant if at first suspicious, as if she might be a pro, but our conversation migrated out to the bench on the sidewalk, a quieter place where we talked (well, mostly she talked) an hour o...

Religion in the old South Growing up in an Alabama Protestant town and a Baptist family in the 20th century, I had a clear idea what religion was, but a limited one. Most local religion was austere or invisible in the frontier tradition, all about words and the "truths" they signified, scarcely existing outside of songs, prayers, sermons, books, and pamphlets. A "mixed" religious family was one where a husband and wife disagreed about which church to go to Sunday morning. There was a Catholic church--small but thriving in 1950 as university influence made Auburn vaguely cosmopolitan--but I've heard that the church was founded by mistake. Around 1910, when no establishment of religion meant promoting all Christian denominations equally, students were required to sign a log at the church of their choice every Sunday morning. Since there was no Catholic church in Auburn, if they registered as Catholic, they could sleep in, and the story is that thes...

Shortly before my fiftieth birthday, my father announced that he had inoperable lung cancer. I see this moment as a snapshot. He’s sitting on the sofa in my son’s apartment, my mother beside him. After a long pause, I ask, “What are you going to do?” He answers in one word: “Live.” And live he did for two more months, hospitalized the last few days for palliative care. On the final night, they sent Daddy home with an oxygen tank. Another snapshot: he’s smiling in his recliner in the family room as we run a slideshow of family pictures, his life in review. We drove back to Phenix City before bedtime, and the next morning my brother called to say Daddy had died that night. Daddy never shared his afterlife expectations, and they may not matter. Whatever waits after the heart stops and the body decomposes, I doubt that expectation changes anything. His religion did guide him well through life. He said he was a Christian because his father was the best man he knew. Even if I can...

My great-great-grandfather Green was a devout lay Methodist who founded Sunday Schools wherever he went. He founded Green's chapel in north Alabama, which was my grandfather's and father's home church. My paternal grandfather, Papa Green, was a gentleman and a scholar, retired businessman, and farmer who kept a Bible and newspaper on the table by his rocker. My mother's grandfather donated land for a Baptist church down the hill from his house in central Alabama, where her father and mother, were pillars of the church and sustained a one-room school, also on family land. Grandaddy worked road maintenance in addition to farming to send my mother to Montevallo, the nearby women’s teacher’s college. Mother and Daddy were the first college graduates in their families. Both became teachers and settled in Auburn, Alabama. I grew up in a house just a few blocks from the university and within sight of one of the best public schools in the state. Daddy had converted t...