I've Been to Calvary - I've Seen the Lord

It is a peculiar feeling when you stumble upon an image from the past. Every once in awhile, I'll put something in a Google search box, and a memory will surface as I scan the results.

Tonight, I found a picture of my dad's first church. I was probably about three when we moved to Hoover, Iowa. The church is different from the way I remember it. Today, the entrance is located at the rear of the church. When I was a little girl, this was the back of the church. Mentally remove the entryway and imagine a little door in its place. That was the back door. The door to the sunday school rooms in the rear (where an older boy in the congregation once took me when everyone else was eating in the preacher's house - and forced me to do things I couldn't imagine doing - and then made me promise not to tell - the one memory I'd love to forget permanently).

If you walked around the church on the right side, you would pass a cemetery - oh so many snakes in that cemetery.

Mom would chase them down with the push mower and shred them into stringy red and green pieces that wiggled in the grass before going still.

If you kept on walking with the cemetery on the right and the church on the left, you'd come to the front of the church - or at least what used to be the front, in the late 1960s.

It smelled like old wood when you stepped inside, and little field mice would sometimes get caught in the false ceiling and run through the light fixtures above us. I liked it when they ran through the lit-up rectangles overhead - it brought a whole new kind of entertainment to the long, boring prayer services.

In the summer, overweight elderly ladies with big updo hairstyles would lay claim to personal handheld fans which they picked up from a little table just inside the front door. I remember thinking that the handles looked like a doctor's tongue depressor. Old-timey pictures of Jesus-and-sheep decorated the front side. I couldn't read the words yet, but I loved the pictures that told a story all by themselves. So much better than Sally, Dick and Jane books.

Mom played the piano, so my sister and I had to sit in the front row on the piano-side of the church. Close enough that Mom could poke us if we were too squirmy. Sometimes, I would get to sing in front of everyone - even with the microphone. I remember the smiling faces. I don't remember being scared at all. I thought I was like those people on TV who would hold a microphone and sing on the stage of some enormous church - out in television world.

I sang Elvis Presley's song Somebody Bigger Than You and I.

And there was the song I've Been to Calvary. That was probably my favorite. I could imagine the song in my mind as I sang. Up Calvary Mountain, there my savior to see. . . I've been to Calvary, I can say I've seen the Lord.

But, I hadn't been to Calvary. Not really. Only in my mind. I'd been there in my imagination. In the same way I put myself in the pictures on those old fashioned fans. As though the scene had come to life for me - like the mice that ran in the light fixtures or the snakes that lived and moved in the cemetery just beyond the windows.

That little country church, that's where I first learned to love Jesus. Where He became real to me. And I realized that He knew me, too.

But I hadn't really been to Calvary. I hadn't stood at the cross. Not yet. I hadn't held Him in my hand. I hadn't taken Him inside me, not really. I was only four or five. I would have to wait nearly thirty-five more years to truly know what it is like to travel up Calvary Mountain, there my savior to see.

I would have to travel a very long way to get to Calvary. To have it made present for me. To truly have Jesus come to me. A very long journey, just to get home. I still have tears when I encounter Him in the Mass. And I suppose there are some who look at the tears and don't understand. They don't realize that finally - finally - it isn't just a song or an image in my mind. For I have taken the journey of journeys for me . . . up Calvary Mountain, there my savior to see. I've been to Calvary, I can say I've seen the Lord.

. . . what a thrill of love divine, just to know that the Savior is mine.

I've Been to Calvary - I've Seen the Lord

Once Upon a Time, When I Was Wesleyan

At five, I didn’t realize how much life imitates falling dominoes or how one seemingly insignificant event calls into being the next and the next. I’d yet to memorize the verse that says all things work together for the good of those who serve the Lord. But I knew there was a God. In fact, I knew God existed before I was fully aware of my own existence.

That’s how it is when Dad’s a preacher.

By the age of five, God is at the core of all things. You have doubts about the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. But the Great I Am simply is.

At five, it doesn’t seem strange that Dad’s a preacher. Having a farmer or a trucker for a dad sounds weird. But having a preacher for a dad is normal. He has a church. People come to hear him speak. Mom is the church pianist. And you sit on the front row and behave until the benediction. You go to every potluck dinner, where everyone calls you by name and helps you fill your plate with whatever your heart desires.

When I was eight or nine, I invited Jesus to come into my heart. It was the normal progression in the evangelical and fundamentalist denominations. First, you teach a child. Then, the child chooses for herself.

From that point forward, I not only knew God was real, I knew that the Lord Jesus Christ was living in my heart. And I absolutely fell in love with Him. It was the beginning of my love affair with Our Lord; it set the stage for receiving the Eucharist - though that would not come for a very long time. Indeed, I learned to love deeply, and decades later, when I understood what I was receiving in Holy Communion as a Catholic, I almost couldn't bear it. It was too wonderful, so intimate, to have this one I loved take the form of something I could receive within me - literally and spiritually.

The summer of my ninth birthday came to a close, and my sister and I prepared to start a new school year.

In December of that school year, my parents got a phone call that my grandfather had fallen into a grain bin on the family farm and the local fire department was at that moment shoveling corn onto the frozen ground in an effort to find his body. The recovery team believed he had climbed to the top of the bin with a wrench in hand in order to break through the frozen layer of ice that sometimes forms on the grain during Iowa winters. He’d done this task many times through the years, but this time something went wrong, and he fell into the bin and suffocated. When he didn’t show up for the evening meal, grandma went looking for him. She had her suspicions when she realized the bin’s drier wasn’t working. A wrench had jammed up the gears. Grandpa’s wrench. The one he’d used to break through the crust of ice just before losing his balance. The wrench had made its way to the bottom of the bin and become lodged in the drier. My dad left the ministry soon after that terrible night, and we moved to the farm to help grandma.

I now had a farmer for a dad.

And that’s how things would have stayed if not for a couple of local Presbyterian churches who happened to be without a pastor. But that is another story for another day. It is enough to say that my first love for Jesus began when I was just a child - when I was Wesleyan. Even then, He was preparing me to come all the way home, to recognize Him in the Eucharist and to crave this Bread of Life with my whole heart and soul. Indeed, all things do work together for the good of those who are called.

Once Upon a Time, When I Was Wesleyan