Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ellsworth Kalas is senior professor of homiletics at Asbury Theological Seminary in Lexington, Kentucky. He is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church and the author of many books, including Preaching the Calendar (Westminster John Knox, 2004) and Faith from the Back Side (Abingdon, 2011).

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

What I Learned When I Was Ten

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

I'M AN INSATIABLE READER, so of course I collect a good deal of unverifiable information. Much of it, I can't document later. When in the course of a day one passes happily and without discrimination through newspapers, billboards, philosophical journals, student papers, and maybe a chapter of a novel, one doesn't remember the source of each insight, whether treasured or trivial.

So I can't tell you where I read it, nor if the source was responsible, but I read somewhere that for most people the tenth year of life is the most important. It shapes, perhaps even controls, much of what follows. I suppose the reason this tidbit stayed with me is because it is true to my own experience. Can anything make a theory more surely true than that it has proved true in one's own experience? This is Newton's apple in every soul's search for gravity.

My tenth year was a long one. It began in August l932, when I was still nine years old, and concluded in February l934, just as I reached eleven. Everything that has happened to me in the more than sixty years since then is a product of those eighteen months. A psychiatrist would want to make a case for the influences of the oral and anal periods, and might want even to suggest the possibility of prenatal factors; if so, I would listen appreciatively. But it's that tenth year that picked up all the stuff from the days beyond conscious memory and conjured purpose from them.

Nor is it simply a matter of memory coming alive at that tenth juncture. I can reconstruct several scenes and dialogue from our visit to the Mayo Clinic when I was four years old. And I remember, early in my fourth year (I can date many memories by the houses in which we lived; this is an advantage of living in rental properties), sitting at the foot of the concrete steps of our yard, saying, "Good morning" to each person who walked by. This experience may have prepared me for the long decades of greeting people at church doors on several thousand Sunday mornings. I do wonder why that particular early childhood memory stays with me and how it is that, timid as I was, I dared so to approach each passerby. But with all of the earlier memories, there is nothing to compare with what I think of as my tenth year.

A Simpler World?

As we grow older, most of us insist that the world was simpler when we were young. It's an illusion, of course. The point is, we have hindsight to grasp the past, and hindsight is a great simplifier. It is possible, however, that the world was more accessible in those days. Not in the way that television, fax machines, and the Internet make things accessible now, but in the way intimacy makes life accessible. It was a world where automobiles had running boards, and where—though adults warned against it—you could jump onto the running board to ride a few blocks without asking your friends to let you inside. Soda fountains were accessible too; you could perch on a stool and sip a cherry Coke for a nickel, with the quality varying according to the skills of the soda jerk.

Politicians were accessible too. We didn't have their images on a television screen, but there was a good chance that even presidential candidates would get within driving distance (say, one hundred miles) on one of their whistle-stop trips, where you could see them up close and personal.

The year 1932 was an election year, and an exceedingly lively one. Herbert Hoover's run for reelection was being challenged by a patrician candidate (or so it seemed to us Iowans) from New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We hung over the radio, enchanted by Mr. Roosevelt's patterns of speech, so different from our flat, Midwestern talk. But my father's heart was with President Hoover. After all, Mr. Hoover had been born in Iowa, and besides, Dad was an unrepentant Republican. Poor as we were in the Depression years that followed, Dad never believed that the Democratic Party was on his side. In human relationships, my father was the most democratic person I have ever known. I doubt that there was a prejudiced bone in his body. He needed no lessons in race relations. And although he was a Sunday school teacher and church officer, the prostitutes and small-time gamblers on his laundry route were to him nothing other than human beings who had made a wrong turn. They were, in the language of an old song, more to be pitied than censured. Indeed, I don't know that even pity would have occurred to my father, because pity implies judgment, even if kindly judgment. If he had known Robert Burns, he would have agreed with him, that "a Man's a Man [or a Woman's a Woman] for a' that." But when he voted (as he always did), he voted Republican.

Those were very dark days. When Iowa farmers couldn't get a fair price for their milk, they refused to sell to the dairies and drove caravans of trucks into town to pour their milk into the containers of us city dwellers, for free or for a donation. We were glad to fill our fruit jars and kettles with this very unpasteurized milk. Our fear of germs was subordinate to our shortage of money. There were instances of violence when some farmers decided to sell to the dairies, and bitter feelings ran deep among people who had been neighbors for generations.

Fear ran deep, too. I remember the evening Dad returned from work to tell us he had just learned that Frank had committed suicide the day before. "Hung himself in the barn. I guess he decided it was easier to die than to go through a sheriff's sale." I knew Frank only from seeing him at family reunions—a slight man who looked better fitted to an accountant's office or to teaching medieval English than wrestling milk cans and plows. Now he was like a small side of beef, to be taken down and buried.

Nevertheless, we remembered how to laugh. There was the politician from the South, speaking on a national broadcast so that we got him in Iowa. "My opponent reminds me of the day old Davy Crockett thought he spotted a raccoon up in a tree. He took a shot, and it was still there. Tried again, and it hardly moved. It was only after the third try that Davy realized the raccoon was nothing more than a louse on his eyelash." My father and my brothers-in-law laughed loudly, but the women said, "That's such nonsense!"

If the radios gave immediacy to our news, the daily papers gave permanence. We waited for the delivery boy to throw our copy of The Sioux City Tribune in the vicinity of our porch. As a nine-year-old I looked each evening for the short front-page column by Will Rogers. Poor as we were in the years that began that October 1932, we never stopped getting the newspaper. We had no telephone, and our diet was modest by any standards, but we always had a newspaper. It cost only three cents a day and five cents on Sunday (even less by weekly subscription), but since my father—like many laboring men—earned only a dollar a day (six days a week), after losing his "good" job at the laundry, three cents was significant. Today's fifty-cent newspaper is, by comparison, a bit of a bargain.

At our house, and in the homes of our best friends and family, we had a vested interest in reading the newspaper. We believed that any day the news we discussed in private would...