"NASHVILLE"

 “NASHVILLE”

Caroline and I visited Nashville last week, staying with long-time (met in Norfolk) friends Jane and John Skelly, who provided great hospitality to us.  We were traveling up to Nashville when we heard that Dolly Parton had died, so that made it a special time to be in Nashville, as her humanity and her music were celebrated.  Our daughter Susan was also born in Vanderbilt Hospital, though we left Nashville for Decatur and Oakhurst when she we six months old.

I’ve had three iterations in Nashville.  After I graduated from Rhodes College in 1968, I moved to Nashville to attend Vanderbilt Divinity School, seeking either a PhD in philosophy or theology there.  Thanks to Dr. Michael McClain at Rhodes, I got a full scholarship, plus I wanted to be near to my girlfriend/fiancé, who was still a student at Rhodes.  Nashville was a great place to be in those days, and I learned  how deeply the Civil Rights Movement revolved around Nashville.  I started volunteering for the Tennessee Council on Human Relations, and I worked with Baxton Bryant, Andy Lipscomb, Will Campbell, Riggins Earl, Ed Hamlett, and others.   Eventually, my romantic relationship was broken off, which threw me for a loop (I don’t recommend such long-distance romances).  I was still in school, but I was increasingly involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement.  While attending an anti-war seminary conference in New Hampshire in the summer of 1969, I began to think about giving up my draft-exempt status, seeking to force the church to take a stronger stand against the Vietnam War.

The USA invaded Cambodia and Laos in May, 1970, and I was part of thousands of demonstrators who went to DC to protest that invasion and the continuing war.  While there, I made up my mind to drop out of seminary and seek to work to end the war.  Giving up my draft exemption meant that I would be drafted, but I was not going to serve in the War, so I had three choices:  go to Canada, go to jail, or seek conscientious objector (CO) status.  During the summer of 1970, I was on the faculty of the Roses Creek Folk School in the mountains of east Tennessee, which brought together middle-class students and mountain people.  In that summer, I became good friends with Ed Loring and his first wife Pat Hiott Loring, and they both helped to steer me towards seeking conscientious objector status.  Professor Don Beisswenger at Vanderbilt Divinity School was also instrumental in helping me discern my direction on this.

At the end of that summer, I moved back in with my mother in Arkansas to apply for my CO status and to seek a job which would qualify for alternative service to fulfill my duty to serve my country.  The local draft board in Helena would determine if I would be granted CO status and would have to approve any job placement that I would find.  While I was working on all this, Don called me at home to tell me that Father Jim Zralek was looking for someone to help him start a halfway house for men getting out of prison.  He felt that it would qualify as a CO position, especially since the pay was so low!  I talked with Father Zralek, and he sounded enthusiastic about my coming.  I packed up and moved back to Nashville for my second iteration there as director of Opportunity House.  I served there for two years, and it was there that I had my eyes and heart opened about prisons and how they serve in American culture.  Almost half of those in prison were Black, and there were a miniscule number of people with money in prison.  (For more on this part of the story, see my book “She Made a Way:  Mother and Me in a Deep South World.”).

While living in Nashville in this second iteration, I met Caroline in Nashville at the wedding of Robin and Linda Williams. Caroline had been ordained in 1973 by Atlanta Presbytery and was a campus minister at Georgia Tech.  She had come to Nashville with her housemate Murphy Davis, and I was smitten by her.  By this time, Ed Loring had talked me into returning to seminary and in coming to Columbia in Decatur, where he was on the faculty.  I was also motivated by the fact that Caroline lived in Atlanta!  I moved to Decatur, re-entered Columbia Seminary on a scholarship (thanks to Ed and Erskine Clarke), and Caroline and I started dating.  We eventually got married in 1974 and moved to Norfolk, where we became the first clergy couple to serve in a local church in the Presbyterian Church in the United States at St. Columba Presbyterian Church.

After doing ministry at St. Columba for five years and writing a grant to receive the Presbyterian Women’s Birthday Offering, our son David was born in 1980.  We were a long way from our families, so we worked with our friends Randy and Theon Dempsey to try communal living in Nashville for my third iteration.  I worked there at the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prison (under Joe Ingle and state director Harmon Wray), and Caroline stayed home with baby David.  My job was to work for prison reform in the Tennessee state legislature and to visit with people on death row.  I was terrible at being a lobbyist, but my pastoral presence on death row was strong – my designated death row prisoner eventually had his death sentence rescinded.  While in Nashville in this third round, I also became part-time pastor at Second Presbyterian, which was a great church for us.  We discovered that we were not made for communal living, and my work at Second reminded me how much I missed pastoring in the church.  Again, through Ed Loring, we were contacted by Oakhurst Presbyterian Church in the fall of 1982 to see if we would be interested in becoming pastors there.  We were, and we did.  We moved to the Decatur area in March, 1983, and stayed as pastors at Oakhurst until I retired in 2017.

There will be more of these stories in our upcoming book “Better Together:  Pioneers in Ministry and Marriage,” which we will complete soon.  But, for now, a lot of these memories rolled through my consciousness in our recent visit to Nashville.  Like the Civil Rights Movement, Nashville was central to our formation too.