THE SCHISM METHOD

I was raised in the Methodist Church to which I attribute the atheism to which I have ascribed since I was 16 years old. Let me explain.

My maternal grandmother was a Methodist in the revivalist tradition of the late 19th Century. I suspect that her parents may well have been Methodists too though I have no knowledge of that either direct or indirect. That grandmother died several years before I was born so I never got any direct influence from her for good or ill. I do know that I have a paperback book of revivalist hymns that belonged to her. My mother, the middle daughter who was closest to my grandmother, was a confirmed Methodist who became very involved in her church. My mother was a great watcher of religious programs on television which is how I became acquainted with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Oral Roberts and every televised Billy Graham crusade. It is also how I acquired a subconscious association of religion and showmanship.

The church to which we belonged, a small but reliable congregation in the section of Waterbury, Connecticut near where we lived when I was very young, had two ministers up to the time when I was ten or eleven. The second of those was British. He was a silversmith, as I understand it, who underwent a conversion experience which led him to seminary and the ministry. I am not sure but that experience may have involved comforting a dying flyer whose plane crashed during World War I.

In any case, I was allowed into a Bible class taught by Rev. Reith generally reserved for high school age children by the time I was ten years old. By the time I was twelve I was teaching a Sunday School class of 1st and 2nd graders. At fourteen I was hired by a Protestant Ecumenical group to teach in a weekday religious school whose main attraction was early discharge from the public schools one day each week. Everyone in my congregation firmly believed that I was headed to seminary and would be ordained as a Methodist minister.

The core of my church's congregation was a group of extended and interconnected families who had been instrumental in founding the church in 1876. Though such a core is fine for tradition it is also ossified and tends to see the church as its proprietary business. As long as the old families remained unchallenged and secure in their proprietorship all was well but change was coming.

Rev. Reith's replacement was a young, energetic man who was deeply involved with the civil rights movement. He was appointed to serve both my church and another in what was fast becoming part of the African-American ghetto. This other church served a largely African-American population in what had once been a German and Polish immigrant ghetto. It was the neighborhood in which my Polish paternal grandmother lived. This other church was dying. Many of the African-American members were finding a more congenial home in the black led pentecostal churches. The diocese decided that it deserved a shot and preservation so Rev. Floyd was sent to give it a try. Had Rev. Floyd been African-American he might have succeeded in preserving the other congregation but my church would never have accepted a black man as minister. Our church was essential to paying Rev. Floyd's salary so the diocese sent a white man to do a black man's job with predictable consequences.

After a short couple of years Rev. Floyd was moved to a congregation in Bridgeport where he had a better chance and more success. His replacement had been a missionary in the Philippines. He had a Fillpino wife which the congregation found exotic but not like them. He was also frightfully insecure and easily intimidated by the entrenched members of the congregation.

That minister's tenure was very short indeed. He was replaced by Rev. Howley, his wife and a brood of three or four children, maybe more. Rev. Howley had been a Roman Catholic priest. He was taking a graduate course in theology or ancient languages (I forget which.) in which a fellow student was an attractive, young nun. They began conversing, going out for coffee after class and, to shorten this narrative, fell in love. The got released from their vows, married and began raising a "good, Catholic family" of many children. Not wanting his theological training to entirely go to waste, Rev. Howley converted to Methodism, was ordained a Methodist minister and was sent to Grace Church with a mandate from the Bishop to make the church more financially viable.

Revs. Reith, Floyd and Howley represent three worthies in my religious upbringing. Rev. Reith taught me the fundamentals of Methodism. Rev. Floyd introduced me to a church militant for social justice as well as saving souls. Rev. Howley was the first person to take me to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City which, though he was not involved in it any further than as chauffer, taught me the art and intellectual side of religion.

Rev. Howley's mandate to place Grace Church on a better financial footing ran him headlong into the entrenched families who used the church as their subsidizing landlord and piggy bank. He was there less than a year. When the beneficiaries of church largess finally drove him out of that church he said he was fed up with the ministry. I fully understood. I was heartbroken to see a bunch of selfish bastards drive him from my church and from the preaching of theology that he loved. His departure happened to coincide with my growing interest in the theatre and my reading of Isaac Asimov's original Foundation Trilogy. Those three concurrent events along with the ongoing insanity of the Vietnam War, the vile responses to the civil rights movement south and north alike and my own intellectual growth led me to reject all religion. In one far too glib formulation, I saw the entrenched families of my church acting selfish, vile and nasty to protect their prerogatives and decided that if they were, as they smugly felt themselves to be, on the short route to Heaven, Hell was going to be a pleasant picnic, Dante not withstanding.

I have never really given up on religion though. I cannot believe in the supernatural mumbo-jumbo of risen dead and demons from Hell or angels in white reclining on clouds somewhere above us. I can, however, believe in decency and humanity and their opposites, vileness and inhumanity. I've seen too much vileness and inhumanity from political leaders and neighbors alike just as I've seen plenty of decency and humanity from some other political leaders, friends, nuns, priests, Salvation Army Captains, ministers, rabbis and everyday people. I still think that Christianity is a wonderful religious philosophy and wish that more people practiced it. Certainly the Simoniacs like Jim Bakker, Creflo Dollar, Jerry Falwell father and son, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Francis Chan and a host of televangelists and similar con artists do not. Those who clothe the naked, feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, visit those who are sick or in prison and generally see to the needs of fellow human beings who cannot provide for themselves are doing the good work that, god or no god, makes human life a little more heavenly and a little less hellish.

Today the site of Grace Methodist Church in the Waterville section of Waterbury, Connecticut is the location of a strip mall with a check cashing shop and other businesses catering to a more downscale population than existed in that neighborhood fifty years ago. Grace Church did not survive to celebrate its centennial in 1976 and, given the narrow  minded and narrow self-interest of the parishioners, I'm very glad of it.

Today a similar situation writ large envelops the United Methodist Church. A group of entrenched and bigoted "conservatives" has decided that who someone loves must exclude a person from the church generally and certainly from fulfilling sacramental offices. It has always seemed to me that the person who said "Suffer the little children to come unto me," who had no qualms about sitting down with the most reviled members of his society and who posed parables like "The Good Shepherd" and "The Good Samaritan" would be able to find it in his heart to embrace gay men and women or those who find their birth gender inconsistent with their own self-image, but that's just me. I'm terrible at finding limits and qualifications on the statement, "Love one another as I have loved you." Clearly others, including many self-styled "conservatives" feel that only those things of which they personally approve are consonant with the teachings of that good man, Jesus of Nazareth.

So the United Methodist Church has decided to try to split amicably. There will be a Methodist sect that embraces all comers, much as, we are told, did Jesus himself. There will also be a Methodist sect that embraces only those who live by its approved standards both in the church and in private life. The first Methodist sect will ordain gay and transgendered men and women, provide them with all the sacraments of the church including marriage and treat them as valued members of their Christian community. The other will exclude gay and transgendered men and women from all or some sacraments, refuse such folks the right to  marry within that church and treat them tacitly or overtly as pariahs who offend the narrow morals to which those "conservatives" adhere. To call this latter sect "Christian" is a step too far for me as I see nothing Christ-like in their bigotry.

Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov relates a parable of The Old Woman and the Onion. It seems that a young woman, thrown out upon the road and the mercy of other people and the elements, is starving. She comes to the gate of an old woman, known for her viciousness, meanness and greed, asking for food. This old woman who has never done a good deed for anyone throughout her long life, digs in her trash pile and retrieves an onion, partly rotten and black with mold. She tosses it to the starving woman and says something on the order of "That's all you'll get from me. Now be off with you and be damned."

Time passes. The starving woman gets little additional sustenance and eventually dies of starvation. The old woman also dies, alone with no one to see to her funeral rites. The old woman is condemned to a lake of fire in hell for her inhumane life while the starved woman rises to heaven and is called before the throne of god. God makes an offer to this poor woman. He gives her that very onion that the old woman gave her and tells this starved soul that she may, if she wishes, descend into hell and use that very onion, the symbol of the only good deed done in the old woman's life, to rescue her benefactor from the lake of fire. The starved woman descends into hell and extends the onion to the old woman telling her of god's mercy toward her. The old woman latches onto the onion and the starved woman begins to pull the old woman from the lake of fire. As she's being pulled toward salvation the others condemned in hell see what's happening and they grab onto the old woman until every condemned soul in hell is being drawn toward heaven. The old woman, true to her nature, realizes that all the others are about to be saved by her one good deed and shouts, "It's MY onion!" In that moment the stem of the onion breaks and all those souls, including that of the old woman, fall back into the lake of fire and resume their eternal suffering.

In the formerly United Methodist Church one group has decided that salvation is for everyone while the "conservatives" led by Bishop Yambasu of Sierra Leone have decided that it's THEIR onion. We do not easily eliminate bigotry. I expect that Bishop Yambasu and his following will persist in their self-made lake of fire for a long time to come. I can only wish them the joy of it while their rejected fellow Methodists rejoice in the joy of their diverse fellowship. Amen.