Leaving the Land of the Numb

Guest Writer: Don Follis

In my memoir Leaving The Land of Numb—A Journey To Connect My Emotional And Spiritual Lives (Mountain Ash Press, 2023), I tell the story of how, at age 14, my first boss told me I was the only person who ever worked for him that he couldn't teach how to do the job. To make matters worse, he was a man in our church and friends with my Dad and Mom. Neither of them ever intervened to help me make sense of what happened. The rest of my growing-up years, I mostly avoided the man.

Years later, following seminary, I spoke at my home church one Sunday. My old boss was there, and he shook my hand afterward. “Congratulations,” he said. “I never thought you could do it.”

I went on to serve 25 years as a campus pastor at the University of Illinois, and now have served 46 years in the ministry. One Sunday as a young campus pastor, I spoke at a rural church an hour from my home. Returning home, I started smiling from ear to ear. It suddenly occurred to me that I had forgiven my first boss. As I drove through the countryside, I thought about my hurt from years ago. I began empathizing with the old fellow, whose life had been hard. He had lost his wife, and my parents told me he was in poor health. He needed my love way more than my derision. Though I thought I had forgiven him, all alone in my car that day, I felt it as never before and said, “I forgive you old boy, and wish you all the best. May the peace of Jesus be with you.” I told the Lord I wanted to be a man committed to forgiveness for the long term, come what may in my life. 

Over decades of ministry, I have seen how forgiveness challenges seeking revenge and the need for reciprocity. Forgiveness is the one force in the world that invites us to approach people with love, giving us a desire for their well-being. That means giving up our natural inclination to protect ourselves and seeking justice on our terms. As we have received forgiveness from God, we extend the same forgiveness to others, even when it’s difficult or painful.

 Don  Follis

Don’s memoir, now available on Amazon, tells how he learned to feel his emotions, both painful and positive. His journey took him through a teenage marriage and divorce, rejection by the church because of that divorce, the death of his son, and a new vision of the richness of the emotional life of Jesus.

Joanna https://www.joannaseibert.com/

All Souls Day continued: Generous Heart, Columbus

All Souls Day: Generous Heart, Columbus

“In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a pocket handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints…

Many people think of saints as plaster saints, men and women of such paralyzing virtue that they never thought a nasty thought or did an evil deed their whole lives long. As far as I know, real saints never even come close to characterizing themselves that way.”–Frederick Buechner initially published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words. 

Columbus

Buechner reminds us that being a saint is less about ourselves and more about the way God, for some reason, works through and redeems the mess of our lives. Yesterday was All Saints Day, where we remember the saints of the church who have died. Today is All Souls Day, where we remember all the faithful departed. I cannot help but remember Columbus, someone well known by all in the recovery community in Little Rock, Arkansas, only by his first name. Every year, usually early in the morning on the birthday of your sobriety, you get a phone call from Columbus. You waited in anticipation for that call, celebrating one more year of an alternative life with someone you knew only over the phone lines.

Columbus’ wife of forty-six years would leave him three times before he went into his last rehabilitation, after many DWIs and missed work, and days when she admitted not knowing where he was. Columbus died in the thirty-eighth year of his sobriety and was credited with having led thousands of men and women worldwide to sobriety.

Columbus made 15,000 calls a year and almost half a million calls before his death. He also called people he knew were no longer in recovery and told them he cared about them. As a result, many people say they returned to recovery because of Columbus.

Columbus’ wife described his change when he went into recovery as “truly unbelievable. He became a dedicated and involved father and grandfather after he came so close to losing his family.”

When I hear people wonder what they could do to make a difference in the world, I tell them Columbus’ story: one man with a generous heart picking up the phone every day and changing lives with a simple phone call. One day at a time.

This may be the way saints live. They are resurrection people. They know all too well what Good Friday is like. Yet, God continues to change them and the world one day, one phone call at a time.  

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com  https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Charleston: All Faithful Departed

Charleston: All Faithful Departed

“You have heard the whispers on quiet summer evenings when you have been walking alone. They are the sound of the ancestors, speaking softly just on the other side of what we call real. You have seen the strange lights at twilight, like candles lit in evening rooms, beckoning people home to houses you cannot see.

You have felt the touch on your shoulder, when you were deep in prayer or bent with worry, and known the energy that hums along the wires of faith, the presence of a power that knows how to heal. You have experienced the physical mystery that surrounds us, the mystery of the Spirit, the thousand tiny proofs that we live next door to heaven, waking up in a wonder we are only beginning to discover.”—Bishop Steven Charleston, Facebook, October 31st, 2018.

November 1st is All Saints’ Day, and November 2nd is The Celebration of All Faithful Departed. These two liturgical celebrations are our Church’s family reunion day. It is the time for us to pull out our family photograph album and remember where we came from and all the faithful who influenced our lives.

Where were you the night of April 4th, 1968? My husband and I were seniors in medical school in Memphis. That night, Martin Luther King was assassinated outside of the Lorraine Motel. After that, Memphis became a police state. Clergy in Memphis responded by marching to the office of the mayor, Henry Loeb, to ask for relief for the striking sanitation workers whose cause had brought King to Memphis. The ministers gathered at St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral. At the last moment, Dean William Dimmick, who later became the bishop of Northern Michigan (and eventually baptized our two sons), went into the Cathedral and took down the processional cross from the high altar. Then, holding it high above him (he was a very short man), he led the march down Poplar Avenue to City Hall.

The air was electric. Down the streets, the clergy and supporters marched. A Methodist minister writes about one moment he will never forget: As the clergy advance down Poplar Avenue, up ahead, he sees an older woman sitting on her front porch. As the procession approaches her, she stands up and screams, “GET THAT CROSS BACK IN THE CHURCH WHERE IT BELONGS!”1

Dean Dimmick took the cross out of the cathedral into the streets of a city on the verge of riot. He taught us where Christ lives, especially in times of grief and oppression. Christ is out in the midst of the mess. Christ was out walking the streets of Memphis in 1968.

Today, my prayer is that we can emulate what we learned from a leader of our church, Dean Dimmick, and take Christ out to those who are sick and suffering, to those who are hungry, to those living in poverty, to victims and families of the many recent episodes of violence in our country, to immigrants around the world, to the lonely and fearful, to those who may be invisible to us much of the time.

On the days we remember saints, we especially affirm what we cannot explain. Dean Dimmick will always be there beside us, praying and cheering us on.

1Katherine Moorehead, “Stepping Out of the Tent,” Preaching Through the Year of Mark (Morehouse, 1999), p. 75.

Joanna.    https://www.joannaseibert.com/