Tellin' it

My granddaddy, Walter L. Moore, was not a civil rights leader per se. He was a company man. He did the usual company-man things: wore a suit, drove a big car, played golf, all of that. His company just happened to be the Baptist Church, a subsidiary of the Kingdom of the Lord.

Okay, I'm trivializing to make a point--Granddaddy was a man of deep faith and strong leadership, and his faith guided his leadership all the way along. But it's true that he was a man of his generation, and although he spoke out strongly and used his influence to further the cause of civil rights in Georgia, he didn't see himself as being a part of "the movement." Until last year when our family celebrated his 100th birthday, I really didn't even know that he felt the injustice all around him so keenly.

But listen to this piece of a sermon from 1938 in Cedartown, Georgia:

Even until this good day, race prejudice and provincialism have retarded the spread of the good news. We feel that we are the only race worth saving. . . . If an African is worthy to carry our crosses, he is worthy to hear what the cross means. Christ does not recognize the barriers of race. If you can't find it in your heart to have a brotherly feeling for the brother in black, I'm afraid you'll have to sit by him in the next world, because some of them are going down there, too.

Whew! Them's fightin' words!

But I'm struck, too, by the end of this very same sermon:

Is it fanatic and unbalanced to be wholly Christian? Since he made us and made us for that purpose, that life is unbalanced and wholly frustrated which devotes itself to anything else.

Granddaddy had not yet met Al Henry, my father, when he spoke these words. And the young Al Henry himself was a long way from his out-of-balance adulthood. But since we lack a professional diagnosis, "fanatic and unbalanced" is a pretty fair assessment of what he became. "Fanatic and unbalanced" is what he became when he felt the unresistable call to leave all and follow Jesus--leave his wife, his daughters, his responsibilities. To live in a tent in the swamp.

The area between wholly Christian and wholly fanatical can get kind of gray. Granddaddy recognized the difference, but not everybody does. Including my dad.