ON EASTER MONDAY
The United States was a country in complete turmoil the summer of 1968. Our nation was embroiled in an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. The Tet offensive that January had brought the horror of that War into American homes on the nightly news broadcasts which further polarized not only the nation but families. War protests blossomed across the nation and the world.
The struggle for civil rights continued even as the country recoiled from the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. that April. That horrific event was followed by the assassination of presidential candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy in June. President Lyndon B. Johnson elected not to run for another term, ensuring that the Democratic National Convention scheduled for August of that year would be interesting to say the least.
Young people were rising up, listening to their own music, following their own style, questioning everything, and demanding change.
It was a time of polarization. Blacks and whites, hawks and doves, liberals and conservatives, young people and the older generation. Animosity and distrust of the other ruled the day.
As that summer wound down, I made plans to spend a couple of weeks with my grandparents on their cotton farm just north of Brazil, Mississippi. A cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in late August might not seem like the ideal way to wrap up the summer, but Pop and Cat were two of the dearest people in the world to me, and the farm was one of my favorite places.
I had been spending summers with them for over ten years now, tagging along with Pop as he ran the place, going to the garden with Cat and learning to shell peas with her. At first as a very young boy, I spent entire summers with them. As the years went by and I had various summer jobs, those summer months on the farm had turned into summer weeks.
I had turned 15 back in June and had spent that summer mowing yards in the neighborhood and bagging groceries at the local Kroger’s. In my free time, I had read, mostly science fiction, or hung out with my friends. We would all be headed for our first year at Tupelo High School in September. All the turmoil in the country and the world at large seemed far away. It was something we saw on the TV. There had been no race riots in Tupelo. I did not know a single soul involved in the war in Vietnam. I liked The Doors, but my hair was still short.
So, for the last two weeks of the summer of 1968, I packed a suitcase and headed to the Delta.
Life on the farm was essentially unchanged. Cat still went to the garden every morning and I went with her. Pop still roamed all over the place checking on the crops and the farmhands, although I drove him now more often than not, and he seemed to appreciate that.
Brazil Baptist Church, where Pop and Cat worshipped, had their summer revival scheduled for the last week of August. For the uninitiated, a Southern Baptist Revival involves bringing in an evangelist to preach in special services held every night of the week and often someone to provide special music. Each service ends with an altar call where the unsaved can make their public profession of faith in Jesus Christ and those who may have lapsed can publicly rededicate themselves to the Lord.
That summer, Mike Pinion, whose family lived on the place just north of ours was home from Mississippi College where he was studying for the music ministry. I had known him for years. He was gregarious and engaging. He was providing the special music for the revival.
At some point, and I am not sure how he managed it, Mike convinced me to join a young local girl, Polly, in singing a duet on Thursday night of revival week. At that time, my experience in that regard extended to singing congregational hymns at church and warbling along to my favorite songs on the radio. My first public vocal appearance was to be in the church that my grandfather and Mr. Vinson, who owned the place to the south of us, had built in 1953, the year I was born, the church where my grandfather had led the singing every Sunday morning since then. No pressure.
With a combination of naiveté and the unwarranted confidence of youth, I threw myself into rehearsals with Polly. Although I have no memory of being nervous that Thursday night, I am sure I must have been. Honestly, I am sure it was not the highlight of the special music that week, but as a grandfather myself now, I have some idea of the pride Pop and Cat must have felt that night.
The song Polly and I sang was “In the Garden.”
Fast forward 54 years to Lent 2022. My wife Sherrie and I are members of the Logos Sunday School Class at Myers Park Methodist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. For Lent, our class is studying Unrevealed Until Its Season: A Lenten Journey with Hymns, a wonderful book written by our pastor, James C. Howell. Our class has a revolving group of teachers, and my turn came on Palm Sunday, and I was privileged to have the lesson for Holy Week.
The final hymn in this inspiring and thoughtful book is set on the day after Easter Sunday, Easter Monday. The hymn is “In the Garden.”
The first verse and refrain are:
I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses.
And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
“In the Garden” was composed in 1912 by C. Austin Miles, a pharmacist turned hymn writer from New Jersey. He was inspired by the passage in John 20 where Mary Magdalene encounters the risen Lord and mistakes Him for the gardener. Jesus, whom she had seen crucified, dead, and buried, was certainly the last person she expected to see that day.
As I mulled over this while preparing my lesson, I was reminded of the passage in 1 Kings 19 where the prophet Elijah encounters God not in the howling wind nor the crashing stone nor in the earthquake nor in the fire but in the gentle sighing of the breeze.
As these two scenes swirled around in my mind, I began to wonder: How often do we fail to recognize the face of Jesus or hear the gentle sighing of God’s voice? In Matthew’s gospel, Christ implores us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoner, for if we do it to the least of these, we do it to Him. How often does the hectic pace of our lives, the clamor of the world around us, the obligations of family and work distract us from the faces and voices of the hungry, the broken-hearted, the disadvantaged, the lonely, the outcast, the widow, and the orphan?
Fifty years ago, most Americans probably thought their country could not get more polarized and divided or their lives more hectic. I suggest that they were wrong. Admittedly, in 1968 I was still living in my protected, middle-class cocoon, and only beginning to awaken to what was going on in the wider world around me. But in the years following, particularly during my college years, I grew increasingly aware of how the social fabric of our country was being shredded. I was also fortunate to have professors and classmates with whom to discuss these things, and together we began to look around us for the faces of those in need and seek ways to answer those needs. It was a compelling and formative time for many of me and for many others.
Perhaps that is why to this day, “In the Garden” with its simple, direct lyrics, its haunting melody, and its flowing 6/8 time signature all of which bely its profound message, continues to take me back to that time and simultaneously resonate even more strongly in our broken, fractured world of 2022. The closing verse states:
I’d stay in the garden with Him
Tho’ the night around me be falling;
But He bids me go; thro’ the voice of woe,
His voice to me is calling.
If we as Christians are to be the hands and feet of our Lord on this earth, we must learn to recognize the face of Jesus in the gaunt features of the hungry, the tear-stained faces of the grieving, in the angry snarl of the unjustly treated. We must hear His voice in the sob of the desperate, the groan of the oppressed, the plea of tortured. The message is clear. “He bids me go.” We must leave the garden and when we hear that voice or see that face, we must respond as if Jesus our Christ is calling to us. Because He is.
jamesgregorycatledge 