One
Saturday morning when I was eleven, I went to see Mr. Hedgepath, my pastor at
Conway Methodist Church. It was my very
first time to seek out a pastor for a personal conversation.
In the
sixth grade, I was just about to come into puberty. My voice had not changed.
I had little body hair. I was
intelligent but rather socially odd—at least compared with my peers. I desperately wanted to be popular, but
somehow felt all the surefire ways of doing so as a boy were blocked to
me. I was not interested in nor good at
sports. I had few close male
friends. The girls that I wanted to like
me seemed always to be drawn to more boyish boys.
I remember
asking Mr. Hedgepath if it were OK for me not to play sports. I obviously wanted some assurance that I was
in fact all right. I was beginning to
suspect that I was “different.” In fact
I knew I was. Almost none of my peers,
girls or boys, was nearly so enchanted as was I with churchy things. I liked a raft of things that few other kids,
boys especially, seemed to care at all about—house cleaning, flower arranging,
gardening (I grew zinnias from seeds), genealogy, local history, visiting older
people. I doubt that I unpacked very
much of that for the pastor. I might
have had a few other issues—but I can only remember the question I put to him
about playing football and baseball, they being clearly the focus of my visit.
Mr.
Hedgepath, said, “Frank, I think football and baseball are fine—I played them
both, but I don’t think you have to.” He proceeded to look for a book he wanted
to lend or give me. He never could lay
his hand on it, but in the process of looking, he pulled out a thin little
volume called God’s Perfect Way for You,
by Hazel Pickett. He gave it to me,
suggesting that I might find it helpful.
I think I never opened it. I
could never get past the title. I
thought, as I grew older and occasionally cast my eye on the fading blue cover,
that it was likely a book that would reveal to me that God had a “perfect” way
for me that somehow I would find it terribly difficult to live up to.
I held on
to the book for one reason. Mr.
Hedgepath had given it to me. In all the
downsizings through the years, I have never even seriously thought of giving or
throwing it away. Nor have I had any
intention of reading it. Apparently I
never read the subtitle: “A Manual of the different Ways we may come to know
God as a Living Presence within us, and thereby reach complete fulfillment and
complete joy.” Words were unimportant,
but the gift, my only token of a real childhood model and mentor, was
precious.
In my
latest thinning out of books, I picked up Mrs. Pickett’s book. I opened it and began reading. Much to my surprise, it turns out to be
something of a practical mystagogy. It
is not the kind of book I would likely write or even buy. But what impresses me is how much I
understand of it today and how little of it I would have understood sixty years
ago. I could not have understood much
more than the bare words on the page. I
would have missed the message entirely.
Hazel
Pickett was clearly a mystic, in the sense that she had a direct experience of
God. Like all mystics, she transcends
binary thinking and understands the fundamental Unity of all things and persons
with God. Her grasp of the “perfect way”
is a contemplative, peaceful, joyous ride with the Almighty.
It has
taken me six decades to arrive at the point where I am able to read
appreciatively the book Mr. Hedgepath pulled off his library shelf. Maybe unconsciously I saved it until the kairos moment—when the time was
fulfilled and I was ready.
© Frank Gasque Dunn
