A Chautauqua Week Begins

A friend and I took off for the Chautauqua Institution yesterday morning at about 7:30.  Excellent  weather – sunny and breezy 80s, a perfect backdrop for our day after weeks of haze and humidity.

 

The focus of our morning was the main religious service in the outdoor ampitheatre, which seats 5,000 people.  It makes my summer every year to hear those voices raised in the singing of “Holy, Holy, Holy,” always the first hymn.  The service was led by Joan Brown Campbell, the Director of the Department of  Religion; Joy Carroll was our reader and her husband, Jim Wallis, was our preacher.  The Carroll-Wallises will preach at the daily 9:15 services for the rest of the week, and Jim Wallis will participate in the afternoon Department of Religion lectures in another outdoor venue, the smaller and Greek-inspired Hall of Philosophy.  That series will involve a number of speakers from across the spectrum of Christian politics who, as Joan Brown Campbell announced, “will all have to sit down to breakfast with each other every morning!”

 

Jim Wallis’s theme, garnered from a young woman activist he had known who had died much too young, was, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!”  Some statistics:

 

More then 1,000,000,000 people on this earth live on less than $1.00 per day, a situation technically described as “extreme poverty.”

 

Three billion people live on less than $2.00 per day.

 

Thirty thousand children die every day.  That’s one every three seconds, most needlessly, from unclean drinking water, starvation, and illnesses for which we have vaccinations.  Periodically throughout his sermon, and in his presentation later in the day, Jim Wallis would snap his fingers every three seconds, reminding us of the death of yet another child, and another, and another.

 

I cannot, of course, replicate a Jim Wallis sermon.  But I can offer a few quotations, as I wrote them down in my program (I can’t lay claim to their exactitude, however):

 

“We can end poverty.  We just need the will to do it, and the task of the faith community is to generate that moral energy.”

 

“The altar call was invented by 19th century evangelist Charles Finney, who wanted to sign new converts up for the anti-slavery campaign.  Poverty is today’s slavery.  It ends hope for generations of people.”

 

“The spiritual choice we must all make is between hope and cynicism.  Cynicism is a buffer against hope.  Hope is not a feeling; hope is a choice.”

 

“History is always changed by social movements, and the best ones have a spiritual foundation.”

 

After the service we had lunch with a couple that we had run into from our own church.  We spent time (and money) in the bookstore, time on the beach – my friend actually got me into the lake for a swim, which is something I just don’t do – and time with old friends of mine, a grandfather and the granddaughter he often brings to Chautauqua.  His granddaughter and my daughter were inseparable companions as little girls for several summers when our families stayed at the same Chautauqua guesthouse.  Some of my favorite Chautauqua memories are of walking down the hill to the lake with his wife, to sit and talk for hours as the girls played on the beach.  She died of breast cancer a few years ago, at Christmastime after one of our summer weeks together.

 

We also made time for a new Chautauqua tradition, the late afternoon presentation by the chaplain(s) of the week of their stories of faith.  Jim Wallis walked about youth his conversion in a Baptist church --  made to please his mother, who was concerned that he had not been “saved” by the age of six, and his later conversion awayfrom the church – he had begun to question why whites and blacks in his native Detroit lived such very different lives, and was told by a pastor that “Race has nothing to do with faith.  Race is a political issue, and our faith is personal.”  We wished that he had talked about his experience in the civil rights movement and his return to faith and seminary, since neither of us knows the story.  He did talk a little about his joyful life with his wife and their young sons and his conviction, after his speaking tour of many cities, that “the monologue of the religious right is over, and a new dialogue is breaking through.”

 

Joy Carroll’s presentation was a powerful one.  She was one of the first women ordained to the Anglican Church (the Church of England, known as the Episcopalian Church on this side of the Atlantic). She described her upbringing by minister parents in the South End of London; her insistence on spending a year in Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, on a mission project at the age of 18, and its transformative effect on her life; her call to the ministry at a time when women could only become deaconesses, members of a lay order; and her involvement in the movement to ordain women as priests.  She was a delegate at the synod where the controversial vote took place.  A two-thirds majority was required by the bishops, the clergy, and the laity to pass the resolution, and the margin was so close that, as the count was announced, it was impossible to tell without some quick calculation whether it had.  It did, of course, by a slim margin among the bishops and the clergy, and by ONE vote among the laity.  ONE vote.

 

It would have been impossible to hear this gracious and quietly passionate woman speak and not be moved by the realization that, but for ONE vote, her voice and gifts might have been silenced for another decade.

My friend and took a final walk along the lakefront as early evening progressed, and finally decided that we really had to drive home.  It had been exactly the kind of day  Chautauqua was  created over 130 years ago to foster: a day of deep faith, magnificent music, provocative preaching, recreation, lasting friendships, and endless conversation.

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I have discovered that much of Jim Wallis's sermon to us can be heard in his recent graduation address at John Carroll University, here.