Let’s Pretend
2014 by Ed Chasteen
Every Saturday morning when I was a child Let’s Pretend came over the radio and took me to live for 30 minutes with King Arthur, Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks, Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Three Little Pigs, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood and others whose names escape me but whose images live on in my life.
Every Sunday morning Mother took me as a child to Henderson Street Baptist Church where my primary and beginner teachers put up on their flannel boards big color cardboard cutouts of David, Samson and Moses and told me stories of great battles won by miraculous means against impossible odds.
Then Mother walked with me up a long graveled Alvarado Street from our home to Santa Fe School where Miss Lula Douse was my first grade teacher, as she had been for my dad. Counting to a hundred came hard for me, and Miss Douse kept me after school more than once. Miss Mary Spell and Miss Lucy Rankin came in second and third grades to usher me through the basics and prepare me for the wonders of our town’s Carnegie Library and the first two books I ever held in my hands: Wings over England and Silver Chief—Dog of the North. I read every word. And went back for more.
I walked up the aisle of our church one Sunday morning when I was 16 and told Brother Clinard, our pastor: “I’m surrendering to preach.” He, not long after, returned as Professor of Preaching to the seminary where he had been a student just before he came as pastor to our church. He and I devised a plan before he left. After I graduated from the college in my hometown, I would come to him at seminary. Together we would look for a part time job for me and I would go to seminary to become a pastor. If no job could be found, my wife would take a grade school teaching position near a university, and I would enter grad school to become a professor.
No job for me could be found near the seminary. I went to university. I became a professor. And I realized what I should have said that Sunday morning when I was 16 to my pastor. What I would have said had I seen how things actually would work out: “I want to be just like you.” At what I should have said, I succeeded. We both became professors. He at a Baptist seminary; me, at a Baptist college.
But there is a dark side to my boyhood church years. From my Baptist church back then I heard hints and sometimes outright teachings that caused me to fear and avoid Catholics and Jews. One Sunday morning this struggle between love and hate for dominance in the church was made plain to me. I got up from my pew following another elegant and eloquent sermon from Brother Clinard about loving all people. All would be heavenly in our town come Monday morning. How could it not?
My blessed assurance lasted less time than it took to walk out the church door. To either side of the door stood two deacons. As I walked between them, one said to the other, “If them niggers try to come in this church, I’ll beat ’em back with a baseball bat.” “Me, too,” said the other.
When I walked across town a few years later to enroll in our local college, I went first to the bookstore. The book that caught my eye sits now right behind me in my downstairs study in my home as I type these words to you. The Negro in America it’s called, written by Arnold Rose, Associate Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. I would learn later from reading the book that it is a condensation of Gunnar Myrdal”s two volume An American Dilemma, a classic study of American race relations. But in the moment I first saw that book, I thought of those two deacons and their hate filled response to a message of love. Maybe this book held the answer.
I took the book to the bookstore cashier. “What major is this book for?” I asked. “Sociology.” She said. “That’s my major,” said I. And I signed up a few hours later for the course in Race Relations taught from that book.
Jump now in your mind’s eye many years forward. I’m teaching Race Relations at William Jewell, a Baptist college and attending Second Baptist Church, just one long block up Franklin Street from the college. Both in a town called Liberty, Missouri. The church appoints me Ambassador to Other Communities of Faith. My students at Jewell and I start HateBusters when a member of the KKK is elected to the Louisiana Legislature and the governor invites us to come help the state redeem itself.
As both Ambassador from 2BC and HateBusters leader, I have for the past several years invited folks to Table of Faiths, an annual gathering of all the faith communities in this place I call Greater Liberty and sponsored by the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council (GKCIC).
This gathering of more than 20 faiths in one place for three hours one evening is intended to raise funds for the year-round work of the GKCIC. So HateBusters this year has bought tickets and is inviting all friends and members of 2BC and WJC to come on Tuesday, May 9, from 5:30-8-30 in the evening to Stoney Creek Hotel in Independence for Table of Faiths.
More than 50 folks have already signed up to be guests of HateBusters at Table of Faiths. We have room for more. Just email me at hatebuster@aol.com to tell me you’re coming. I’ll have your ticket for you when you arrive. You will be a guest of HateBusters at Table of Faiths. And my mind will go back over time and space to that radio when I was a child and Let’s Pretend brought King Arthur and the round table at Camelot to me. This refrain from Camelot, the musical, will play all evening on a back channel of my mind: “Let it never be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, known as Camelot.”
Maybe that’s enough. Enough to carry us over troubled waters, as between faiths we find friends. One of my dear friends, Yahya Furqan, is a Muslim imam. We travel together. Do programs together. Visit in one another’s homes. Know each others families. He says he is a better Muslim because he knows me. I say I’m a better Christian because I know him.
Yahya will be a HateBusters’ guest at Table of Faiths. Come meet him. Meet folks of all many faiths.
