My Proud Stubborn Mother

My mom Helen at about 23 years old (front right) at her mother Lucille's 3rd wedding to Doc Boyer - Late 1940's I'm guessing.  Her cousin Betty is 2 seats down.  Betty's mom Muriel is front left.

I was thinking about my mother today, Helen Chester Harms.  I remember her as being a beautiful and gracious woman.  Her father passed away when she was only five or six - early in the Great Depression.  There is a photograph of her wearing a rabbit fur coat for her first day of school - her hair in lovely blonde curls (which darkened as she grew older).   I can’t imagine what the mothers of her impoverished classmates must have thought. The depression did not touch my mother and her mother Lucille Thien Chester Boyer because Helen’s father Henry (twenty two years senior to Lucille) had been very wealthy. It took my grandmother thirty years and two other husbands to run through his fortune.  My mother told me how they lived in luxury hotels when she was young and everybody got a kick out of her because she loved to eat spinach.  Hearing this beginning, you would probably think my mother was a snob, but she really wasn’t. My grandmother Lucille was definitely a snob but not my mother.  (Grandmother Lucille told me that she could tell everything about a person by their table manners.)

People naturally flocked to my mother.  She once half complained to me with a smile that it seemed that everyone in a grocery store always wanted to stop to talk to her.  In high school she fell in love with the tall handsome football star and president of his class, Rob Lowe.  They married when she was 18.  World War II was in progress, and he was in the coast guard stationed on the great lakes.  They had my older sister Katherine within a year of marriage and divorced soon after.  My mom said women were constantly swooning over Rob, and he did not resist their attention.  Mother also told me that they basically married so they could have sex and that waiting to have sex after marriage was a big mistake.  In those days “nice” girls didn’t have sex before marriage but “nice” boys did: one of the hypocritical and unfair double standards of that generation.

As a young divorcee and single mom, Helen moved from her home in Wisconsin to California where she had a pretty awesome time dating an assortment of fabulous men. She told me how one of the owners of the famous rose company, Jackson & Perkins (I can’t remember which one) was desperately in love with her and wanted to marry her.  About 10 years ago, I saw a yellow begonia in the Jackson & Perkins catalogue called “Helen Harms,” and I must admit I did wonder.  Yellow was my mother’s favorite color.  She told me of some of the movie stars she met.  She danced with Robert Stack (who was incredibly handsome but unfortunately for my mom in love with another woman); she shared a piece of pie with Canadian actor Walter Pidgeon, and Errol Flynn had propositioned her. (She was entering a restaurant he was leaving, and he was hopelessly drunk.) Helen’s uncle, Emil Thien, was an elite plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills and had many famous clients including all of Howard Hugh’s stars, so he had Hollywood connections.  Her cousin and best friend Betty Tholen was Emil’s daughter, and they palled around together.  Betty ended up marrying a sweet man and business person from old California money.  (His family had donated the land for the University of Southern California.)

At a family wedding in Wisconsin, my mother became reacquainted with my father Wm Scott Harms whom she had not seen for many years.  He was her second cousin, 12 years older than her, divorced with no children.  They fell passionately in love. However, when my father heard that she was going to vote for Republican Dwight D Eisenhower for president instead of the famous liberal and my father’s hero Adlai Stevenson II, he almost called off the wedding.  My mother became a proper liberal thereafter.

The incidence that I was thinking about today happened many years after my father had passed away (1968) of lung cancer. My mother had been dating Frank for a number of years.  He was a decent enough man - I liked him. He was a successful engineer turned salesman in the air conditioning business, but his drinking problem certainly made my mother’s drinking problem much worse.  Once about 6 months into their dating, Frank plowed into a parked car after they had been drinking at a party together.  My mother was injured and hospitalized - almost killed.  Frank’s lawyer couldn’t believe that my mother didn’t sue.

They had been together for about seven years when Frank was diagnosed with liver cancer.  He was dead within the month.  On his deathbed he whispered to my mother “the safe,” and she knew exactly what he meant.  Frank had a big pile of gold coins in that safe, and he wanted her to get it.  But my mother had a sort of stubborn pride.  She just could not bring herself to take the gold even though she knew that Frank had never rewritten his will, and it would all go to his ex-wife.  She had the combination and opened the safe for the police a few days later. They counted out the number of Krugerrands together.  “The policeman looked at me like I was nuts,” she confided to me.  Then he took the gold to the station.  

My mother was not rich.  She had sold our family home for too little money, and lived on a comfortable but fixed income.  The gold would certainly have come in handy, but she would not take it even though she knew that Frank had wanted her to have it.  I was in my early 20’s at the time and could not understand my mom’s decision.  Now I think my mother was old school and believed that you didn’t take money from a man unless he was your husband, father, or brother.  Not even from a long time lover.  If Frank had put all that gold in a strong box, wrapped it in a ribbon, and given it to her, I am pretty sure she still would not of taken it.  He could only of gotten the gold to her through his will.

You have to understand something too.  Frank despised his ex-wife.  Frank was somewhat of a playboy bachelor most of his life- living an unmarried salesman life: drinking and partying. One girl he partied with had told him that he had gotten her pregnant, so he manned up and married her.  A couple months after the wedding he was asking, “Where’s the baby?”  No bump. “I miscarried,” she told him. Right.  The divorce was ugly. She made out like a weasel in the hen house who not only ate all the eggs but bit off the heads of a number of hens too just for the fun of it.  That woman had embittered Frank against all women until he met my mother.  My mom knew that the gold, the cadillac, the house, the vacation cabin where she and Frank spent a lot of time, and whatever bank account and investments he had would all go to the ex-wife. And it did.

Frank loved my mom.  He had asked her to marry him multiple times, but she had always refused.  She was probably the classiest woman he had ever dated, but he never “got” her.  Some men think all women have a price, but what the woman is really looking for is a man who takes authority and responsibility.  One of the things that my mom complained to me about Frank was that he refused to advise or guide her on any financial matters. For example, she once looked at a cadillac that was on sale from a friend but was unsure about whether to buy it.  Frank refused to give her advice on the matter, but when she decided not to get it,  Frank bought it saying that it was a great deal.  That just infuriated my mother - although she never told him.  If he had encouraged her to buy it, she probably would of - but he refrained. Responsibility and authority rest upon a man like golden epaulettes on the uniform of a officer.  My father naturally wore those epaulettes; Frank didn’t.

After Frank’s death, my mother moved to the Florida West Coast to be nearer to my older sister and to spend the last years of her life in a warmer climate.  She reconnected with some of her old Wisconsin high school friends and was happy that she made the move.  But she was not impressed with the men in her age group in Florida.  “They are all unbearably conceited,” she told me.  There are many more women over sixty in Florida than men.

Alcoholism and cigarette smoking killed my mom at sixty seven.  Her mother had lived to ninety six, but Lucille drank alcohol and smoked very moderately.  I love and miss my mother.  I wish she could have been around longer for my children growing up.  I will always remember her as a great lady.

Baptized into Community

I was infant baptized by my father under the flag of The United States of America and in the Name of the Declaration of Independence.  I’m serious. My mother told me about it when I was a teenager, and I assumed it was some rite that my agnostic father had made up and didn’t think much more about it.  Then I was doing research on my German ancestors a few years ago who had settled in Wisconsin and discovered that this was a thing.  Freethinkers baptize their babies under the flag and Declaration of Independence.  My great great grandfather on both sides of my family happened to be a Freethinker. Henry Thien bought land in Southern Wisconsin and built a mill there in the 1840’s.  Freethinking was a small popular movement in Germany at the time called  Freidenkerbund.  It is considered one of the philosophical parents of Humanism and Socialism.  Henry Thien believed that people should worship God in nature not in churches, and when he chartered much of his land to start the town of Thiensville, he sold lots on condition that no churches would ever be built there.  It didn’t make him very popular with his devout Lutheran neighbors or many other people come to think about it.  (They said Thiensville was a godless place.) After his death, his son revoked the charter; churches started moving into Thiensville like they have in every other town in America.

In my mid twenties after years of being in the New Age movement, I began studying the Bible and became a believer. I believe that Jesus Christ is Lord  and rose from the dead. A few years after that I was baptized in a lake in the name of The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and my eight year old daughter was baptized at the same time.  I didn’t think much more about the subject of baptism until a few years later when I was fellowshipping with some Mennonites.  One of their most important books is the Martyr’s Mirror which is like an Anabaptist version of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.  The Martyr’s Mirror (the full title is The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians who baptized only upon confession of faith, and who suffered and died for the testimony of Jesus, their Saviour, from the time of Christ to the year A.D. 1660.) is filled with, among other things, first hand reports of Catholic priests who kept records while torturing Anabaptists for the sin of having a believer or adult baptism. (Anabaptist was originally a derogatory term used against those who were “re-baptized.”)  That was when I got my first inkling that the rite of baptism was a big deal in church history.  That people were actually tortured and burned at the stake if they got baptized as an adult after they had been baptized as a child.  It seemed to me pretty obvious which ones were on the wrong side of the argument.

I didn’t become an Mennonite - I disagreed with some of their doctrines, but I had no problems with a believer’s baptism.  All the Christians that I ever spent time with or went to church with had believer baptisms.  Most of the people I knew who had been baptized as infants were like my parents -borderline Christmas and Easter type Christians, more of a cultural Christianity than a belief based one.  So this confirmed to me that infant baptism was a problem.  However, I am a bit of a historian. The more I studied church history, the more I realized that infant baptism was practiced from the earliest times and is still the most widely form of baptism for Christians around the world.

I became more reformed as I grew in maturity in Christ, and I went to reformed believer baptistic churches. I knew that my Puritan ancestors (my mother's side of the family) baptized infants.  I had visited Presbyterian churches (the heirs of the Puritans) a few times, but found them to be too liberal for my tastes with women preachers and elders and other teachings that I found unbiblical.  After I started regularly reading reformed pastor Douglas Wilson’s entertaining and pertinent blog, Blog and Mablog: Theology That Bites Back, I began to attend a CREC church where not only infant baptism is practiced but also paedo communion.  I knew that I needed to revisit the subject of baptism.

I have to admit, sometimes all the terms and debates concerning baptism can be confusing.  Why is it that theologians like to make simple things as complicated as possible?   Dr Michael Heiser has clarified the issue for me - even though I don’t think he calls himself reformed and is better known for his “Divine Council” studies (The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible).  What I like about Heiser’s teachings on baptism is that he doesn’t have a denominational ax to grind; he studies the subject from a scholar’s perspective, and, for a scholar, he writes clearly.  Part One of his series demonstrates how complex a subject baptism actually is (http://drmsh.com/the-biblical-teaching-on-baptism-part-1/). The disagreements include when, where, who, how and why to baptize.

As a reformed Christian, I believe in the continuity of God’s people in the Old and New Testament and that God guides his people through covenants. The typical justification of infant baptism for the traditionally reformed is that circumcision in the Old Testament is similar to baptism in the new.  Heiser says that circumcision in the Old Testament didn’t guarantee salvation or mean anything for Israelite women (actually it performed a very important health benefit for Israeli women but that is off topic.)  Heiser states: “Circumcision granted the recipient admission into the community of Israel. Female children were also admitted by virtue of being the property of an admitted male (this is standard patriarchal culture, so women were NOT excluded just because they could not be circumcised).”  Heiser continues in Part Six of his series that baptism, in the same way, grants admission into the community of the church whether the one being baptized is an infant or an adult.  

It is pretty obvious that being baptized whether one is old enough to confess one’s faith or not, in no way confers salvation because, unfortunately, people fall away from Christ no matter what method of baptism they receive or how old they are when they received it.  If you believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and that he has risen from the dead, you should certainly be baptized and be part of a church that believes the same thing.  In my opinion, if you were baptized (in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) as a child and only come to faith as an adult, there is no need to be baptized again, but if you are, it is no sin.  I once heard a Messianic rabbi teach that there were five different baptisms performed by the Jews in Old Testament times.  Perhaps that is part of the reason why the rite of baptism is not more clearly defined in the New Testament.  

My views of baptism have evolved to a satisfying place where my family history and church practices and traditions come together.  My father baptized me into the community of Freethinker where I did not choose to stay.  In fact, I am the opposite of a freethinker. I try to confirm my thoughts, beliefs, and practices to the Word of God (aka the Bible).  Confirming my thoughts to God’s thoughts is a radical act which actually produces true freedom. Biblical thinking frees us from conforming to the ever changing current trends and philosophies of our society.  Biblical thinking frees us from the slavery of sin.  Biblical thinking values the acutely logical and delights in the  supernatural.  And the best part is I get to fellowship with others who think the same way I do.   I am part of a community of believers through baptism, a community of saints who believe in loving God and loving one another.   I think of it like this: Many are called, but few are chosen.  Baptism proves one’s calling not one’s election. Election is demonstrated by continuing love and obedience towards God and persevering to the end.

From accepting infant baptism, my church’s practice of allowing children to partake of communion seems perfectly reasonable.  For one thing, it is generally agreed upon that the communion of the very early church was a meal.  Surely children were included. I also look to the first Passover meal as a model for communion. Each household of the Jews living in Egypt were protected by the blood of the lamb upon their doorpost the night that Death came visiting for each first born.  When the Angel of Death saw the lamb’s blood protecting the family, he would “pass-over.” Inside the home, the whole family ate the Passover meal. They were all “baptized” together in the Red Sea (1 Corinthians 10:1-3).  Clearly Jesus was showing the connection when he initiated communion (this is my body: this is my blood) during Passover.  Some are concerned about the injunction in Corinthians 11 to not receive communion in “an unworthy manner.”  But small children cannot receive communion in an unworthy manner because they are innocent.  As they become older, the parents teach their children what communion means and the importance of faith and confession.  Sharing communion with children installs in them the practice of being part of the Christian community from the earliest age instead of keeping them out of that community.  It is a blessing to them that should not be withheld.

I love sitting in church on Sunday morning; watching all the well behaved children sitting with their parents through our rather long service, and sharing in the bread and the wine of our Lord’s supper.  Belonging is a very good thing.