Madonna della Pieta

In world art, no theme is more prevalent or more important than that of the mother.  Mother Earth, Mother Goddess, and Mother Creator, she represents creation, fertility, and compassion.   There are masculine fertility representations, but they lack the sense of nurturing that the mother symbols do, which makes them less common and less popular.

Western Art tends to compress all of its thoughts and feelings about Mothers into the singular character of Mary, The Mother of God.  In parts of Europe, every church and nearly every home has images of Madonna and Child--Mary, the mother of God, holding and codling the infant Jesus, innocent and unaware of the life he would lead.

The second image we have of Mary in Western Art is La Pietà, "the compassion."  The dolorous image of Mary the Mother of God, holding his lifeless body, wearing for her lost son, before laying him to rest.  It's one of the most powerful images in all of Christendom.  Mary, who the angels told would bear the Son of God, holds his broken and dead body in her arms, wondering what went wrong.  People talk about the perfection of Michelangelo's statue of David.  For me, Madonna della Pietà is not only the greatest work of  Michaelangelo but possibly the greatest statue of all.  

In Lewis's The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Lucy and Susan represent Mary, the Mother of God, and Mary Magdelene when they come upon the dead body of Aslan, still tied to the altar table.  Weeping and in pain, they beseech the mice to help free the dead body of Aslan from the ropes that bound him.  Susan cradles the dead king's head in her lap.  The cruelty of life has taken their most precious from them.

No mother should ever endure the loss of her son, but how common is it that accident, disease, addiction, depression, and most of all, war takes the son from the mother.   No other cause has separated more mothers from more sons than war from the beginning of time.  On Mother's Day, remember your mother, but remember the mothers who lost their progeny and issue.  Nothing can ever fill that void.

Nourishing Mother

Off and on, I've been attending commencement celebrations at Millsaps since around 1970.  There are a few people who have attended more than I have, but not many.  Contenders would be people like Don Fotenberry, Bob McElvane, and David Woodward.  

As a child, I would watch my father practice speeches in front of the mirror in his bathroom.  Eventually, he got so accustomed to it that he quit using a mirror and would just do it in his office or in bed.  Until I got to be around nineteen, I rarely got to see any of Daddy's speeches because he delivered them at places that didn't allow little boys.  Millsaps did.   Afterward, I could run amock among the bushes, and nobody cared because Millsaps was just about the safest place they could think of, and there were so many trees to climb.

Weary of the world, I quit going to Millsaps for anything for a long time.  Until today, the last Millsaps graduation I attended was the one Sam and Erin were in.  Waiting to enter commencement today, A woman approached me.  "I bet you don't remember me!"  The shape of her face was familiar, but my wheels were spinning and not finding purchase.  It was Avery Nicholas's Grandmother.  The last time I saw her, she was attending football games where I played in the class between her two sons at St. Andrews in a year where we only won two games.  (Why St. Andrews struggled in football is another story.  It's an honorable story, though, one where Andy Mullins made a just choice rather than a convenient choice.)

Like my nephew Campbell Cooke, Avery is a third-generation Millsaps Graduate.  I'm sure there were others, but I also got to see another third-generation Millsaps Person.  Mary Ranager's father and uncle graduated from Millsaps, and her Grandfather coached football and baseball there for many years.  One of the points of a Millsaps education is that, whether you're third-generation or starting your first generation there, the Millsaps experience reaches back through time, connecting each graduate to generations before.  I spoke to one family where their child was the first in their family to ever go to any college, and they chose us, and now that graduate starts their multi-generational journey with Millsaps.

At Commencement, Provost and Acting President Keith Dunn awarded Stacy DeZutter the Distinguished Faculty Award.  One of my friends commented that Stacy was the new Darby Ray.  While I would never compare the two, Stacy does seem to be having the same impact on Millsaps that Darby did.  Both were like a comet that traveled through the Millsaps Solar system, with a gravitational attraction so strong, they changed the course of other bodies in the firmament.  I owe an infinite debt of gratitude to Stacy for nurturing the flame of theatre at Millsaps and keeping it alive until Sam could get there, and she did it on top of her already packed work schedule.

Thanks to Stacy's presence, two members of Alpha Psi Omega graduated today, and another two theater kids who weren't inducted.  Ryan McDougald and Michael Montgomery were in the first new class of Alpha Psi Omega initiates since the major was put into abeyance many years ago.  Best friends, their last performance at Millsaps was alone together in The Universal Language by David Ives.  Although he didn't have enough points to get into Alpha Psi Omega (having never acted before) Trey Clark also walked today.  He tells me he plans to attend Jackson State as a graduate student this fall.  Hopefully, he'll continue acting.  Amelia Savaric, who worked in both plays this semester, spent her senior year at Millsaps, but as an exchange student, she received her degree from her university in France.  I honestly wish I'd written down its name.  While every department at Millsaps had a graduating class this year, it's been a while since Theater had one, so I'm especially proud of them.

The Founders Medal is the highest academic award given at Millsaps.  I was never remotely a candidate, but my cousin Anne Powers was.  She was the only Campbell who left Hesterville, Mississippi, who ever achieved a high level of scholarship.  Most years, we only have one Founders Medal Winner.  It usually represents a perfect academic score at Millsaps.  We've had Five winners before.  Today we had four, the second-highest number ever.  This from a class who saw their second semester at Millsaps interrupted by covid and subsequent semesters interrupted by the Jackson Water Crisis.  I suppose adversity can yield excellence.

I got into an argument once with someone who told me not to value the opinion of students too much because, in the academy, students are transitory; the faculty is what matters.  I got sort of frustrated and didn't know how to respond at the moment, but it's been almost twenty years and I'm still thinking about what that means.  Students ARE transitory.  That's the point, isn't it?  They're traveling through time at a point in their life where time seems endless, and they chose us because, at Millsaps, they believe their transitory experience can transform their lives--and it does.  At the hooding ceremony for the Else School MBA class, Monty Hamilton talked about his transmission at Millsaps transformed his life.  I was there for part of it.  I can think of so many people I've seen who came to Millsaps as one thing, and left as another.  They were transitory.  We all are.

At graduation today, I saw a very muscular woman who wore only a sleeveless vest so she could show off her intricate tattoos and her shaved head.  I thought to myself, "This is someone determined to forge her own way in the world and create her own identity from whole cloth."  That's what Millsaps does for you.  It gives you the materials you need to forge your own identity--whatever you believe it should be.  One of the bigger things that sets us apart from other private colleges is that we don't give you values; we give you the tools to create your own, and people who create their own values serve them far better than those who accept what was given to them.

Alma Mater means "nourishing mother."  Bet you weren't expecting that.  The nourishing mother of our minds are our studies, and our studies achieve greater heights at our Alma Mater.  Loyal Ones are we.  When I graduated, that was changed from "Loyal Sons are we" because people noticed we weren't all boys anymore.  One class leaves, and another class arrives.  The Nourishing Mother remains.    

The Eudora At Fondern Public

 I got to spend some time with Brother Lewis today.  We darkened the door of Fondren Public.  I had a drink that a friend of mine named the Eudora thirty years ago.  A few fingers of Makers Mark and a little ice if you have it, alone if you don't.   Miss Welty, I think, took it with a little branch water.  I modified it some.  Ice melts, ya know.

Talking with somebody who remembers what it was like in Jackson and Millsaps thirty and forty years ago makes me happier than a warm puppy.  It kind of needs to be a guy, though, because one of the things we're gonna talk about is girls, lost, found, and the ones that got away.  The guys I can still do this with are getting pretty sparse these days.  There's Tom and Doug Mann and a few others, but we're at the age with a fair number of our population is dropping away.  Old white guys don't typically "pour one out for our homie," but if we had, we'd still be there.  Those of us that survive the gauntlet will probably live until ninety.  That's a frightening consideration.

Tom's Dad is a titan at Millsaps and Galloway and the United Methodist Church.  To some, TW Lewis was one-half of the righteous brothers.  To others, he was an agitator.  In Mississippi, it turns out that the only people that had any sense were the agitators.   At church, I like to listen to TW and Don Fortenberry talk.  They experience a level of Christianity I've never approached, and there's much to be learned just by listening.

Tom mentioned that a friend of ours was getting fairly irritated with the goings on in the Mississippi UMC conference and just might take a trip to Tupelo and speak his mind at the conference meeting this summer.  I don't have permission to say who it is, but if he goes, I might just go too.  I have some concerns about what's going on in our conference to, so maybe we can do some good.

Talking with long-time Jackson people, it's hard not to lament what's been happening to the city lately.  Of all the brilliant men and women we talked about, almost none still live in Mississippi.  Ray Mabus once said that Mississippi's biggest export is brains.  In Mississippi, we take our precious youth and work like hell to educate and train them; then, once they're on their own, we lose them because Mississippi can't offer them opportunities equal to the skills we've given them, so they find something bigger--maybe less complicated morally.

A lot of guys our age are thinking about giving up.  They're moving to Madison or Oxford, or Hernando and pulling the world up around them.  I can't fault them.  They fought to keep Jackson growing all those years I was hiding in a cave.  Maybe it's just my turn to get back into the fight.  

I have a real need to one day be able to tell Tom and especially tell his dad that everything is OK now.  Jackson and Millsaps are growing again, and the danger is past.  Millsaps is doing light years better than Jackson, but both have a ways to go before I'm satisfied.   Ultimately, I'd really like to make Mississippi the kind of place where parents don't have to worry about their children leaving for greener pastures.  I don't really know how to do that, but, ya know, not knowing what I was doing never stopped me before.  

View Our Eudora Welty Collection

Ministers and Missles

A lot happened in 1965.  I was two years old.  Millsaps formally opened its doors to integration, following a federal mandate that no school remaining segregated would receive federal funds.  We used federal funds to build the Christian Center, among other things.  

June fourth, 1965 The Clarion-Ledger publishes an article from Bishop Pendergrass, delivered at Galloway, imploring all methodist congregations to stop employing ushers at the doors of the church, implying bouncers who kept negros out, but not mentioning it directly.  Pendergrass said directly that the church in Mississippi must come into compliance with the national church's position on integration without ever using the word "integration."

On the same page, they had a much larger article with a photograph of the Gemini V capsule preparing for launch that week.  Gemini V was the first space walk; For comments by the Methodist Bishop to take up as much space on the front page as the Gemini Launch meant something.  

My Uncle Tom was the editor of the Clarion Ledger.  I never discussed his feelings about integration or how the paper covered it.  I don't know that he would have discussed it with me.  He had a reputation.  Sometimes, it was fair; sometimes, it wasn't.  My grandmother, his sister-in-law, tried to explain it to me a few times, but for people of her generation, these things were difficult to speak plainly of.

One thing I'm getting from all this is a new respect and appreciation for our parents.  Not just my parents but everybody's parents.  There was just so much going on.  There were missiles pointed at us, we were in Viet Nam, the Russians wanted to crush us (and said so), and here at home, everything was coming apart.  

While I'm at rehab, upstairs from me are five people who were at Galloway in 1965.  Two left the Methodist discipline altogether.  Two stayed; one became an independent Methodist for a while but eventually reconciled with Galloway.  Seeing them makes it all very real.

When I go to Sunday School, I try to sit near TW Lewis and Don Fortenberry.  Ed King joins via Zoom.  All pastors fully engaged in what happened in 1965.  William Faulkner said of Mississippi, "The past is never dead. It's not even past"

What started me down this rabbit hole, partially, is this is was a part of my life that had huge implications in my life, but I was too little to understand it, and for a long time, not many people would discuss it.  My sister wasn't even alive yet.   My brothers were mostly concerned about baseball and tree houses.  Most of what I knew about the schism at Galloway came from my grandfather, who used it to frame the story of his childhood church in Hesterville, Mississippi, which chose to leave the larger Methodist church and go it on its own.  That was very painful for him.  His father built that church after the first church burned down.  His father and mother, and brother were buried there.  Since he moved to Jackson, he had no say in what happened there, even though his brother's estate was paying for the upkeep of the cemetery.  Granddaddy decided he wouldn't die on either hill during the fight for integration.  His task, as he saw it, was to employ as man negros as he could and see to it that some effort was made to educate them.  He would and did break bread with any man, but he saw all this fight over race was painful.  Necessary but painful.

Sixty is a nice round number.  The church, my church, again finds itself on the rubicon of deciding whether or not to fully open our doors to people who are unlike us sixty years later.  That decision is rending us into pieces, much like it did in 1965.  

Reading "Agony at Galloway," written in 1980, I get some sense that Cunningham is trying to align himself with the winning side now that the conflict is over, but I do strongly believe he was in genuine Agony in 1965.  Pastors tend to be more idealistic than practical.  That's one of the reasons they become pastors.  Having known some of the people he mentions later in life, I wonder if Cunninghman had taken a firmer stand on one side or the other if the situation would have escalated and truly ended Galloway.  

As it stands, between 1960 and 1968, Galloway lost 18% of its enrolled members.  That number was higher among those who actually sat in the pews every Sunday, but it was a survivable number.  I had always believed it was much higher.  It certainly could have been higher.  Cunningham may have felt personally tortured, but he piloted the ship through the breakers, with some damage, but we were afloat.  He didn't have the benefit of a crew with beeswax in their ears, but I do believe he was tied to the mast.

In today's conflict, Galloway, from what I have seen, is very unified, which is quite different from what happened in 1965.  The rest of our conference, though, is not nearly as unified.  There are painful days ahead.  What I get from all this is that we survived it before.  One product of the change in the sixties was the creation of the United Methodist Church.  It's hard to imagine that, out of a time of such hurtful division, so much growth was the product.  

I'm not a traditionally prayerful person.  I say the Lord's Prayer as instructed to keep the communication between myself and God open,  but I don't ever pray for specific things.  I figure that any God capable of making all this is also capable of seeing what I need and what the people I love need--without me begging like he was Santa Claus.  

What I write, either here or in my journals, is how I articulate the things I would pray for.  Even that is unnecessary for an entity that knows the number of hairs on my head (that one's easy, it's zero), but writing it and articulating it in my own mind helps me see things more clearly.  If that's praying, then I pray for my church nearly every day now.   Not Galloway so much because we're pretty durable, but for the larger church.  We're facing a crisis of conscious similar to that we faced in 1965, and we're getting beat up pretty good for it.   

I have faith that we'll sail through these waters alive.  I have faith because, even though I was very young, in my experience, that's what happened before.  My current pastor, and the two before him, are all within four or five years of the same age as me.  When the church last rented itself apart, all four of us were more concerned about what Captain Kangaroo had to say than Bishop Pendergrass.

I have no issue with following Cary Stockett wherever he leads us.  I've listened to his sermons for a few years now, and we are of like mind on most of the important issues.  His pastoral staff is vibrant and energetic and also of a similar mind and purpose to mine.  I suspect Connie Shelton, of all of us, will take the greatest heat from all of this.  It's already started.  One man felt completely content to lie about her on his website.  I sent him a letter but got no response.  I'm not worried for Connie.  She's pretty strong.  I am sorry she has to go through this.  She loves her church, and she loves us who are in it, and this has to be painful.  In church affairs, the leaders of the battle and the front line are the same.  When the arrows fly in anger, they will hit her before they hit me. I'm sorry for that, but I'm also appreciative of what she's doing for us.   This is the way.

Christianity was born out of one man's agony on a Roman cross.  In that, he prepares us for the far lesser agony that sometimes comes from following him.  Just like in 1965, most of Southern Methodism is girding its loins to fight on one side or the other.  I am, too, I suppose.  My church won't be on the front lines like it was last time.  I'm grateful for that.  Our pastor seems to have the idea that we can become a sanctuary for the battle weary.  Sanctuary, in the original sense, of a place free from attack, but also our architectural sanctuary.  Safety, in the lee side of the tempest.  I'm grateful for that too.

For thine is the kingdom.  Kingdoms are born of suffering.