Iowa is an Indian word meaning "beautiful land." And that's where it all began for me.
I started out on a legal career and passed the Iowa bar. Long before, though, I had harbored thoughts of one day becoming a preacher. Sunday school had not been a bore as it often is for many kids. Attending summer youth conferences, then Bible classes in college - taught by Dr. Howard Legg, who looked like he belonged in the Senate rather than in a college classroom - set the stage for an invitation one August to give the sermon in my home church. I was 20. From that day on I was hooked - at least in my private thoughts - though it would be a whole war later before I would have enough confidence and courage to set those first plans aside and begin seminary.
Iowa was a good place to be born. A beautiful land indeed. Rolling green hills, small towns, extreme weather. The only "gang" we heard about worked on the railroad. In summer, the sky was robin-egg blue. Christmases were most often cold and white, just like the song.
Kevin Costner's Field Of Dreams is in the eastern part of the state. My birthplace was in western Iowa, a town called Atlantic, located just 40 miles from the border-defining Missouri River. But dreams were abundant for my generation - at bargain prices.
I grew up in the presence of good books, Grace Barnard's smile at the bank, football practice, declamatory contests, working-class parents determined that I would have opportunities that had been denied them.
In 1947, I went back to Atlantic to practice law.
I had graduated with honors from the University of Iowa Law School, passed the bar, the War Years were over, and now an excellent opportunity had opened up for me to practice in the legal profession among people I had known and lived with all my life.
A prominent law firm by the name of Boorman and Whitmore had invited me, because of the death of Mr. Boorman, to ply my trade there as a young attorney.
Other lawyers in the town also welcomed me, and my life seemed off to a successful start - though a combination of things, my upbringing, an intellectual pilgrimage that had caught fire in college, plus three and a half years at sea, had left me with the nagging thought that maybe the ministry, rather than law, was where I belonged.
One day Mr. Whitmore called me into his office with a flattering suggestion.
"Jim," he said, "if it's okay with you, I'd like to nominate you for City Attorney. You haven't had a lot of experience, but I know you can do it. May I have your permission to make the nomination?"
"Of course," I said. How could I say no to that?
Another lawyer in town with much more experience was also being proposed for the job. Roscoe Jones was a good and long-time friend of my father and mother, and someone who also had been most friendly to me - and honestly so.
The night the city council met, the vote was 3 for Mr. Jones and 3 for me. The mayor had to cast the deciding vote, and he voted for Jones.
I wasn't shattered by that turn of events. I would have been surprised to have been chosen, given my very junior qualifications. But I remember walking home from the council chamber that night with a new lightness of spirit, with some feelings of freedom that seemed to say, "If you're determined to go to Seminary, you can still go. The light has just gone green."
I was ordained on a February night in 1950, after it had snowed most of the afternoon. Many of the highways that surrounded the little square-towered red brick church were closed. When I rose from my knees that night, after having made my vows, I knew, though, that it was the most right thing I had ever done.
My initial "call" was to the Presbyterian congregation in Indianola, Iowa, where I had gone to Simpson College. In that church I would be nurtured and equipped for a church career that would continue 42 years.
The newly-ordained minister asks, "Will I get a chance to do what I have been trained to do?" "Where" is a matter of keen interest - though "where" turns out to be one of the least important questions of all. A wise parishioner once told me, "It isn't where you are, but what you are."
And lucky is the pastor who does not begin as someone else's assistant, but who from the starting gate is faced with regular preaching opportunities, and must accept responsibility for both failures and successes. Perhaps most important is the privilege of standing close to people in their sorrows, joys, and general need of God.
I remained with that flock in Indianola slightly less than five years. Leaving them broke my heart, for these were people who had given me everything every young pastor needs. Looking back, I can still see those many wonderful faces, and relive most, if not all, of those shining moments that would help to light the path ahead.
A few days before that departure (by now we were husband, wife, and three children) I stumbled onto these words in John Doberstein's Ministers' Prayer Book, words I have reread many times since - written by the father of a young clergyman at the beginning of a pastorate:
I beg you, do not look upon Dortmund as a steppingstone, but rather say: "Here I shall stay as long as it pleases God; if it be his will, until I die." Look upon every child, your confirmands, every member of the congregation as if you will have to give account for every soul on the day of the Lord Jesus. Every day commit all these human souls from the worst and weakest of hands, namely your own, into the best and strongest of hands. Then you will be able to carry on your ministry not only without care but also with joy overflowing and joyful hope.- Friedreich von Bodelschwingh
There are many among my best memories of that first parish.
In a church school class the Bible reading was the story of the Good Samaritan, and about the priest and Levite who, prior to the Samaritan's arrival, "passed by on the other side." After listening to this violation of the laws of mercy, six-year-old Terry exclaimed, "Boy, Mr. Angell wouldn't do anything like that!" Let's hope he was right.
The stained glass windows, extraordinarily appealing from behind the pulpit during the organ prelude, left their mark upon my soul. And when the lower panes were tilted open on hot mornings, a bird would sometimes fly in and soar about, providing considerable competition for people's attention.
A youngster perished in a fire only a block from the manse. I remember the late night fire sirens, the family's pain, the cemetery's deep cold a few mornings later - how the service book shook in my hands, how I struggled to keep my voice firm and comforting, as my chin quivered in the freezing wind.
During that year, as the new young pastor, I came down with the mumps, just as Holy Week was beginning. It seemed like an awful disaster to me. The congregation took it in stride.
One day in the spring was designated Rose Sunday. And members were invited to choose a single rose from their gardens to be displayed at worship. Lee Beymer brought his Peace rose.
Weddings, ice-skating nights, remodeling the manse. Calling in a home where a middle-aged woman lay terminally ill and was being cared for by her mother. Agnes, the mother, made milkshakes and served all three of us, along with some cookies. That afternoon I saw the Holy Grail.
My next pastorate was in Lexington, Kentucky, where I followed a distinguished man of wisdom and experience. At age 69, Jesse Herrmann had suffered a fatal heart attack at the All-Star baseball game. That was in July.
By January I was ready to assume the role, though I was but half his age. My greatest asset: a young family easy for all to fall in love with.
Kentucky is Henry Clay, tobacco, thoroughbreds, whiskey - fields with grass that looks bluish when the winds of March and April blow across it. It's where county roads have names like Ironworks Pike, where horse farms are called Calumet, Coldstream, or Spendthrift. One Derby Day the clerk of session and I placed a bet on a horse named "Divine Comedy." He ran eighth.
It is tradition, affection - more varieties of beauty than the heart can remember. And for the next 12 years, Lexington became a place we still look back on with lump-in-the-throat appreciation. The sanctuary was Gothic. And to preach there, facing a great Transfiguration window on a Sunday morning was like having a reserved seat in heaven.
Jane Offutt lived on North Broadway in a handsome three-story made of native limestone. Her husband had been a physician. After his death, she now lived there alone, assisted by a devoted black man named Holly. Jane taught Sunday school and liked to tell this one on herself. On a Saturday night she had studied the next day's lesson especially hard and Sunday morning shared with her juniors the harvest of her scholarship. After a serious 15-minute introduction she asked if there were any questions. Pause. John, his fist tucked under his chin, then inquired: "Mrs. Offutt, have your two front teeth always been that far apart?"
The aristoc_esermonsratic small city dealt with changes brought about by the Civil Rights movement with courageous openness. The "colored" and "whites" signs came down. Black students moved into the dorms at the University of Kentucky. Second Church became recognized as having one of the clearest voices of all, appealing for the dismantling of segregation. Hubert Humphrey telephoned from the Senate Office Building to commend the town's progress toward helping to create a genuinely inclusive society.
I played the Christus in a city-wide Easter pageant that brought thousands of people early to the Coliseum. One summer as part of an international exchange, a minister in Wakefield, England, and I traded houses, cars and jobs. I became the Vicar of Wakefield, while the Wakefield pastor became an American for a season.
Fifty miles to the east just outside Berea, Appalachia begins. Here is coal country. Strangers are suspect. But loyalties, once established, are as fixed as the hills. Fascinating names of eastern Kentucky's hamlet world include Pippa Passes, Kingdom Come, Thousand Sticks, Cranks, and Crummies.
Bruce Davis liked to say he was the "senior elder." And he was. He also claimed that, after finishing the work of creation, God had made Kentucky, and used it as a signature for the final masterpiece. Learning that he was ill, I made a visit one day to his upstairs bedroom. I had left word at the church where I might be located in case I was needed. In the middle of talking with Bruce, the telephone rang. It was the hospital, asking me to come as soon as possible because of an emergency. I rose to leave, but he ordered me to "sit down." "There's an emergency here, too," he said. We talked and prayed some more. In a short while, he died.
Then, California - a name no longer as golden as it was in 1945, but where desert, ocean, and mountains are still fertilized by genius and creativity, making it one of the Seven Wonders of the modern world.
At the ripe age of 45, I heeded the Horace Greeley advice, and moved our family West in response to an invitation to become pastor of a fascinating congregation in West Los Angeles, near the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).
It still seemed like the New Frontier, though controversy over involvement in Viet Nam kept the city in a mild uproar much of the time. By now one of the Angell daughters was married and living in Georgia. But the rest of us yielded to this strange call of the western wild, forsaking the gentle ways of Kentucky for a new position where the pastor's study was only about 100 yards from the gravesite of Marilyn Monroe.
The first year was a time of adjustment, but we stayed with it. The Golden State has been, now, the anchor of our existence for more than a quarter of a century - long enough to have piled up more armfuls of adventures.
California brought the beginning of a writing career, television appearances, and a national church leadership race. In 1974 I was nominated for the position of Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the USA. The General Assembly, which gathers annually to decide these things, met that year in Louisville. On the Sunday morning when I departed from Los Angeles for the assembly, I received a friendly ride atop the shoulders of supporters. But in Louisville, I lost.
Despite the excitement of new horizons, the highest adventure for me was being preacher and pastor. The second California congregation that was "ours" for a time was in the college town of Claremont, east of Los Angeles. Preaching there was made doubly challenging when the sermon listeners included not a few professors and other academics. During my 18 years at Claremont Presbyterian Church, I supervised the ground-breaking for four new buildings. I helped establish an exchange program with the local Hebrew Temple, made trips with church elders to the Chino prison, and witnessed singers and dancers lift spirits on the wings of ecstasy. I learned countless things from talented staff, prayed with the people, and loved them. The benedictions of a long pastorate are many.
In Claremont there was an adventure in darkness, when our 21-year-old Susan was killed in a falling-asleep-at-the-wheel accident returning Easter Eve from a short holiday at the Grand Canyon. A call from the Highway Patrol at 5 a.m. on Easter morning changed life for us forever. Out of that darkness came my book O Susan!, which seems to have spoken to the hearts of many.
When "retirement age" arrived, instead of stopping work that I so much enjoyed, I undertook a series of short-term interim pastorates. Westfield, New Jersey, Newport Beach (back to California again). Then to New York City.
Living in the East meant more stretching, and checking up on our knowledge of American history.The New Jersey church had been organized in 1728. On the edge of the Watchung Mountains, it had a Revolutionary War cemetery across the street, a picturesque adjoining lake, and a tall white steeple overlooking the town of Westfield, the symbol of things everlasting. The ambience of the Seaboard is a mellow mix of Harvard and Yale, West Point, Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, Vermont, Gettysburg, Brooklyn, Harlem, the Delaware and Hudson rivers. As different from California as Long Island Sound is from the Mojave desert.
Being part of the teeming city of New York was different from being a visitor. It was a good feeling to sense that some of it was mine - that, for a little while, I was one with its energy, its diversity, museums, libraries, concert halls, subway trains, and historic memories and bustling harbor. That 18-month stay changed me in some ways that I like. The Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church had had but three pastors during the major portion of the twentieth century - all household names in the world of the church: Henry Sloan Coffin, George Arthur Buttrick, and David H. C. Read.
But to be a New Yorker is and always has been, to identify with the plight of strangers (bus drivers are often amazingly kind), with the dispossessed, with the grandeur of Central Park, and with the best of nearly everything.
Would I want to repeat these past 40 years - so filled as they have been with overflowing inspiration, variety, and stretching?
Yes. Yes - again and again. Wherever we went there were children in search of visions and people in search of affirmation. Grief, steadfastness of soul, a yearning for the balm of Gilead. Laughter and picnics. Supper of Bread and Wine. The Book. The community which, when we make it our own, transforms the world and what we come to expect of it.
