Blog | Stephen Mansfield

WinstonMas: Churchill on Marriage

January 21, 20121 Comment

“At times, I think I could conquer everything—and then again I know I am only a weak vain fool. But your love for me is the greatest glory and recognition that has or will ever befall me: and the attachment which I feel towards you is not capable of being altered by the sort of things that happen in this world. I only wish I were more worthy of you and more able to meet the inner needs of your soul.”

We no longer live when public men are measured by the quality of their marriages. “Men of affairs” today are often just that and the greater the distance they can place between themselves and their crumbling home lives the better. For some unclear reason, the inability of a man to loyally fulfill his vows to his wife is no longer taken as indication of the character with which he will serve the public. Our age has suffered for embracing such folly. In Winston Churchill’s age, though, a public man’s marriage was more than a well-rehearsed drama, it was the yardstick by which the moral measure of the man was taken. Thus, it was often said of Churchill what is announced of today’s leaders only with a wink of cynicism: “Winston Churchill loved his wife.” Little else is as revealing of his character.

When thirty-four year-old Churchill married Clementine Hozier, he was already a war hero, author, and statesman. With a renowned ancestry and an international reputation, he was a man on the rise in Parliament. Clementine, ten years his junior, was the product of a shattered marriage and an unstable home life. Yet, she had been educated at the Sorbornne, possessed “classical” beauty, and was known to be an excellent tennis player and a good hunter—”for a woman.”

They appeared to be as opposite as a husband and wife could be. She was an early riser who retired early in the evening. He worked until 3 a.m. and then slept until mid-morning. She was an inveterate worrier. He took risks whenever possible and loved daring adventure. She was of Scots descent and believed in frugal ways and plain living. Money problems made her nervous. Winston, on the other hand, spent money like there was no end to it and kept the family in perpetual arrears. He enjoyed raucous parties and loud dinner guests with strong opinions. She found them crude and unsettling and sometimes even ordered guests out of her house (Winston said she once descended on a man “like a jaguar from a tree.”) He had boundless energy; she was often tired and in constant need of rest. Politically, she was to the left of the Liberal establishment of her day, but he was a conservative “Tory Democrat.” He loved Chartwell, their home in Kent; the work on the house, the development of the land, the entertaining. She found it ostentatious and too much work. He expressed everything, wept freely, and lavished affection upon her. She kept everything bottled up until the pressure became too much and she exploded, much to the astonishment of her family and friends.

This strange mixture seems a sure prescription for divorce, but somehow Winston and Clementine melded their differences into one of the most movingly intimate marriages on record. Together they created a realm of supportive intimacy that filled the void in their lives. It was a private realm, adorned with gentleness and a level of acceptance neither had known before. As one historian has written, “There would always be a place in their relationship into which no one else would enter.” From the time of their honeymoon, during which they “loitered and loved,” they together built a safe haven that would forever be their private refuge.

Within this world only pet names were used. He was “Mr. Pug” or “Pig” and she, “Mrs. Kat.” The children were called “kittens” and were given names like “Chumbolly” and “Duckadilly.” Unborn children were “Puppy Kittens.” When one of them entered the house, some absurd sound—like a nasal “Wonk! Wonk!”—would be made, with the entire family, from whatever quarter, repeating the sound in greeting. Their displays of affection were public and unrestrained. There was abundant wrestling, slapping, holding, and tickling in their home. On Churchill’s birthday, a visiting Lord found “Kat” and “Pig,” attired in paper hats, purring cat-like at each other on a sofa. They delighted in caring for each other. If a wasp landed on Clementine, Winston, knowing her deathly fear, would gallantly grab the insect and cast it into a nearby fire. Then he would turn to her and ask with deepest concern, “Did you survive, my Kat?” as though they had together confronted the dragon of St. George.

Their letters reveal an almost adolescent sentimentality. He might address her as “my beautiful white pussy cat.” If he had just left on a plane he might write that he had “a touching vision of you and your kittens growing rapidly smaller.” He was “eternally attached to her” and pledged, “I want to be worthy of all the beauties of your nature. It gives me so much joy to make you happy.” Clementine was equally expressive in writing, far more so than in person. When she had once been rude to one of their house guests, she wrote in apology, “My sweet and Dear Pig, when I am a withered old woman how miserable I shall be if I have disturbed your life and troubled your spirit by my temper. Do not cease to love me. I could not do without it.” Often, their letters included drawings of pigs, kittens, hearts, and other symbols of endearment. These exchanges might easily be mistaken for the love-sick scrawlings of teenagers were they not signed by the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

What is most astounding about the marriage of Winston and Clementine is that—far from immune to the pressures which shipwreck the marriages of others—they experienced almost every disadvantage in outsized proportion. By modern standards they were doomed from the beginning. There was no degree of loneliness, anger, rejection, pain, bitterness, or opportunity for unfaithfulness that they did not experience. But in their more than 55 years together, they endured largely because they admitted their inadequacies, fed their intimacy at any cost, and understood their marriage in the sustaining light of eternity. So, as Winston wrote in the very last line of his autobiographical My Early Life, “I married . . . and lived happily ever afterwards.”

Category: Posted Under: Love, Marriage, Winston Churchill

‘Winstonmas’ Begins

January 18, 20121 Comment

My historical hero, Winston Churchill, died on January 24, 1965. Each year during the week before the anniversary of the Great Man’s death, a few of my friends and I read a good book on Churchill, revel in his spirit and usually have a fine meal in his honor. I also like to memorialize him—during this annual time we have humorously begun calling ‘Winstonmas’—by offering selections from my book Never Give In: The Extraordinary Character of Winston Churchill. I think you’ll find liberation from the cult of the contemporary in Churchill’s words and I hope you’ll think on him with gratitude in this week leading up to January 24.

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On Realism: “The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it; ignorance may deride it; malice may destroy it, but there it is.”

As a rule, human beings try to avoid unpleasant truths. We prefer the comfortable to the unsettling. We dislike harsh facts for the same reason we dislike mirrors: they force us to stare our problems in the face. Historians have long known that civilizations in crisis take refuge in myth and fantasy because the sensual, escapist world of imagination promises deliverance from the cold, disturbing world of reality. But the deliverance is never genuine: it is only a temporary distraction, not real hope. Hope springs instead from courageously confronting the truth, no matter how bleak or costly it may be.

In complaining about the age of appeasement, Churchill once said, “No one in great authority had the wit, ascendancy or detachment from public folly to declare these fundamental, brutal facts to the electorate.” This touches one of the distinguishing marks of his style of leadership: he believed in the necessity of squarely facing the most ugly realities. How refreshing this is in our media age when public relations experts are mistaken for leaders and when every unsightly blemish or untidy fact is carefully reworked, re-painted, or retired. Churchill would have none of it: “It is no use dealing with illusions and make-believes. We must look at the facts. The world . . . is too dangerous for anyone to be able to afford to nurse illusions. We must look at realities.”

Churchill possessed an almost mystical confidence in knowing the facts and facing them honestly, whatever the offense, as a critical step toward ultimate triumph. In September of 1932, he warned the House of Commons of the Nazi movement and urged honesty in dealing with the public. “I would now say, ‘Tell the truth to the British People.’ They are a tough people, a robust people. They may be a bit offended at the moment, but if you have told them exactly what is going on you have insured yourself against complaints and reproaches which are very unpleasant when they come home on the morrow of some disillusion . . .” Years later, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he told the House of Commons of a major naval defeat and reminded the members, “We do not at all underrate the power and malignity of our enemies. We are prepared to endure tribulation.” And when the defeats continued, his conclusion was near brutal in its frankness: “We shall suffer and we shall suffer continually, but by perseverance, and by taking measure on the largest scale, I feel no doubt that in the end we shall break their hearts.”

This resolve to engage the truth at any price granted Churchill some immensely important insights. As a careful observer who refused to change facts to fit his philosophy or bend reality to his imagination, he acquired shrewd insight into the ways of men and events. While others fashioned fantastic theories to explain what little they understood, Churchill recognized that history does not arrive in neat packages or move in defined channels. Time, chance, human nature,—all play their role. Life is not black and white, events are stubborn and unruly, and men rarely follow precise patterns in their behavior. Understanding this gave Churchill the judgment to fashion policies suited to the fluid and uncertain nature of circumstances.

“The world, nature, human beings, do not move like machines. The edges are never clear-cut, but always frayed. Nature never draws a line without smudging it. Conditions are so variable, episodes so unexpected, experiences so conflicting, that flexibility of judgment and a willingness to assume a somewhat humbler attitude towards external phenomena may well play their part in the equipment of a modern prime minister.”

A “humbler attitude” meant caution in dealing with other human beings: “The high belief in the perfection of man is appropriate in a man of the cloth but not in a prime minister.” It also demanded an unnatural willingness to consider opposing views: “The more knowledge we possess of the opposite point of view the less puzzling it is to know what to do.” It enabled him to coolly calculate risk: “We realize that success cannot be guaranteed. There are no safe battles.” And it made him even more impatient when empty posturing replaced informed action: “Peace will not be preserved by pious sentiments expressed in terms of platitudes or by official grimaces and diplomatic correctitude.” Perhaps above all, it gave him a healthy sense of the absurd in the affairs of men: “The human story does not always unfold like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes in life they make five or minus three; and sometimes the blackboard topples down in the middle of the sum and leaves the class in disorder and the pedagogue with a black eye.”

Facing ugly truth is not easy. Often the toughest battle a leader will face is the one against his own reticence to see things as they really are. It requires uncommon courage and very few have the character to deal with such stark reality. But when the truth is known, the worst is over and the benefits are a clearer vision and the wisdom of a “humbler attitude,” without which leaders cannot move beyond despair to a brighter day of victory.

Category: Posted Under: Realism, Winston Churchill

The Weaving of the Christ Tale

December 20, 20111 Comment

The birth of the Christ child did not begin with a manger and shepherds in their fields and wise men following a star. It did not begin even with a lone husband and wife seeking shelter for the night. God weaves a better story than that.

It began, of course, with all the Great Ones of old who foresaw the Messiah or who played a role in his ancestry or who wrote of how it would happen so that when it did everyone would know that God had been preparing, that all was according to plan.

But we don’t have to go back that far.

We can start with Anna. That is the name we know her by. The people who saw her everyday may have called her something else and it may not have been that kind. She was old. In fact, Dr. Luke tells us she was “very old.” And maybe a bit odd. People saw her each time they went to the temple. She was there, her lips moving wordlessly, often her hands raised to something invisible. Folks probably thought she was insane, some wrinkled old homeless woman who mumbled to herself all the time.

She wasn’t any of these things. It turns out she was once a lovely young woman who had long ago married the love of her life. The two lived happily for seven years until the young husband died. Anna was shattered and wept away her days. Then, in the swirl of her grief, she noticed a purpose taking form despite the fog. She knew what God wanted her to do: to wait and pray and fast and worship and do it out where anyone might see—in the temple courts. She sensed something marvelous was going to happen before too many years and that in some invisible way she was supposed to pave the way.

So day and night she stood before her God and reminded him of who he was and what he had promised. And the years passed—almost sixty of them. All along, Anna stayed true. And then there was that day, when Joseph and Mary—who were not yet born when Anna had stood her watch for forty years!—walked into the temple courts with something in their arms.

Simeon saw it too. He was old as well though not as old as Anna. Perhaps the two even knew each other. Her job was to stand in the holy place and call upon God to act. Simeon’s job was to know what was coming and to let it live inside him until the day it was fulfilled—even if it was the last day of his life.

So when Joseph and Mary’s grandparents were still young, Anna moved from grief to intercession and began to stand her watch. Simeon saw what others did not of God’s intent for Israel and waited, like a pregnant woman eager for the day of birth. And he was there, too, before Joseph and Mary were even a dream in their parents’ hearts.

Then, without either of them knowing it, the night we remember each year came. A young couple, forced to travel by a decree of Caesar, looked for a place to give birth. There was no room in the inn. Everyone was out on the roads. And so a cave used to tend cattle became their home for a while.

It had taken miracles to get them there. An angel appeared to Mary to tell her what was to come. She was only 14 or so and understandably unsure. Joseph had suspicions that only another angel/dream could correct. Then, Mary’s Uncle Zechariah had seen an angel by the temple altar and things had not gone well. He didn’t speak for nine months while his wife, Elizabeth, had a child though she was well up in years.

God was weaving his story. And he wasn’t done. On this night, while Mary gave birth to a child no human father produced and Joseph served her knowing the child was from God and Anna worshipped in the temple and Simeon carried the sacred dream….

….Priests of a foreign religion and a far distant land were woven into the story. They followed a slow moving star and would not arrive for two years, but they had begun their journey to worship the Christ and would not stop searching until they did. Shepherds tending the temple flocks heard angels declare what had happened and rushed off to find the new Lamb of God. And in Jerusalem, Zechariah spoke and held his new son named John while his wife, Elizabeth, recovered from her joyous trial.

And he came. The Promised One. Just as was foretold. As a pudgy, squirming baby nestled in an animal trough. Not much fanfare for a king.

Then, forty days later, to fulfill the law of God, Joseph and Mary carried their child, Jeshua, to Jerusalem and into the temple courts. Simeon found them first, old as he was and perhaps a bit weary in the search. Once he explained to the parents, he took the child in his arms and knew his unanswered waiting had come to an end. He held in his trembling hands the one who would reach beyond the borders of Israel to the great unknowing masses in lands no honorable Jew would set foot. And he told these parents it would not all be easy for them in the days to come.

Anna likely saw the three and the child amidst the temple throng and drew near. What she had envisioned all those years ago, what she had long asked God to do, now was here. She wept and prayed and began to tell all who entered the temple a story that must have made the passersby shake their heads at that crazy old woman and her mystical tales.

Each one played his role. The grieving young wife, the patient seer, the priests of a strange religion, the shepherds just putting down for the night, the old priest of Israel who had trouble believing, his now-young elderly wife, and the Christ himself who was ancient before he was born and took on the form of a child.

In this way, the Destiny Weaver, wove his story in time. And the weaving goes on, for those willing to lend the strand of their lives to the woven purposes of God.

Category: Posted Under: Birth Of Christ, Christmas

The First Thanksgiving in the Pilgrim’s Own Words

November 20, 20111 Comment

Our nation is in crisis. Our times are troubled. Our national memory has grown dim. We need to remember who we are. Thanksgiving is a perfect time for this. Take a few moments this holiday week to ponder the words of our Pilgrim Fathers about their First Thanksgiving. It may be a first step toward recovering who we are meant to be.

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In 1608, the Pilgrims left England for Holland because of persecution by the Anglican Church. William Bradford, their chronicler and long-time governor, wrote that they had “as the Lord’s free people, joined themselves by a covenant of the Lord into a church estate, in the fellowship of the Gospel, to walk in all His ways made known…unto them, according to their best endeavors, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them.”

While in Holland, Pastor John Robinson powerfully preached a Christian vision for the New World: “Now as the people of god in old time were called out of Babylon civil, the place of their bodily bondage, and were to come to Jerusalem, and there to build the Lord’s temple, or tabernacle…so are the people of God now to go out of Babylon spiritual to Jerusalem…and to build themselves as lively stones into a spiritual house, or temple, for the Lord to dwell in.”

After 12 years of living in Holland, the Pilgrims began to nurture a desire to take the Gospel to the nations. Bradford writes of their passion for coming to the new world: “…a great hope and inward zeal they had of laying some good foundation, or at least to make some way thereunto, for the propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world; yea, though they should be but even as stepping-stones unto others for the performing of so great a work.”

They were carefully counting the cost: “…all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be enterprise and overcome with answerable courages. It was granted that the dangers were great, but not desperate, and the difficulties were many, but not invincible…and all of them, through the help of God, fortitude and patience, might either be borne or overcome…[But] their condition was not ordinary. Their ends were good and honorable, their calling lawful and urgent, and therefore they might expect the blessing of God in their proceeding; yea, though they should lose their lives in this action, yet they might have comfort in the same, and their endeavors would be honorable.”

They were willing to face hardship: “Yea, and as the enterprise is weighty and difficult, so the honor is more worthy, to plant a rude wilderness, to enlarge the honor and fame of our dread sovereign, but chiefly to display the efficacy and power of the Gospel, both in zealous preaching, professing, and wise walking under it, before the faces of these poor blind infidels.”

The were particularly concerned for the conversion of natives in the New World: “And first, seeing we daily pray for the conversion of the heathens…it seemeth unto me that we ought also to endeavor and use the means to convert them; and the means cannot be used unless we go to them, or they come to us. To us they cannot come, our land is full; to them we may go…that they may be persuaded at length to embrace the Prince of Peace, Christ Jesus, and rest in peace with him forever.”

After making arrangements for the voyage, their pastor, John Robinson, called a “day of sollemme humiliation.” Robinson preached from Ezra 8:21: “And there at the river, by Ahavba, I proclaimed a fast, that we might humble ourselves before our God and seek of him a right way for us, and for our children and for all our substance.” Robinson later wrote, “The rest of the time was spent in powering out prayers to the Lord with great fervencies, mixed with abundance of tears.”

The majority left Holland to board their ships in England. Their godly Pastor, John Robinson, stayed behind to care for the elderly and infirm. He sent a letter with one of the leaders that was to be read as they boarded their ships. The words would repeatedly provide comfort and encouragement to them as their adventure unfolded.

. . .We are daily to renew our repentance with our God, especially for our sins known, and generally for our unknown trespasses. . .[For] sin being taken away by earnest repentance ad the pardon thereof from the Lord. . .great shall be [a man's] security and peace in all dangers, sweet his comforts in all distresses. . .

As they prepared to leave in 1620 “they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lifted up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest cuntrie, and quieted their spirits.”

The voyage on The Mayflower lasted 66 days. The Mayflower was no longer than a volleyball court and the storms they sailed through sometimes laid the ship on its side, sometimes threw it high in the air only to slam it upon the water again. During that time of year the North Atlantic waters are so cold that the U.S. Navy estimates a man will live only three minutes if he falls overboard.

For weeks at a time, the Pilgrims were forced to remain in the “tween decks.” One sailor repeatedly called them “psalmsinging pukestockings.” They suffered all the effects of being tossed on the ocean for over two months — men, children, pregnant women, the elderly — but they always harbored in their hearts an earnest desire to be a “stepping stone of the light of Christ in a new land.”

When they arrived, landing in a howling wilderness, Bradford wrote these moving words: “Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys, no houses or much less townes to repair too, to seeke for succoure. And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that cuntrie know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search and unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not. What could now sustain them but the spirite of God and his grace? May not and ought not the children of these fathers, rightly say: ‘Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness.’”

Because they had been blown off course by the storms and had not landed upon the land of their charter, the Pilgrims wrote a new charter, called the Mayflower Compact. It is the first binding covenant or constitution in American history. It states clearly why they sailed to the new world.

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland King, defender of the faith, &c, having undertaken for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic.

But this unity was quickly challenged. Bradford wrote:

In these hard and difficult beginnings they found some discontents and murmurings arise among some, and mutinous speeches and carriages in other, but they were soon quelled and overcome by the wisdom, patience, and just and equally carriage of things by the Governor and better part, which clave faithfully together in the main. But that which was most sad and lamentable was, that in 2 or 3 months time halfe of their company dyed, especially in January and February, being the depth of winter, and wanting houses and other comforts, being infected with the scurvie and other diseases, and which this long voyage and their inaccomadate condition had brought upon them; so as there dyed some time 2 or 3 a day in the foresaid time; that of 100 persons, scarce 50 reminded.

And of these in the time of most distress, there were but 6 or 7 sound persons who, to their great commendations be it spoken, spared no pains, night or day, but with abundance of toyle and hazard of their own health, fetched them wood, made them fires, dressed them meat made their beds, washed their loathsome clothes, loathed and unclothed them, in a word did all the homely and necessary offices for them which dainty and queasy stomachs cannot endure to hear named; and all this willingly and cheerfully without any grudging in the least, showing herein their true love unto their friends and brethren.

Still, God’s grace was sufficient. God caused English-speaking Indians named Samoset and Squanto to help the Pilgrims learn how to farm the land and harvest the bay. Squanto lived with the Pilgrims until 1622 when he died. His last request was that Gov. William Bradford would pray that he might go to the Englishman’s god in heaven. Bradford wrote: “Squanto continued with them and was their interpreter, and was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation. He directed them how to set their corn, where to take fish and to procure other commodities and was also their pilot to bring them to unknown places for their profit, and never left them till he dyed.”

Their next harvest proved the wisdom of Squanto. They had abundance of food for the first time. Governor Bradford called for a Day of Thanksgiving.

Our harvest being gotten, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might, after a special manner, rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king, Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted; and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation, and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God we are so far from want that we are partakers of plenty.

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QUOTES FROM SPEECHES
ABOUT THE PILGRIMS AND THANKSGIVING THROUGHOUT HISTORY

“Let us, in the midst of these reflections, have our hearts enlarged in thanksgiving to God, for his merciful favor to our fathers, and to us by their instrumentality. Let us piously acknowledge the hand of God, in all that has been done for them and us, and to the whole, cry, grace, grace. With what strange gloom are our hearts filled, when we make the supposition, that all our fathers had been left to perish in their attempt! Proportionable to the dreadfulness of such a supposition, let our gratitude be, to our father’s God and our’s. And, out of gratitude to God, let us improve the blessings of life with sobriety, and maintain our liberties with an honorable Christian firmness.”
-Charles Turner, 1773

“…let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary. Let us cherish these sentiments, and extend this influence still more widely; in full conviction, that that is the happiest society which partakes in the highest degree of the mild and peaceful spirit of Christianity.”
-Daniel Webster, 1851

“Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone to many, yea in some sort to our whole nation; let the glorious name of Jehovah have all the praise.”
-William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation

Category: Posted Under: Pilgrim, Thanksgiving

A Thanksgiving Meditation

November 15, 20112 Comments

It must have been the most horrifying experience of their lives. Though there were 103 people aboard the ship called The Mayflower, only 54 were from the band of Separatists who had lived in Holland the previous twelve years to escape persecution in England. They were farmers and sheepherders for the most part, though some might have been craftsmen of one trade or another. But never had they been on the high seas. And it must have seemed as though the very demons of hell had been loosed upon them during that fall of 1620.

The storms of the north Atlantic were so fierce and the ship so tossed that the main mast frequently dipped into the waves. It was a disorienting, gut-wrenching experience for even the experienced sailors among them. The small band of believers on board — men, women, an expectant mother and small children among them — were kept in the “tween deck” for fear of the buffeting storms. Many were sick. Some wailed their agonies endlessly through the terrifying nights. The icy winds wailed with them. What a filthy, smelly, terrifying time of testing that was!

But the elements were not the only opposition these Christians, who would soon be called “Pilgrims,” endured. There was one sailor who persisted in calling them “psalm-singing pukestockings,” which are exactly the two things they spent most of their time doing. Though the Pilgrims forgave and prayed for the man’s soul, he was, mysteriously, the only person to die during the voyage.

For 66 days the little ship, no longer than a modern volleyball court, made the treacherous voyage from England to the coast of Massachusetts. And when they arrived, what must their thoughts have been as they scanned the howling wilderness which was to be their home? William Bradford, their Governor, later wrote:

“Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys, no house or much less townes to repair too, to seeke for succoure.”

“What could sustain them but the spirite of God and his grace. May not and ought not the children of these fathers, rightly say: ‘Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness.’”

And perish they almost did. More than half of them died during that first winter, often called “the starving time.” At one point, each person’s ration for a day was no more than five kernels of corn. Indian friends like Squanto and Samoset taught the white men how to harvest the bay and the land, but the yield would not be sufficient until the next year. So, they buried their dead and prayed for God’s mercy.

In the spring they planted and began to sense that God had heard their prayers. The previous winter had been the worst of times, but the harvest looked bountiful now, the settlement was growing and God seemed to be smiling upon them.

When the harvest was gathered that fall, Governor Bradford called for some of the men to go hunting in preparation for a great feast to celebrate the goodness of God. Wild fowl, fish from the sea, and venison were prepared in abundance. They invited their Indians friends and these, thankfully, brought five freshly killed deer. The white women prepared hoecakes, cornmeal pudding and a variety of vegetables while the Indian women introduced delicacies like blueberry, apple, and cherry pies. The most welcome new food which the Indians brought with them, though, was a new way of cooking corn in an earthen pot until it became white and fluffy — popcorn!

It was indeed a thanksgiving, but not just for safety and abundance of food. It was also a time to remember the words they had penned about their purpose for coming when they were yet on the The Mayflower. The came, they said, “for the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith,” “for propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world; yea, though they should be but even as stepping-stones unto others for the performing of so great a work.”

So they were. And we ought to remember them this Thanksgiving, and take their mission to our hearts.

William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation

Category: Posted Under: Christians, History, Thanksgiving

The Virtue of Slow

October 24, 20112 Comments

I had an experience a few days ago and it was so profound that it has nearly become a life philosophy for me. Let me explain.

I strained my back last week. I don’t usually have back problems and I’m actually in pretty good shape but I’ve had a lot of travel recently. During one stretch I hauled a heavy suitcase to multiple speaking events across the country, something I don’t normally do. The beds at some of my hotels attacked me in my sleep. I stupidly worked out too hard one day to compensate for not working the two days prior and, well—I strained my back last week.

This strain wasn’t the profound experience. It was what the strain made me do. Because I was constantly feeling twinges in my lower back, I walked slowly everywhere I went—airports, airplanes, hotels, restaurants, big convention centers—everywhere. Now, usually I’m a fast walker. I have long legs and walking somehow triggers thought and before I know it I’m nearly race-walking through life. More than once I’ve been walking while lost in thought and then realized I’d lost my wife somewhere along the way too. My fault. I walk fast and it makes me drift away into my other, mental world.

So this past week has been a revelation in walking slowly. I don’t limp. I don’t walk with a hitch in my step. I just walk very slowly, very smoothly–like a man with a satisfied mind—whether I am or not. This has changed my orientation to the world and the people in it. Moving slowly, I see more and notice what I might not have. People also see me and this is the big lesson from my week of moving slowly.

While walking through one airport, I noticed what I certainly would not have a week before—a woman in tears. I had just taken note of her when I realized she had already noticed me. I was moving slowly, at a different pace from everyone else and I didn’t appear too busy. “Can you help me?” she said choking back sobs. She had just received some bad news, it turned out, and couldn’t dial her cell phone for her shaking and her tears. It was no big deal to help her, really, but people rushing to planes don’t look like they are interested in such trifles and I, in my diminished speed, did.

Then I got on a plane and after take off a flight attendant asked me what I do. I told her and she said, “I thought so. You just move like a man in rhythm with himself.” Hmm. “In rhythm?” All I had done was slow down, but my pace said to her that something was right about my life. Another man approached me in a restaurant and said, “Are you someone famous?” I am not, of course, though he might have seen me on TV through the years. I asked him why he asked. His answer surprised me. “Just the way you walked into the room, I thought maybe you were someone I should know.” We both laughed when I said that that actually I in was in pain and that there is ample evidence that knowing me is not that great a thrill.

There were other similar episodes and they all convinced me that being slow sent signals and allowed connections I couldn’t have imagined otherwise. I came to realize that I want to be that more present, compassionate, accessible man others perceived me to be this past week. I know I’m not him, not yet. But maybe pace is the key. At the least, it’s a start.

Category: Posted Under: Injury, Slow, Virtue

Prohibition, Part II

October 6, 2011Comment

In honor of Ken Burns’ PBS series entitled Prohibition, I excerpted a portion of my book The Search for God and Guinness in my last blog. I believe that the Prohibition era is one of the most instructive for our time. So below you’ll find the second part of my overview of Prohibition as it first appeared in my book and I hope you enjoy it along with Burns’ fine documentary.

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The legislation that would lead to Prohibition began in 1917 with the passage of the Food Control Act, which gave Woodrow Wilson the authority to regulate the manufacture of beer and wine. Prohibitionists had worked behind the scenes for the passage of the bill knowing that it was a first step toward outlawing alcohol sales. Wilson complied. He required a reduction in beer sales of thirty percent and dramatically limited the alcohol content a beer could contain. It was only a beginning. Immediately, a constitutional amendment was proposed for prohibiting intoxicating drink entirely. This amendment passed in January of 1919 but it needed a accompanying legislation to assure enforcement. In the famous Volstead Act that ensued, an intoxicating beverage was defined as anything containing more than five percent alcohol. Oddly, President Wilson vetoed the act, Congress overrode, and the Supreme Court upheld the act when brewers filed a desperate suit to bring the prohibition mania to an end. On January 17, 1920, the United States became a dry nation.

It would prove to be one of the most foolish governmental acts in American history, a point of discussion on morality and law for generations to come. It had little popular support. A poll taken in 1926 revealed that only 19 percent of Americans favored prohibition and the Eighteenth Amendment that made it law. Prohibition was thus a blow to democracy. It was also a blow to law and order. The more than 177,000 saloons in America prior to Prohibition merely went private, so that in New York alone some 32,000 speakeasies thrived, many eventually providing still other illegal activities, such as prostitution, among their benefits of membership. These establishments were often serviced by thousands of smugglers who focused their efforts on whiskey, gin and rum. Prohibition, then, not only led to illegal trade in alcohol but it also meant that increasing numbers of Americans were drinking hard liquor rather than more moderate and healthy beer. In short, Prohibition increased the consumption of hard liquor in America.

It also increased home-brewing. As H. L. Mencken wrote at the time, “Every second household has become a homebrewer . . . In one American city of 750,000 inhabitants there are now 100 shops devoted exclusively to the sale of beer-making supplies, and lately the proprietor of one of them, by no means the largest, told me that he sold 2,000 pounds of malt-syrup a day.”

The miseries, mysteries and manipulations of Prohibition would last nearly a decade before the Roman Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith of New York made repeal a major theme of his campaign. Though Smith lost his race for the White House, he made repeal acceptable and soon such luminaries as General “Black Jack” Pershing, Walter Chrysler, Harvey Firestone and John Rockefeller were echoing Smith’s cry for change.

Rockefeller was perhaps the most interesting of these because he did not drink alcohol but he did recognize the failure of prohibition.

Failure of the Eighteenth Amendment has demonstrated that the majority of this country are not yet ready for total abstinence, a least when it is attempted through legal coercion. The next best thing—many people think it a better thing—is temperance. Therefore, as I sought to support total abstinence when its achievement seemed possible, so now, and with equal vigor, I would support temperance.

It fell to the newly elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt to call for the end to the madness. Barely a week after taking office, Roosevelt asked Congress to raise the legal alcohol limit of beer to 3.2. Congress complied and though the official end of Prohibition would await the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933, the end this misguided policy had come.

Prohibition stands as a testimony to the damage that can be done through ignorance of the benefits of beer. Rather than emphasize beer as an antidote to drunkenness, as a healthy alternative to harder drinks which, in excess, ruined men’s lives, Prohibitionists treated all alcohol as the same. This not only meant that hard liquor drinking rose during Prohibition, but that the destruction of breweries removed the societal benefits of beer in the post-Prohibition years. Prior to Prohibition there had been sixteen hundred breweries in America. Only seven hundred reopened when Prohibition was repealed, but more than five hundred of these soon failed, burdened as they were with out of date equipment and inadequate financing. This meant, that, again, during the critical 1930’s when beer might have served a Depression era people well, hard liquor ruled the day. Lives were destroyed, crime and poverty spread as a result. Prohibition had served no better purpose than to ban moderation, both during its reign and in the difficult years afterward.

Category: Posted Under: Part II, Prohibition

Prohibition, Part 1

October 4, 20111 Comment

One of the great pleasures of life is a documentary by Ken Burns and his Prohibition series airing recently on PBS is no exception. It beautifully captures the lessons to be learned from the Prohibition era—the good intentions, the folly and the curse of bad public policy. I don’t drink beer and maybe you don’t either. Still, the Prohibition story is so relevant to our times that I not only urge you to watch the Burns’ treatment but I also want to excerpt a section about Prohibition from my book The Search for God and Guinness here. Enjoy. I’ll put the next part up in a few days.

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There had long been efforts for prohibition of alcohol sales in the United States and it is not hard to understand why. From the earliest days of the colonial era, alcohol had played a vast role in nearly every part of life. Men paid for goods with whiskey, doctors treated wounds with wine and political events were awash with strong drink cynically provided by the politicians themselves. Inebriated men made easy political targets. Whiskey was so prized that when the new federal government decided to tax alcohol sales, a revolt ensued known to history as the “Whiskey Rebellion.”

The popular attitude toward drink was that of earlier generations of Christians: alcohol in moderation is a grace of life but drunkenness is both sin and a plague upon society. As pioneers moved westward and small towns began to dot the plains, the negative effects of alcohol became more pronounced. It would take only a few hard drinking men to terrorize a small community, and only one drunken father and husband to leave a family destitute on the dangerous frontier. Naturally, anti-drink societies formed—understandably led by women—and many a tension arose between the “dry” and “wet” factions of the American west.

As anti-alcohol sentiments increased, entire states banned alcohol sales. Maine was first in 1851 with Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Vermont following in 1852. A year later, Michigan followed suit as did Connecticut in 1854. These laws were loosely and incompetently enforced, though, and this only led to increased frustration on the part of temperance groups. Finally, anti-alcohol sentiments merged with religious beliefs and led to the formation of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874. This body thrived in the rural sections of the country and led, in time, to the rise of the legendary Carrie Nation—the widow who took axe in hand and hacked to pieces the saloon where she believed her husband once drank himself to death. Her exploits captured the imagination of many Americas and, in an age of anti-corruption reform, the war on alcohol gathered strength.

In retrospect, brewers seemed unaware of these currents of change. Believing rightly that beer and alcohol had always been a valued part of America life, brewers throughout the U.S. saw little threat in the gathering anti-alcohol storm. They continued to cite the American heritage of moderate alcohol use and even proclaimed a favorite truism from the era of the founding fathers: “The Brewery is the best pharmacy.” They were tragically unaware of their times. They were unable to see what would come of women gaining political power, many of these women armed with tales of the devastation excessive drink had meant for their families. They could not have understood how World War I would lead to fiery anti-German sentiment and how this in turn would focus rage on the largely German trade of brewing beer. And they could not have foreseen how many a politician, riding an anti-corruption wave, would blame alcohol for most of the country’s woes and thus come to proclaim prohibition as a national panacea. When brewers in America did wake up to the prevailing trends, there was little they could do.

Category: Posted Under: Alcohol, Politics, Prohibition

My Next Book

September 15, 2011Comment

I am eagerly looking forward to the release of my next book, the cover of which you see here. Though I admire Oprah Winfrey for all that she has accomplished, I am deeply disturbed by the brew of spirituality she has encouraged through her various media. In this book, I carefully describe her rise to fame, her turning to alternative spirituality, the influence of Baby Boomer history on her life, the spokesmen for New Age spirituality she has promoted on her show and her religious influence upon our culture. I’m looking forward to exploring the themes of this book with readers around the world in the coming months. By the way, the book releases in mid-October.

Category: Posted Under: Cover, Oprah, Religion

Some History Behind 9/11

September 11, 20112 Comments

When 9/11 occurred, I was leading a tour of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. Naturally, my thoughts that day turned often to our American founding fathers of faith and what connection there ought to be between their view of Islam and our own. Many Americans believe that our problems with Islam—or, more accurately, radical Islam—began fairly recently in history. The truth is that this struggle shaped the earliest days of our history. Consider:

It was to defeat Islam, among other dreams, that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492. He was a young boy when the devastating news of the fall of Constantinople to Muslim armies reached his land. It marked him. He grew into manhood surrounded by tales of the Crusades into Muslim lands. When he determined to fulfill Marco Polo’s dream and return to the east by sailing west, he did so in part to harvest the wealth of the New World to liberate the Old World from Islam. As he wrote to Isabella and Ferdinand from the Americas on his first voyage,

I hope to God that when I come back here from Castile . . . that I will find . . . gold . . . in such quantities that within three years the Sovereign will prepare for and undertake the reconquest of the Holy Land. I have already petitioned Your Highnesses to see that all the profits of this, my enterprise, should be spent on the conquest of Jerusalem, and Your Highnesses smiled and said that the idea pleased them, and that even without the expedition they had the inclination to do it.

Columbus dreamed of defeating the armies of Islam with the armies of Europe made mighty by the wealth of the New World. It was this dream that, in part, began America.

What Columbus dreamed became the hope of later generations. The greatest theologian of the American colonial era, and possibly of American history, was Jonathan Edwards. In his History of Redemption, written in 1773, Edwards predicted that a great revival to begin at the dawn of the twenty-first century in America would spell the end of Islam. What Edwards called “Mahometanism” would fall, he wrote, “when the Spirit begins to be so gloriously poured forth” at the end of the age.

Satan’s Mahometan kingdom shall be utterly overthrown. And then—though Mahometanism has been so vastly propagated in the world, and is upheld by such a great empire—this smoke, which has ascended out of the bottomless pit, shall be utterly scattered before the light of that glorious day, and the Mahometan empire shall fall at the sound of the great trumpet which shall then be blown.

This expectation of the fall of Islam was a central theme of the Great Awakening, the founding revival of the Revolution, and thus became a central theme in what might be called the founding dream of America.

It must have come as no surprise to those who fought it, then, that America’s first war was against Muslim armies. Modern Americans are often shocked to hear this. They assume that our first war was against the British in the War of 1812. Not so. Our first war was the Tripolitan War, fought against the Muslim pirates of North Africa’s Barbary Coast. It was a war that presaged much in our history, complete with hostages, rescue missions, terrorist acts, and a Congress that could not decide whether it was engaged in a war or a police action.

Though later generations would tend to see this and most wars in non-spiritual terms, Americans of that generation understood their battle as the Rais Hudga Mahomet Salamia did. He was the Muslim captain of a ship manned by American captives at the start of the war. He warned his enslaved crew of Christians that they were to be treated harshly, “for your history and superstition in believing in a man who was crucified by the Jews, and disregarding the true doctrine of God’s last and greatest Prophet Mahomet.” Clearly, the Tripolitan war was a battle of faiths and Americans are reminded of this deeply religious conflict every time the U.S. Marines tell us in song that they were fashioned first “on the shores of Tripoli.”

We are not limited to the perspectives of those early generations of Americans nor was everything they believed correct. Still, it is of more than passing interest that our nation was forged, in part, in an ongoing struggle with Islamic forces. At the least it causes us to realize that our current conflicts with radical Islam are nothing new. At best, it may provide some insight into the nature of those conflicts.

Category: Posted Under: 9/11, Columbus, History

On Lincoln and Self-Education

August 18, 2011Comment

I once read a sentence that Randolph Churchill wrote about his father, Winston. He said that when the future prime minister was a young subaltern in India, “he became his own university.” Randolph meant that his father read so deeply and gave himself to the pursuit of knowledge so fully that he learned as much—if not more—than a university can usually teach a man. I found this phrase a near perfect description of what the great self-taught giants of history accomplished. They taught themselves—thoroughly, broadly, eagerly—and so much so that they became their own universities. This was Jefferson at Monticello or Edison in Menlo Park or Truman as a lonely, bespectacled boy at the Independence library.

This phrase and these achievements came back to me this week as I researched the life of Abraham Lincoln. I drove from our home in Nashville to Lincoln’s birthplace and boyhood home in Kentucky, to a later childhood home in Indiana, and finally to the town he made his own in adulthood, Springfield, Illinois. Though I am preparing to write a book about Lincoln’s faith, I was moved profoundly by how Lincoln became “his own university.”

He was born to illiterate parents and could boast only a few months of formal schooling all his days. His early years were bound to a dirt scratching farm life that took all a man had to give and gave back mere subsistence. There was little time for the life of the mind and little to encourage a smart, muscular boy to do anything but sweaty labor.

Still, Lincoln taught himself to read. Think about that phrase. He taught himself to read. He reasoned out the letters and asked questions of those few who knew the English alphabet and he taught himself to read. This was the beginning of his exceptional life. Once he mastered words, he quickly moved on to sentences and then paragraphs. Whole books followed. He eagerly consumed The King James Bible, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the works of Shakespeare, and Aesop’s Fables, beloved frontier fare among the literate. Then he borrowed, bought and even happened upon in an abandoned barrel books like Pilgrim’s Progress, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, a biography of Jefferson, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Parson Weems’ George Washington and the works of Robert Burns. These launched him. He would in time read hundreds more and some were the most difficult books of the age—the multi-volume Commentary on the Laws of England by William Blackstone and Plutarch’s Lives for example.

He was a tender soul in a steely body and so he felt as much as thought what he read. Poetry came from the mix. I am touched not just by the agility of his mind but by the sweetness of his words. He gave us “the better angels of our nature” and “mystic chords of memory” and “that government of the people, for the people, by the people shall not perish from the earth.” A poem he wrote when he returned to his childhood home in later years captures the feelings of us all. Two stanzas of the two dozen reveal the genius:

My childhood’s home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There’s pleasure in it too.

I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms,
And feel (companion of the dead)
I’m living in the tombs.

How does a self-taught man achieve such heights? He reads. He pushes himself. He hears of a word or a subject he knows nothing about and he insists on learning all he can. He engages the knowledgeable and is willing to make mistakes and he will not be satisfied until he is certain of what he needs to know to fulfill his calling.

I’m moved by this not only because I am inspired by the self-taught leaders of history, but also because I believe this skill of self-education is one we all have to master to prosper in our present world. We live at a time when there is a complete technological revolution every five years. Knowledge doubles in our world in approximately the same length of time. It is important we go to school but we must also accept that in the future we will have to learn most of what we need to know on our own. We will have to become high tech Lincolns—reading, mining the internet, watching YouTube, listening to podcasts, being mentored by our friends, attending seminars, refusing to be destroyed by the knowledge tsunami.

It may be odd to think that what Lincoln learned to do in a dirt floor cabin, we must now do in order to achieve. It is also exciting, and it only makes me more thankful we have examples like Lincoln from ages past.

Category: Posted Under: Lincoln, Self Education, Study

On Economics

August 9, 20112 Comments

I have a tendency to see the world in simple terms. I trust this is not the fruit of low intelligence. I trust instead that it is the product of a life-long desire to frame problems in terms that allow for action. I assume complexity stifles. Simplicity mobilizes. Perhaps I’m wrong.

Still, I find this habit helpful when it comes to economics. I cannot hear the word “economics” without immediately being aware of the original meaning of the word. It means “house law” in the original Greek. And that is, quite simply, what economics is: the laws necessary for running a family household.

Now, my professor friends must already be squirming. They protest that this is too simplistic, too childishly framed to be of any help. But it helps me. When I think of economic policy, particularly at the macro level, I immediately “go micro” and try to imagine how that approach would work for the average family household.

Obviously I’m not alone in this. Another simpleminded man, a dear friend of mine, is Dave Ramsey. He apparently uses the Single Household Method as well. For example, read what he has said about our current American debt crisis.

“If the US Government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year, they spend $75,000 a year, & are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing BIG spending cuts to reduce their spending to $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget and debt, reduced to a level that we can understand.”

Now, this I get, and I can’t help wondering how our nation and the world would be different if economics were thought of in this manner.

It isn’t, though, and this is largely due to the work of a man named John Maynard Keynes. You see, Keynes is the man credited with giving us our modern thinking about economics, which means the policies that have led us to our present global financial crises. He would have disdained my simple approach. He disliked simpleminded people like me. He also disliked Christians and, in part, because they insisted on thinking about the future, about matters like the next generation and legacy. Keynes, when asked about the implications of his policies on the future, simply quipped, “in the long run, we’re all dead.” You see Keynes believed that national governments have the obligation to protect people from the ebb and flow of markets through deficit spending—a fancy term for spending borrowed money. I think that when governments started listening to Keynes—early in the 1900’s—is when things started getting complex. Even Time magazine’s attempt to honor Keynes in their 1999 list of “The 100 Most Influential People of the Twentieth Century” includes a sentence that makes simple minds like mine wonder if anyone is truly paying attention. Listen: “His radical idea that governments should spend money they don’t have may have saved capitalism.” Am I alone in thinking this mad? Am I alone in thinking that our current mess is precisely because Keynes urged government to spend money it doesn’t have to fend off crises that people could survive better if government would stay out of it to begin with?

I’m open to someone talking me out of my simple ways. Until that happens, I’m going to urge that macroeconomics to be conducted according to the principles of household management every housewife knows without even reading a book. Maybe this kind of simplicity will help us understand what is happening today. Maybe it will even help to save us.

Category: Posted Under: Debt, Finances, Government

We Can Be Better

July 30, 20112 Comments

It is Saturday morning on July 30, 2011, as I write these words. Most Americans are going about their usual weekend routines while our president and our congress vividly display the cowardice and systemic dysfunctions that have brought us to the brink of disaster. A deal will be struck, I believe. There will be some cosmetic cuts in spending and the debt ceiling will be raised. Glad-handing politicians will proudly congratulate each other as architects of a great victory. The worst will be avoided for now. But we already know what we need to know. Both parties have vainly and irresponsibly brought us to this humiliating, terrifying moment and both parties have revealed they are, in their present form, incapable of leading in the days to come.

My thoughts on this rainy Nashville morning have turned first to a scripture and then to the lives that have fashioned America through four centuries. The scripture is Hebrews 12, in which Christians are encouraged to remember the great saints of old—pictured as though seated in a stadium before the start of a race—in order to fulfill their generation’s call. The message is that by keeping in mind those who have gone before–their character, their faith, their sacrifices—servants of God today can live more courageously and passionately for their Christ.

I do no violence to this scripture to turn this same imagining of heart to the American saga. While our representatives in Washington play out their pitiful pageant, I think of the gallant souls who look on from another world. I think of those who spent 66 days locked in the ‘tween deck of the Mayflower, concluding their wrenching voyage with the words, “We sailed for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.” I think of Crispus Attucks, the black man who gave his life in the Boston Massacre of 1770 and I remember names like Whitefield and Adams and Washington and Lafayette and von Steuben and Paine and Jefferson and Revere who gave us a novus ordo seculorum—a “new order of the ages.” Always I envision the faces of the common lives—those who endured Valley Forge or bled at Antietam or marched into Paris or lay in that cemetery in Manila where I cannot walk without tears. These men and women fought their wars and tended their homes and worked their fields and poured their muscle and their genius into factories and shipyards, always believing that in some way they gave to the nation they loved.

I am aware of them this morning. I feel—I imagine—their unspoken urging that we not lose what they hewed out of wilderness, what they protected with their lives, what they labored almost to death’s door to pass on to those who would follow.

We can be better than we are now. I think we will be. But we will have to remember—what we have been, what kind of people fashioned our undeserved legacy, and why an offended God has withheld his judgment as He has.

Category: Posted Under: Faith, Law, Leaders

The Hidden Calling

July 8, 20114 Comments

I received an email this week. It asked that I offer again a piece I wrote nearly two decades ago. I’m happy to do so. May it be an encouragement to those who serve in unnoticed roles.

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Her name was Elizabeth Anne Everest. Few today will remember her. In fact, few would have known of her even during her lifetime, which ended in near obscurity in 1895. She was, after all, only a nannyone of thousands in Victorian Englandwho quietly spent their days caring for the children of other people. Strolling in a park with her baby’s carriage or braving the London streets with a little boy clinging tightly to her side, there would have been nothing to distinguish her to passersby; she was just another British nanny with another nobleman’s son in her charge.

Or so it would seem. But Elizabeth Anne Everest was not just another nanny. She was a Christian, of the most passionate and fearless kind, and for her being a nanny was not just a job, it was a ministry. She lived her faith boldly before the families that hired her and worked hard to build godliness and biblical truth into the young lives in her care. Thus it was, while serving her Lord in the hiddenness of her calling, that she came to have an impact on the course of modern history. For on a blustery English day in February of 1875, Elizabeth Everest came to be the nanny, and soon the primary spiritual influence, of one rosy-cheeked baby boy by the name of Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, future Prime Minister of England and leader of the western world.

There was little hint in his early years, however, of the greatness that young Winston would one day command and Mrs. Everest soon understood the immensity of her task. In time, the boy’s mother would warn visitors, with typical British understatement, that the he was “a difficult child to manage.” She was right. He kicked, he screamed, he hid, and he bullied. The word “monster” was often used of him and the trouble was that he was bright, too. Knowing of Mrs. Everest’s Christian faith young Winston once tried to escape a mathematics lesson by threatening to “bow down and worship graven images.” It worked, too…for a while. But Elizabeth Everest was an exceptional woman. She knew how to enforce the boundaries she set and from the beginning Winston held a grudging respect for this woman who seemed to know the secretthat his irritating behavior only served to hide a desperate longing of his heart.

This was the truth she tenderly guarded, for she knew that her Lord had not entrusted young Winston to her solely for the discipline she would enforce but more for the vacuum she would fill in the life of this lonely little boy. Few knew how painful his loneliness really was. It would be nice indeed to report that the Churchill’s shared a warmly intimate home life and that Winston was smothered with parental affection, but nothing could be further from the truth. Quite to the neglect of their son, Randolph and Jennie Churchill gave themselves completely to their social ambitions. True, Victorian parents maintained an astonishing distance from their children, receiving them only at prearranged times and under the watchful eye of servants, but the Churchills were remote even by these standards. Of his mother, Winston later wrote, “I loved her, but at a distance.” His father thought Winston was retarded, rarely talked to him, and regularly vented his mounting rage on the child. More than one historian has concluded that Lord Randolph simply loathed his son.

Thus it was that Elizabeth Everest Winston came to call her “Woom”became not only his nanny but his dearest companion, sharing with understanding and tender loyalty the secrets of his widening world. She was, after all, the stereotypical British nanny; plump, simple, cheery, ever optimistic, always compassionate. The boy grew to love her completely. Of their special relationship, Violet Asquith later wrote that in Winston’s “solitary childhood and unhappy school days Mrs. Everest was his comforter, his strength and stay, his one source of unfailing human understanding. She was the fireside at the which he dried his tears and warmed his heart. She was the night light by his bed. She was security.”

She was also his shepherd, for it was here, in the safety of their shared devotion, that Winston first experienced genuine Christianity. On bended knee beside this gentle woman of God he first learned that surging of the heart called prayer. From her lips he first heard the Scriptures read with loving devotion and was so moved he eagerly memorized his favorite passages. On long walks together they sang the great hymns of the Church, spoke breathlessly of the heroes of the faith, and imagined aloud what Jesus might look like or how heaven would be. As they sat together on a park bench or on a blanket of cool, green grass, Winston was often transfixed while Woom explained the world to him in simple but distinctly Christian terms. And it is not hard to imagine that when their day was done many an evening found this devoted intercessor praying the prayers of destiny over her sleeping charge, asking her Heavenly Father to fulfill the calling she sensed so powerfully on his life.

It would seem her prayers were answered, for though in early adulthood Churchill immersed himself in the anti-Christian rationalism that swept his age, he eventually recovered his faith during an escape from a South African prison. So deeply had he received the imprint of Mrs. Everest’s dynamic faith that in this time of crisis the prayers he had learned at her knee returned almost involuntarily to his lips, as did the Scripture passages he had memorized to the familiar lilt of her voice. From that time forward, his faith defined him, as it did his sense of mission. He came to see himself in much the same terms as those he once used to dedicate his grandson. Holding the child aloft he tearfully proclaimed him “Christ’s new faithful soldier and servant.”

So when the tests of life had prepared him and his day of destiny arrived, Winston Churchill was ready to lead the world with a clear trumpet call of the solid faith he first learned from his godly nanny. In an age of mounting skepticism, Church proclaimed the cause of “Christian civilization.” It was threatened from without, he believed, by “barbarous paganism”—like Nazism—which spurned “Christian ethics” and derived its “strength and perverted pleasure from persecution.” Therefore, every Christian had a “duty to preserve the structure of humane, enlightened, Christian society.” This was critical, for “once the downward steps are taken, once one’s moral intellectual feet slipped upon the slope of plausible indulgence, there would be found no halting-place short of a general Paganism and Hedonism.”

While other leaders of his age vacillated and sought the compromises of cowards, Churchill defined the challenges of his civilization in the stark Christian terms that moved men to greatness. Yet behind the arsenal of his words, behind the artillery of his vision, was the simple teaching of a devoted nanny who served her God by investing in the destiny of a troubled boy.

So it was that when the man some called the “Greatest Man of the Age” lay dying in 1965 at the age of ninety, there was but one picture that stood at his bedside. It was the picture of his beloved nanny, gone to be with her Lord some seventy years before. She had understood him, she had prayed him to his best, and she had fueled the faith that fed the destiny of nations…in the hiddenness of her calling.

Category: Posted Under: Elizabeth Ann Everest, The Hidden Calling

The Fourth of July: A Meditation

June 30, 2011Comment

For 235 years Americans have celebrated the Fourth of July as the birth date of our nation. It marks for us a beginning, a sort of national commencement—of the revolution, of our nation, and of our vision of freedom.   

Yet if we consider this important day through the eyes of our Founding Fathers, we find that the Fourth of July marked for them not so much a beginning as an end to a long and painful process, a troubled time some have called the First American Revolution—the one in the minds and hearts of men.   

We must remember that the famous Lexington and Concord engagements, as well as the storied ride of Paul Revere popularized in the Longfellow poem, took place in April of 1775. However, it was not until July of 1776, some fifteen months later, that Congress formally endorsed the Declaration of Independence. What took our Founding Fathers so long? What was the struggle that raged within?

The men who would ultimately sign the Declaration of Independence were not men for whom the idea of revolution came easily. A conservative lot who held dear their Christian faith, their English heritage, and the unique colonial society they cultivated at great cost in the wilderness, these men were not the wild-eyed malcontents we think of as revolutionaries in our day. Instead, the Founding Fathers were men of strong principle who could not back down when their ideals and lifestyles were threatened by English aggression. When a war they did not want was forced upon them, when their values, their property, indeed, their very lives, were at stake, peace on British terms was never an option and here we find one of the most misunderstood truths of our national origins.

The American Revolution was fought, unlike most modern revolutions, to preserve a social order rather than to overthrow one. What we have called a revolution was in reality a colonial rebellion against a power seeking to destroy a largely Christian and traditional way of life. As Peter Drucker has said, the American Revolution was a “conservative counter-revolution,” fought not by power hungry radicals seeking to overthrow an established government but by loyal citizens against grasping tyrannical rule.   

The truth now so often forgotten is that it was England who first declared war on the American colonies. Attempting to consolidate her possessions following the French and Indian War, late in 1775 the British Parliament passed the Prohibitory Act, which broke off relations with the colonists and declared them a “foreign enemy.” John Adams wrote in response that the Act “makes us independent in spite of our supplications and entreaties.” England forced the colonies out from under Royal Protection and declared itself the colonists’ adversaries. This belligerence stunned the colonial leaders and they sought every means available to prevent separation. Even after Lexington and Concord, they hoped against hope that England would modify her harsh course. It was not to be.

Finally, with every possible remedy exhausted, the colonial leaders pleaded their case in a Declaration before the nations of the world, claiming America’s rights according to God’s law and the law of reason. America was, they said, and of a right ought to be, a free and independent nation.

The Founding Fathers were not radicals seeking power; they were family men, business men, ministers and, for the most part, Christians, who were now forced to fight a defensive battle, seeking a return to established legal principles and governmental boundaries—and it cost them dearly.   

Many of the signers of the Declaration were killed during the War. Some were heartlessly made to watch as loved ones were tortured or hanged by British troops. Many lost their estates and a large number suffered physical ailments for the rest of their lives from wounds incurred during the war. They were hunted, vilified and despised by the British and some colonists alike. Yet they knew—they always knew—that their course was the right one.   

The founding generation knew what it seems at times this generation has forgotten—that there are some things that warrant a pledge of “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” For our own age to rediscover these values would mean nothing less than cultural renewal.

Writing some years after the events of the Revolution but as an eyewitness to most of it, John Quincy Adams wrote, “Posterity, you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.” Perhaps, even yet, we will. Perhaps.