[Dialogue] 10/20/11, Spong: My First Mentor: Robert Littlefield Crandall

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My First Mentor: Robert Littlefield Crandall
One of my favorite characters in the New Testament is an obscure man named Andrew.  While he is supposed to be one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, there is no content attached to his name in the first three gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke, other than the fact that he was the brother of Peter.  Deferred status is frequently not an asset, but a heavy burden.  Imagine your identity being limited to the fact that you are someone’s mother or father, someone’s son or daughter or someone’s husband or wife.  Deferred status implies that you have no intrinsic worth only deferred value.
In the Fourth Gospel, however, the character of Andrew is developed a bit more.  John’s gospel (chapter one) says that not only was Andrew Peter’s brother, but that Andrew was the gate keeper, who opened the door for Peter and who made it possible for Peter to meet Jesus of Nazareth.  Later, John says (chapter six) that it was Andrew who brought to Jesus’ attention a lad, one among many in a hungry crowd of 5,000 men (plus women and children) who had offered his five loaves and two fish to help feed that host.  Andrew seems to have been one for whom no gift was too small to be honored or too insignificant to be effectively used.  Still later, John’s gospel (chapter 12) portrays a group of Greek citizens coming to Andrew in their quest to meet Jesus.  It is Andrew who then serves as their guide and leads them to that encounter.  Andrew was not a spectacular human being, not even a leader, indeed he was rather ordinary.  He did what anyone is capable of doing, opening doors, appreciating small gifts and directing people to important relationships.  I have called Andrew “the patron saint of ordinary people,” which is what most of us are.  Few of us will ever achieve political power, lead an army to victory, found a large corporation, change the world or even start a religion, but the world more often than not turns on the gifts of ordinary people not on heroes.  No one achieves success without being the beneficiary of the gifts of countless numbers of those who are ordinary.
I thought about Andrew and the role of the ordinary recently when I made a decision to do a series of columns on those who have been the mentors and guides in my life.  Very few of them will appear in the news of the daily paper or on the pages of human history.  None is likely to be the subject of books or win the adulation of the masses, but I cannot imagine what my life would have been without each of them.  If I can identify the people who stood with me and helped to transform my life in those crossroad moments where decisions were made and irrevocable turns in different directions were taken, then perhaps I can encourage you my readers to recall those who have done the same for you.  So periodically throughout this next year or so I will do columns on my mentors, my heroes, all of whom qualify as “ordinary,” even Andrew types, in the larger arenas of human history. The first one, long deceased now, is a man named Robert Littlefield Crandall.  Let me tell you his story and why he will always be a hero to me.
I must take you back to the year 1945.  World War II had just ended.  Millions of men and women were returning to civilian life from the armed forces.  I was 14 years old, a rather lost boy whose father had died in 1943 leaving my family emotionally distraught and in economic poverty.  All of our resources had been spent on his final illness and burial.  My mother was a 35 year old widow with three children and without even a 9th grade education.  She had no marketable skills.  In her quest for our survival as a family she got a job in the baby department at a local department store, selling diapers and layettes.  She did know about babies.  Her salary was $18 a week.  That was all that stood between us and both bill collectors and hunger.
In 1943, just prior to my father’s death, I had joined the boy’s choir in St. Peter’s Church, Charlotte’s downtown Episcopal congregation.  It was a “paid” position and I received 50 cents a month plus carfare to get to the church on Sundays and to rehearsals on Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings.  This church had a rather prominent history, but I at first felt lost in its gothic arches and its liturgical formality.  Our minister was an elderly, retired priest filling in because most of the younger clergy were in the Chaplains’ Corps of the armed services.  I think I made the assumption that one had to be at least 80 to be a priest, for I had never known one who was not, at least in my mind, both ancient and boring.
With the end of the war now being celebrated I learned via the church gossip lines that very soon we were going to receive a new rector at our church.  I also learned that he had been in battle during the war and those comments built an aura a round him at least in the expectations of my mind. When he arrived, however, I was not prepared for the shock.  In an instant he blew away all of my stereotypes.  A chaplain aboard the USS Wasp in the South Pacific, Robert Crandall was 32 years old.  He wore white buck shoes, not laced up black oxfords.  He drove a Ford convertible.  I had never known a priest to drive a convertible.  I thought clergy only drove hearses!  He played a guitar and sang all sorts of songs.  Bing Crosby, in the motion picture “Going My Way,” had nothing on my new parson.  He also had a gorgeous wife named Erin with whom I was very smitten.  She was as beautiful and elegant a woman as I had ever known. She wore diamonds on her fingers and furs around her neck.  Each Sunday after the church service concluded, this woman would go to her husband’s office, sit down on his desk and cross her legs in the most worldly of ways, while lighting up a cigarette, which she smoked in a long golden cigarette holder.  This was sophistication in spades. I had never known a minister or a minister’s wife like this!  Suddenly church became a very different experience for me.
I quickly turned into a “Crandallite,” a genuine “groupie” always seeking opportunities to be near him. He always seemed to have time for me. I became the image of a faithful acolyte, indeed the only one willing to serve at the 8:00 am service every Sunday morning.  Robert Crandall was what Anglicans call “high church.”  He loved ritual and ceremony.  Watching him celebrate the Eucharist, genuflect, cross himself and bless the sacred elements with many convoluted hand actions simply filled me with a sense of wonder and mystery.  He convinced me that I should receive the communion elements while fasting, lest some undigested bits of toast contaminate “the body of Christ.”  I tried!  In those days, however, to help support our struggling family I carried the Charlotte Observer, which meant that I rose at 4:30 am each morning, delivered about 150 papers, returned home and, on Sunday, showered, dressed and caught the bus downtown to St. Peter’s, in order to arrive by 7:30 am in time to vest for the 8:00 service-all without food.  I was famished.  As a consequence, I hardly ever made it through the entire service.  The “Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church,” which went on for two pages in the prayer book, was the ultimate test. More often than not I failed it. I would either faint dead away or I would turn green and throw up, leaving my offering for that day at the foot of the altar, until the mop and bucket brigade of the altar guild arrived to clean up the mess.  Despite this obvious shortcoming, Robert Crandall continued to allow me to serve at that early hour.  Perhaps I was better than nothing, which may have been his alternative.  Following the service, by which time I had recovered, he and I would walk up North Tryon Street in Charlotte to a greasy spoon type of restaurant and have breakfast together and we would talk.  I have no idea what we talked about, but I do know that in all my teenage years, this was the only time I can recall when an adult actually talked with me.  Lots of adults talked to me or at me.  Robert Crandall talked with me.  He listened to my opinions, unthought out and immature as they were, without criticism or ridicule.  He offered me adult friendship, he became my surrogate father.  Because of that relationship, I developed a yearning to be just like Robert Crandall, my “padre,” as I called him.  It was in that context that I am sure I felt “called” to the priesthood, as religious people are prone to say.  I look back today and try to analyze exactly what he did.  It was not dramatic.  Anyone could have done it. He cared, he listened and he accepted me as I was, frightened, insecure, lonely and lost.  His were ordinary gifts, but to me those gifts changed the course of my life.
Robert Crandall left Charlotte to serve a church in Louisiana after I went to the university.  There alcohol captured him and long before the age of retirement, he was dismissed from his church and drummed out of the ranks of the priesthood.  Some people might, therefore, think of him as a failure.  He certainly did not achieve the level that his gifts might have predicted. For me, however, this human being was a hero, a mentor.  When I needed him, he was there, listening, encouraging, accepting.  I owe him more than I can express.  He was an Andrew. He made a difference in the lives of some that he touched.  Anyone could do what he did, but he did it.  It did not take education, position or skill.  It simply took sensitivity and the ability to respond to the needs of those around him.
Robert Crandall was never overtly religious.  Neither am I. Someone once said “the louder the dance the weaker the faith.” He sought to engage the issues of his day in the name of Christ.  So do I.  He shaped me more than he or I realized that he was doing.  That is what a mentor is.  When I think of those to whom I am deeply indebted, Robert Crandall stands at the top of the list.  The church is not made up of saints and angels but of flawed human men and women.  One never knows, however, when an action that we think of as pedestrian and minor can be life changing, life defining and even redemptive.  That is what Robert Crandall was to me.  Who was that person for you?
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





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RE-CLAIMING THE BIBLE FOR A NON-RELIGIOUS WORLD


John Shelby Spong presents Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, a book designed to take readers into the contemporary academic debate about the Bible.  
A definitive voice for progressive Christianity, Spong frees readers from a literal view of the Bible. He demonstrates that it is possible to be both a deeply committed Christian and an informed twenty-first-century citizen.
Spong’s journey into the heart of the Bible is his attempt to call his readers into their own journeys into the mystery of God.
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Question & Answer
Rodney from New Zealand writes:
Question:
I've just finished reading your book, Eternal Life and just before that Jesus for the Non-Religious. My spiritual seeking had taken me away from Christianity to traditional philosophies such as Advita (literally means non-duality). However, since being introduced to your work, I have a renewed desire to look deeper into my own faith tradition for the truth that Jesus was trying to convey to humanity, whereas in the past, I had all but given up on the Bible.
The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas seems to be more in tune with the mystical experience of the Jesus/God experience you talk about in your new book.  Could you please give us your take on this gospel?
“I am the one who comes from what is whole.  I was given from the things of my father.  For this reason I say, if one is whole, one will be filled with light but, if one is divided, one will be filled with darkness.  Whoever has ears should hear.  There is light within a man of light and it shines on the whole world.  If it does not shine, it is darkness.”  Jesus - Gospel of Thomas.
Answer:
Dear Rodney,
I am familiar with and attracted to the Gospel of Thomas which only came to the attention of western scholars in 1946.  It has had a meteoric rise since the discovery of its full text in Nag Hammadi that year.  The Jesus Seminar quickly voted to recognize this gospel as an authentic part of Christianity’s scriptures and included it in the Seminar’s masterpiece entitled The Five Gospels, edited by Robert Funk and Roy Hoover. Elaine Pagels, the brilliant professor of Early Christianity at Princeton University, made a monumental contribution to Thomas scholarship when she wrote Beyond Belief, published by Random House in 2003.  I commend that book to you.
As you note, Thomas’ message is much more eastern than western, more transcendental than literal, more mystical than rationalist.  It does show us something about Christianity that was real before doctrines and dogmas began to stifle its life. It also helps us to recall that Christianity has never been fixed, but is rather always evolving.  The Christian dialogue is always between the experience of God and the thought forms of the world at the moment the faith is being articulated.  No articulation is ever final to say nothing of being “inerrant” or “infallible.”  Scripture, creeds, doctrines and dogmas hopefully always point us to God, but not one of them ever captures God.  Indeed it is the height of idolatry to suggest, as religious systems frequently do, that human words can ever contain the truth of God.
So I urge you to gain what insight you can by living fully, loving wastefully and being all that you can be and then put that into dialogue with the insights you might have previously gained from Paul, Mark, Matthew and John and keep walking into the mystery of God as you journey through the 21st century.
Thank you for your question.
 
~John Shelby Spong
 



 


New Book On-Sale 11/8/11 !
RE-CLAIMING THE BIBLE FOR A NON-RELIGIOUS WORLD


John Shelby Spong presents Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, a book designed to take readers into the contemporary academic debate about the Bible.  
A definitive voice for progressive Christianity, Spong frees readers from a literal view of the Bible. He demonstrates that it is possible to be both a deeply committed Christian and an informed twenty-first-century citizen.
Spong’s journey into the heart of the Bible is his attempt to call his readers into their own journeys into the mystery of God.
Order your copy now on amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com!









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