Part One:
I’d like to tell you the last chapter of the
story of Billy Davis and his wife.
In the middle part of the 20th
century, Billy was a well-known evangelist here in Texas. They called him the
littlest cowboy preacher. He wore a hat and boots, and he spoke the language
that men of that time and place understood. He was also a shade under five feet
tall. There wasn’t much of him, but what was there was pure cowboy, or so they
say.
I never met Billy, never laid eyes on him. But
I was there at the hospital on the day he died, back in 1988.
In those days I was a chaplain intern at Baylor
University Medical Center. I was in my late 20s and scared shitless most of the
time. I was afraid I was going to make a mistake, afraid I was going to look
stupid, afraid I would say something wrong. I was afraid of a lot of things, but
my greatest fear was of looking unsophisticated. It was very important to me to
appear theologically sophisticated, or at least as sophisticated as a baptist
can be.
I was covering one of the many intensive care
units at Baylor when the call came in that someone on my unit was close to
death. When I arrived the doctor gave me the particulars.
“His name is Billy Davis. His heart has just
about given out. There’s no doubt he’s going to die and fairly soon. It’s just a
matter of time. Maybe you can help his wife be prepared for the news. She’s in
the family room.”
I opened the door to find a gentle,
grandmotherly woman sitting quietly with both hands laid reverently on the top
of the very worn Bible in her lap. I introduced myself using one of my standard
opening lines.
“Mrs. Davis? I’m Gordon Atkinson, one of the
chaplains here at the hospital.”
She looked at me for a second or two, then
asked if I had ever heard of her husband.
“No ma’am, I haven’t.”
She seemed surprised. “Are you sure? He’s known
as the littlest cowboy preacher. He’s very short, but he’s preached revivals and
camp meetings all over Texas. He was a small man, but powerful in word and
deed.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I nodded somberly
and made a “hmmm” noise deep in my throat. A very thoughtful, somber nod with a
deep “hmm” works pretty well in a pinch. The person you are speaking with will
hear it in whatever way helps them the most at that moment.
After a few minutes of me nodding and her
telling me more about her husband, she grabbed my arm and started pulling me
down toward the floor.
“Get on your knees, chaplain. We gotta get
prayin.”
I must say, this made me very uncomfortable. I
was more of a “sit in a chair, lean forward and dispense somber nods” kind of
chaplain. Not so much a flop on the floor and “get prayin” chaplain. Still, I
figured if the woman wanted to get on the floor and pray, the least I could do
was get down there with her and do my part. I knelt awkwardly and tried to find
a comfortable position for my knees and feet, which wasn’t easy since I was
wearing a suit and stiff, new wingtip shoes.
Mrs. Davis, on the other hand, looked as though
she had been on the floor praying many times. She grasped her bible with both
hands, held it up in the air, and began what seemed at the time to be the
strangest prayer I had ever heard. It lasted about five minutes, which is a VERY
long time if you’re kneeling on the floor with a woman who is shouting, moaning,
and rocking back and forth. At any moment I expected the medical staff to burst
into the room to see who was dying.
She cried out to the Lord in her grief. She
said that demons were dragging her husband down to hell. She begged and pleaded
for God to spare his life. She reminded God that Billy might be his smallest
servant, but he was by no means the least of them. “Please, dear God,” she
prayed. “Save my little Billy, your servant, your own little cowboy preacher who
loves you so. Save him from the vicious hounds of hell that would drag him down
to perdition.”
Somewhere in the middle of this prayer, my
mouth fell open and I turned to look at her. Her eyes were squeezed shut. She
was putting everything she had into this.
This was a kind of praying I had not heard in
the quiet Baptist churches of my experience. The hounds of hell? I’d never heard
of them. It sounded like the title of a book that Edgar Allan Poe might have
written.
I was bothered by the theology of her prayer. A
central teaching of Christianity is that death is no longer something to fear.
We approach death faithfully, knowing that it is an inevitable part of life and
trusting that it is a birth into a new kind of existence. We share this idea
with many spiritual traditions. It seemed to me that Mrs. Davis was forgetting
that part of our faith.
Finally, she stopped praying. She took a couple
of deep breaths and nodded at me, indicating that it was my turn. I was glad to
have a chance to pray because so much of what she was saying was making me
uncomfortable.
And I thought this might be just the right time
for a little theology lesson.
Part two will be posted Monday, December
26th. Have a Merry Christmas, everyone!
rlp
note: The names in this essay have been
changed
