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Part Two:

Note: Click here to read part one.

God love me, I was so young and ignorant. My awareness of myself and of the world was almost completely limited to the sphere of words. I was good with words, and words mattered to me more than anything else. God bless Mrs. Davis for putting up with me and the people at Baylor Medical Center for letting me stumble through my internship like a bull in a china closet.

The good news is that there is a certain grace to ministry that happens when the humanity of the minister collides with the humanity of the bereaved. It’s a comfort to know that God can work both with us and in spite of us. Sometimes God makes use of even our rawest materials.

After Mrs. Davis was finished, I began my much quieter prayer in a calm voice that sounded something like Mr. Rogers. I carefully countered each of her theological points with words that I addressed to God but were meant to teach her a thing or two.

“There is no need to be afraid for Billy, for he is in the hands of his maker.”

“Of course we KNOW, dear Heavenly Father, that death is no longer our enemy.”

“Not our will but yours, not our desire, but your kingdom.”

You know what I’m talking about. Highfalutin, seminary-boy words. Very theologically correct and, in my case, very flat. Very much without passion.

After my prayer I opened my eyes, expecting to find her greatly relieved and comforted, and perhaps happy to have learned something in this hard time. After all, one never knows when the Lord has a thing or two to teach us.

Instead I found her staring at me with her mouth open.

“So he’s died? He’s dead?” she asked.

“No, he’s still alive, as far as I know. We have to wait for the doctor to come and give us the news about that.”

Mrs. Davis seemed confused, as if she didn’t know what to make of me or my prayer.

“So he’s not dead?”

“No.”

“You were praying like he was already dead.”

I had no response for this. Not even a somber nod. I just looked back at her. I had no idea what she was talking about.

Her brow furrowed as if she was trying to figure out what kind of a chaplain she was dealing with here. Unable to comprehend me, she bowed her head and commenced her passionate pleas that God save Billy from the hounds of hell and the demonic hosts of the nether regions. This time she never stopped to give me a chance to pray. She kept going right up until the moment the doctor came in and gave her the bad news. Billy fought hard, but he was dead.

I braced myself for what was coming. In her mind and according to her stated theology, the hounds of hell had won the day. The devil and his demons were even now dragging Billy away. I wondered what she would do now that the battle was lost.

To my surprise she clasped her hands together just under her chin, raised her eyes to heaven and said, “Thank you, Jesus.” She gave me a hug and told me again what a wonderful man he had been. “We will miss him dearly,” said she, “but he’s in a better place. He’s gone to his reward.” She quietly signed the necessary forms to start the funeral process and went on her way, leaving me completely befuddled and unable to comprehend what I had just seen.

She made a complete and very sudden 180 degree turnaround. Suddenly his death was a victory and a reward. I puzzled over this for weeks, wondering what caused the change.

Some years later I finally figured it out. Here is the answer to the riddle of Mrs. Davis’ prayer:

Sometimes people don’t mean what they say. They mean what they mean. And never so much as in the prayers we blurt out in times of grief. Prayer is not simply a communication of words. It is a full-bodied expression of the soul. People weave their history, their theology, their brokenness, their buzz words, their ignorance, and what wisdom they have into a very private and intimate conversation with God.

Perhaps grieving is a kind of speaking in tongues. How can you know what people are talking about? They might not even know themselves.

Young ministers would do well to let people have their say and not worry too much about exactly what they say when the chips are down, the awful moment has come, and they are staring into the great unknown. It may be that the only one who can make sense of our grief is the one to whom we speak in those dreaded times.

When last I heard, Mrs. Davis was still alive, in her 80s, and running a cowboy camp meeting named after her husband.

Dear Mrs. Davis, thank you for letting me bear witness to your intimate conversation with your beloved Creator. God understood you just fine, even if I didn’t. And I must say that it was an honor to be there when the littlest cowboy preacher exited stage left.

I think of you and Billy sometimes. And I always smile.

rlp

note: The names in this essay have been changed

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 20^th 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