The Spirit of America

While the nation sadly watched workmen sift through the tortured ruins of Oklahoma City’s bombed-out Federal Center. There arose out of those ruins a spirit many Americans thought extinct. It was a spirit expressed in moving worship and courageous restructuring of broken lives. It resurrected a species of dream long since unemployed by a multitude of Americans.

What those viewers saw in central Oklahoma, I chanced upon by the grace of God when I married my English-Irish, Cherokee in 1947. Within the very early months of that marriage, we learned that she was terminally ill. Only then did we learn why she experienced such excruciating pain. At last I knew why she experienced continually repeating blackouts.

People say she was lucky: fortunate at the very east. Sensitive, and gifted; yes, she was different. Rather than call Dr. Death to euthanize her, she made an altar and rayed to the God of her mother to make the pain bearable. She was “ready to die” and she admittedly prayed for release from the intense suffering. But in the meantime, she promised God she would fulfill to the best of her ability any tasks he sent her way.

Recognizing the human limitations of our situation, the United States Air Force sent me home to Michigan with a discharge in my hand. The only “southerners” my family knew were migrants whom they considered undesirables, but they dutifully introduced their newest family member as their daughter-in-law. When out of earshot, however, they quietly confessed to their friends that she was “a good Southerner.”

My in-laws were simple people who lived close to the  land. Their word was their bond. Everyone was a neighbor to be politely greeted. My father-in-law graduated with the 1906 class at the University of Arkansas Medical School at Little Rock. My Mother-in-law’s people migrated westward from New England, travelling into Indian Territory via Wagon Train.

In time he became a Houston surgeon, until forced to retire from a disabling heart condition. They consequently returned to Central Oklahoma where he established a rural family practice midway between Tulsa and the City. As a “GP” he delivered babies, practiced family medicine, dispensed spiritual counsel when asked, provided socio-economic assistance wherever he could, and even tried his hand at preaching for about three years.

During this time, Doc and Mary raised their eight offspring while taking in several additional nieces and nephews. World War Two found their first-born working at Tinker AFB insuring that his department provided the kind of aircraft maintenance he expected his next younger brother to benefit from while flying A-26 “Flying Coffins” in the South Pacific.

Faith in God provided the steering wheel by which this family drove their vehicle of life. The children, once born, never forgot their “praying mother” going out back, down to the end of the path behind the house every morning at 5:00 o’clock. She remained unseen to prying eyes, but she was overheard now and then, since she prayed aloud to the God that ruled her world.

There were occasions when this “praying mother” had personal confirmations of answered prayers, like the time her number two son was away at war and on the other side of the world. Wounded and struggling hard to stay conscious long enough to return his aircraft home safely, he drifted in and out of consciousness, slowly losing his ability to hold his craft “on course.” As he shared later, privately with his mother, in private conversation, he described hearing the voice of his praying mother rising out of his semi-consciousness. By correcting his drifting flight pattern back to the sound of her voice, he realized after the fact that he had made his way back to home base and a safe landing.

The family would learn more upon reading the news clippings from the San Antonio Evening Light, which the girls had saved at the time while working in the Alamo City for Uncle Sam. Reporters described his crew on one occasion as missing in action behind enemy lines. Fortunately, he lived to return home and confide enough of the truth to his praying mother that he knew she knew.

Mary, being younger, eventually outlived Doc by twenty years, but in 1982 I put Tommie on board an Air Wisconsin flight that allowed her to gather with her siblings to receive the final edition of her lifetime ritual before they buried their mother. At 5:00 a.m. the day Mary died, Staff members at that Tulsa Hospital overheard, or listened in, to her asking God for grace, mercy, and strength as she named each living child before God one final time before she boarded the final flight of her eighty-nine-year journey.

Her Memorial Service attracted family and friends far and wide and they all made their way to the country church where her baby first began his preaching ministry. Although her children had been the first Sunday school in the once-booming village, the crowd now spilled out across surrounding yards and included twenty-seven pastors and wives.

The prayer mantle Mary left behind was picked up by a devoted son-in-law that retired in later years as a Foreign Service Officer and government expert on Far East Affairs, who continued to write Text Books and assist on political junkets at well past eighty.

The “baby” later retired from pastoral ministry. He was “on-call as a longtime Chaplain the day the bomb blew. Following that terroristic debacle he turned to his telephone for some necessary debriefing, calling his sister, also a minister married to a minister, who had taken their dad’s place.

Long accustomed to the realities of naked tragedy, he was nevertheless jaded by the glut of too many body parts and too much suffering. Finding sanctuary in humor as was his custom, he talked of looking for his son-in-law who worked near the Federal Center. He approached the damaged building with its glass wall strewn across the younger man’s desk, but not knowing where Larry was at that moment. He looked down at his feet as he approached the desk and there, amid the rubble and splintered glass, he recognized two pictures from Larry’s desk: his two grandsons.

“You can do a lot of things,” he chuckled with jaded emotion barely concealed, “but you just don’t mess with my grandchildren.”

What surprised many observers of this traumatic debacle was the way he citizens of this region rallied together from all across the Sooner State. The faith and fortitude of the people in this region was forged in the fires of survival, and most have lived much of their lives with a fierce Mother Nature noted chiefly for drought’s, floods, and tornadoes. It was a tanned, leathery-skinned, weather-beaten peanut farmer that said to me, “The only way we could survive out here was to help each other.”

An experience I had one day later reinforced for me the gentle ferocity of these sturdy south-westerners. I was driving a carload of kids to a Youth Rally in Odessa, TX, some one-hundred thirty miles distant. The trip revealed only open prairie, sage brush and sand, divided equally by two tiny gas stations and an easy bypass of Odessa’s mid-sized neighbor, Midand.

My car broke down en route. Although stranded and apparently isolated, it was but a short time until I took note of a cloud of dust on the horizon signaling some sign of life. We watched it progress over the hill and soon discerned a pickup truck heading our way, where there appeared to be no-way. A casually-dressed old rancher stopped, asked about our problem, and told us he was headed into town. We had neither rope nor chain for towing, but he voluntarily agreed to push us into the nearby village—that turned out to be eighteen miles.

Introducing us to his mechanic, this Good Samaritan informed him to take care of us. He then made sure we had refreshment. Between the two men, they soon had us on our way to Odessa, rejoicing at being part of the human race.

This region has long been called “Bible-belt” country. Predominantly Baptist, it includes Methodists, Christians, Churches of Christ Acapella, and other lesser-known denominations. These people believe in prayer, patriotism, and personal responsibility to each other and to God. The Bible is part-and-parcel of their cultural heritage. Lampooned by many in the media, many well-meaning Americans accept the caricature as fully accurate – “religious right wing extreme.”

Right or wrong; I know this: when you take from anything that which makes it something, what you have left equals little or nothing. What we saw in Oklahoma City witnessed to the hearts and souls of a citizenry whose faith loves God supremely and treats one’s neighbor as one’s self. That Spirit of America is the essence of what made and kept America great. 

Distilled as the Spirit of America, it is what the girl I married more than seventy years ago was all about when at her best.

From Warner’s World, I am
walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com.