The Noble Character: A Tribute to Miss Jane - Part 4, Music.

This is a tribute to my dear friend Miss Jane. I’d like to tell you about her because, by God’s grace, she didn’t waste her life, and that’s probably the highest compliment any of us could ever hope to receive from anyone. This is partly about some of the events and people of her life, but more than that it is also about some of the things she taught me and how she influenced me, to the Glory of God. Thus, in reading about her un-wasted life, may you receive God’s grace to make the best use of yours.

During her decades as a travel agent and small business owner, the entire earth changed its orbit and started spinning in reverse. The amazing technologies of the 1900’s didn’t merely innovate travel, commerce, and leisure; these technologies established innovation itself as the new paradigm. Here we see another odd paradox for the giants of her generation: the innovations that made them powerful became more powerful than their inventors and swallowed them whole, like what might happen if a goldfish could birth a shark. The men and women who first mastered their creations could not have fathomed the implications their inventions would have on their grandchildren.

This is even more ironic when we consider those novel little companies whose very business drives them out of business. Consider the success of the great newspaper moguls of the early century whose empires were eventually driven out of business by the Internet for which they paved the way. They didn’t just offer information to the masses; they offered need of information. The Internet was born for the very purpose of supporting the speed and volume of information the newspapers instigated. Ironically, as we all know, our headline-lust has been helping drive paper-based news out of its own business. They’ve lost at their own game.

This is just one example of innovation-domination. On a long enough timeline, their success is the same thing as their demise. Miss Jane’s travel agency benefited from this type of success. She could not have foreseen that every travel destination she booked was helping make her business a bit more obsolete; she shrank the globe one customer at a time. Thus her occupation helped advance the world of travel while the job itself remained motionless. I like to imagine that her little office must have been a major pivot point for many great inventions and ideas, because, after all, Miss Jane was rich with many great connections and stories. Her travel agency was like the pivot foot of a basketball player – because the foot stays planted, the rest of the body is allowed to make giant turns around it. Miss Jane delighted in being the hub of all important movements while she stayed planted. That’s not to say she was a sloth – far from it, you will never meet anyone more active than she was. Rather, despite these baffling changes all around her, it never occurred to her to try outrunning her ancestors. For years, week in and week out, her life kept a happy rhythm, which she humbly counted as the measured pace of every servant of Jesus.

Let us pause here to wonder and pray about our individual roles in these historical shifts – these titanic changes. Let us not take for granted that all these changes are a benefit. Indeed, they are not all beneficial. For many of you reading this, your success with these innovations might well be the same as your demise. It is sobering how drastically the world has changed from the time of Miss Jane’s birth till her death: the technology, the political earthquakes, the reincarnation of old ideas; the shift from the Church occupying the center of all social activity, yet forfeiting it to a network of computer screens where everyone is “connected” without being in the same room. The 1900’s advanced so rapidly that it is as if the very story of human history saw its finish line and tried to outrun its own people to the end. In fast times like these, Miss Jane often went against the grain, believing it important to heed the old Wisdom of slow feet. (Please, dear reader, I want to help you see these things in their complexity to really help you understand the complexity of this dear lady.) Consider that, through all these changes, Miss Jane could speak intelligently about every current event. She stayed active in politics both locally and nationally, and she kept a thriving small-business in a college town with good relationship to young clientele. Yet she hardly ever saw a movie in her entire life. She refused to believe a computer was good for anything except flying rockets to the moon (and that may not be worth much either). And, most poignant of all, she would not stoop to call anything “music” which didn’t receive its blood and bones from fathers like Beethoven, Bach, or Handel. Everything in the world was evolving to handle the speed and change encouraged by her travel agency; yet her own roots were deep, and slow, and ancient. Hers was the tree’s life when all the world had gone to weeds. 

Nothing better represents this contrast than Music. She loved her music, and it was old. More than old: it was Immortal. Her music belonged to that ancient class of wild, mysterious objects that can’t be changed by the generations – like mountains, or oceans, or stars. If her music was unchangeable, it’s because she believed it held as much mass and meaning as a mountain or an ocean or a star. It is not there to behold you; you are there to behold it. And it will scoff at your passing long after you’re dead and can no longer behold anything. Hers was so unlike the music of my generation, which usually has only enough mass to last about a decade. After that our music usually becomes a joke, something for the next decade of teenagers to mock. There was a time in my youth when other people’s music was my favorite joke (much like the way a new crop of weeds dominates another). It is the type of joke that invented the term “generation gap.” Since the 1950’s, each new generation of teens has weaponized their music to suppress and kill the previous generation’s music, making it impossible for a people to unite under a common tune. Innovation, it turns out, makes an equally cruel lord to music as it does to business. 

When this regrettable music divide happened in the Church, it fell with the violence of a divorce. We called it “Worship Wars,” and you know what I’m talking about. I’d like here to confess – as a representative of my generation, the generation borne of the wealthiest Church in world history and the Christian music boom of the 1980’s and ‘90’s – that even in my deepest sympathies toward hymnals and organs and all the classics, I wished earnestly to destroy it, or worse, to forget it. I didn’t care if the earth was wiped of its memory, as long as my side of music won the game. I think back now on some of the first “contemporary songs” that began to supplant the old songs, and we don’t sing them anymore. They’re a shameless self-joke, the yearbook picture of a pubescent boy doing his best to look tough. More than that, they’re a mistake; just consider how each “contemporary song” from just a few years ago is now called “old” and gets groans and protests whenever the tune is re-played. Just imagine that: a 4 year old song supplanting a 400 year old song, then destroying itself by the same mechanism it used to win the silly game it invented. How embarrassing. The Church’s Worship Wars were a fool’s quest. It is like ripping out your vegetable garden to plant rye grass, then complaining of a sore appetite. It is like demanding your grandfather’s inheritance before he’s dead. It is like selling your birthright for a bowl of stew. And we’ve literally applauded it.

But Miss Jane protested it. 

Yet she didn’t walk away from her church, even when she felt they walked away from her music.

At last, here it is. We’ve reached the tender nerve. Even now, it is a hard thing to expose without defensiveness from some, and attacks from others. Nonetheless, there she sits at her organ, stubborn as a gargoyle but soft as a willow, playing the songs she wished we loved. It is the thing I’ve come to admire most about her: equal faithfulness to the “old” music and to the “young” church. She never missed an opportunity to give us an earful about how we should play the hymns (“And please, without that dreadful guitar! You could make better music with a freight train!”), but the point is she was there to say it. She did not leave, though a flood of temptation tried to sweep her away. Miss Jane did not leave.

Dear reader, do take a moment here with me, and let’s humble ourselves together. Let’s sit one last time at the feet of an elder with whom we ardently disagreed, yet who never left our side. Let’s pass under her argument once more to test whether it holds any truth. And if it does, let’s believe it.

It seems to me that music is the audible soul of a culture. Miss Jane ached to impart a culture rich with heritage and lineage to young brats like me. She felt as close to her music as to her last name, because they’re both current and ancient. Her music gave her the same kind of stability as a good family name. How fitting then that she sang the songs in her last year that she had learned in her first. If you’re like me, you’ve switched music styles a dozen times since childhood, not unlike changing your name to make yourself more “unique;” not unlike getting a nose job because the eyes of other people are more important to you than your own dear face. Indeed, when your music is as ancient and sacred as a mountain, it will compose you. And, I now believe, that what she really wanted to ensure as she sat at her organ and pleaded the hymns was something less tangible but more essential than I ever stopped to receive: undying delight in knowing exactly who you are in Christ.

Thus, even when she couldn’t affect the music culture of her church, Miss Jane passed on to me (and I pray now, dear reader, to you) the immortal spirit of faithfulness to the Church – the Bride of Christ – that her music embodied. 

Faithfulness, after all, makes a music all its own, and it is the only fitting overture for the Wedding Day of the Lamb. 

The Noble Character: A Tribute to Miss Jane - Part 3, The Travel Agency.

This is a tribute to my dear friend Miss Jane. I’d like to tell you about her because, by God’s grace, she didn’t waste her life, and that’s probably the highest compliment any of us could ever hope to receive from anyone. This is partly about some of the events and people of her life, but more than that it is also about some of the things she taught me and how she influenced me, to the Glory of God. Thus, in reading about her un-wasted life, may you receive God’s grace to make the best use of yours. 

For decades after college, Miss Jane lived a good life, the life she had been raised for. The bulk of these years were spent as a business partner in a successful travel agency. She bought 50 percent of the company with Dr. Adam Miller, an American World War II veteran who spoke Japanese and helped interpret for the signing of the armistice that ended the War. 

I’ll give a word about Dr. Miller’s character: Miss Jane could not have worked so long with just any old chump; her standards would have required her business partner to be a gentleman. She just wouldn’t have put up with it any other way. He was proper, and, naturally, she respected that about him. He had a few mannerly quirks that she even made fun of a few times, but she still admired him. For example, if ever the two of them had to drive somewhere together by themselves, he would always make her drive while he sat in the back seat, just to avoid any question of his integrity to his wife or anyone else. Dr. Miller was an accomplished historical theologian in his own right and had even written a book on Church history. Miss Jane always acted surprised whenever I would remind her that I didn’t use his book in any of my college classes. She would say things like, “No one could possibly know what they’re really talking about on Biblical history unless they knew what Dr. Adam Miller said on such-and-such a subject.” This was her admiration for her business partner.

She loved the travel agency – the charm and the research it required, the regular customers, remembering names, finding bargains, sharing mutual travel stories, and booking a celebrity from time to time. (By the way, Miss Jane used an advanced paradigm to determine celebrity. Our culture evaluates celebrity by how many people know about a certain person; Miss Jane evaluated it by how much a person deserved to be known. Ours is based on marketability; hers was by remarkability. You may laugh because she had never heard of Katy Perry, but she’d laugh at you because you don’t know your own mayor. Thus, she was always talking about unknown people as though you were the one with your head in the sand. And she was right.) The travel agency gave her that deep, abiding satisfaction that fewer and fewer of my generation experience: she loved her job.

It was in working with that business partner, in that town, with that type of business, that Miss Jane built a small fortune and traveled the globe. Almost every continent. Multiple countries within each continent. She toured this planet with zeal, as if to familiarize herself with her Christian inheritance. Just think of that for a moment; I hope it stuns you. God granted world travel to this dirt-poor, Depression-born, only-child-of-her-mother little girl from Alabama. By the time I had met her, she had seen things I haven’t yet read about. She would mention these travels every chance she got. Her stories were frank, yet she could never quite conceal her delight in bringing them up. It is, perhaps, like how I imagine the children of some mega-celebrity would try to blend in in public, “Oh yeah, I was at the game when Michael Jordan won his sixth championship. He happens to be my dad, so...ya know.” She would often hunt for people’s travel stories in conversation – searching for the shared landmarks, the cultural oddities, the local dishes that only people who had been to that corner market could have tasted and all the places fellow travelers also held sacred.

As one of her church’s pastors while she was in her 80’s, I saw this scene unfold several times, and I was always quite in awe of it: her aging frame would frequently land her in the hospital, and I’d get to sit with her in an ER hallway as she’d tell foreign doctors about her travels in their home countries. We all knew she was showing off, and we loved it, nobody minded. Many nurses and doctors listened intently as if to learn. Some simply patronized her with a bubble-gum-type of interest whose sweetness wore out just as soon as it began. Others were clearly distracted with the million other things nurses have on their minds. Then there were some nurses and doctors, aside from distraction, who were clearly dismissive and apathetic to her relentless charm. And as I reflect on it all, I’m amazed – it’s shocking when you think about it – that all your best adventures will soon be treated like checkmarks on some nurse’s clipboard.  Not all nurses, but some nurses. He’ll let you ramble about the old days while he’s more in tune with the numerical biology of your vital signs than with you. She’ll treat your proudest moments with the same malaise that she checks your urine bag. You. It is coming, and it is close. Your face will shrivel and your joints will fail, but worst of all, your stories will be uncherished; your words will be simply tolerated by some young person rushing in to the same old destiny.

You might never let yourself think of this reality, but you know you know it. And when it overtakes you, when your stories give way to silence, when there is no more audience, only one question will matter: Who? Who saw your tales unfold, and who will hear them now? Who accompanied every journey? If the only people who would be interested because they lived out your times with you are dead, and all the young people who owe you an ear don’t care, then to whom will you turn? It is the question everyone always cares about at the End. But this haunting question has a great solace if we add just a single, triumphant word: For. For Whom? And such a bold question can be satisfied by only one gracious answer, the only One who has seen every human face perish from the face of the earth from Abel to you: the One Immortal, Invisible, only Wise God. The One for whose sake every day unfolded will be your best companion when your last day enfolds you. Miss Jane, even amid her ornery boasting and shameless name-dropping, really did live every day from, and to, and in, and for Jesus Christ. When death seized her like an owl’s claw and the Last Question demanded its final response, Miss Jane could reply with gentle repose, “Thee, my Lord. None but Thee.”

Perhaps, in view of these weighty things, we are ready for the ever-timely and ever-tender word of the Psalmist, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.” (Ps 116:15)

The Noble Character: A Tribute to Miss Jane - Part 2, Anderson College.

This is a tribute to my dear friend Miss Jane. I’d like to tell you about her because, by God’s grace, she didn’t waste her life, and that’s probably the highest compliment any of us could ever hope to receive from anyone. This is partly about some of the events and people of her life, but more than that it is also about some of the things she taught me and how she influenced me, to the Glory of God. Thus, in reading about her un-wasted life, may you receive God’s grace to make the best use of yours.

We live now in a world that no longer believes in sacred places, either by exclusion (e.g. there’s no such thing as a sacred place), or by inclusion (e.g. every place is equally sacred therefore no one place has any special meaning). The first finds its roots in atheism, the second in pantheism, but both have the same conclusion: no place is necessarily sacred. I’ll not here draw out the logical ends of these lines of thought, but I must point it out so you’ll understand that Miss Jane didn’t suffer from such modern nonsense. She knew some places sacred and some places common, and you would do well not to confuse the two. (Even as I write this, I can hear her adjusting even this idea, “Places are not sacred, my dear boy, God is sacred, and it is up to Him whether He makes a place special or not special.” Yes ma’am.) Anderson, Indiana was sacred to Miss Jane. All her childhood she looked forward to living there, then most of her adulthood she did. Then after moving away from there as an older woman, she always regarded it with tender reverence. Rome could take notes from Anderson on how to endear a people to itself as Miss Jane adored that city. Without question, Anderson was the setting of her Golden Years. Those of you who haven’t yet seen the Church of God, I’m afraid I just can’t explain why Miss Jane felt so strongly for Anderson; only this – it was sacred. Those of you reading this who have seen the Church of God are probably either smiling or rolling your eyes. I’m smiling.

As a teen girl, Miss Jane’s mom would pay a cheap weekend fare to let her ride the train from Decatur, Alabama to Anderson, Indiana just to spend a couple days at a time, perhaps to admire her bright future. Miss Jane would do her homework on the ride up and sleep or window-watch all the way back. These kinds of trips made travel as lovely a thing as her beloved city. On every trip she carried an invisible suitcase full of her mother’s Trust, her papa’s Dignity, and the Privilege of a young lady who gets rewarded for her best behavior. She did not waste any of these trips on common teenage dangers; there was too precious little time for stupid games. Rather, she sought acquaintance with Church leaders, and she availed herself of the grand musical instruments of Park Avenue Church of God. There was no finer setting than Anderson to fall in love with the music and theology of her Church, which every young girl should do, but so few do, or even are allowed to.

It easily follows then that Miss Jane earned her undergraduate degree at Anderson College (now Anderson University). In my observation, most freshmen either act like they own the place or recede to the shadows; she never verbalized this but I can clearly imagine that she arrived acting like she owned the place. She never seemed to need a shadow. Anderson was, in the sweetest sense, home. She talked about her college days the way friends quote great movies to each other. It gets a better laugh the more often you quote it, and the better the movie, the more mileage to its quotes. Only, Miss Jane’s reverie of college will far outlive any mention of Anchorman, even now. It was just that good. She went in the 1950’s and majored in Commercial Art and Advertising, and for a few years after graduation she worked for the marketing department of a grocery chain (in a time when hardly anyone talked about “marketing departments,” I might add).

Old Main at Anderson College

But the main thing I glean from her college years is not that it was the best of times, rather that she rightly assessed it as a springboard for the best of times. How many of our modern stories depict adolescence and college-years as an invincible age, where no sin is accounted for and life can’t get any better? Then the same storytellers, without intending contradiction, turn around and spin dreary tales of the gray lives of mortgage-paying adults who rise above responsibility and “find themselves” by returning to younger, more carefree times. Miss Jane did not get this backwards: the fun of college was mere foretaste to the pleasure of meaningful adulthood. Grape juice, then wine. In college, she was a southern debutante coming into society, wisely making a good first impression rather than chattering her good name away over free champagne and hors d’oeuvres. She may have acted like she owned the place – she was admittedly guilty of some mildly silly antics – but she was never unseemly.

I saw only one picture of her during her college years. She was probably 20, sitting in a small classroom of peers, and the black and white photo reminded me that cameras were still rare, so everyone knew they had to get it right. Miss Jane was amid a soft bundle of girls in the middle of the class. She wore a neck scarf and classic 1950’s cat-eye glasses. Her hair was bobbed just below her ears, and I’m certain her skirt reached her shoes though it wasn’t visible in the picture. I seem to remember she was clutching a purse pulled into two magnetic knees. And she did not quite smile. She was pretty: her expression was exactly like a doe: controlled with due caution, focused, innocent, pleased, yet prepared to bound away. There was something natural yet wild about the angle of her neck. Her eyes, you could tell even at that age, were determined to see yours just as much as they were seen. And she had also trained her eyes, even then, to show you that they kept a secret for the secret’s sake. And as a doe, you dared neither approach nor look away, because it was clear, whether she meant for you to know it or not, that every encounter with her is a gift. I do not know many college girls these days that can pull off a look like that, despite flooding Facebook with their best attempts. 

The Noble Character: A Tribute to Miss Jane - Part 1, Girlhood.

This is a tribute to my dear friend Miss Jane. I’d like to tell you about her because, by God’s grace, she didn’t waste her life, and that’s probably the highest compliment any of us could ever hope to receive from anyone. This is not simply about the events and people of her life, but also about some of the things she taught me and how she influenced me, to the Glory of God. Thus, in reading about her un-wasted life, may you receive God’s grace to make the best use of yours.

She was born August 2, 1930 in Decatur, Alabama as Martha Jane Bradford, and she battled the name “Martha” her whole life the same way people battle the stomach flu. If she were reading this now, she’d probably give me a dirty look for even mentioning it. Her mother’s name was Tassie, a God-fearing seamstress who loved her daughter enough to give spankings, hugs, and Bible lessons at all the right times. I can’t remember her dad’s name, and out of respect to Miss Jane I won’t bother to research it. She always said with quiet loneliness that he left her and Tassie the same week she was born because he had wished she was a boy. I’m sure there was more to the story than Miss Jane shared, or probably that she even knew. It is interesting, though, that often the only thing that’s told about any story is the only thing that matters. He was never part of her life. About the only other thing I knew of him is that after Miss Jane was grown, he was hit by a car and killed while crossing a street in Decatur, and Tassie was the only one who bothered to visit him in the hospital to grieve his passing. If Almighty God ever sees fit to use a jury at Judgment Day, then I imagine that scoundrels like Miss Jane’s father will beg for the merciful saints they wounded to be on the panel.

Miss Jane believed the 1930’s was probably the last decade anyone could’ve been born with any real sense. The older I get, the more I think she was right. She was an only-child, and as happens with many only-children she was spoiled. However, her mom didn’t spoil her with toys and things: she was spoiled by good manners. Only-children who are spoiled with clothes and stuff grow up acting smug about their possessions, and they often become un-sharing snobs. Miss Jane never suffered this smugness because she grew up poor. Her toys were second-hand and her clothes were precious; but every correction to say “please” and “thank you,” to keep elbows off the table, or never to run or climb in a skirt, these were little Jane’s daily allowance. Tassie gave them so generously that her daughter grew to pity anyone impoverished of them. Miss Jane grew to wear propriety like a tiara, and was never more at home than among the well-behaved. That’s not to say she was never smug, but rather that if she was smug she had good reason for it: she felt her upbringing was better than other kids’, the same way a rich kid’s corvette is better than a skateboard. Thus she was living proof that money and wealth can never measure class.

Miss Jane came from a different era. Now when I say “different era,” you probably think I mean The Depression-Era-South, as opposed to our Modern Era (whatever that means). That’s true to a small degree, but it only tells you what century her body aged, and that she witnessed multiple-global-seismic-booms in technology, and that she was familiar with social and historical turmoil. But when I say she was from a different era, I really mean she was an “old soul” in the classic sense. To our techno-saturated, commercially-driven, no-time-to-learn-your-name culture, Miss Jane’s old fashioned sensibilities might as well have been from another millennium as just another generation. She was from beyond her own century. Her biases may have come from the 1930’s, but her heart and soul came from the time of kings and queens, of courtiers and castles, when Merlin had more influence than McDonald's. There was more of Camelot than of Cullman about Miss Jane. Rarely have I met a woman so stubbornly grounded in practicality and decorum like a duchess, while balanced by all the girlish wonder and enchantment of a fairy. All her best stories gave a wink toward mystery, toward a beloved time long forgotten. All her dealings followed their proper order with grandeur and charm. Dragons were real, and she wasn’t afraid to point out the absurdity of any man who didn’t have the chest to go and fight them. And no matter what anyone else thought they heard, the organ was the pinnacle of all instruments, because nothing else was as fitting for the majestic halls of royalty. She was regal, and she felt it every day. How odd were those of us who couldn’t feel it too.

And this is what I find most amazing about her: as a little girl, she inferred she was a princess without her daddy or Disney ever telling her so. When so many fatherless girls come to believe they are garbage, Miss Jane came to believe the Scriptures: that she was part of a Royal Priesthood, and that the Church is the Bride of the King. Best of all, she knew that she was the Church; thus, she knew she was Jesus’ Bride. From girlhood her faith was more of Romance than Religion. If you didn’t know this about her, then you probably misunderstood her deep affection for and attachment to the Church. My generation has odiously presumed, “I’m special, therefore the Church is special;” but Miss Jane got it right: “The Church is special, therefore I’m special.” She had an implicit sense of betrothal to her King. Maybe that’s why she could never marry: no mere man could live up to her battle-worthy Prince of Peace.

Miss Jane wasn’t completely fatherless, because she did have a father in the Faith: the Reverend Dr. Dale Oldham. Dale was her “Papa” and he walked her down the aisle to Christ. Miss Jane never mentioned him without the honor due a father. She was proud, beyond proud, to call him “Papa,” though I was never clear whether he gave little Jane the name "Papa" as a present, or if she chose it for him and informed him that’s who he was. Whichever way it came about, “Jane’s Papa” is who he was, and out of respect to Fate I’ll conclude they chose each other and the name “Papa” was spontaneously mutual. She always had an angle when she talked to you about him, namely, to make you jealous he wasn’t your Papa. For my part, it kind of worked. 

Reverend Oldham was the kind of man every other man should want to be, an honest champion. I’m not saying this because Miss Jane drew any realistic pictures of him; in fact, it’s very likely she ran wild with altruism, exaggerating all his good traits with equal blindness to his bad, like a politician backed into a corner. That’s not why I call him a champion. Rather, I want to be like Miss Jane’s Papa because he was the kind of man who didn’t protect himself from the loneliness of a little girl who had been left by her actual father. His hands were strong and tender enough to patch the scrapes of a little girl who didn’t belong to any man in particular, the same way a wounded bird belongs to no one in particular but you admire the man patient enough to mend its wing. Just the fact that Miss Jane kept bragging on him after so many decades is all I need to know to know the man was a shepherd, and a real daddy, and a true friend. In fact, these are the same words I use about God; thus, no better words could describe any man than shepherd, real daddy, true friend; thus, if any man thinks there is any higher achievement than to be a shepherd, or a real daddy, or a true friend, then he has exposed that he is an idolater. Such a wicked man should repent, and as penance he should teach a lonely little girl to be Jesus’ princess the way Dale Oldham taught Miss Jane. But even then, the next-best-man will have to live in Dale’s shadow, for it is a bold man indeed to convince anyone of their royalty the way Miss Jane held to hers.