PLYMOUTH CHURCH NEWSLETTERS
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IN THE MEANTIME...
“I love to tell the story,” is the refrain of an old hymn. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we love to tell the story. Every Sunday, we read a scripture, a portion of the great story that is the Bible. At least once a month, we gather at the communion table to tell the story of the Last Supper. Year after year, following the liturgical calendar, we tell and retell the stories of Jesus, beginning with Advent and the story of Mary’s pregnancy, continuing through Christmas and the story of his birth, and on through Epiphany and Lent and Holy Week and the great celebration that is Easter. We tell and retell the stories of our faith. We remember. We recollect. And in our remembering and recollecting, our spirits are refreshed.
In February, designated as Black History Month, we tell and retell the stories of African American people – the Middle Passage and slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation and Reconstruction, the Jim Crow South and the Great Migration to the North, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement, the election of this country’s first-ever African American president. We recount the deeds of our heroes and she-roes, remembering Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks and Martin King, Fannie Lou Hamer and Malcolm X, and on and on. And we remember, as well – or at least, we ought to remember – those whose names are not found in history books, the unsung heroes and she-roes of our families and communities.
Because February is also the month when we celebrate Valentine’s Day, I often find myself recounting stories of love. This year, there’s a special poignancy to the recounting because it was my late grandmother, a wonderful storyteller, who told those stories best. One of her favorites was the story of her grandparents’ courtship.
During the 1880s, my grandmother’s grandmother, Sally Fife, was a school teacher living near Muskogee, Oklahoma. She was a woman of mixed heritage, Creek Indian and African American, a young widow with four small children.
Nearby lived a farmer named Johnson Lee, the son of former slaves. He’d never been married, but he’d taken a liking to the young widow who taught Black and Indian children in the one-room schoolhouse not far from his farm. He wasn’t certain, however, of how to approach her. She was a literate woman, and while he could count, he’d never learned to read or write. Undaunted, he began showing up at the schoolhouse each morning. He’d wipe down the old chalkboards, sweep the hardwood floors, start a fire in the wood-burning stove so that Sally and her students could stay warm. “In other words,” my grandmother would always say, a twinkle in her eye as she recounted her grandparents’ romance, “he made himself indispensable to her.”
Sally Fife and Johnson Lee eventually married. They had three children together, and in between the demands of farming and teaching and raising children, she taught her husband to read, starting with children’s primers and then graduating to the King James Version of the Bible.
“I love to tell the story,” is what we say and sing. May February be for all of us a time of telling the stories – stories of our families, our heritages, our faith, and our love. May we find in those stories, again and again, testimonies to God’s grace and evidence of the Spirit’s movements in our lives.
Blessings to you all,
Download the February 2012 Newsletter for details about our Advent Activities and much more. |
