Ralph Gage, RIP

On my last day at the Lawrence Journal-World, I burned all my bridges.

The whys and wherefores don’t really matter; indeed, they’ve basically turned to dust. What matters is that I had seen the end coming, had arranged to move onto a lucrative new job elsewhere in media, and then — once everything had been put into motion — got my feelings hurt. I reacted badly. I went around the newsroom, shook hands, made it plain that I was full of rage, gathered up my belongings and rather ostentatiously marched out the front door. It was impetuous, and probably stupid. I was 34, married a bit more than a year, had a few nice awards under my belt and considered myself somewhat ambitious. I was still young enough to think I had a future. 

What I didn’t count on was a series of cascading failures: The economy, the media industry, my health. I really didn’t have a clear-eyed view of my own foibles, for that matter, and how they could bring me down.

When my health went, in 2011, I was already at the end of my rope: I’d lost my job in Philadelphia the year before — it still hurts to write that — and was broke, with a wife and young son to support and no idea how to do it. A sudden brush with death brought me to my lowest point. It felt like nothing could ever be good again.

That’s when Ralph Gage reached out to me.

Ralph was a longtime veteran of the Journal-World. He was a journalist and then managing editor, general manager and eventually chief operating officer of the company. He was known in the newsroom for having a gruff personality. He could be scary, frankly. When I burned my bridges at the paper, I figured he was one of the people I had burned. But while I was in the hospital, he reached out to me on Facebook — checking to see if I was OK, if he could offer any support, rooting me on as I recovered.

It was humbling. I never expected to hear a good word from him again — and, to repeat, I probably didn’t deserve to. He didn’t owe me any kind of grace. He gave it freely.

And he gave it again when I returned to Lawrence from Philly, eight years after I’d left. He wrote to several people who had the ability to give work to freelancers, vouching for me and asking them to send some assignments my way. I didn’t ask for it. He didn’t have to do it. And that support was meaningful.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had the good fortune to make a bit of peace with a number of people that I thought I’d broken with. It’s such a relief to let go of grudges, to free yourself of the burden of anger. I’m great at carrying that anger, to my eternal detriment. I don’t think Ralph intended to serve as an object lesson in the power of grace — I don’t think I ever let him know how much his kindnesses meant to me. I’m not sure I would’ve known how to have that kind of talk with him. Now I won’t get a chance: He passed away this weekend.

So I’ve tried to learn from his actions toward me — to be more careful about recognizing the human beings whom I deal with, to remember that they’re more than the sum of their interactions with me, have more facets and needs and wants than I’m capable of perceiving. To consider their pain instead of using it as an excuse to return anger for anger. I am not good at this stuff yet. I might never be. All I know is I didn’t expect to learn those lessons from Ralph. Life is funny. 

— 30 — 

Memories: The difference between fundamentalism and evangelicalism

Photo by Nikko Tan from Pexels

Discussing the debates within the Southern Baptist Church, David French offers a distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists (and no, he emphasizes, the two are not the same):

Instead, I’d frame the difference in a number of different ways—“grace versus law,” or perhaps “open-hearted versus closed-minded.” In an earlier newsletter, I described fundamentalists as possessing “fierce existential certainty.” The fundamentalist Christian typically possesses little tolerance for dissent and accepts few sources of truth outside of the insights that can be gleaned directly from the pages of scripture.

(Snip.)

Evangelicals often also have a higher view of grace than fundamentalists. They emphasize God’s grace more than God’s rules and are more prone to focus on God’s mercies than God’s judgment.

In my real life and my online/writing life, I refer to myself as a lapsed Mennonite, but it's actually more complicated than that. I was raised and baptized -- Feb. 27, 1983 -- in the Church of Christ, a fundamentalist nondenominational church found primarily in the south. Some of my earliest memories involve my dad's year attending what was then known as Oklahoma Christian College, a sort of denominational school, as much as there could be one, for the churches of Christ.

I grew up so afraid of sin. So afraid I would lie, then die without having had the opportunity to pray for forgiveness. It's stressful to be a kid when Hell is sitting at your elbow, constantly. Jesus dying on the cross was an act of love, but it also reflected God's Terrible Wrath. God may have so loved the world, but he also was ready to torture you eternally for getting crosswise with him, and that was the part that made an impression. I think I remember the word "grace" being used in Church of Christ sermons, but I don't really remember feeling it. 

In 1984, my family moved to Hillsboro, a central-Kansas town populated mainly -- but not exclusively -- by Mennonites and Mennonite Brethren, the latter a more evangelical branch of the church. And then, one day, my parents decided to take us to an MB service. This was shocking -- to step foot inside a church that wasn't a Church of Christ, to worship with all these people we'd been told all our lives were going to Hell because they didn't love God the right way (they used musical instruments in their worship!) was terrifying.

Over time, though, I got over it. What I remember most from this time was a transition from the constant fear, from a legalistic belief in God, to the emphasis on God's mercy -- on having a relationship with God. Hell was still there, to be sure -- it was one reason the church supported missionaries. But it receded as a presence from the center of my daily lived theology. Eventually, as I got older, I embraced the Mennonites more broadly, but then slipped away from the church. I won't lie: Along the way the old ways have occasionally stuck in the back of my mind. What if my grandparents, who stayed in the Church of Christ and who railed against my father's choices, were right? What if a little embrace of grace was just a steppingstone to Hell? 

Somewhere over the years I asked myself that question and answered: "So be it." I think it was when I encountered gay Mennonites at the original national meeting of the Mennonite Church-USA in 2001. (Oh, goodness, that's 20 years ago now.) I decided that if God really did so love the world, he wasn't going to hold it against me for trying to act in the same spirit even if I got the particulars wrong. It was liberating. Of course, that also liberated me to leave the church entirely, I suppose.

The point being: French's distinction between fundamentalists and evangelicals really resonated with me. They both might look conservative from the outside, and they are, but there are (um) fundamental differences in approach. In my life, those differences have been meaningful.

Memories: Goneward, Christian soldiers

Does he, though?

I used to be a real churchy guy.

One reason I moved to Lawrence in 2000 -- aside from the newspaper job -- is that I already knew of a lefty Mennonite church in town that I had come to adore. For the first few years I lived here, the congregation was my home. By that time, my late 20s, I had come to define my Christianity as a sort of language: I didn't think it was necessarily the only right language, but it was the language I knew and had grown up in, so it was the language I would use. The congregation was a place where I could be open about that, and it was ok. And the community was terriffic - the most meaningful of my life. Church-goers were my mentors, my friends, the people I watched movies with and drank with and, once or twice, even tried to date. (Unsuccessfully.) I may never find that again, and that hurts.

After 9/11, though, even my loose definition of faith began to feel implausible. Everywhere I looked, it seemed, people were doing terrible things in the name of whatever religious language they possessed. Hindus and Muslims killed each other in India. They didn't ostensibly share my religion, but Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson did, and they blamed the terror attacks on "abortionists, feminists and gays." I didn't want to share the identity of "Christian" with them. Around the same time, my own congregation went through a process that resulted in our welcoming, for the first time, gay and lesbian people into membership -- a necessary and good journey, one that I advocated, but also draining. I didn't want to have to fight over whether the love of my gay friends was somehow legitimate or not. Over time, I began to think that if God condemned those genuine and loving relationships -- as so many of my fellow Christians fiercely believed -- that maybe I couldn't be cool with God. One Sunday morning, singing hymns, I realized that I could not honestly sing or speak the words in front of me. Mark Twain was right. You can't pray a lie.

John Updike is nowhere near my favorite author. But in November 2002, he wrote a short story for The Atlantic about a man who relinquishes his faith after watching the Twin Towers fall.

Thus was Dan, an Episcopalian lawyer of sixty-three, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war or plague. His revelation of cosmic emptiness thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism. He had fought this wisdom all his life, with prayer and evasion, with recourse to the piety of his Ohio ancestors and to ingenious and jaunty old books—Kierkegaard, Chesterton—read in adolescence and early manhood. But had he been in that building (its smoothly telescoping collapse in itself a sight of some beauty, like the color-enhanced stellar blooms of telescopically photographed supernovae, yet as quick as the toss of a scarf)—had he been in that building, would the weight of concrete and metal have been an ounce less, or hesitated a microsecond in its crushing, mincing, vaporizing descent?

No.

And I felt it.

But I have kept the door open to returning to the church. Art was a big motivator -- the songs of Johnny Cash and Sufjan Stevens, the novels of Marilynne Robinson, the films of Terrence Malick. And I have remained sympathetic to the conservative Christian friends that I made in college, understanding why they are so vociferously opposed to abortion without sharing that view.

The last few years, and the last few weeks, have made that open door feel a bit closer to closed. White American Christianity -- which is not *Christianity*, I realize, but still the faith language I know best -- aligned itself with Donald Trump so thoroughly that it began to look distinctly un-Christian to me. The celebration of vulgarity, the lies, the racism and misogyny ... if this was what people understood that God required of them, wanted of them, I wanted nothing to do with that God, or those people really. More likely, the people who called themselves Christians did what they wanted and told themselves that it was God speaking, but that didn't really make me feel any better.

There is no real complex, intellectual theology for me to offer you, only my sense even now that I lost something when I walked away from the church, but that I cannot embrace what the church -- or, rather, what I knew as my experience of church -- has to offer. I know there are other varieties of religious experience, but they don't speak to me. My old congregation still meets, in a different place than when I was a regular, and I still visit from time to time. The music of the old hymns still stirs me. But I still can't sing the words. Right now, I am not sure that I ever will be able to again.

Memory: Baptism

My dad baptized me on Feb. 27, 1983 in the Emporia Church of Christ. It's funny that I remember the date so precisely, but it seemed at the time like it might be the most important thing in my life -- a marker signifying whether I would go to heaven or hell someday.

The baptism came at a Sunday night service. We always went to church twice on Sundays, and usually went on Wednesday nights as well. The preacher that Sunday night didn't do a sermon, as per usual -- he instead gave answers to presubmitted questions. One was about how young was too young to get baptized. I don't remember his answer. What I do remember is that at the end of it, my dad nudged me and asked: "Do you want to get baptized?"

I did. 

I had asked, in fact, to be baptized a few months before. It had been judged that I was not ready. (By the time this particular Sunday night occurred, I was about a month short of my tenth birthday.) But my grandmother, in particular, had queried me from time to time about theological questions -- a test, I think, of when and if I would be ready.

My dad had been a preacher in the Church of Christ -- we didn't call them pastors. (I'm not speaking here of the liberal United Church of Christ, by the way, but a more fundamentalist non-denomination that didn't believe in instrumental music or letting women speak in church.) He asked this congregation's preacher if we could go ahead after the service. The congregation, which had been ready to leave, retook their seats. Dad and I entered the baptismal together. And then, after a few words, he dunked me.

And as my head went under, my foot slipped up and out of the water.

This haunted me for awhile after. The Church of Christ believed in full-body immersion -- and I had not been fully immersed. It seemed to me that my foot shooting up above the surface in the moment of baptism might mean I had not really, truly been saved. That, without that immersion, I might end up in hell.

But I didn't tell anybody. Instead, I lived with the fear.

A few years after that, my family left the Church of Christ. We'd settled into a largely Mennonite small town. It took me a long time to not fear that we had made a terrible mistake. But over time, at least, I stopped being afraid that my foot was going to keep me from going to heaven.

Livin' It Up at the Hotel Pennsylvania

Me outside the Empire State Building
(on the right!) on the trip in question.

The first time I stayed at the Hotel Pennsylvania was in the fall of 2004. I had turned 30 a year previously, and had recently concluded it was time for me to be done waiting. I had spent the bulk of my adult life waiting for a mate -- somebody to make me complete, an actual grownup. It was only then, I thought, that I could embark on grownup adventures like trips to New York. Who would ever do such a thing on their own?

There was an obstacle, however: Money. I wasn’t poor, exactly, but I was a journalist, and of course had little money saved. But the idea of a New York trip -- centered around the annual New Yorker Festival -- had taken hold of me.

So I resolved to be profligate -- I would use a credit card -- but not too profligate. I would stay at the cheapest non-scary hotel I could find in Manhattan. A search at Hotels.com gave me just one plausible answer. For less than $200 a night, I could stay at the Hotel Pennsylvania.

What the website didn’t tell me, I would glean soon enough: That once upon a time, the Hotel Pennsylvania had been a thriving New York City hotspot; that Glenn Miller and his band had played there; that Miller’s famous song, “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” took its name from the hotel’s phone number. All I really knew was that in photographs on the Internet, pictures of the rooms looked clean. That was all I needed.

And when I arrived at the hotel, fresh off a plane from Kansas, I was initially dazzled. The lobby was beautiful! You had to show your key to a doorman to get on the elevator! The elevator had a TV! What kind of luxury was this?

My perspective changed when the elevator doors opened on the 14th floor. The hallway was ominous: Threadbare carpeting and dim light, lined by a row of room doors that -- in their size and bulk -- looked like they belonged on meat lockers, or in a morgue.

This is my main memory of the room: A huge, blotchy stain on the carpet that very much appeared to be the result of somebody bleeding to death about 30 years prior. The furnishings, with the exception of the television, seemed to have gone unchanged since the 1970s.

I kind of loved it. No Disneyfied Giuliani New York for me! I was staying in an honest-to-goodness fleabag hotel! This, I felt, revealed something important and flattering about my character.

The Hotel Pennsylvania thus became my New York City lodestar. I spent the next few days walking as far as my legs could carry me around Manhattan. Down the Avenue of the Americas, eventually to Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park, where I was challenged to a chess game. Up through Times Square, to Central Park. One night, I stumbled back to my room -- tipsy on free wine -- up a darkened section of Broadway, returning from a New Yorker event. Another late night, I found myself with a handful of fishnetted thigh -- I’m still not certain how -- as a Greek hooker offered me her services not far from the Ed Sullivan Theater. By the end of my stay, my feet were covered with blisters. Every night, though, they carried me back to the Hotel Pennsylvania.

So I was a little sad to find out the hotel is not long for this world. Sometime in the next few years, it will be demolished to make way for a giant new skyscraper they say will rival the nearby Empire State Building on the New York skyline.

That makes me wistful, because the Hotel Pennsylvania is still where I start my New York experience. The BoltBus from Philadelphia -- where I live now -- drops its passengers at nearby Penn Station. When I visit, I always walk to the hotel to get my bearings, then stroll down 33rd Street for breakfast and the New York Post at Times Square Bagel and Deli, which is nowhere near Times Square. After that, I can begin my business in the city.

It is likely, however, that I have contributed in a small way to the hotel’s demise. Two years after that first stay, I returned to New York -- on a honeymoon. I’d finally grown up. It seemed unwise and unromantic, however, to subject my new wife to bloodstains and a rickety bed. We stayed at a Holiday Inn.