GRANDMA SAID TO MARRY A PREACHER

Grandma Said to Marry a Preacher


“Bethy, if you want to be happy in this life, marry a minister.” At the age of 92, Grandma Flanagan was a beautiful woman. She was blind and bedridden, her long hair wound in a braid up on top of her head, a beatific smile always on her face. Her mind was as sharp as it had been on her graduation day from the Lucy Webb Hayes Deaconess School in Washington, D.C., in 1910. Yes, that was the same Lemonade Lucy known to the country as the wife of President Rutherford B. Hayes, the woman who refused to serve alcohol in the White House. She was a hero to my Grandmother.
I was devoted to Grandma and fiercely protective of her, especially when it came to my own inadequacies. I had to keep her from being disappointed in me. Marry a minister, sign the temperance pledge, take time for daily devotions, visit the homebound, tithe one’s money, and pursue education? I was a teenager, a wild free spirit, an adventurer who knew few bounds. Thankfully a love of learning and a yearning to spend time in spiritual discussions with Grandma kept us close. Her gnarled hand gliding across the quilt, reaching for mine, was a signal to sit down and hear a story.
“Yes, Beth, I married your grandfather when I was 39 years old and never intending to marry. He was a widower, a minister with six children, and I felt it was my calling to leave my work in the immigrant lumber and coal camps and join with him. My own father married us in his church at Rosby’s Rock. Someday I hope you can travel to that little town and see where the B&O Railroad tracks were joined on Christmas Eve, right in the middle of the Civil War. Now where was I? Ah, yes, your mother’s birth a year later was a gift from God, surely as much a miracle as Elizabeth giving birth to her son, John, who became John the Baptist. And now you are here with me.” She squeezed my hand. “It wasn’t long after I took on that role, that Reverend Flanagan was put in the TB Sanatarium up in Terra Alta. Yes, I had my hands full with the children and the church near Wheeling, but everyone helped. The church folks were my family. Of course, Grandpa was soon well enough and we were moved down to Salem, in Harrison County, where we were commissioned to help them build a new church building. But that’s a story I’ll keep for another day. I’d surely like to hear you sing a hymn right now. Could it be “How Great Thou Art” - you do that one so...robustly.”
Why is it, almost 40 years later, on a sunny winter’s day, hiking down a lane in the Blue Ridge Mountains, that my Grandmother’s words come back to me? “Bethy, if you want to be happy in this life, marry a minister.” I ponder my life of adventure, of love and divorce, of working many jobs, of relationships that have come and gone, and I realize what she meant by those words. Although she may have been literal in her intent, she knew as well as I, that ministers are simply human, with the same fallacies as each of us. I have known ministers as family members, as friends, as mentors. I spent a few months getting acquainted with Reverend Jim Bakker, much humbled as he left prison, Tammy Faye remarried, no money, and an indomitable spirit to write a book and get his life back on course. As a broken man, he was a true minister. And as I thought about Jim and others, I realized Grandmother was saying that to marry a life of ministry is the key. We are called to contribute, to care for others, to grow as a person, to learn to listen, to humble ourselves, to exalt in this gift of living. And to reach our sometimes bruised and gnarled hands out to others and tell them the story that never ends.