You all know him. He’s the guy who is there “whenever the church doors are open.”
Jim Jones won’t be attending Grace Church in Roanoke this Sunday, but only because his funeral is today. He was 90.
Okay, he may have missed some services lately due to declining health. I don’t know because I don’t live in Roanoke anymore. But when I went to church there starting in 1966 as a two-year-old (Dad was the pastor), he was always there. Always.
If the church doors were open, whether worship service or Bible Study or Saturday work day, you might wonder how many people were going to show up. But you knew Mr. Jones would be there. Dad, Mr. Jones, and whoever else decided to come.
Jim Jones and wife Emily
According to the obit, he arrived at Grace Church in 1966, the same year I did. I am suspicious of this. Jim Jones has always been in Roanoke, since its founding, and he has always been at Grace Church, since the beginning of time. At least in my mind. I don’t have a conscious memory that doesn’t include seeing him up in the pulpit a couple times a week leading the hymn singing or making announcements or providing some other service or function for the church. When someone else better arrived on the scene to do it, he stepped aside with total graciousness and looked for other ways to serve. He was always serving, always smiling, always appreciating, always believing.
Today they sing cooler songs, praise music and such. But my spiritual formation cannot be understood without including years of my early psyche singing along with Mr. Jones to: Bringing in the Sheaves; When the Roll is Called Up Yonder; Jesus is All the World to me; I’m So Happy and Here’s the Reason Why; and dozens and dozens of other old faithful tunes. While they may not make the canon of all time classics (neither will the praise tunes, probably) they contained a more important element: a guy who really believed them leading the charge. That’s a nice thing for a young kid to observe several times a week in an age craving for authenticity.
The church asked me to speak at their 60 year reunion last year. Before I spoke, Jim Jones was on the agenda. There he was, up in the pulpit, speaking and providing old memories. It had been 30 years since I had been to the church, but, for me, nothing had changed. The world was still stable. Jim Jones was in the pulpit.
You know, the big dogs can be a little volatile, my Dad included. They reach great heights, then take a plunge. Think Jimmy Swaggart or Charles Stanley. Or even King David in the Bible. But it’s the Jim Joneses of the world that help us all keep the faith. They never waver. He is my Rock of Gilbraltar.
“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” Jim Jones modeled that. He is an icon. An archetype. A legend. I guess I could say I will miss him. But the truth is, Jim Jones is never leaving my memory.
Chattanooga has an electric shuttle that allows you to navigate downtown at no charge and with no yukky emissions.
I have an office at one end of the route where I eat breakfast every morning at the Bluegrass Grill around the corner. Joan Marie, the vivacious waitress, chats with everyone while her husband Jonas cooks the eggs and biscuits or the tofu and hash, if that’s your thing.
At the other end of the shuttle route is a coffee shop and a bookstore I frequent, along with my apartment. Most importantly, the Yellow Deli is nearby, a block from the local university, where 50 some people in a local commune with long hair, beards, and women in flowery dresses serve strange teas and sandwiches and talk a lot about their religion. It’s open 24/7 and the young people flock to the place.
They’re a cult. Or so say a bunch of the locals.
No they’re not, insist a bunch of other locals. They are lovely people who take their faith seriously, live out their beliefs of following Christ with all their heart, and have simply continued the ideals of the hippie and Jesus movement of the 60s.
Mural at the Yellow Deli
Au contraire, argue the others, who are familiar with the Yellow Deli people from when they rocked Chattanooga’s Bible Belt world back in the early 70s. A number of families had to kidnap their children and then have them deprogrammed. All the fuss caused the Deli leaders to move the commune to Vermont. But last year they resolved to return to Chattanooga, the city where they once shook the dust off their sandals.
The Yellow Deli people have written a book about all the controversy entitled “Cult Scare.” The parents were the kidnappers, they say, mainstreamers simply scared by people enthusiastic about their love for Jesus. One lady in the group was captured twice by her parents, once in Chattanooga, another time in France, but returned to the commune both times and serves sandwiches to this day in the Choo Choo city whose trains stopped running in 1973 but now boasts an electric shuttle.
To me, the world seems to revolve around Chattanooga. I wrote a book about the enigmatic place a few years ago. My theory was cemented during a visit to the offices of the United States Senate in D.C. There on the wall was a picture of Andrew Jackson, Pocahontas, and some folks in the 1890s heading up Lookout Mountain, the eminence that overlooks Chattanooga. I have no idea why it hangs there.
Neither can I figure out how a small Yellow Deli group, after moving to Vermont, then grew into over 30 communes across the world and now boasts perhaps the world’s largest movement of intentional communities.
The last couple of weeks I’ve asked all kinds of people about the Yellow Deli folks. The answers are very polarized, from “you’re an intolerant buffoon to ask such questions” to “they are a dangerous cult. Beware.”
So I checked them out myself. Unlike most, I love to interact with these types. If the subject is not politics, religion or sex, I’m probably not interested.
It was midnight when I got there after a busy day and I was hungry as heck. Lots of literature was laying around and I glanced at some of it as I headed to the counter to order something. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a grey-haired guy with a pony tail inching nearer. I knew he wanted to talk, but I wanted to order.
“Are you interested in the literature,” he asked enthusiastically.
“Sure,” I said, walking away from him toward the counter. He kept following me, thinking I was another wary visitor.
Fortunately, I made it to my destination and got my sandwich order processed and sat down. There he stood.
“What’s your name” I asked.
“Ayal.”
“A what?”
“Ayal. It means Ram in Hebrew.”
He introduced me to the head guy who goes by “Yoenig.” I don’t know what it means, but I did know that he is originally from Chattanooga’s uninteresting neighborhood of East Ridge and was known then as Gene Spriggs. Now he’s the “apostle” for the “Twelve Tribes,” as the Yellow Deli people now call themselves.
Apostle Gene "Yoenig" Spriggs and wife Martha.
Whatever. I can deal with this. These folks are trying to love each other, live in community, and worship God. Sure, they are kind of weird, but it sure beats suburbia and prozac. Young people are energized and are living for something greater than themselves and greater than materialism. Lots of people call themselves bishop and apostle. So what? Robert Duvall was a pretty harmless apostle. There could be a lot of worse things.
I had read their mission statement. Trinitarian. Christ both God and man. The infallible Bible. All the things my father the evangelical pastor who got his doctorate in theology from Dallas Seminary would nod approvingly over. Why quibble over Jewish names and pony tails?
“We believe slavery was biblical” said Ayal.
“Come again?”
“Our black brothers need to know this to be free,” he continued helpfully. “They are under the curse of Ham, Noah’s son.”
I scratched my head.
“Ayal, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Why are you bringing this up to me so quickly? I mean, isn’t this a bad PR move on your part? Why not leave this subject for another time?”
“Well, people need to be free of deception.”
Further questioning convinced me that if I had a question about their PR strategy, ultimately I’d have to ask Gene “Yoenig” Spriggs.
Down at the Bluegrass Grill, I got some interesting insights. Turns out Jonas the cook is “Father Jonas,” a priest for the local Orthodox Church, as in Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox. He wears a cute little square black hat when he works in the window behind the counter and I never learned whether that’s just his cool thing or part of his priest thing. He used to be Larry. They take on new names as well.
Joan Marie and Father Jonas outside the office.
Joan Marie, who used to be Jane, told me she and Larry . . . I mean, Father Jonas . . . actually lived in a commune themselves back in the day. They were trying to act just like the early church, who, we’re told in the Bible, all sold their stuff and lived in a commune for a while. Their early church studies also told them that bishops ran the church, wore robes and hats and stuff, and conducted church in a liturgical, synagogue/temple kind of way. Apparently, the Orthodox Church today still does the same thing, and the folks in Jonas and Joan Marie’s commune eventually all decided to become Orthodox.
“What about communes?” I asked her. “Do the Orthodox still do that?”
“They’re called monasteries,” she said.
She went on to explain that communes get very difficult when children are in the mix. How does a father provide? Who gets the bike? What about college funds? She thinks the Yellow Deli people may be keeping men from being the fathers they ought to be.
Interesting contrast. Gene Spriggs the Apostle got things going a few decades ago. Jonas and Joan Marie follow a tradition that started 2,000 years ago. According to the Orthodox, the line of authority started with Jesus laying hands on the 12 disciples and never stopped. For a thousand years, councils of hundreds of bishops ruled the church and developed key foundational beliefs like which books are in the Bible, one God in three persons, the God-Man Jesus, and the Apostles Creed.
The movement got a major glitch when the bishop of Rome in 1000 A.D. or so decided he was in charge of the other bishops. “We don’t think so,” they responded, and Eastern and Western Christianity excommunicated each other. The Roman Catholic church was born. When the Protestant Reformation emerged 500 years later, it led to thousands of Christian groups today, including the version provided by Gene Sprigg’s Twelve Tribes Yellow Deli.
For the Orthodox, there’s no particular difference between Gene and the Pope: both wandered from the fold. The Orthodox have never corrupted into indulgences, papal infallibility, crusades, or slavery endorsements. They remain “Orthodox.”
The next day at the Yellow Deli, I got to chatting with “Elihav,” a nice enough young guy who served me coffee. He explained to me that the mural on the wall with lots of graffiti and painted words is a history of the entire Jesus movement. You can tell he’s proud that their group stuck with the vision, the Big Chill be damned.
After talking a lot, he asked me some questions, and eventually I shared my concerns, after talking to Joan Marie, that anyone can’t just start a religious movement. There needs to be some history and tradition over time.
He nodded with enthusiasm. “We’ve been around over 38 years.”
I have a reoccurring nightmare: I am about to go on stage (I did some acting in high school and college), but I’ve only memorized about 10 percent of my lines.
I suppose this subconscious fear is related to our culture’s pressure for perfection and performance. I felt something eerily similar when the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society agreed to my suggestion that I read to them my movie script about the close relationship—and later falling out—between authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
Next week would be great, the president told me. I had made it sound like my finished screenplay was ready for prime time. In fact, the three months I’d spent in England were so far mostly about research. I had only written about ten percent of the script.
I grew up in this house in Roanoke, Virginia, with Grace Church as a constant and watchful presence.
I spoke for a few minutes last Sunday at the church where I grew up, Grace Church in Roanoke, Virginia. You can listen to it here.
Time and distance have made me greatly appreciate those old time saints, the faithful everyday Christians who actually make things happen.
It wasn’t until I was a lot older that I realized how difficult it is to tithe. But a bunch of folks in my home church have been faithfully giving for decades. We can’t take such sacrifice for granted.
Instead of going to church faithfully every week, people can sleep in, go golfing, or any number of other cool things. But the folks in the church I grew up in keep faithfully gathering together as Christ calls us to do.
I guess it’s kind of a tortoise and hare thing. We look for great speakers, bold evangelists, expositors of the Greek and Hebrew. But can you tithe? Can you just show up regularly? Most people can’t. I’m glad I got a chance to give a tribute to those who did.
Since last summer’s beach trip I have traveled to a bunch of cities: Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Washington D.C., San Diego, Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, Dallas, London, Oxford, Belfast, Derry, Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Frierichshaven Germany, Liechtenstein, Geneva, Zurich, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome and San Francisco.
Of all those cities, the last two are the ones that captured my heart the most. Rome, of course, has the best food in the world, the best coffee, arguably the best wine and bread. The mediterranean climate is lovely and the historical soil ranks as perhaps the richest in the world (though not the oldest). Visiting the Colosseum where Christians were fed to lions, and then visiting the Vatican where Christians dominate Rome and the Western world, is a stunning contrast. From the Vatican they likely planned the engraving of giant crosses on the side of the very complex that once persecuted and violated Christian martyrs.
San Francisco has a different and multilayered attachment to my heart. The bay area is probably the most beautiful piece of geography I have ever observed, which, this year, included the Alps and Eiffel Tower. The contrasts are striking when overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge: ocean waves crashing to your right, golden brown mountains behind you. Giant pine trees straight across the way, a major world city skyline across the blue bay to your slight left, Alcatraz Island just in front of you, beautiful sailboats and giant cruise liners and cargo ships traversing the bay, the Oakland Bay Bridge in the distance, and the quiet villages of Sausalito and Tiberon to your far left. Another layer of romance emerges when the fog rolls in from the ocean through the Golden Gate like a fluffy gray blanket being pulled by a tugboat.
Marin County, what you enter when crossing the giant orange bridge, has a personality and flavor unique to the world. Here you reach ground zero for organic concerns and the sustainability craze. Worldwide anti-war demonstrations probably germinate here. Signs in windows and bumper stickers on cars provide unsolicited maxims on world peace and politics (like complaints of big oil on a suburban).
While most cities hope to find one unique characteristic to promote tourism, the Bay Area has scores of them: Cable cars, Redwood forests, beaches, 17-mile drive, the Point Reyes Seashore, Napa Valley wine country, Chinatown, Haight-Ashbury, the beautiful bay itself . . . and the list goes on and on.
Some of you may wonder how such a culture might be attractive to me, given my heritage of strong morality and conservative politics. However, half of my DNA derives from Howard and Cecil Waite, my grandparents who purchased property an hour north of San Francisco in the 1960s after decades of traveling the globe helping war torn countries restore their infrastructures. Their seven acres on top of Vision Mountain in the village of Inverness on the Point Reyes Peninsula proved to be the nucleus of art and liberal activism that agreed with their sometimes naieve, sometimes sagacious, but always altruistic concerns. (One daughter went to Berkely right down the road, became one of the first beatniks, and helped trigger the 60s revolution. My mother attended UCLA and converted to Christianity in Bill Bright’s first Campus Crusade for Christ group.)
Those twists of fate made me a more complex person I suppose, but the Bay Area is in my blood. Also, I visited there every four five years of my life, and driving up the road to my grandfather’s several handmade dwellings at the top of the mountain–where the overwhelming scent of Bishop Pines compounds the nostalgia–always provides me with my own sense of what oasis and paradise might feel like. On this anomalous tract of land with Tomales Bay on one side and the ocean on the other, the temperature, like San Francisco, never exceeds 75 or dips below 40, and fluctuates quickly as the fog rolls in almost daily. A sweater and a burning woodstove are part of the daily lifestyle, perfect for a man who has been at an oceanside condo for the last five days now and has not yet stepped on the beach.
San Fransciso and Marin County does indeed connect with my internal psche and DNA in a poweful way. The town was named Inverness because the area so clearly resembles Scotland: pine forests, daily fogs, purple thistles growing on the sides of windy hills overlooking the stormy Pacific Ocean. My ancestor Stephen Arnold likely traveled to America from similar terrain in Scotland ten generations ago. He and his progeny continued moving West from their first settling in Southwestern Virginia, which also has an uncanny resemblance to the Scottish countryside I observed earlier this year. These frontiersmen were finally stopped by the Pacific Ocean. The friendly, laid back California lifestyle must somehow be related to these restless wanderers finally admitting the journey is over and its time to sit back and relax.
And what about the morality of the Bay Area? I disagree with the Gay agenda, certainly, but you actually see very little of it there unless you drive to certain areas of town where tourists rarely tread. And although the effects of evangelical Christianity are indeed small or fading, the Orthodox Church, now my faith tradition, has a uniquely strong presence in this eclectic city. Only a handful of saints have been canonized in North America, most from centuries ago. But the most recently canonized is named St. John the Wonderworker of Shanghai and San Francisco. Born in Ukraine, he became a bishop in Serbia, established a number of orphanages in China, then moved to San Francisco in his last years and built a major cathedral there before dying in 1965. Known for rarely sleeping, praying all night for his fellow Christians, and working miracles of healing, he was also reputed to scrap his heirachical garb at times and roam the streets of Haight and Ashbury in the early days of the Age of Aquarius, influencing and converting many young leaders in Berkely and San Francisco.
I visited the cathedral when I was there. St. John’s body sits in a coffin to the right of the altar. The top is glass, but John Maxomovich’s face is covered with a veil. His two hands, however, are completely visible, and, though darkened, have not decayed at all. During the service, many people will stop by the coffin, cross themselves, light a candle and say a prayer while observing the great saints’ remains. Weird, but very powerful.
So the Bay Area even has a spiritual connection to me. In fact, the small village of Inverness saw an Orthodox monastery established there 25 years ago, and several devout monks prayed and worshipped there, and interacted with the local crowd, who found them to be surprisingly godly, loving, and fantastic representatives of Christ and humanity, despite their “female bashing” traditions (I got this straight from the woman who owns the local New Age shop.) However, the monks left a year ago and moved to Redding California. In several months, they say more people have expressed interest in Christ than they saw in their quarter century tenure in West Marin County. Although very spiritual, the people in Marin are in fact quite hostile to Christianity. Political viewpoints don’t necessarily equate to spiritual health, but it is instructive to know that out of 50,000 registered voters in West Marin, only 76 are Republican.
While the Bay Area has a major spot in my heart–and may in fact feel more like home than any geographic area on the globe–I also feel that it could not remain my home for very long. Birth rates are below replacement; children are scant. The stark wilderness of the terrain reflects a lack of economic activity and a future unlikely to prosper. My grandfather’s cabin, sublime and award-winning 30 years ago, now slowly deteroriates at the foundation, with little to no hope of a restoration. I am once again reminded: this world, under its current cosmic regime, is not my ultimate home. But I do love it, just like the One slated to succeed the current ruler.
Every Christmas, my daughter and I collaborate on a children’s book about the Three Wise Men. She is the illustrator. I wrote it when she was three years old.
Today she is 16, and the book is 18 pages. So she has illustrated 14 pages so far, one a year since we began the project. The bottom right says “(P)AGE 3” etc., to capture the double meaning of how each page is a year in the process.
This whole thing originated one day when Tabitha’s mother showed me a drawing Tab had made of a bunny. She was two and half, and, to our surprise, it kinda looked a whole lot like a rabbit. That was the beginning of the realization that this kid had some serious artistic talent. (A few years later she grabbed some hot candle wax at church while bored and quickly sculpted a griffin with wings. I was stunned.)
Anyway, years before I saw the bunny, I had a children’s story in me I had always wanted to write about the Wise Men. It emerged after meditating on the bible story and being so intrigued by the fact that the smartest, most literate bible scholars in Jerusalem not only failed to identify the Christ child through their understanding of the Prophets, they actually used their knowledge to help Herod go kill him! (Go to Bethlehem, they told Herod. That’s where the Bible says the Christ child will come from.)
That bit of irony I thought would make a good twist for a story. And I kinda wanted to do the Dr. Seuss rhyming thing. So I wrote the first page of my story to include a bunny and used Tab’s early piece of art on (P)AGE 2. Since then, she’s illustrated a page of the story every year.
I’ve written a number of books and been involved in a number of creative projects, but this one I find extremely interesting and in some ways it is an idea of which I am most proud.
This video gives a glimpse of the book and Tab’s drawings over the years. As usual, Jaime provides the comic relief.
I have made my living off and on the past seven years as a ghostwriter. Usually, a client has a great book idea in mind, has a lot of content they can talk about, but don’t have the kind of personality to sit down and write it all out. (One of my favorite quotes is: “The art of writing is the art of putting the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”)
I typically spend 10 to 15 hours interviewing them, recording the interviews, getting them transcribed, and taking those transcriptions and further research and turning them into a book.
Several of my book projects are featured in a brochure that was designed for me by my childhood friend, current close friend, and imagery guru, Rob Tipton. I turned the brochure into a website, www.GhostwritingByDean.com. Since the time the brochure was designed, I also have this project published by McGraw-Hill in the quiver.
(2nd in a series of 3 tributes to Gordon Wetmore. 1st is here)
It’s one thing to ask a friend to do you a favor. It’s another thing to ask him for cold hard cash. But I was headed up the elevator again to Gordon Wetmore’s cool studio to see if he would consider making an investment in a movie script venture I was working on.
I was also working on a documentary project, and maybe if he didn’t bite on the feature film venture he might give me some cash for the documentary.
Gordon wasn’t rich. He did pretty well. But he loved to tell about what every guy did when he had the casual conversation about his career.
I was headed up the elevator for the umpteenth time, this trip to ask my celebrated artist friend to do me a tacky favor. I wasn’t sure how it would be received.
Gordon Wetmore had painted portraits of some of the world’s most famous people. Richard Nixon, Princess Grace, Norman Vincent Peale. A long list.
A portrait artist is a sole proprietor, a businessman, a risk-taker. You must have talent, as Gordon clearly did. But that is not enough. You must also be a promoter, a salesman, and great at customer service. Gordon was all of these.
He and I connected on the level of being self-employed. The risk aspect, the freedom, the thrill of the reward, the loneliness of having no regular colleagues—we could relate to it all. That last factor was why we both enjoyed getting together so often and catching up. I was running my own news publication when we met in the late 90’s hanging out at Greyfriar’s coffeeshop downtown at Jack’s Alley. Because we worked our own hours, we might find ourselves at Greyfriar’s at various times during the day.
I was bringing in one-tenth of his kind of revenue with my investigative reporting enterprise distributed by fax machine. It was all the news that’s not fit to print, and Gordon loved reading it. But was he willing to be Continue reading “A Man’s Contradiction is his Genius”
