God & Grandma's Chickens

by Thomas Ahlburn

Like most Unitarian Universalists, I am a convert to liberal religion. Like most of my congregation, I am not a Christian, and I don't believe in the God of the Bible. I am a Unitarian Universalist Buddhist. Why? Well, for many reasons. But I wonder if maybe my Buddhism didn't begin with Grandma's chickens.

Though I was christened a Roman Catholic, I never made my First Communion. Perhaps this is because I went to a public school, where I fell in with Protestants. It wasn't long before my grandmother, herself a fully immersed baptismal graduate of some muddy Kentucky creek, had enrolled me in a nearby Baptist Sunday school.

You might say that I am a former Roman Catholic, twice removed. But Roman Catholicism never really had a chance with me. My grandmother had tried it briefly in her first marriage to an Irish Catholic policeman named Thomas Harris. They had two children, my mother and my uncle, before Thomas Harris died in 1914.

Somewhere on the corner of a street in Newport, Ky., there is a memorial plaque to my grandfather: "Thomas Harris: The Kiddie's Cop." He was a crossing guard, known for his kindness to children and dogs. The schoolchildren of Newport donated pennies to purchase this plaque. I imagine some of Tommy Harris's friends had already been made detectives or maybe traveled about Newport on horseback. But my grandfather's big thing was standing on the corner, protecting kids and dogs. I used to have a faded newspaper photograph of him - one I fear I've lost along the way. There he is, a big Irishman, with a tall helmet, standing in the middle of the street. All around him are little children and dogs. He has the biggest smile on his face I have ever seen.

After Tommy Harris's death, Grandma reverted to ancestral form - southern fundamentalism. Out of faithfulness, she raised his children as Catholics. My mother gave me her father's first name, but not his official religion. In Baptist Sunday school we memorized Bible verses and sang lively and catchy little tunes that even my grandfather would have liked - songs about peace, little children, gardens, flowers, slowly flowing rivers, and soft and lovely flocks of sheep.

Also, we prayed to Jesus, our gentle elder brother. It was hoped that Jesus would steady us in our various resolves and growing responsibilities. I hoped that he would do something for the chickens my grandmother murdered behind the barn.

If you have ever been present at one of these dreadful executions, you know what I mean. The doomed chicken knows something terrible is going to happen. You can see it in her eyes. They are large with fear. Just before the ax falls there is a lot of loud, heartbreaking squawking. The deed is done. Then the headless body runs across the yard, spurting blood.

Oh Jesus.

Vegetarianism was not an option in those days. Nonetheless, I remember hoping the chickens would forgive me as I asked for yet another drumstick, and piled on Grandma's thick, rich, sinful gravy.

We prayed to God in Sunday school, too. But mostly we prayed to His son. This suited me just fine. I liked Jesus much better than God. I felt sure the chickens did.

One of the problems with God is that He isn't like Jesus or Tommy Harris. At least, that's the way I felt then. For instance, I couldn't imagine either Jesus or Tommy Harris creating a world in which chickens are murdered and kids and dogs suffer. But God did. In effect, that's what we were taught Sunday mornings.

Mrs. Lennon, my Sunday school teacher, didn't talk about things like chickens getting murdered, and kids and dogs getting hit by cars. But she did talk incessantly about God's love; the implication being that God was not only all-powerful, but absolutely good and loving.

"But how do we know that God is like Jesus?" I asked, hesitantly, one Sunday.

"Because the Bible says so," Mrs. Lennon answered pleasantly. She was not a philosopher.

I wasn't a philosopher, either. After all, I was only 11. Still, even I knew something was wrong. Could God be all-powerful and all-good at the same time? I didn't see how. Not if God let Grandma's chickens suffer the way they did.

One Sunday morning I went for a walk in the woods instead of going to church school. Somewhere on that walk I said good-bye to the biblical God. I had happily concluded that this God didn't exist.

I reluctantly said good-bye to Jesus, too.

After all, what is Jesus without God?

Maybe I was just siding with the chickens. I don't know. But I never went to Sunday school again. Despite my grandmother's ravings, I saw no good reason to change my mind.

That was years and years ago, but now I wonder if I wasn't too hard on my Baptist friends and their naive theology. Make no mistake about it, they were very fine people.

Eugene Motter, our minister, was a wonderful man. In may ways, I have modeled my own quite different ministry on his (and on Tommy Harris). He was the first person I knew to speak out against segregation - not an easy thing to do in southern Ohio in the 1950's. In later years, he was unreservedly Pro-choice.

Today, when I think of Jesus as an elder brother, I think of him.

The theology of the Roselawn Community Baptist Church was about faith, not blind belief. I'm sure the good people there had their doubts, too. Perhaps if I had stayed around for a few more years, and had been a better, more mature listener, I would have had more sympathy for their religiosity. They were uncommonly kind to me. And this wasn't always easy, I'm sure. When it came to chickens, kids and dogs, they were hardly cruel. Neither was my grandmother, the great chicken executioner. Many's the time I saw her weep after the death of an animal. Yes, even a chicken. Perhaps I am a Buddhist because of her, and not merely in spite of her. It was certainly her wish that all beings be happy.

Who knows, maybe it was my karma to be or become who I am now. I grew up standing off, sort of at the edge of things. From the time I can remember, I was living this way.

We lived in a strange little house that stood off by itself, with large, open fields stretching away from the house on one side and in back of it, and with woods on the other. We had just enough land for a decent garden, and just enough room for a few berry patches and some chickens. Because no one with children lived nearby, and perhaps because most of my grandparent's friends, such as my Aunt Pearl and Cousin Floyd, were either childless or elderly, I had very few playmates. But this didn't seem to bother me much at the time, and mostly I was proud that our house stood by itself this way, and pleased that the neighboring woods were mine alone to play in. Of course, one's memories are always very selective, but I do remember being very happy back then, living at the edge of existence.

At dawn and dusk, great silent and deadly barn owls patrolled the wet fields, looking for little meadow voles and deer mice. Air ghosts, my great grandfather called them. They still patrol my dreams.

Who are they after now, I wonder?

If I was living at the edge of existence, so was my family. My grandmother was at least eccentric, if not a bit cracked. For instance, there were those times when I would discover her alone in the kitchen holding prolonged conversations with herself - and others. I'd wake up and hear her in the kitchen and wonder who on earth she was talking to. I'd go out and find only her, babbling away. Or she would spend hours alone in the basement singing gospel tunes - the truly happy ones like "Whispering Hope," "Abide With Me," and "Nearer My God To Thee."

What a joy!

On the other hand, Grandpa Earl (which is what I called my grandmother's second husband) often whistled popular melodies to himself, and never commented on my grandmother's spirituality. He repaired televisions and radios. He seemed to carry inside of himself his own portable radio which he could turn way up whenever he wished to escape Grandmother's backwoods spirituality. Somehow, he was never around when Grandma needed to murder a chicken.

One day Grandmother announced that we, she and I, were going on a picnic. I was still quite small at the time, but I knew in a way that I couldn't then even begin to articulate that this was special, that she wanted to say something special about the nature of our life together by going on this picnic. By then I had begun to feel at least a bit uneasy about living with this older couple. Not that they weren't good to me, they were. But already I had begun to believe that this was not how things were meant to be. Other children's parents were not old people. But I was different, and somehow not right. Here I was again, out on the edge.

It must have been late May or maybe June because the fields were full of flowers and not yet too high for us to cross so easily as we did that day. The little creek was still flowing, too, and by July it was almost always dry. And so we crossed over the stones that someone had placed there, and climbed on up the hill to where a large elm overlooked our land. "Right here. We'll have our picnic here," she said. And so we did, and we ate wonderful cold chicken and fresh potato salad together there under the elm. I remember that it's leaves seemed just as fresh and bright green as the bits of onions and celery in the potato salad. The day was just as perfect as the food. Everything was just right. We ate in silence, and when we had finished, we collected our leftovers, put everything back into the little picnic basket, and walked back home without a word. We had never done anything like this together before, and we never did it again. But I will never forget that one day.

Somewhere beyond the hill where Grandma and I had our picnic was Longview State Hospital, a sanitarium. From time to time, lost souls with a far away, confused, but gentle look in their eyes would wander into our yard from out of the woods. Grandma would ask if they would like something to eat or drink. Sweet tea was what she meant.

Sometimes she would make them a chicken sandwich. Invariably, she treated these lost individuals with great kindness, as if they were honored guests. Words like "sick" or "dangerous" or "escaped" were never used. Then she would make a call, and my great grandfather and I would sit with them - he would tell them stories about his long years with the Louisville & Nashville Railroad - until a blue station wagon with two white-coated men arrived to take them away.

We never saw the same person twice.

We lived at the edge of things. For long periods we barely seemed part of the real world.

Every so often, a fox would come out of the woods and carry-off one of our chickens.

Morning and night, owls hunted all our fields.

Life encourages many of us to be different. For as long as I can remember, I have felt this way. You too? But maybe we aren't so very different, after all. Maybe we are all pretty much like the Baptists and the chickens, and, yes, even the air-ghosts themselves.

My guess is that most of us believe that we are alone at the edge in some final way; alone between home and the void. Though I once believed this to be true of human life, I no longer feel that it is. To be sure, in some painful ways we are all condemned to be forever unique and alone. The philosopher Martin Heidegger has written that each of us is born as many, but dies as a single one. It's true, life has a way of shaping each and every one of us in a special way. After that first slap on our rear end, none of us experience quite the same schedule of joys and pains. When it comes our time to die, we are likely to be very unique, indeed. But still, I think that we are much more similar to one another than we usually suppose - or want to suppose. Personally, I was greatly relieved to discover this similarity. I remember the great comfort I felt when I first began to understand (in my late teens or early twenties) that others shared my feelings about these matters, and told me that as youngsters they, too, felt as if they were always living at the edge of existence. Interestingly enough, frequently these individuals were from what once seemed like the very center of things to me. Which is to say, they were not necessarily persons who had been marginalized by their life circumstances in any obvious way. But as youngsters they felt isolated or removed from things, nonetheless. This discovery made me feel even better about things. Goodness, maybe we're all in the same boat, I thought. And in fact, I think we are. For all it's great size, our world is made of small waters and tiny words. None of us really stands out or stands off from others as much as he or she feels, thinks or believes. Not even my poor grandmother, singing her cheerless hymns alone in the basement, or conversing alone with herself and her invisible friends in the kitchen, seems half so marginalized to me as she once did.

As the Dalai Lama teaches, all of us - religious liberals, Baptists, chickens, deer mice, the residents of Longview State Hospital, and air-ghosts - want love and happiness, and none of us want to suffer.

From time to time, all of us need the special kindness of some crossing guard or Kiddie's Cop, some Buddha or Christ.

It has taken me a long, painful time even to begin to understand this. What I am struggling to say this morning is that, if we are fortunate, we will find our way - wandering confusedly out of life's woods - to safe places near the edge like this one. Most of you probably found your way here this way. We often pretend otherwise - especially in the fevered ways we organize our religion. We think we are consciously choosing and setting new standards; that we have a better vantage point to see and grasp the truth. But I do not think that life works quite this way. Not really. It seems to me that most of what human beings find and do in life, they find and do another way. We come upon life's meanings or, what is more usual, they come upon us.

Life is this way: This world is full of air-ghosts and murder. Existence and loneliness hunts us down - all of us. But none of us want to suffer. We all want love and happiness. We want a little dignity and compassion before we are asked to leave.

Yes, even Grandma's chickens.

According to the Buddha, knowing this--and showing this--is the only thing that really helps.

If we are fortunate, we will happen upon a little house at the very edge of things. If we are lucky, someone will greet us with sweet tea, freshly made potato salad, and cold chicken sandwiches. A funny old southern gentleman in bright red suspenders will tell us wonderful stories about long journeys and steam engines, and his stories will come to seem so real to us that we will feel the very sway of the caboose, and hear the clicking of the hard wheels along the steel rails.

We will be treated with kindness and dignity - maybe even be taken on a picnic.

Then someone will make a call in our behalf.

We will be given a ride home.

Even now, the station wagon is on its way.

Until then, a few dear souls wait with us somewhere near the edge - with stories, sweet tea, and sandwiches.

(c) Don DeMaio 2012