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The Church of the Redeemer

October 15, 2006

Lloyd Dahmen 

Good Morning:

I thought I might spend a few minutes talking about the spiritual journey that has led me home to the Redeemer.  It has been a winding path, parts of which some of you may have also traveled.   When I was a kid, long, long ago, I was initially pushed to church out of fear.  Yahweh the God of Abraham and Isaac ruled my thoughts, and I was sure that retribution would surely be visited upon me for all of my self perceived transgressions.  In retrospect, I am relieved to observe that I wasn’t nearly all that bad a kid, but in the beginning, boy ! was I worried; at least  enough to present myself scrubbed and ready to go each Sunday morning. We had some kindly neighbors who took it upon themselves to drive me and my middle brother to the Haskell Flats Evangelical United Brethren Church located four miles up the valley from our farm in western New York.  At first, it didn't occur to me to question why my parents never attended that little church perched near the banks of the Haskell Creek.  Nor did I ponder why they, and my oldest brother as well, managed to completely escape God's wrath.

In time, in fact fairly quickly, I came to realize that I too was probably not in imminent danger of retribution.  My fear was replaced by the oft repeated words of a very patient and kindly Sunday school teacher: God is love.  These words were also printed, seemingly just for my benefit, on a small heart-shaped cardboard cutout, covered with blue flocking.  I kept this small reminder tacked to the bulletin board next to my bed.  These were happy and simple years for me.  The toughest part was the lengthy sermons made all the more boring by the incredibly slow pace of the red sweep second hand of the large round clock that hung on the left wall of the church.

Fast forwarding over several many years and two continents, as a teenager, I came to look to the Lord as my personal provider.  It was comforting, even exciting, to think that all I had to do was to ask, pray hard enough, and my desires would be granted.  Initially this approach seemed to work quite well, but soon, as my wants grew, I started to discover that life was not that simple.  More and more of my earnest requests went unfulfilled.  Surely, I thought, it wasn't that I hadn't prayed hard enough.  Perhaps I wasn't asking for the right thing, and it never occurred to me that my wants had far exceeded my needs.  This was a very confusing time for me, but instead of rejecting religion entirely, I put it aside, perhaps for another time in my life.  This was an easy thing to do because many of my classmates were doing the same.

Again, fast forwarding, this time many, many years through college and a few lost years afterward, I found myself in Chestnut Hill, married to Gene, and the father of young Lloyd.  I certainly would not want to minimize these two events because Gene, Lloyd, and in turn, my daughter, Laura, are most dear to me.  Rather, in retrospect, all of these events occurred under the ever watchful eye of the Lord, and I was not aware of His plan or what He had in store for me.  When young Lloyd was less than a week old, a truly amazing woman took over our life.  Catherine had been spending a day a week in our house restoring order and cleanliness to our chaos.  She was a very stately woman of color who had an unshakeable faith in the Lord.  She moved with a certain slow grace even though both her knees were locked nearly straight by arthritis.  If ever there was a soul with a “home free” ticket to heaven, as illustrated in this morning’s scripture lesson, it was Catherine.  She also had very definite ideas of how things should be done, whether it was scrubbing a pot, or caring for a baby.  She was particularly fond of, as she put it, boy babies.  So when she learned that Gene had given birth to a boy, she announced that she would be giving up all of her other jobs so she could come to or house every weekday.  We had no idea how this would go over with our next door neighbors, the Hansels, who had been depending on Catherine for several years.  But the Hansels, bless their hearts, understood, and they also knew there was nothing they could do because Catherine’s mind was already made up.   Within a few months Catherine also announced that since Lloyd would soon need to be baptized we should establish some ties with a proper church. 

Catherine had moved from Panama along with her husband, a retired cook who had worked for the Panama Canal, to join her daughter in Boston.  Before moving, she asked her rector in Panama to recommend a church for her in Boston.  He suggested St Paul’s probably because it was a Cathedral and hence the nominal home of the Dioceses.  Catherine’s papers were sent to St Paul’s and she dutifully began attending.  In turn, Catherine suggested that the parents of her young charge should do likewise.  And so it was that we started trekking into Boston every Sunday, and that young Lloyd was duly baptized by Dean Charles Buck.  Two years later Laura followed suit.  However, back then the Cathedral did not offer child care, and Lloyd would soon be needing a Sunday School.  I knew the very first time that we attended the Redeemer that it was the right place for us.  The Sunday school was bustling and it reminded me of Haskell Flats.  It felt like a family, and I already knew many members of the parish as neighbors.  Soon I found myself on one of John Finley’s work groups painting the old parish hall on pleasant summer’s evenings.  Don Bitsberger’s avuncular sermons crept up on me like an old friend. 

A lot has happened in the thirty years since we joined the Redeemer.  Catherine passed away, and we had her memorial service right here at the Redeemer.  Our children have grown and moved out.  The Redeemer has had four rectors, three interims rectors, and an incredible number of associates and assistants to whom we became deeply attached yet we had to bid them a loving farewell as they moved on in their own careers.  As I look about the church, I see a flood of wonderful people who have traveled with me on this faith journey; we have shared our many joys, our disappointments, and some stunning tragedies.  Most of all, I am warmed by the presence of my oldest and best friend Dick Tucker who has found his way into our midst.