What Do I Have That I Did Not Receive?
Reflections on the Unmerited Gifts I've Received from Others
Alasdair MacIntyre declares in After Virtue that "we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co--authors of our own narratives." Co-authorship can entail percentages both great and small. I believe that, as we grow older, our own side of the ledger shrinks. The proportion may fall even into single digits, so great does our sense of indebtedness increase. The Apostle Paul presses home this point to the Christians at Corinth in the sharpest terms: "Who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?" (1 Cor. 4:7).
Receiving the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature gives me occasion to enumerate some of the things I have been given beyond all deserving. Permit me, therefore, to mark five major moments when I received markedly more than I merited.
I. The Blessings of My Upbringing
I regard it as a blessing beyond all adequate thanksgiving to have been reared amid modest circumstances in the rural South—namely, in Linden, population 1,714, a -county-seat town set deep in the piney woods of northeastern Texas. Though I never knew poverty, I knew people who didn't have enough to eat or decent clothes to wear. Indeed, I knew one white family whose only flooring was the bare earth. My maternal grandparents were sharecroppers, constantly on the move to escape creditors. My grandfather, Jim Walker, was never able to follow his desire to be a teacher. Yet he made his silent protest against the sharecropping system by refusing to train any of his four daughters to plow. In that radical refusal he gave my mother, and eventually me, the desire to be a
teacher.
Both my father and my mother were the first members of their families to receive education beyond the tenth grade—the maximum level offered in small-town schools. After two years of sub-college, they became full-time teachers in rural one- and two-room schools when they were only 19. They married in 1930, hardly an auspicious year. Not until a dozen years later was I born, in 1942, an only child. That small datum—"the unbought grace of life"—has produced an unbroken line of gifts received far more than deserved.
My parents were public-school teachers, and they earned as much respect as the local lawyers and doctors and ministers. My best teachers—Annie Mae Cameron, Margaret Lovelace, Faye Wadsworth—were not content merely to keep order. They knew their subjects—reading, English, biology—and they taught them well. I wanted to become a person worthy of their regard. I wanted most specially to follow the path of Brother Joe Gilmore, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Linden. Unlike most of our less-educated ministers, Gilmore was a Baylor graduate who studied his Bible and books, prepared his sermons in advance, and preached with both eloquence and passion.
These Baptists in this small town thus gave me the most important thing in the world: the Gospel of Jesus Christ and life in his Body called the Church. I owe them an unpayable debt.
II. The Blessings of My College Years
Because of Gilmore's sterling example, I felt a call to gospel ministry. This meant that, like Gilmore, I wanted to attend Baylor. But when I graduated from high school at age 16 in 1959, Baylor was far too expensive for my parents to underwrite the studies of a preacher-boy down there at Jerusalem on the Brazos, as Waco was called. With the aid of a valedictorian's full tuition scholarship of $150, I matriculated at a much lesser school, East Texas State College in Commerce, sixty miles east of Dallas. Some of my teachers were first-rate, some were dull as dirt, but all were overworked—teaching five classes per term, plus six weeks of summer school.
Yet one of them stood out. His name was Paul Wells Barrus, an Iowan who had come south to escape the harsh winters of Des Moines. He was not only the most learned member of the faculty, the best teacher by far, and a scholar gifted with the largest mastery of languages and cultures; he was also the deepest Christian, a man who embodied sanctity. Yet there was a problem: he was a devout Roman Catholic, the only one on the faculty. I had never even met a Catholic; in fact, there wasn't a single Catholic church in my home county. The divine irony here is keen indeed. Had I realized my desire to attend Baylor, I would never have encountered such a teacher, for, at that time, Baylor prohibited Catholics from teaching on its faculty.
Ralph C. Wood was, until his retirement, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. His books include The Comedy of Redemption (University of Notre Dame Press), Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans), and Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God (Baylor University Press).
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