Years ago at one of those pastors schools held at the University of Richmond, the late Stuart Grizzard, a renowned and beloved Virginia Baptist minister, said something which stuck. He reminded pastors that those who were parents needed to be mindful of their parental commitments and responsibilities.
He said that one day when he was a pastor in Norfolk there came to his study a young man who was down and out. When the visitor introduced himself, he immediately recognized the family name and remembered that the man’s father had been one of the leading Baptist ministers in the state. Grizzard was curious as to what had happened to the young man. The visitor said that his father never had any time for him. The minister-father had experienced all of the demands which a pastorate entails, but his son never felt that he received guidance and attention.
Fred Anderson
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It was a sad story but not the only one. While gathering a deceased minister’s papers for our denominational archives, I commented upon the minister’s voluminous and detailed journals. His son simply said, “Would that he had spent as much time with me as he did his journals.”
Another son complained that his father never took the family on a real vacation trip. “We only went to wherever the Southern Baptist Convention was meeting.” A hundred good excuses could be made for every one of these situations. The minister-father was overworked and underpaid, was a workaholic, was obsessed with the never-ending and seldom-satisfied needs of parishioners. But excuses don’t heal hurts or fill voids.
George Braxton Taylor, who was pastor of Enon Baptist Church outside Roanoke and who is best remembered in history as the founder of the Sunbeams, the children’s missionary organization, had a strained relationship with his only child, Cabell. Taylor’s wife died soon after giving birth to a son and he had to rear the child as best he could.When the terrible teens came, the boy was sent to a military school.
Cabell entered Richmond College, a fabled Baptist school with long family connections. His great-grandfather, James B. Taylor, had helped raise funds just to begin the school. His grandfather, George Boardman Taylor, and his father were graduates. Imagine the pressure placed upon the boy to succeed. Ultimately, he quit because he came down with tuberculosis.
Cabell spent time in a sanatorium. He sufficiently recovered to take one job after another. At one point he wrote a story. When it actually was purchased for publication, the young man’s father was ecstatic. He later wrote that his son “gave promise of worthy authorship.” It likely was the only real accomplishment Cabell made which actually pleased his father.
When one considers the family pedigree, it is no wonder that Cabell felt overwhelmed. His fourth great-grandfather was president of Yale. His great-grandfather was the first head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Foreign Mission Board and a man known all across the denomination. His grandparents were the first Southern Baptist missionaries to Italy. His father was the author of several books. Indeed, the family was full of published authors. The burden of legacy must have been heavy.
Tragically, Cabell’s TB returned with a vengeance. He moved to the southwestern United States for his health and eventually entered a sanatorium. The members of Enon Church knew the prognosis and they provided a money gift so that the father could make the long train trip to visit his dying son.
George tried his best to pack a heap of living in that visit in June 1922. He got books from the public library for Cabell to read. He visited his son’s doctor, who considered Cabell “a pretty sick man but not beyond hope.” He sat beside his son’s bed and listened to confessions of transgressions. He slipped away to attend Sunday services, but on the last Sunday, he stayed all day with his son. Cabell asked his father to read the 23rd Psalm. When the time came for parting, George promised to try and return in September.
Instead, in October, the news came that Cabell had died. For the second time in the year, George took the long train ride to the Southwest where he claimed his son’s body. On the sad trip home, the father kept checking on the coffin in the baggage car. Cabell was buried beside his mother in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond. The next day would have been Cabell’s 30th birthday and the father confided to his diary: “Oh, how I have reviewed all these years!”
George White McDaniel was another prominent minister of yesteryear who also had strained relations with his only son. Now virtually forgotten, McDaniel was one of the most prominent ministers in the United States — pastor of First Baptist Church in Richmond and president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is the subject of a new biography which will be published this summer by the Virginia Baptist Historical Society.
His son, John, favored baseball over books and his parents sent him to a military school. John and the headmaster were at constant loggerheads. A prominent member of First Church urged McDaniel to tread lightly with the boy. He was “just sowing wild oats,” cautioned the man who shared that he had lost his own sons’ affections for being too harsh and restrictive.
Surprisingly, John managed to graduate from prestigious Princeton University. In the Princeton yearbook, John listed his father’s occupation as “author” and his own religion as “Episcopal,” although at the time father was a Baptist pastor and president of the Southern Baptist Convention. In a revealing letter to a friend, the father wrote: “If I had it to go over again, I would be my boy’s chum and have him with me as much as possible.”
All of these illustrations happened to be about ministers, yet it isn’t only ministers who sometimes fall short on fatherhood. Laymen are just as guilty. Fathers and sons, fathers and daughters need to develop satisfying and healthy relationships. Life is short and there are too many sad stories.
Fred Anderson ( [email protected]) is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and the Center for Baptist Heritage & Studies.