Words about God matter most

Roy Cantwell was never seen at a church.

Roy carried a wound inflicted by one sentence spoken by a minister when he was 7 years old. Roy Cantwell became my dad. Roy wasn’t the only Cantwell who hated the church. Roy’s dad, Edison, did too.

The story begins in the Littell Cemetery where generations of Cantwells have been buried since the late 1800s. The cemetery shared land with the Fairmount Church, a simple, iconic white clapboard building, erected in 1887 on the southeastern Kansas prairie.

The Cantwells claimed the Fairmount Church and the Littell Cemetery as their own. The cedar trees lining the fence rows stood watching over the living and the dead. It was here, on what some affectionately called “God’s Little Acre,” where they worshiped and baptized and married and buried.

When the fields and livestock and weather would allow, Edison and my grandmother Ellie and their five children faithfully attended the Fairmount Church. The Cantwell homestead sat atop a hill almost straddling the Missouri state line. To get to church, they walked as a family the quarter mile west, down the hill, on the proverbial “dirt road.”

“June 18, 1932, was the day the Cantwells’ relationship with church changed forever.”

June 18, 1932, was the day the Cantwells’ relationship with church changed forever.

It was six days after the great love of my granddad’s life, 36-year-old Ellie Cantwell, died. After the ceremonial dirt was tossed on Ellie’s casket, Edison had one question. He approached Rev. Carpenter asking, “Why did Ellie have to die?”

Rev. Carpenter replied, “It was God’s will.”

My grandad had asked the last question Rev. Carpenter ever would hear from him. “What damn God would want to kill my sweet Ellie?” Grandad turned, not waiting for any response from his now former minister, and motioned to his motherless children to follow him up the hill. He never went back.

Words matter. Words about God matter most.

Delyte Cantwell was always at church.

Twenty-four years after my grandmother’s funeral, the Beverly Hills Baptist Church in Independence, Mo., was the place where everything would change for my parents. Delyte didn’t just warm a pew on Sunday morning. She was present on Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesday nights or you could say, “anytime the church doors were open.”

Some might even call her an accidental saint. She was no theologian, and she wasn’t one bit concerned that she couldn’t spell “theologian,” but she loved her church. It would have been an odd day to be at BHBC and not see Delyte. Delyte Cantwell was my mom.

Twenty-four years after that life-altering day in Littell Cemetery, Roy and Delyte decided to start their adoption process after years of hoping and dreaming of having a child. The Willows Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., was where couples like my mom and dad had a place to redirect their hopes and dreams toward becoming parents.

“It also was a place of heartbreak — a place where women arrived pregnant and went home childless.”

It also was a place of heartbreak — a place where women arrived pregnant and went home childless.

The social worker at The Willows offhandedly advised my parents with a wink that if they were members of a church, their chances of adopting a child would be greatly enhanced. This was going to be a problem. Mom was a “church widow.”

There was a ritual at the Cantwell house whenever Mom left for church. “Honey, would you like to go to church with me today?” she would ask. Dad would lower his newspaper and reply, “Not today, dear.” As she was leaving, he would always hear, “I will miss you, dear, and the church will, too.”

Years later, years after Dad was buried in the Littell Cemetery and before the long goodbye of my mom’s fight with Alzheimer’s began, my sweet, accidental saint of a mother told me every time she left home for church alone, “it made my heart sore.”

The next time Mom and Dad met with The Willows social worker, she told the Cantwells, again, this time without a wink, that if they wanted a baby, they both needed to be members of a church. The Willows’ social worker did what the love of a wife couldn’t.

Mom made an appointment with her pastor to ask what Roy needed to do to become a church member. More than anything, they hoped it would bring them one step closer to adopting a baby. Thirsten Healer was the pastor of BHBC. He was no Rev. Carpenter.

Healer spoke with my parents, mainly my dad, during that appointment about Jesus and church membership. My dad remarked to my mom on the way home from Healer’s office, “I believe that Rev. Healer fella actually knows Jesus.”

My mom said later she looked over at her husband in disbelief as she saw the answer to years of what she felt were seemingly unheard, unanswered prayers.

Dad stood up on the first Sunday he had ever set foot in a church since his mother’s funeral, during the singing of the hymn of invitation and walked down the aisle at BHBC and shook hands with his new friend and told him and all the people who were in attendance, most with wide eyes and gaping mouths not believing what they were seeing, that Roy Cantwell wanted Jesus and church membership.

Pastor Healer asked Mom to come up and stand next to Dad, and as she stood up from her pew and began her way to the front, barely able to see as she wiped away a never-ending stream of tears, walking the walk she never let herself believe she would ever walk. Two weeks later, Dad was baptized by his friend, and as he came up from the baptismal waters, his glasses were askew, as Pastor Healer pronounced, “You will never be the same.”

Mom called The Willows’ social worker the next day after Dad’s new membership. His church membership was the final piece of the Cantwells’ adoption puzzle. Six months later, I rode to my new home from The Willows with Roy and Delyte in their 1955 Chevy.

Over countless cups of stiff black coffee in our tiny living room, Healer helped my dad see that Rev. Carpenter’s words weren’t simply mistaken. They were abusive. The aptly named Pastor Healer continued to tell his new friend it wasn’t God’s will that Ellie died.

I do not remember Pastor Healer, but I will never forget him.

Dad continued to drink black coffee with the pastor in our tiny living room, and then, as the temperature warmed up, they drank coffee in our driveway, leaning up against the pastor’s car, which served as an altar. Mom would bake shortbread cookies and quietly bring them out to Dad and his pastor. She was no longer a “church widow.”

Dad was now sitting on Sunday mornings next to the great love of his life. Someone finally had told him a better story about God. Not all stories have happy endings. For a while, the wound began to heal.

Then Healer left Beverly Hills Baptist Church. Dad believed the pastor had been pushed out. Whether it happened that way no longer matters. Dad believed it, and he never trusted another church.

I was in elementary school when I was baptized after I had walked the aisle to declare my love for Jesus during a Sunday night service, carried to the altar by the voices of the BHBC faithful singing the second verse of “Just as I Am.” Mom played every card in her wife deck to coerce Dad to attend my baptism, which he finally agreed to, begrudgingly.

He sat quietly through the service. We never spoke about it. My baptism was the last time Dad ever entered the BHBC doors.

Dad and I were as close as a father and son could possibly be, and our closeness helped bridge the vast differences between us. We talked about everything but rarely about God, and when we did, only in passing. He never understood my fascination with God.

For years I wondered why my call to ministry never resembled the stories other ministers told. Mine began before I was born. The answer had been waiting in a Kansas cemetery decades before I arrived.

Outside the church, my father looked remarkably like the kind of church member every church hopes to have. He was the person mowing the yard of the single mother next door and loaning his mower to his unemployed friend down the street and helping pour concrete for the young husband across the street who didn’t know what he was doing.

For years I envied ministers who could point to one dramatic call story. Why not? The only answer is I have been petrified, almost paralyzed at times, that I might be seen as a “Rev. Carpenter.”

Words matter. Words about God matter most.

Rev. Carpenter may have been sincere. Sincerity doesn’t redeem bad theology. This one sentence spoken beside my grandmother’s grave wounded my family for three generations.

The origin story of my call began beside my grandmother Ellie’s grave, beneath the Kansas cedars. My calling has been helping people recover from sentences like “It was God’s will” to “Everything happens for a reason” to “God needed another angel” — sentences spoken by people who sincerely believed they were speaking for God.

 

Tom Cantwell is the chaplain at Baptist Health Deaconess Hospital and serves on the board of directors of the ABP Foundation, which supports Baptist News Global, and is a graduate of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and The University of Tulsa. He and his wife, Christy, live in Madisonville, Ky.