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AN AFTERNOON IN THE SUN
Derrell E. Emmerson
The sun of that summer afternoon had never warmed me so deeply. To the core of my bones I sensed a glow that still resonates when I think of that day. It was a time of real human connection not only with another person, but with an adult in my life who led me to the threshold of the emotional connection of fellowship.
My grandfather Em(m)erson was a very old man when I was born. He was 81. He had long since given up working the hardscrabble farm that was his last acreage. He had already raised a family of 9 children all of whom lived on the edge of poverty all their lives. Those were times when the whole family was required to labor at scratching a living from the depleted soil of a farm that had been over stressed in an era that is famous for the death of the small farm and economic depression.
When I knew granddad Emerson he was a wrinkled wisp of a man who sat by the wood stove, mused silently when alone, interjected a word or two here and there when others were talking and chewed on his ever present plug of tobacco. He was an interesting figure but not exactly a paint-worthy subject for a Norman Rockwell creation. He was too grass-roots, too earthy and anachronistic for the cover of Saturday Evening Post.
For the first ten years of my life my grandfather lived on the rustic family farm. My uncle Wellons had come home after a probe into the outer world to take care of the farm and both of his parents. Then my grandmother died. That left my grandfather, who sat alone large portions of the day while my uncle was in the fields. In his senile moments my grandfather often wandered off the homestead trying to find his way back to the home of his childhood. That is when the rest of the family stepped in to help.
My grandfather spent the last of his days, the winter months, at the home of his youngest son, my uncle Harold. I believe this was because Uncle Harold had a new home with a furnace. However, I am not familiar with the nuances that led to this arrangement. I only remember well that spring and summer of 1947 when granddad Emerson lived with us. By that time he had lost almost all of his teeth, chewed less of his beloved plug tobacco, was eating soft foods and bread soaked in coffee, moved about with the ever present walking stick and spent large portions of the day sitting in the shade or sun in our back yard.
The day I remember so well is an afternoon in the sun. It was one of his lucid days and one of my boring ones. I had been secretly assigned to watch after him but I didn’t know what to do. This was when he began to talk, telling me tales that fascinated me. They were stories that I remembered not only because they were interesting, but because for the first time in my life an adult talked to me as if he appreciated my responses.
Whatever happened to me psychologically was the beginning of the mysterious connection between people that I have experienced many times since. I can only explain it as a social awakening or birth. I liked this connection and its accompanying sensations. I not only liked it, but the experience has been repeated and lingered from one relationship to another.
On that day, I think I began to realize that I was part of something larger than my self, that this sense I had was a sense of wholeness and that the days of being an alien, of being condescended to, of being only an object, and of personal isolation were over. I had discovered something familial and mysterious that lingers beneath the surface of every human inter-relationship, and I wanted more of it.
Since those days, I have grown up and discovered that what I experienced has been long ago defined in the Bible: the fellowship of Christians. It is not only described in the many dissertations on love in the New Testament but it is defined in the descriptions of how the members of the early church responded to one another in the days of the purity of their Godly passion.
This fellowship, I discovered, takes an experience that is an awakening of shared brokenness, of need, of mutual dilemma and vulnerability. It is a relationship resulting from appreciation for others, of their uniqueness, of their power to contribute, to give and to love back. It is a relationship of common focus. It is a focus that grows out of the worship of Someone grander than us who has stamped our natures with His own. It is a tie with others through the One who calls us back to the connection that is broken—by our reactionary resistance to love because we are afraid of being disappointed and wounded.
I must admit that much I have described here is an ideal. However, it is like all other ideals that grow out of an experience. It is an ideal—of which experience is verification. It is something which I have tasted, experienced in varying degrees with many Christian people and something which I first experienced that summer afternoon long ago when my grandfather and I had my first conversation as adult to adult. That day in the sun got into to my bones.
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