CHAPTER I I
CHAPTER I I
THREE HOUSES,
THREE
TABERNACLES
Does the Lord of heaven live in the houses of Earth? The prophecies of Isaiah ("Behold, a virgin shall ... call his name Immanuel" (7:14)) and the Book of Revelation ("Now at last God has his dwelling among men! He will dwell among them and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them" (Rev. 21:3, NEB)) are fulfilled everyday in the homes of those who love God. I've had some glimpses of this lately, and have been blessed by seeing the presence of God in the homes I've visited.
Scene 1: An apartment in Boston. The young wife is pregnant. Her husband, a stock analyst, has made up his mind to get a dog. Not a manageable, apartmentsized dog, but a nice bouncy big golden retriever that he can run and roughhouse with on the Common. "Oh dear," she says to me, "what am I going to do? I'm having this baby, and the apartment is very small."
We had talked on other occasions about the biblical principle of a wife's submission to her husband (see Eph. 5:22; Col. 3:18). There are times, we agreed, when without disobedience to that command, a wife may offer an alternative viewpoint for her husband's consideration. "I don't want to be a shrew," the young woman said. "The dog and the baby in the apartment with mecan I cope?" I wondered if she could. I felt very sympathetic to her.
So we prayed about it, asking God to give His answer. That very afternoon she called me. "Instant solution! Mike has decided not to get the dog until we can move to a house in the country. And I hadn't even said a word, hadn't suggested that I wasn't sure we could manage! Just wanted you to praise the Lord with me, and Mike doesn't need to know."
Scene 2: Early morning. A polished tile veranda on a hillside overlooking a turquoise sea. There is a cool breeze; birds twitter, chirp and dart among the flowers. Heavy perfume rises from the garden. Two black men are talking quietly nearby, speaking the island patois that I cannot understand. From the open door leading into the cool dark dining room comes a man. He is a big man with big shoulders, broad chest, black hair, and a scarred and deeply lined face. He is wearing jeans and a white shirt this morning, not the black in which the public is accustomed to seeing him. He is Johnny Cash. We talk of the beauty of the morning, of what he's been reading in the Bible, and of June, his wife. I speak of how lovely she is (I met her only yesterday). "She's pure," John says. "That woman has a pure heart." John Carter Cash runs out of the house. He is seven years old, the apple of his father's eye, and the three of us go for a ride in a golf cart before breakfast.
Breakfast is served at a glass table on the east veranda by an elegant black man in a white coat. There are six kinds of fruit, including naseberries, an unimpressive brown-skinned sphere with a pulp delectable enough for the gods. The other guests are Billy and Ruth Graham. After breakfast we all go to the beach John and June, Billy and Ruth, John Carter and Mrs. Kelley who takes care of him, and I. People's faces everywhere light up at once with astonishment and joyisn't that Johnny Cash? Wow! And-wow again-that's Billy Graham! All of them will carry for the rest of their lives a little of the glow.
Finally, two teenagers disengage themselves from a knot of friends. "Mr. Graham, could we have your autograph?" "Sure. Are those your friends over there? Tell them all to come over." They are ecstatic. I take a color photo (and wonder a week later why it didn't occur to me to take the address of one of the kids. How thrilled they would have been to have a picture of themselves with a famous man!). He is gracious and kind to them. When they go I ask if he is ever irritated by autograph hunters. He laughs. "It isn't a very big thing to do for people, is it?" John says that before he turned his life over to Jesus he was sometimes rude. He got sick of publicity and swarms of hangers-on. "But I'm not living for Johnny Cash now. It has to be different."
Evening. We've had dinner and are sitting in the living room. Gleaming dark wood floors and woodwork. White sofa and chairs, with Wedgewood blue cording. Pale blue draperies, white walls, Oriental rugs and a grand piano. John Carter sleeps, sprawled on the sofa beside me in the blissful relaxation of childhood. Eight Jamaicans are there with us-cooks, maids and security men. It is the birthday of Miss Vicki, a cook. June has given her a little collection of presents, and Miss Vicki is asked to lead us in prayer. She does so. Without fuss, without hesitation or self-consciousness, she prays for all of us, calling the Cashes and Grahams her best friends, speaking to God of her responsibility to welcome them and help them, speaking then of the Holy Spirit, asking Him to bless us, bless her church and bless our communion together.
"`Nothing in my hand I bring,"' she quotes, "`simply to thy cross I cling."' Then, "I'm like a leaf that the wind blows through. Blow, Holy Spirit."
John strums his guitar, talks a little bit about some of the experiences of his life, and goes into a song, "Why me, Lord?"-a favorite of the prisoners, he says, and they always cry when he sings it. Then he sings "One Day at a Time," and "What on earth will you do for heaven's sake?" The servants sing, too. One by one, opening an old hymnal, they stand and sing, "Peace, peace," "Into my 'eart" (islanders seem to drop h's), "Amazing Grace." Johnny, the "Man in Black," once a drug addict, many times a prisoner, a hard and selfdestructive man, listens. He knows well what those simple familiar words mean: "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me." It includes all of us.
Billy reads the Bible-a harmony of the Gospels, giving the Maundy Thursday story since that is what day it is. We pray together. Then June, her great deep eyes earnest, her voice gentle, talks. "Christ dwells in this house," she says, "I know He does. And these people know it." She gestures toward the staff. "When you're here, Elisabeth, you are covered. We're all covered-Billy and Ruth, John Carter, Kelley, John, you and I. We're covered by prayer. These people pray for us, don't you?" The Jamaicans nod. "Yes, mum."
John sings some more at our request. "A Boy Named Sue," "Welfare Cadillac," "I Walk the Line." At 9:30 P.M. Billy gets up from his chair. "I don't know about y'all, but for me it's bedtime." Everybody gets up.
Ruth and I pause with June and look down at John Carter on the sofa. "I want to tell you about this little boy," June says. "One time John and I were lying in bed just praising the Lord, thanking the Lord, lifting our hands in praise. John Carter was lying there with us, and he lifted up his little hands and said, `Mama, I think I'm gonna cry!' We all wanted to cry, we were so happy."
During the night a shutter bangs, a dog howls, rain thunders on the roof and my sunburn wakes me each time I turn over, but I don't mind. It gives me a chance to luxuriate in the huge antique four-poster, to ponder the unthinkable fact that I am in the Cashes' house in Jamaica, a house built in 1740 by the Barretts of Wimpole Street, now the home of a man utterly transformed by the grace of God, and a woman whose prayers followed him in some of the dark years. ("I wore out the floor praying for him!" June said.)
Next morning we sit by the pool. "I had this passion, this consuming passion, to do something with my life, something besides being a wife and mother," June tells us. "I wanted to be a star. I ruined two marriages because of it and I know it. Well-I gave it all up. I gave it up to the Lord, this selfish ambition, and now I have a husband who adores me." (It is obvious that he does.) "So I tell my daughters (and we've got six of them), `You do like the Bible says. You submit. You submit to your husband. If he tells you to get down and scrub floors, buddy, you hit it! On all fours if necessary!"'
Scene 3: A doctors' house in San Francisco. In the bedroom are three cribs with three little boys, giggling, cooing, smiling toothlessly, jumping up and down with glee as their mother and I come in. All are about a year old, but they are not triplets. They are adopted and their parents are middle-aged, both of them doctors, the mother nearly 50. I watch the boys being fed. They get nothing out of baby-food jars. Elizabeth Paeth Lasker (always "Bunny" to me) prepares it herself-pureed chicken and spinach, done in a blender, for lunch, apples and cheese for afternoon snack, salad (salad!) for supper. She lines up three high chairs and starts scooping spoonfuls from a single dish with a single spoon. It is one, two, three, one, two, three. If Number Two spits it out, Number Three gets it. Everybody loves it, everybody is relaxed and exuberant. "Aren't they gorgeous?" Bunny keeps saying. I have never been in a happier home.
Her letter to me last week says, "The children have all had their first birthday now, and so endeth the most eventful and beautiful year of our lives. What a privilege to be this close to these little living, growing persons! There is a constant sacrament of praise as I go through the repeated acts involved in caring for three active little boys. Evelyn Underhill's idea that every temporal act that fills the moments of our day are not just a'sort' of sacrament but are in fact the real sacrament. And since so much of my day is spent in doing little repetitive activities that seem so mean and small, it is somehow cheering and reassuring to think of each of these (scraping messes off rugs, rerolling entire rolls of toilet paper, changing diapers, washing clothes, making bread, scrubbing sticky floors, scouring high chairs, ad infinitum) as a sacrament of praise and of worth (incredible!) to the master."
"The tabernacle of God is with men" (Rev. 21:3) and, in the words of John Keble,