My grandaddy spent a lifetime as a devoted bird watcher. His greatest moment came late in life when he and his partner identified, deep in the Everglades, a bird long thought extinct.
Although the find was verified and published in National Audubon Society news, he never revealed the exact location of the rare and fragile bird.
Ethel is like that bird. She would never allow me to write about her, so I have changed her name and a few details of her life.
And I am like my grandaddy, except I am a saint watcher, and Ethel is my rarest find to date.
Where I found Ethel
I was pastoring in rural Indiana when I met Ethel. She was still living in her little house then. But the talk was all of nursing homes. I can still see the off-white shingles and tin roof on her four-room house. The living room held a big furnace in one corner, snapshots of her family, scattered books, and a garish painting of Jesus, his heart shining from his chest in a sunburst that filled the frame.
I asked her about the snapshots, and she told me of her family. One by one she pointed to the old black-and-whites of handsome young men. This son had died behind the wheel of a truck in 1937. That one never came back from the war. She had buried three of her four sons. She had lost her husband years ago.
Ethel could not talk about her family without baring her soul. The deepest wounds life had inflicted hung there on her walls.
All I had to do was listen.
She had little formal education, but she loved to read. And she wrote gospel poems, metrical lyrics like Fanny Crosby might have written:
Where the little stream meanders
Through the meadow in the wood,
There’s a place that’s very special
To my soul;
It is there I talk to Jesus
When the storms of life descend
And He meets with me
And straightaway I am whole.
When she discovered I appreciated her gift, she would close her eyes and recite her poems. I wasn’t listening to an old woman chant devotional poetry-I was observing a saint at prayer. How could I help but respect this woman who had suffered so much, whose sorrows had built a faith that my easy youth could only touch from afar.
How she loved that little house! Two years later, failing eyesight forced her to give up her reading, and her home. When she moved, she gave me a set of bookends that now sit in my office.
Ethel’s secrets
Our visits continued as she adjusted to life in the nursing home. When I walked into her room, she would stare up at me from her rocking chair, squinting through the fog of her failing vision to identify the newcomer.
“Ethel!” was all I had to say.
“Oh-it’s you!” she would reply. “I was hoping you would come. Come here, hold my hand.”
Even pastoring a small congregation in rural Indiana, I was busy with many things. I chaired committees, directed boards, presided over our county’s council of churches. Ethel could have fallen through the cracks of a busy schedule. But the lessons life had taught her in her pain seemed more important to me than most of my administrative workload.
She would then close her eyes and recite her latest composition. I took down the words on my note pad to publish in our church newsletter.
One day Ethel handed me an old, brittle newspaper clipping. Dated from the turn of the century, it told a lurid story of rape and tragedy. Some ninety years ago, a little nearby town had taken a handicapped girl under its wing. She had no parents. She was a dwarf, and she never progressed beyond the mentality of a three- to five-year-old.
A drifter had come through town once, riding the railroad. He stayed a few days. He raped the young ward of the town and then disappeared on the next train.
“Those were my parents,” Ethel confided.
Then she spilled the story of her life to me in earnest. Her mother, the handicapped dwarf, had died in childbirth, being far too small to deliver a baby. Ethel was raised by an uncle some of the time, by friends around town for the rest.
She told me of her uncle’s insistence she marry a man she did not love, and her compliance. When her first husband died, she was alone, raising four boys. Well-intentioned officials tried to take her children away as wards of the state-but she refused to give them up. A kindly neighbor took the struggling family in and went on to become Ethel’s second husband.
She spoke of heart-stopping knocks on the door, policemen reporting the death of first one, then another of her boys, and of the son who came back from the war a cripple. Bitter and broken, he abused her and himself until he died an alcoholic.
When the time came for me to leave that parish, Ethel was my hardest farewell. She said she remembered the pain of sending her sons off to war, not knowing if they would come back-and this was harder.
I promised to come back.
I think of Ethel now. I see her there in her rocking chair-her smile, her outstretched hands, her delighted “Oh-it’s you!”
My holy hobby is saintwatching. I look for saints, listen to them, enjoy them, pray for them. I touch their lives by letting them touch mine.
-Charles Denison
Second Presbyterian Church
Newark, Ohio
Copyright © 1993 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
