Ch. 6 Family Cemetery

Chapter 6:  Family Cemetery

If you are just going to read one chapter of this book, this is the one to read. It sums up the reasons that Allen Hunt was unhappy with the Protestant religion and the reasons he found the Catholic Church so meaningful that he completely changed most of his life to join it.

This is one of the longest chapters in the book and it is divided into five sections:

1.       Lessons from a Cemetery with Chickens

2.       Paul’s Lesson To Timothy on Authority

3.       Doctrine by Democracy

4.       Little Agnes

5.       God’s Exit Strategy

In Lessons from a Cemetery with Chickens, he discusses  visiting a Catholic Church in Carrolton, Georgia, and being shocked to see, not only chickens, but hundreds of white crosses planted in the church yard, with a sign that read, “In Memory of the Millions of Children’s Lives ended by Abortion.”  He pointed out that Methodist views on abortion are decided by a convention of elected church members, half lay people, with no theological training, held each four years.  Certain decisions could result in Methodists withholding contributions or leaving the Methodist church, so the Methodist church provides funds to both pro- and anti-abortion groups! He stated the crosses at OLPH Catholic Church in Carrolton literally took his breath away.  He now refers to it as “the family cemetery.” What he learned:  “Upon merely pulling into the parking lot, I encountered the Church who is not afraid to speak the Truth, regardless of the public response or pushback that comes with it.”

In an amusing side note, he describes the priest wearing high top sneakers and a parishioner reading the news paper in one of the back pews during Mass!  My comment:  I am perfectly happy if Monsignor wants to wear sandals or high top sneakers, but I don’t advise anyone to be reading the newspaper in the back of the sanctuary at OLM while he is conducting Mass!

In Paul’s Lessons To Timothy on Authority, he describes how Paul relates to Timothy, in 1^st Timothy and 1^st Corinthians, the basis of the Catholic Church’s authority. It is not the vote of the congregation, the Scripture alone, or each person’s individual interpretation.  It is the tradition, scripture, and teaching authority of the Church based on a six-line hymn Paul wrote to sum up the meaning of Christ, in 1^st Timothy 3:

Jesus

Was revealed…,

Was vindicated…,

Was seen…,

Was proclaimed…,

Was believed…,

Was taken up….

In Doctrine by Democracy, he points out that there is not a core of standard belief in the Methodist church that cannot be challenged by the conventions held every four years. He stated that fundraising was done on a regular basis by those wanting to change the Methodist church versus those wanting it to remain more traditional.  The most well funded and politically connected won.  Over the years, he began to question his role in a faith that involved him as the pastor for serial marriages and marriages of couples he did not even know.  He stated that one of the last straws was when a pastor was approved for a post despite the fact that he had been married five times.  He began to think that his supervisors felt like he could just do whatever he wanted as long as he kept the contributions rolling in.

I think the best section in the whole book is Little Agnes, about Mother Teresa, who answered when she heard God calling her when she was 18, and became a teaching nun.  Then when she was 38, in response to finding a dying woman on the street, started her medical mission.  The power of the Catholic Church and Mother Teresa’s faith can be seen in Allen Hunt’s statement: “Fifty years after she met that first dying woman in the gutter, more than 3,000 women in 517 missions in 100 countries served alongside  Agnes.”  He again shows the impressive power of the Catholic Church when he tells us of Mother Teresa’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast at the Clinton White House in 1994:

If we accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill? How can we persuade a woman not to have an abortion?  As always, we must persuade with love. Love means being willing to give until it hurts.  Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want.

Mother Teresa was to Allen Hunt a personification of what the Catholic Church is:  a living example of the power of the Church’s moral teaching and tradition.

Finally in God’s Exit Strategy, he writes about his transition to the Catholic Church after he pondered the fragmentation of the Protestants into 33,000 different groups each claiming to have the ultimate truth all based “solely on Scripture.”  He wanted to be a member of the Church that used “a little gathering of crosses” to speak “a message of life to a culture of death.”