I'm going to just read from a little bit of a chapter
from my book American Gospel, which
is really about my own relationship
with fundamentalism.
I'm not a scholar like everybody else who's been in this series,
so I really can't say scholarly things about fundamentalism.
I can really only speak to my own,
to the fundamentalism I come from.
And I spent a long time trying to write myself through that,
trying to use language not as therapy, but just
like a really good country song.
Just to give shape to something painful just
to kind of get a hold of it.
And I think that sometimes, that's enough.
This is from a chapter called Accommodation.
My father, like his father, was a Baptist minister.
He shot himself with his hunting rifle when I was three.
Twenty years later, my mother gave me his Bible,
the one he had used since his days in seminary.
I opened it to the cloth marker at chapter 10 of Matthew
and read "Never imagine I have come to bring peace on Earth.
I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
I have come to set a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother.
He who loves father or mother more than
me is not worthy of me.
He who loves son or daughter more than
me is not worthy of me."
I do not know.
I have no way of knowing if the marker had fallen on that page
simply by coincidence or if it reveals
something crucial about my father's suicide.
But the fact that the question, like all the questions
we ask of suicides, is unanswerable
makes the second possibility inevitably more compelling
and more sinister.
Who is the egomaniac speaking these words?
Who would demand across centuries
that we love him, a historical stranger, more
than our own fathers, mothers, sons and daughters?
And just a few pages earlier, wasn't this the same teacher
bestowing blessings on the peacemakers?
Given such a wild reversal, we might with good reason
doubt the authenticity of the passage.
But what I want to know, and have no way of knowing,
is whether my father took this passage seriously.
From everything my mother, my father's friends,
even my grandfather have told me,
my father wasn't the kind of man who
would have read these lines literally.
Much of the anxiety he began to feel as he grew out
of adolescence was related to the fact and the fear
that a gap was widening between his own beliefs and those
of my grandfather.
Because there was such a clear distinction
in my grandfather's mind between good and evil, spirit
and flesh, the word of the Lord and the godless static
of the world, the answers came easily to him.
And perhaps because they did come so easily
and were greeted so uncritically by his congregation,
I don't think it ever occurred to my grandfather
that he might be wrong about anything.
Such certainty lent my grandfather
his strength of conviction, his power before crowds.
But I also think it came at the cost of self-awareness.
I sometimes suspect this is a trait
common in Baptist ministers, but it
isn't one my father possessed.
When he was pastoring his first church,
a woman from his congregation would come by the parsonage
every Sunday after church to give pointers
on how my father might improve his sermons.
My mother told me he would always
listen patiently, and then grow quiet and sullen
after she left.
I try to imagine the same woman interrupting my grandfather's
Sunday dinner.
He would have dispatched her with such righteous haste
that his butter beans would have still been steaming
when he returned to the table.
But my father lacked that conviction
and therefore, lacked the confidence that comes with it.
If my grandfather had too little self-awareness,
my father seemed to have too much.
It led to a debilitating self-consciousness
and a depression so heavy, he could not
rise out of bed some days.
He was in such a state when my mother left to teach school
on that last morning.
In the afternoon, she collected me from the babysitters
and returned to our yellow clapboard parsonage
in Wakefield, Virginia to find my father still in bed.
But this time, his body was lifeless.
His rifle lay at his side.
That was September 1, 1970.
14 years earlier in the summer before his freshman
year of college, my father swallowed a bottle of aspirin.
He told my grandfather that he was confused.
Besides, when they had been on vacation in Canada that summer,
he overheard teenagers making fun of his clothes.
And you expect me to go to college
wearing these baggy pants, he told my grandfather
who took him down to Nachman's department store the next day.
My grandfather told the saleswoman, whom he knew,
I've been blind here.
I've been expecting Don to go to school
wearing these baggy pants.
And evidently, it's become a matter of real concern.
He was trying to make a joke out of it.
She played along, measuring my father for new pants.
Then said, OK then, Don.
I pronounce you fit for school.
But about a month later, my grandparents
received a call from Carson Newman college.
They were told my father wasn't getting out
of bed to go to class.
The school suggested my grandparents
come down and collect their son before the six week deadline
when a withdrawal would appear on his official transcript.
So that's what they did.
Driving back to Virginia, my grandfather
was still at a loss.
I thought we had you all fixed up, he told my father.
I thought we had you looking like somebody, not
like some hick son of a country preacher.
But my grandfather must have known
by then my father's problems went
much deeper than the sartorial.
My father had always been overly sensitive to the culpability
that looms large in my grandparents'
religion, the belief that Jesus died as a sacrifice
to cleanse a fallen world of its sins.
And for Southern Baptists, particularly
those of my grandparents' generation, sin is everywhere.
As the 20th century became rapidly increasingly secular,
the spiritual life must have gradually
become to seem to my father like an ever lengthening list
of things that must be avoided.
Women, alcohol, playing cards, foul language, movies.
My mother grew up in a small town near Macon, Georgia
and met my father when they were both doing
summer missionary work in Montana in 1965.
My mother was as voluble and sure of herself
as my father was reticent and awkward.
And whereas Christianity was beginning to seem to my father
like a penal system, to my mother it meant just
the opposite, absolute liberation.
Jesus was the truth that set us free.
That was and is the heart of her religion.
It must have looked very appealing to my father.
Surely, he could have used some of that lightness.
In the end, it wasn't enough, of course.
And my grandparents found subtle ways to let my mother
know she had failed my father.
Though his life insurance policy barely paid for the funeral,
they never offered to help my mother
with the cost of raising a three-year-old on her own.
In fairness, I cannot lay all the blame
of my father's suicide at the steps of the church.
He suffered from a bipolar disorder,
as did his younger brother whose life up to the day he died
remained a haunted search for stable work
and the right medication.
My father hoped marriage and family would cure him,
so he hid his problems from my mother
until they were married, until he couldn't get out of bed.
Rounds of therapy followed.
An increased dosage of vitamins, then rounds of shock treatment.
Nothing helped.
And in the end, a 22 gauge Remington looked to my father
like the only solution.
I honestly felt like he was doing us a favor,
my mother says now with no bitterness,
like we would be better off.
My grandmother always found consolation in the fact
that my father was 33.
The same age as Jesus, she would say, when he died.
Several years ago when I turned 33,
I started to experience incredible migraines
for the first time in my life.
Then, a numbness started to creep up and down my arms
and legs.
No one could explain it.
The CT scan showed no signs of the tumor I feared.
The MRI showed no signs of multiple sclerosis,
but the symptoms remained.
Then, my skin began to crawl.
Panic attacks began.
Doctors tried all manner of pharmacological relief.
Nothing helped.
33 was the worst year of my life.
Finally, I sought out a therapist.
I told her my story.
I told her I was the same age my father was
when he killed himself.
After several sessions, she told me
I needed to have a serious talk with my grandfather.
Over Christmas, I drove down to my grandparents retirement
community in Florida.
During the last few years, my grandmother had quickly
begun losing her short term memory
and my grandfather was having one heart attack after another.
Because he could no longer take care of my grandmother,
he had moved her to the assisted living facility.
When I visited with my grandmother in her new room,
I did all the talking, mostly about the book
she had read to me as a kid.
As I talked, her mouth would drop open.
Her chin would quiver and she seemed
to be staring hard at the ceiling,
as if that was where her memories of all those events
had disappeared.
On my last night, my grandfather and I
sat down at his small kitchen table.
And with a tape recorder running,
I asked the questions I had never asked
about my father's suicide.
That's when my grandfather told me
about the bottle of aspirin, the baggy pants,
the hunting rifle he had given to my grandfather.
He said it was true that the church, religious authority,
and his own fundamentalism had led my father to a crisis he
could never resolve.
I think your father was confusing what God wanted
him to do and maybe what I and his mother wanted him to do,
he admitted.
We had to finally realize that there
was some questions in Don's mind between religious authority
and human freedom.
As time went by, I could see he felt he was not free.
This is what I had expected, what I had wanted to hear.
But then, my grandfather said something I didn't expect.
He said he himself had thought about suicide
hundreds of times.
But he said, I do not have the character, the courage
to do what your father did, to take my own life.
The character.
The courage.
The poor child felt he could never
be able to accommodate himself, my grandfather said.
And that, I realized was exactly it.
To accommodate.
To find some middle place between where one comes from
and where one hopes to arrive, or to pretend one is at home
when and where one isn't.
That is what my father could never do.
He could never find accommodation
either within his father's religion
or within the treatment of his own depression.
But suicide is the one human act that requires no accommodation.
The suicide.
He'd never return like the Prodigal Son
to the father's house.
He is unbeholden.
The suicide cannot be questioned.
The suicide cannot be punished.
To raise the sword against oneself
is to find release into a moment,
an endless moment of freedom.