Worlds Apart, Living Right Next Door

Chapter Eleven. The Pastor.

I’m not going to tell a lie, Pastor Allen caught me at perhaps my most vulnerable moment on this trip. I had just had an encounter with a guy - an unthinking moment on my end - and it had left me feeling incredibly sad. I had sought refuge at a cafe in the university town of Mars Hill in Madison County. At the next table, a group of older folk were gathered and I could hear snippets of their conversation. One was talking about something being “just shy of nasty,” and another called someone “weird,” and they laughed. It was a compliment. And then a woman let the table know that on September 5, a professor was coming to the local college from Western Carolina University to talk about the importance of the youth vote. There would be tacos, she said.

I was aware too of a young man sitting across from me, working away, yes, but also noticing.

The group at the next table started to break up and one of the women there - the woman who had talked about the voting event - came up to me and asked, “are you Lucy?” She had recognized me from my visit to her church the previous Sunday. She explained that they are part of a philosophy group. They meet every Monday, and try, in their way, to solve the problems of the world. They are from all political persuasions, she says, although she and her mate, Judy, are clearly Democrats: “how did we get ourselves into this fix?” Judy, grey haired, petite, vibrant, says. “We need to write it into the constitution - felons need not apply.”

In any event, they leave, and the young man across the table introduces himself. He is a pastor at a non-denominational church in Asheville. A church that tilts Baptist, he says. We start to talk, and, I ask him how he is feeling about the upcoming elections.

“Sadness is my first emotion,” he says, “The climate, politically is so divisive in nature that it makes me sad to see how it splits people apart.” He goes on, “My responsibility, not just as a pastor, but as a man, as a child of God, is to treat humans with dignity, value, worth, honor,” he pauses, “to love despite differences.” He describes this as, “enemy love,” the idea that, “even if it's someone who I have a really hard time connecting with, liking, I don't agree with anything that they're doing or saying, I'm still called to love them and to forgive and to see past differences.” He continues, voice low and gentle, “everything I just said is opposite of what the political climate is right now.”

When it comes to discussing politics, he says that as a pastor, “there’s a lot of stereotypes that I deal with.” He explains, “automatically I'm supposed to be a conservative, Trump supporter, and so I don't really even stand a chance when it comes to political discussion, because people automatically assume that I'm this far right conservative bigot who is close minded - not loving - and harsh and judgmental, which is not the case at all.”

He says, “I see so many opportunities to connect, but we're missing out on that because we're so busy fighting about who's right and who's wrong.”

I ask him, how do we find a way around that?

He believes it goes deeper than politics. “Me, I look inside my own heart and I see a lot of wickedness in my tendency to choose myself over other people, my tendencies to treat people less than myself, less than what they deserve.”

I ask him what he means by wickedness, and he tells me it is what he would call, “a natural bend towards sin.” He continues, “There's a war inside of me where I know what's right, and I can't do it all the time, you know? And so before there was a political issue or a political problem to solve, I think there's a bigger problem to solve in my own heart.”

He says: “My main priorities are not of this world. They're outside of this world. They're outside of myself, they're outside of other people, and so that naturally changes my standards and my priorities. So I think that's how we get around it - what your question was - I think we get around it by getting outside of ourselves, individually first, and realizing that before other people are dark, twisted and evil, we are, like I am, you know? And that goes along with what Jesus teaches. He’s like, ‘hey, before you remove the stick out of someone else's eye, remove the log out of your own, and when you remove the log out of your own eye, you can see the stick in someone's eye clearly.’”

Pastor Allen found Jesus when he was 21. “I started realizing that no matter what I did to try and fix this thing, I would run myself into the ground. And so I looked outside of myself for a source of strength and power and guidance and health and forgiveness that I found in Jesus, and since then, he's been my standard for my human behavior and my human endeavors.” He comes from a single parent household. His father died when he was seven - he succumbed to drug and alcohol addiction. His mother married again but his stepfather passed away too. “We had a lot of difficulty in our household growing up, and I felt very wayward and lost a little bit,” he says. “When you don't have a father figure in the home - I don't know if you had a dad in the home or not - but when you don't, as a man, when you don't have a father, I think that creates a big hole in your soul.”

And he describes how he tried to fill that hole with all kinds of different things, and, “I came to the end of myself. I realized that nothing that I was doing or trying to do or looking towards was helping the pain inside of me. My friends weren't doing it, the alcohol wasn't doing it. The drugs weren't doing it, and I knew nothing about Jesus or Christianity, but I knew enough to know that horizontally, nothing was fixing this vertical need. I kept going back to God. ‘Where are you God?’ So I just basically cried out to him and asked him, ‘God, if You're real, become my father, be my parent, forgive me for my mistakes. I've mistreated people, I've done wrong, and forgive me and come into my life and give me a new way and a new direction.’”

Do you believe in the inerrancy of the Bible? I ask him. He tells me that this is a complicated question and asks me what I think. I say that I believe the Bible was written at a certain time for a certain time and that times have changed, we’ve changed.

He more or less agrees. “If you don't understand what their world was like, how they chose to write, figuratively versus literally, then you're gonna really have a hard time interpreting it correctly. And I think that's been a big problem with our church overall.”

We talk about Adam and Eve and the snake in the Garden of Eden. “It could be possible that wasn't a literal moment,” he says, and relates this to “a voice inside of me that although I know what's right, sometimes I literally can't do it,” and again, he says it, “I'm bent towards disobedience.” At times of internal conflict, he goes to the garden scene, and “I'm like, that makes a lot of sense. It's almost as if this evil voice is whispering things that I know aren't from a creator.”

Pastor Allen is going to vote in this election but he is having “the hardest time this year voting than ever before.” He doesn’t watch a lot of television and he doesn’t spend a lot of time on social media. His wife will show him some political clips, and even then, “I try not to watch anything less than, like, a couple minutes long, because it's so easy to see clips and then automatically, [be instructed to], ‘form an opinion,’ you know? I try to watch something that's longer.”

He describes a certain disillusionment with politics and politicians. For all of the promises made, the follow through is hard to see in places like Madison County. He thinks that all politicians are lying “at some point,” and that the priorities they make in this campaign are no longer priorities when they get into office. “It seems like they're just trying to win an argument and not find solutions to the deeper problems that are going on,” he says. “And again, I start feeling sadness, because I'm like, if you can't even see what's true and what's not, how can you know anything, you know? And I feel it. That's where we're at.”

Addendum: I heard from Pastor Allen on the day I published this post. He and his family got through the hurricane with no damage to their home, their property. His family and friends are safe. However, as everyone has pointed out, the area was devastated. He is in awe of the recovery effort, people from all walks of life working together to repair and rebuild. He says he has “never been more proud to be from this area.”

Mars Hill, the town where Pastor Allen and I met, got through the hurricane relatively unscathed and so I direct you as always to the town of Marshall. If you would like to support the rebuilding of this beautiful place, there are plenty of options at www.HelpMarshall.org.

It is hard for me to write this piece and not mention Trump’s hate-filled rally at Madison Square Garden last Sunday. I have no idea at all how this rally would impact the pastor’s vote - I have no idea how the pastor will vote - but Trump’s speech, and the hate-filled, racist, divisiveness in it, is not something I saw reflected in the people I met in my (mere) 14 days in Madison County.