Reading John Claypool: His First, Shortest, Most Formative and Influential Book, `Tracks of a Fellow Struggler`
By Walter B. Shurden
John R. Claypool, Tracks of a Fellow Struggler: How to Handle Grief (Dallas: Word Publishing Co., 1974, 104pp.)
John R. Claypool, Tracks of a Fellow Struggler: Living and Growing Through Grief (New Orleans, LA, 70182, P. O. Box 8369, Insight Press, 1995, 98pp).
In my judgment, the two most prominent and popular preacher/theologians among white, progressive Baptists of the South in the last half of the 20th century were Carlyle Marney (8 July 1916 – 3 July 1978) and John R. Claypool (15 Dec 1930 – 3 Sept 2005). Both were exceptional preachers. Marney was a “character.” Marney stories, filled with both his witticisms and his wisdom, abound. And it is probably accurate to say that Marney was more popular among progressive preachers than with the Baptist laity.
A number of years ago, I preached for several Sundays at Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., Marney’s last pastorate. Marney had been gone for several years. In fact, I was preaching following the retirement of Marney’s successor. In one of my sermons, I referred to Marney — a kind of obligatory toast to one I admired. After I had finished shaking hands in the narthex, I walked back down the aisle of the church to the pulpit to fetch my Bible and notes. An elderly man was collecting the worship bulletins from the pews. I stopped and greeted him, thanking him for his work. And as though he were still in my sermon, he jumped right into Marney. “Yeah, preacher, ole Marney,” he said, “I loved him a lot.” And then he paused and added, “But I never understood a word he said.”
Claypool, by contrast, claimed the attention of both clergy and laity. His sermons and lectures, more accessible than Marney’s, grabbed both heads and hearts. His sermons, or adaptations of them, were often heard in other pulpits! He served as pastor of three influential Baptist churches: Crescent Hill in Louisville, Ky. (1960-1971), Broadway in Fort Worth, Texas (1971-1976), and Northminster in Jackson, Miss. (1976-1981).
After his resignation from Northminster in 1981, Claypool and his wife divorced. He spent the next year in a residency in clinical pastoral education at the Baptist Hospital in New Orleans. He then became an associate pastor for two years to Dr. Hardy Clemons at Second Baptist Church in Lubbock, Texas. From there he, like so many other notable Baptists, migrated to the Episcopal Church. He concluded his parish ministry as rector at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Birmingham, Ala. He taught preaching at the McAfee School of Theology of Mercer University, in Atlanta during his retirement years. He published 11 books.
In his semi-autobiographical pastoral memoir, Diary of a Pastor’s Soul, Craig Barnes said that “the only important thing a servant of the Church brings to the ministry” is the “pastor’s soul” (p.13). Attentive parishioners, Barnes said, are grateful for glimpses into that soul. In his very first book, Tracks of A Fellow Struggler: How to Handle Grief, Claypool laid bare his “pastor’s soul” for all his hearers and readers.
Tracks is far and away the most influential book John R. Claypool ever wrote. Not one of his other 10 books comes close. “This little book,” as he so aptly dubbed it, had only 104 pages in its1974 edition, released by Word Publishing Company. By the time Insight Press produced a second edition in 1995, the book had sold one million copies! Other than making gender references more inclusive, the second edition is the same with one major exception. The sub-title of the book changed from “How to Handle Grief” to “Living and Growing Through Grief,” something Claypool had obviously done himself.
On a “hot Wednesday afternoon,” in 1969 doctors in Louisville, Ky., diagnosed Laura Lue, the Claypools’ eight-year-old daughter, with acute lymphatic leukemia. Eighteen months later, she died on a “snowy Saturday afternoon” on January 10, 1970. That heart-wrenching event became the backdrop for much of Claypool’s thinking, preaching, and teaching for the rest of his life.
“This little book” causes one to inhale the smog of human suffering and exhale the buoyant hope of the Christian faith. While written against the darkest of events, the book is life giving, as reflected in the vast number of copies sold. And it is hopeful because, even “after life works us over,” as Claypool often said, it is life affirming. But how does one come out of this kind of excruciating heartbreak to affirm the goodness of life?
The book contains four sermons. Claypool preached three of the sermons at Crescent Hill Baptist Church. He preached two of these during Laura Lue’s illness and one following her death. He preached the last sermon in the book three years after her death at Broadway Baptist Church. I will focus my comments on the first and third sermons in the book. They are the best known and most referenced.
The first sermon, “The Basis of Hope,” is rooted in Paul’s classic passage in Romans 8. Claypool preached it to his congregation in Louisville 11 days after Laura Lue’s diagnosis. In the introduction to the sermon, he asked his congregation to “see me this morning as your burdened and broken brother, limping back into the family circle to tell you something of what I learned out there in the darkness.”
What had he learned? First, he had learned that the challenge was to go on living “even though I have no answer or any complete explanation.” Descartes was wrong: “I think, therefore I am.” “We do not first get all the answers and then live in light of our understanding,” said Claypool. He went on: “We must rather plunge into life — meeting what we have to meet and experiencing what we have to experience — and in the light of living try to understand.” Claypool learned he could not quit living because he did not have all the answers.
Second, he learned to beware of superficiality and quick labeling, “of jumping to the wrong conclusions.” Citing one of his most cherished Old Testament stories, the up-and-down life of Joseph, he uttered what would become one of his most oft-spoken lines: “Despair is always presumptuous.” Just when it looked like old Joseph was all finished, an opening appeared and a new future beckoned. James Dunn told me that Martin E. Marty caught him one day in genuine despair. “Dunn,” Marty said, “You don’t know enough to be pessimistic.” Claypool somehow embraced that idea, even in his heartbreak.
Everyone that ever knew or heard John Claypool knew him to be a star. He was center stage, a winner in every way. But the death of his daughter put him on the losing side. He discovered, as do we all, that hurt hurts. So, we kneel at the bedside of an eight-year-old girl with leukemia, and we kneel without any answers. Empty-handed, as far as quick and pat answers, Claypool worked hard at not jumping to conclusions about the deep mystery of life.
The third thing that became of enormous value to Claypool, in light of his young daughter’s illness, was his understanding of God. God, too, he said was acquainted with “evil and grief and suffering.” He pointed to the crucifixion of Jesus. “Believe me,” Claypool said, “out there in the darkness this companionship of understanding really helps.” Claypool possessed a distinct mystical leaning, one not always recognized in him. He insisted then, as he did the rest of his life, that God’s companionship brought strength in tough times.
Claypool did not preach for a month after his daughter died on that cold Saturday afternoon in January. When finally he came back to the Crescent Hill pulpit, he broke that “prolonged silence” with a sermon that was the most widely known of all the sermons he would ever preach. He called it “Life is Gift.” It was the pearl of his preaching and writing. He based it on that troublesome story of the proposed sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham.
He did not come with theological bravado. Admitting that he was in no position to “speak with any finality” about the tragedy that had bent him over and broken his heart, he said, “What I have to share is of a highly provisional character for, as of now the light is dim.” He saw three alternative roads ahead “out of the darkness.” However, two of these were dead ends. Only the third led to light.
"The first road had been highly recommended to him. It was the route of “unquestioning resignation.” Do not question God, he was told. Simply submit and surrender, he was admonished. Accept the unfolding of life without murmuring. Claypool thought this approach closer to pagan stoicism than Christianity. God, he said, is more that brute power pulling the strings on every event of our lives. “The One who moves” through the pages of the Bible “is by nature a Being of love. We have every right to pour out our souls to God and ask, “Why?”
Claypool said the second road one could take out of the darkness was what he called “the road of total intellectual understanding.” He confessed, to some of his parishioners’ chagrin, that he had been “tempted to conclude that our whole existence is utterly absurd.” But, he said, one cannot coerce life into one posture or attitude. One cannot organize all of our existence around a single principle.
Life is more complicated than that. To reduce life to absurdity is to overlook too much of the good stuff in life. “For you see,” he said, “alongside the utter absurdity of what was happening to this little girl were countless other experiences that were full of love and purpose and meaning.” Do not generalize in such a way, he urged his hearers that morning, “that either the darkness swallows up the light or the light the darkness. To do so would be untrue to our human condition that ‘knows in part’ and does all its seeing ‘as through a glass darkly’.”
The third road, the road that led to light and life, Claypool said, is the “road of gratitude.” “Only when life is seen as a gift and received with the open hands of gratitude is it the joy God meant for it to be.” The only way to descend from the mountain of loss is with gratitude. And then he added these crucial words: “I do not mean to say that such a perspective makes things easy, for it does not. But at least it makes things bearable when I remember that Laura Lue was a gift, pure and simple, something I neither earned nor deserved nor had a right to. And when I remember that the appropriate response to a gift, even when it is taken away, is gratitude, then I am better able to try and thank God that I was ever given her in the first place.” Gratitude, he said, puts light around the darkness and provides strength for moving on.
Claypool closed that unforgettable sermon by asking his church members to help him on his way. “Do not counsel me not to question, and do not attempt to give me any total answer,” he pled. “The greatest thing you can do is to remind me that life is gift — every last particle of it, and that the way to handle a gift is to be grateful.”
This was not a preacher pretending to be strong. To the contrary, he frightened faithful Christians with the way he publicly shared his weakness. This was a Christian living out his understanding of the Christian vision, a vision that said, “Life is gift.”
Claypool moved through the rest of his life with this same positive but realistic posture. On the Sunday after 9/11, he preached at the First Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, Ga. Calling his bewildered hearers that morning to hope, he said again and again in that sermon, “The worst thing is not the last thing.”
In June 2003, doctors in Atlanta diagnosed John Claypool himself with multiple myeloma, a form of dreaded cancer. The next Easter Sunday morning, in 2004, I had a vivid dream. John Claypool and Ben Philbeck, one of the dearest friends I ever had, played central roles. Ben had died with a brain tumor 15 years earlier. The dream was obviously about these two friends, one who had died and one who was seriously ill. I called John on the phone later that morning. "John,” I said, “I had a very bad dream last night, but you became a kind of Joseph. You got us out of a bad situation and led us to hope. After I told him the peculiar circumstances of the dream, he said to me in that confident, calming, and unmistakable voice, “Buddy, I have always been hopeful.”
A year later, on September 3, 2005, John Claypool died as he had lived, grateful and hopeful.
— Walter B. Shurden is Minister at Large at Mercer University Macon, Georgia. He is a church historian and a very well- known connoisseur of good preaching. This article on the writings of John Claypool is the first of six dealing with Claypool’s books that he will write for Christian Ethics Today.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
