By Walter B. Shurden
John R. Claypool, The Light Within You (Waco, TX: Word Books Publisher, 1983, 216pp.)
John R. Claypool, Opening Blind Eyes (Oak Park, IL: Meyer Stone Books, 1987, 128pp.)
In 1960, in my second year of seminary, I had a class in Baptist history under Claude L. Howe, Jr. at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. After a class session one day, so enthralled with what we had discussed, I stayed in my desk for a few minutes, flipped my notebook to the inside back cover, and wrote on that cardboard an outline of what became my first book that I wrote twelve years later. That book was Not a Silent People: Controversies That Have Shaped Southern Baptists. Ever since, I have been fascinated with the origin of books, of how they begin.
Claypool’s The Light Within You, published in 1983, has a fascinating birth. While the twenty-two sermons in the book all originated with Claypool, the book itself began with Bill Taylor, the Secretary and Treasurer of Young Life International. Taylor, like hundreds of others who did not get to hear Claypool’s sermons in person, faithfully read those printed sermons every week for eighteen years. And “John Claypool,” Taylor said, “brought God to me in words and terms that I could understand.”
Most of the white Baptist preachers of my Southern tribe in the late '60s, '70s, and '80s had scores of Claypool’s sermons in their files or desk drawers. So I understand when Taylor, as an expression of overwhelming gratitude to John Claypool, spread out approximately 800 of those sermons on the floor one day and began to select ones that had been most meaningful to him. What an undertaking! The truths of these sermons, he said, had “transformed my very life for Christ Jesus’ sake.” And the sermons Taylor selected that day became the essence of The Light Within You. So while the sermons originated with Claypool, the origin of the book came from one of his many admirers.
Claypool published a second book in 1983, Opening Blind Eyes. It, too, was a requested project. Abingdon Press invited Claypool, along with other religious leaders, each to write a book for its Journeys in Faith Series. Claypool published a second edition of Opening Blind Eyes in 1987. It is that edition that I am using in this article, but keep in mind that he originally published the book in 1983.
The authors of the books in Abingdon’s Journeys in Faith Series had two mandates. First, they were to engage in spiritual autobiography and describe what happened to them and their faith in the decades of the 1960s and 70s. This was an interesting assignment, acknowledging the religiously revolutionary days of the 60s and early 70s. Second, Abingdon asked the writers in the series to look into the future and identify what they considered to be the major tasks of the church in the 1980s.
Claypool followed faithfully Abingdon’s instructions for his 1983 book. Opening Blind Eyes has two very distinct parts. Part One he called “Looking Back,” and it contains sixty of the most invaluable autobiographical pages that we have from Claypool. Indeed, if you read these sixty pages along with Claypool’s first book, Tracks of a Fellow Struggler, you will be able to understand better most everything that Claypool wrote. Claypool labeled Part Two of Opening Blind Eyes “Looking Ahead,” and here he deals with substantive issues facing the Christian church in the decade of the 80s.
These two 1983 books by Claypool originated from two completely different sources. Moreover, they diverge in structure and purpose, one a book of sermons and the other a kind of spiritual memoir that concludes with a prophetic bent to it. Despite these dissimilarities, the two books fit together magically in helping one to understand John Claypool. The sermons in The Light Within You are little more than informational footnotes to the autobiography in Opening Blind Eyes.
In the first part of Opening Blind Eyes John Claypool pulls back the curtains of his life and describes three profoundly personal experiences that help you get a measure of the great preacher. The first experience, a negative one, involved his powerful, subjective feeling of growing up with a sense of unworthiness. The second experience, a positive one, concerned a transformative, palpable experience of grace. The third experience, a family tragedy, focused on Claypool’s heart-breaking bereavement at the death of his young daughter, Laura Lue. Since I have described this third experience in a previous article in this journal, I will here concentrate on the first two experiences.
Claypool lamented that his “most primitive perception” of himself was “The sense that I possessed no worth!” “Emptiness, a zero, a vacuum—these are the images that come to mind as I recall the way I felt about myself.” Rejecting the blame game, he said, “I am the one who chose to regard myself as a nobody, a nothing, a vacuum devoid of significance.”
In response to this overwhelming feeling of being a nobody, Claypool “vowed to become homo competitus, one who would acquire significance by outdoing others.” He set out on a life of acquisition and achievement. He had to out-do, to earn worth.
While it was, of course, much more, this aspect of his life reads like a classic case of salvation by works. Loyal Claypool readers remember that one of his most memorable sermons, a sermon included in The Light Within You, is “Who Is Your Audience?” He said in that sermon, “We each feel the need for something outside ourselves to evaluate and authenticate our deeds.” That line came deep from within Claypool’s psyche.
All the rest of us who marveled at his gifts and his grace are left bewildered by how that could ever be. But we should not doubt its truth for him. This was no mock humility, no faux self-portrait designed to elicit pity or to project a kind of inverted spirituality. Claypool’s negative self-image, despite all evidence to the contrary, haunted and harangued him.
Then occurred his second experience. “In the midst of my mid-life crisis, something happened that proved to be positively electrifying in altering my consciousness of reality itself. The greatest single shift in my whole existence—from seeing life in terms of acquisition to seeing it in terms of awareness.” A Presbyterian minister friend in Louisville called Claypool one day in a painful cry for help. He asked Claypool to be one of five ministers to meet with him and offer him some pastoral help.
Claypool remembered two things about that first session as the ministers opened up to each other in an effort to help. One, each of the six, though very different in religious and social backgrounds, voiced the same “conflicts and pressures” and grieved much the same personal issues. And two, he learned that “honesty evoked compassion.”
In time Claypool said he opened up to the group “and went all the way back and all the way down to those earliest, reality-conclusions that had shaped my life so powerfully. I acknowledged the bottomless feeling of nobodiness, the desperate need to acquire a sense of worth by my own strenuous effort . . . “ After emptying himself of his most honest feelings, he confessed, “It was as if I had lanced a boil and all the infected pus was gushing forth.”
An Episcopal priest and the minister in the group with whom Claypool had the least natural affinity spoke. “I hear you, John, oh, I hear you!” He continued. “Do you know what we need? . . . . We need to hear the gospel down in our guts. Do you remember in the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus said, ‘You are the Light of the World’? He did not say that you have to earn light or become number one in order to get light. He said simply, ‘You are light’.”
Claypool later wrote that as the priest spoke these words, “I felt something akin to fire flow from the top of my head to the depths of my heart, and for the first time in my life I experienced grace.” The image Claypool used for that experience was awareness. He moved from acquisition to awareness. “My eyes were opened in that instant as never before. I began to ‘see’ myself and eventually all things in a completely different light.” Blind eyes were opened. He became aware that worth came with the grace of creation.
The old Zen image of “riding on an ox, looking for an ox” became important for Claypool. All his life searching for worth outside himself, he eventually discovered he had it within him all along. “You are the light of the world” became for him what the Damascus Road was for Saul of Tarsus, the tower experience was for Luther, and Aldersgate was for Wesley. He had moved from trying to acquire worthiness to an awareness that worth came with creation.
These two experiences appear in one form or another again and again in the sermons in The Light Within You. For example, in a sermon entitled “Our Peace Is In Our Place,” Claypool identified the reasons for the tragic demise of King Saul, a man who began with enormous promise. As though speaking of himself, John Claypool said that one of Saul’s problems was Saul’s “self-image, how he viewed his place in the economy of God’s purpose.. For some reason, Saul was never able to accept himself—never able to feel, down to the bottom of his being, ‘By the grace of God I am what I am’.” The preacher continued, “In my judgment, there is no issue of any greater practical significance than this issue of self-image. How do you view the gift of God that is yourself? All depends on your response. To accept yourself positively and live creatively on the basis of what God has made you is the way to joy, but to deny and reject God’s gift of yourself is the way to ruin.”
I told you above that in the second half of Opening Blind Eyes Claypool identified what he thought was the task of the church in the future, which for him at that time meant the 1980s. Significantly, the very first issue he pinpoints is this issue of how individuals feel about themselves. “I feel strongly,” he wrote, that the church should invest significant energy in ministry to individuals—be concerned with the way they image themselves, feel about themselves. This is a foundational sector of human experience. I agree with the old dictum that ‘if religion stops with the individual, it stops—period.’ But the other side of the truth is that if religion does not begin with the individual, it will not begin at all.”
He then used the story of the Prodigal Son, a New Testament text as important for Claypool as Genesis 1-3 was an Old Testament text, to illustrate his point. The Prodigal had to learn that he was neither a Superman without limits who could make life on his own nor was he a slave. The waiting father viewed the Prodigal not as a “hired servant” but as “this my son.”
So, what was the challenge of the church in the '80s? For Claypool I am sure it would have been the challenge of any era. He said, “In relation to self-image, then, the challenge of the church is to open blind eyes to two realities: a true image of self; and the mercy that gives us life apart from our deserving—not once, but again and again. What a gospel this is! What a privilege to work to unmask illusions and enable people to ‘come to themselves’ and to the mercy that will not let them go, that never gives up, and that celebrates whenever and however blind eyes are finally opened.”
Claypool’s intense dual convictions of a lack of self-worth and of the abundance of grace deepened his ability to teach people how to put one foot in front of the other, how to make it through the week, how to live. In Opening Blind Eyes, he recalled his decision to enter the Christian ministry. He said that as a young adult he genuinely wanted to serve humanity and leave the world a better place. Thinking that becoming a medical doctor was the best way to serve, he shared this opinion with their family’s doctor, a rather gruff and matter of fact kind of fellow.
Claypool remarked to the doctor, “You doctors help people so tangibly.” The doc retorted, “Hell! What people need most is somebody to teach them how to live. I have lots of patients who get well and are still miserable.” That chance remark, Claypool said, was revolutionary for him. “Teaching people how to live—that is the most tangible need,” he concluded. “And as I looked about for ways to engage in that sort of task,” he said, “the role of Christian minister seemed more to the point than any other.”
And Bill Taylor and thousands of others say to this very day, “Thanks be to God that he chose the path that led him to the pulpit.
— Walter B. Shurden is Minister At Large at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia where he resides with his wife, Kay. He is a theologian, church historian, and connoisseur of good preaching. This article is one of six he is writing for Christian Ethics Today that address the writings of John Claypool.
