Keep Us in God's Grace

KEEP US IN GOD’S GRACE - June 15, 2008,

Father’s Day A Biographical Sermon

“My grace is all you need.” 2 Corinthians 12:9

The question ministers hear most often is: How can a loving God permit bad things to happen to good people? 

My father was born in Brooklyn, NY on April 24, 1907. He had two sisters and a brother. All four were raised in an orphanage in Yonkers, NY. My father never knew his parents and took the name Brewster while he was at the orphanage. Through most of his life he had little contact with his two sisters or his brother, who had picked a different last name.

My father loved sports and received a baseball scholarship to the Mount Herman school in Massachusetts, founded by Dwight L.Moody, the famous evangelist. Prayer and daily chapel were an important part of school life. He briefly attended Colgate University on a scholarship, but dropped out and came to New York, where he took a room on Faragut street in Brooklyn, studied bookkeeping and accounting, and attended the All Souls Universalist Church on Ocean Avenue in Flatbush. There he met a young woman named Marjorie Bigelow, who was very active, and he joined the church in 1928.

Marjorie’s mother Marie had two sisters, Alice and Mabel. Mabel and her husband Charles Smith, whom I called Uncle Ned, moved to Ridgewood, New Jersey and had two children, Betty and Bob. Alice never married. She and Marie lived in Brooklyn with Marjorie.

The Depression came and my father was out of work and slept in the subways. Marjorie’s uncle, Charles Smith, found him in the “A” train and said, “Al, I want you to come home with me.”  My father lived with them for over a year and was a mentor to their son, young Bob Smith, and good friends with their daughter, Betty. Marjorie would come to New Jersey on weekends and they would all attend the First Presbyterian Church. My mother was maid of honor for Betty’s wedding to Bill Berlin. Betty was matron of honor for her wedding to my father on October 20, 1934. They were married by the Rev. Cornelius Greenway in All Souls Church and got an apartment in Flatbush. On a tip from “uncle Ned”, my father had begun working for Western Union. I came along four years later and was baptized in the church by Dr. Greenway. I was named for Charles Smith.

They then rented a house in Baldwin, Long Island. Fred was born in 1942 and was baptized also in Brooklyn by Dr. Greenway. Aunt Alice moved with us to Baldwin. We were a happy family of five and I can remember my father carrying me on his shoulders for walks in Baldwin by a golf course.

One day my mother discovered a lump in her breast. The doctor told her it was nothing. A few weeks later she was admitted to Memorial Hospital. When she came out months later she was skin and bones. My father would carry her around the house to ease her pain. She was 36 when she died. They had been married 10 years. Fred was two and I was not quite six. The funeral was held at All Souls, and there wasn’t room for everyone who wanted to attend. Fred and I were not there. She was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Because of her long illness, Pop didn’t have money for a gravestone; years later I put it up myself.

My father placed Fred and me in the St. Johnland Children’s Home in Kings Park, L.I., which was owned by the Episcopal Church. History was repeating itself. At the home we were in separate buildings. I was in a large old house called the Gould House, in a second floor room with about twenty beds, and Fred was in Lawrence, also called the “baby shelter”, with wall to wall cribs. Later he was moved to Gould House, but not to my floor. Aunt Alice moved to the Chapin home in Jamaica, and came every Sunday to St. Johnland, always bringing me a 5 cent roll of peppermint Lifesavers. She would say “be sure to share.”  My father moved to the St. George hotel in Brooklyn Heights. For years we had their towels in the bathroom. He came to St. Johnland once every two weeks on Sundays.

Pop went to Dr. Greenway to ask why a loving God would take his wonderful wife and leave him in this situation. After a while he stopped going to church.

According to my father, I made a quick adjustment at St. Johnland and he never really worried about me. But it was entirely different for Fred, four years younger. Not a single picture I have from that time shows Fred smiling. One day the head of the baby shelter told Pop of the tantrums Fred put up whenever he left and said “it would be better, Mr. Brewster, if you didn’t come.”. Of course, he didn’t listen to this advice.

One Sunday in the blizzard of 1948 Aunt Alice caught a chill and Pop cut short their time with us. For several weeks no one came, Then Pop came alone, took us into the chapel, and told us that Aunt Alice was gone. I can remember Fred asking Pop “why is Charlie crying?”

Then my father fell in love again and after what I understand was a torrid romance, he asked the woman to marry him. She said she loved him but was not prepared to be the mother of his two boys. Shortly after, he met Harriet Frawley and they were married and they had a son named Al, whom they also called “Beaver”. They lived in the second floor of a house in Astoria, but Fred and I stayed in St. Johnland.

St. Johnland was in many ways very good for me. The. elementary school was excellent and the weekly church services introduced me to Christian Faith. In the Gould House the boys always had me tell a story after lights out. I didn’t have a choice in the matter. To get material I devoured Hardy Boys books. In summer there was a camp on Long Island Sound where I learned to swim. We didn’t have many toys so we used our imaginations. Once I sent away for a flashlight ring using a Cheerios box top.  I became very self-reliant at an early age. For my brother, on the other hand, St. Johnland was a psychological and emotional disaster. When we left, my brother had spent two thirds of his life in an institution.  It is wonderful what he has done with his life despite such a wretched start. He has a great heart for people and he cannot stand to see kids suffer.

Eventually, Pop found an apartment in Hackensack, New Jersey, and he came with Bob Smith to take us out of St. Johnland. I was 10 and Fred six. I waved good-bye to my best friend as we left “for good”, as we said.

Hackensack turned out not to be the promised land. One day after we had been there for about six months I came home from school and Harriet and Beaver were gone. When Pop came home he was not totally surprised. I was afraid we would be going back to St. Johnland.

In fact, that is what we did that summer. When we got home we moved to a one bedroom apartment to save money and Pop slept in the living room. He began coming home later and sometimes singing laundry soap commercials loudly.  I pressured him to get Harriet back. He found another apartment in Englewood, New Jersey, and Harriet came from Long Island and she and I went together and looked at it.  Pop, Fred and I moved to Englewood and waited for her and Beaver, but they never came. And that was about it. I didn’t see Beaver again until he was a corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps.

One Sunday morning shortly after we moved to Englewood, I told Pop I wanted to go to church. I think I was in the seventh grade. He thought that was a novel idea and asked where I wanted to go. I didn’t know. He said, “Your aunt Mabel goes to a Presbyterian church, why don’t you try one of those?”  We found one in the Yellow Pages and he gave me bus money and I went by myself to the First Presbyterian Church of Englewood.

I was struck by the beautiful blue stained glass windows and the choir. I sat in the back with a woman who moved over and showed me where we were in the service. At the end she said, “My name is Mrs. Kell.  Will I see you here next week?”  I told her my name and said she would. I went by myself every Sunday. Pop would say he couldn’t go because he had to stay home and wash clothes and clean the house and take care of Fred. “You go and pray for me,” he’d say. Eventually, two men came from the church and Pop joined the ushers.

At the end of 11th grade the church paid for me to go to a one week camp at Blair Academy in New Jersey where I was part of a group led by a minister named Paul. We called ourselves “Paul’s Pals”. When I came home I told Pop I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

Fred and I met two brothers our ages who lived with their mother, Mona Surdez. Pop came looking for us one day and soon found reasons to invite Mona to our home with her sons. Mona was a great friend to him. There was a labor strike in the early fifties in Western Union and Pop had to go to Philadelphia. Mona  looked in on us and made sure we were eating OK and that Fred and I were getting off to school.

When Pop got back he had been beaten by strikers and Mona nursed him to health. But for a long term commitment it was not to be. When I told Mona I was going to be a minister she gave me a copy of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. I read it and re-read it. It was during that time I noticed Pop always seemed to need a Manhattan every night before his meal. However, no matter what he was going through, we both always knew he loved us.

I attended Westminster College in Pennsylvania, not far from Betty and Bill Berlin in Ohio. At the end of my junior year I was a camp counselor at a church camp in New Jersey and Pop visited me with Jean DeSiervo, who worked with him at Western Union. She had even attended the funeral of my mother fifteen years earlier. She was from an Italian family in the Bronx and had graduated from Hunter College, the first in her family to attend college.

Pop hated to lose to her at Scrabble. She eventually helped him control his drinking. They were married in 1960 at a Catholic church in the Bronx – Fred and I were there -- and came a few days later to my college graduation, before going on to Dallas, Texas, to which Western Union had transferred him.  Fred at 18 moved with them, but I went overseas for three years missionary service.

Pop and Jean had 12 good years in Dallas, until she died in 1972 of cancer, at the age of 51. The funeral was in the Bronx and she was buried in pouring rain at St. Raymond’s cemetery near the Whitestone Bridge. Fred and I drove Pop back to Dallas, with him in the back seat, sobbing. Pop died three years later after collapsing at Fred’s home at Thanksgiving. He had massive lung cancer from years of Chesterfields. He was 68. Fred and I were at his hospital bedside holding his hands as he slipped away. We buried him in Dallas.

Fred has been married 43 years to a wonderful wife, Peggy, and has two children and four grandchildren. In March he retired as a trucker for ABF, Arkansas Basic Freight, and he will be here in August. Unfortunately, Peggy cannot make the trip because she has no time off following triple bypass surgery last year.

St . Johnland is now a nursing home. Only the chapel survives from our time there. Fred and I will go there when he comes in August.

Before he died, Pop told me that in the great scheme of things he still didn’t understand our mother’s death. All the other things in his life – his childhood in an orphanage, his Depression life and sleeping in the subways, his on the rebound second marriage and subsequent divorce, his third wife’s death from cancer, his occasional temper and battles with alcohol --- all those things he could to some extent accept, but he couldn’t accept our mother’s death. What is the answer for that? He asked.

I can recall today exactly what I told him:  “Pop,” I said, “God didn’t give you an answer. He gave you something far better. He gave you a victory.”

Sometimes I wonder, after visiting his two young sons in St. Johnland, and taking the ride back on the Long Island Railroad to his lonely room in Brooklyn Heights, how in the world my father managed to make it to work the next morning at 60 Hudson Street in Manhattan. Only by the grace of God.

 “My grace is all you need,” the Bible says.

I believe that with all my heart.

Charles