Flashback February- Kalas, the Man Born on Valentine’s Day
This article was originally published in the elink in May of 2014. This month we remember a great man who was filled with love and has changed the hearts of many.
God’s Answer
by J. Ellsworth Kalas
I have mixed feelings about the times in which we live. I’m a deep-dyed optimist but I’m also an honest man. I have seen despair at its ugliest and hope at its beautifully absurd. I grew up during the Great Depression; I remember the family friend who hung himself in his barn when he learned that they were going to sell his farm at a sheriff’s auction. But I, also, remember when President Franklin Roosevelt challenged Congress to work for a world of four essential freedoms, one of which would be “freedom from want.”
I remember World War II, a war that encircled the globe and made tiny islands into household words. But I, also, remember when Roosevelt and Churchill declared in the Atlantic Charter their commitment to “a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries” and then I think of our current mockery of that declaration in Ukraine.
I think especially of the issues of faith and of the struggle for souls. I remember when there were two kinds of Protestants in America, modernists and fundamentalists. I remember, too, when we discovered there were other classifications, such as evangelicals, conservatives, and orthodox. I enjoyed the days when church membership was growing all across America, with new churches in the nation’s suburbs, and with almost every church of any size involved in some sort of building or remodeling program. And I grieve at how we lost that opportunity, that native hunger for God that we tried to satisfy with fellowship and good will that were not too different from the service clubs.
Then there was that remarkable time when the term “born again” was taken out of quotation marks and became part of the common vocabulary; and in the process became diluted to a point where polls showed that fully a third of Americans had experienced some sort of event that they thought could be classified as “born again.” And again, we lost the opportunity.
Now the tide of popular culture is against us. In much of the public mind, evangelicals are one of the subgroups in political analysis. I suspect there are some bright young pagans on the two coasts who have no idea that “evangelical” is a religious category, or if they do they think of it as an oddment of society like snake handlers, ripe for sociological examination.
With all of that, I wish I could have another go at it, another half century to try again to be the Church. I believe what Nicolai Grundtvig wrote in 1837: “Built on the Rock the Church doth stand, / Even when steeples are falling.” And with him I believe that at its best, the Church is “Calling the young and old to rest, / But above all the soul distrest, / Longing for rest everlasting.” I am altogether certain that human souls are as distressed today as ever, perhaps more than ever, but more skilled at covering the distress; and that the Church when it is the Church is God’s answer. Indeed, that we’re the only body with a message that is everlasting. It’s a pity that we’re content for the church to be something else than that, something less.
You and I ought to do something about that. Shall we?
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