Rev. James E. Caldwell — Life Vitae

My Life in One Page

The accounting

I was born in Jackson Ward, Richmond, Virginia, in 1945, to a brickmason and a woman who sang alto like a closing argument. I marched at eighteen, was called to preach at twenty-two — over my own loud objections — and pastored Mount Olive AME Zion for forty-four years. I married Ruth in 1968 and buried her in 2011, and I am still her husband; some offices don't expire. Two children: a daughter who calls every Sunday, and a son who didn't for twenty years, and does now, carefully. By the usual arithmetic: nine hundred-some weddings and funerals, near three thousand sermons, one faith — dented, rebuilt, load-bearing. I am retired from the pulpit. Nobody retires from the questions.

Faith & Spirituality

A faith with a limp

"The limp was not the failure of the encounter. The limp was the receipt."

People assume a preacher's faith is a possession, like a watch — wind it, wear it, hand it down. Mine has been more like a wrestling hold, and I am not always certain which of us has it on the other. I have believed easily maybe twenty of my eighty-one years. The rest I have believed deliberately, which I have come to think is the sturdier kind. Jacob limped away from the river, you'll recall. The limp was not the failure of the encounter. The limp was the receipt.

Life Chapters

Eighteen, in the street

In the summer of 1963 Reverend Hargrove put me in the third row of a march down Broad Street, close enough to the front to be brave and far enough back to be kept. I have spent sixty years complicating what that marching meant — what it bought, what it cost, what it postponed — and I distrust any man my age who tells that story simple. But I'll tell you what was simple. The singing. You have not heard a hymn until you've heard it used as armor on a public street. I became a preacher in that row, years before I'd admit it.

Forty-four years of Sundays

A pastorate is weddings and funerals and the long ordinary in between — hospital linoleum at 2 a.m., budget meetings where the saints behave worst, teenagers you baptize and then bury, a furnace that fails every Advent like it's liturgical. I preached near three thousand Sundays. Perhaps forty sermons were good. The people came anyway, which taught me the true economics of the thing: they were not coming for the sermon. They were coming for each other, and for the seventy-five-year-old proof on every pew that somebody's grief had been survived before. I just kept the room warm.

Wisdom

Faith & doubt · Grief & loss

The year prayer went silent

Ruth died on a Tuesday in Lent, and for eleven months I preached every Sunday on a God I could not get on the phone. I did not pretend otherwise. I stood up and told my congregation the line was quiet, and I kept dialing in front of them. No seminary taught me what that year did: the people never needed my certainty. They needed to watch a man keep knocking at the door of a silent house. If your prayers have gone quiet, you are not failing at faith. You are in the part of it they don't put on the church sign.

To someone younger: Doubt out loud in front of your people. It gives their doubt somewhere to sit.

Regret & forgiveness · Family rifts & reconciliation

Apologizing from the pulpit

In 1989 I preached hard against a kind of man, and my son heard it as a sermon against himself, and he was not wrong to. He left that afternoon — the church first, then the city, then the calling distance. It took me eleven years to understand the wound and four more to do the only thing equal to it: I stood in that same pulpit and said I had been wrong, by name, with him not even in the building. People ask why public, when the harm felt private. Because the harm was not private — I had armed a whole room. A private apology repairs a relationship. A public one repairs the pulpit. I owed both, and I paid the second one first because it was harder.

Family rifts & reconciliation · Parenting & raising children

The unlocked door

I could not make Michael come home. For twenty years the one power I had was to see to it that if he ever tried the knob, it would turn. So I kept the door unlocked — the literal one, yes, but I mean the other one: I sent the birthday card every year with no sermon inside it. News, love, a twenty-dollar bill. No sermon. He told me later he read every one looking for the lecture, and the year he couldn't find it even between the lines was the year he called. He came back careful, and we speak carefully still, and I have made my peace with careful. Reconciliation is not a wedding, child. It is a long engagement.

To someone younger: Send the card every year. Leave the sermon out of it.

Grief & loss · Faith & doubt

What to say at a graveside

I have stood at more gravesides than I can number, and here is the whole of what I know to say there. Say the name. Everyone has gone suddenly afraid of the dead one's name, and the family is starving to hear it out loud. Then say one small true thing you saw the person do — small, mind you; the big things get said by the program. Then hush. Do not explain the death. You don't know, and they know you don't know, and your not-knowing said honest is worth more than your knowing said pretty. And bring the casserole on the thirty-fifth day, not the third. Grief keeps a long tail and short company.

To someone younger: Say the name. One small true thing. Then hush.

Leadership & mentoring · Friendship & community

Shepherding people smarter than you

My congregation held schoolteachers, two surgeons, a federal judge, and Sister Alma Pettiford, who corrected my Greek from the third pew for thirty years and was usually right. A young preacher thinks the call is to be the smartest voice in the room, and the room will let him think it just long enough to embarrass him. The shepherd is not smarter than the sheep — that was never the job. The job is staying out in the weather with them. Authority you demand lasts a season. Authority they hand you for standing in the rain lasts forty-four years.

To someone younger: Be the one who stays out in the weather. The rest is borrowed.

Ethical Will

The inheritance I actually have

"When you are wrong, say so at the same volume you were wrong at."

I have no estate to speak of; preaching was never that kind of work. Here is what I have instead, and I have weighed it, and it is not less. Keep a table where the unexpected can eat. Sing the second verse — anybody can mean the first one. When you are wrong, say so at the same volume you were wrong at. Tend to your people on their Tuesdays, not just their funerals. And leave every door you ever close unlocked behind you. You will not always live to see who tries the knob. Leave it unlocked anyhow.

Letters

A letter

To Michael

Son. No sermon — you'd find it even between the lines, you always could. I want one thing on paper in my own hand: the twenty years were not your debt. A door I helped shut, you walked through; that arithmetic is mine and I have done it before God and a good therapist your sister made me see. What we have now — the careful calls, the ballgame in June, the way you say 'old man' like it's almost a psalm — I would not trade it for the easy thing we never had. Careful is a kind of grace. You taught me that. Your mother knew it first.

A letter

To whoever has to preach this Sunday

I don't know your name, but I know your Saturday night: the text gone dry, the outline a stranger, somebody in the congregation dying faster than your faith can keep up with. Hear an old man: the sermon is the least of what you carry up those stairs. They are not grading the exegesis. They came to see whether the thing you talked about last week held you up this week. So tell them one true thing — just one, you don't have the time you think you do — and let them watch it hold your weight. Then go eat. The furnace will fail by Advent. It is not a sign. It is a furnace.

Closing Blessing

How I want to be remembered

Not as the preacher. As the man who stayed — through the silent year, the empty chair, the long engagement of a son's returning. If you must mark me somehow, leave a door unlocked that you had every right to bolt, and that will do for a headstone. Grace and peace. Go on now. The light's still on in the kitchen.

"Leave a door unlocked that you had every right to bolt."