When your parents were married for seventeen years before you were born, as mine were, you spend an awful lot of time scrutinizing scrapbooks, absorbing family lore, and trying to fill in the blanks.
The task becomes both harder and easier after your parents are gone: My father died in 2010 at the age of seventy-two, and my mother in 2023 at the age of seventy-nine. On the one hand, my parents are no longer available to answer a question or clarify even the tiniest detail, so the accounts they gave me of their lives, during their lives, must stand as final. On the other hand, I have found that I now comprehend the overall sweep of their lives, if not its every nuance, with newfound urgency and clarity. In their sad absence, my parents have become easier for me to grasp onto, to grab ahold of. The means by which I always understood their histories—the old photos, the cherished mementoes, the well-worn stories—are filled in more readily with my own imagination.
Not long ago, while looking through a drawer that contained some of my mother’s things, I came across a small box that contained artifacts from my father’s time as an Air Force officer in the 1960s, including his dog tag. The metal piece gave his name, ID number, blood type, and religious affiliation, the last of which startled me: “lutheran,” the tiny text read.
My father, when I knew him, was not religious, and from what I understood of his upbringing and young adulthood, he never had been. When his father, my grandfather, died, the newspaper said he was of the Presbyterian faith, but if he was, it was an incidental sort of faith—so incidental that it had not been transmitted to his son. So where did my father’s profession of Lutheranism come from?
Then I realized that the dog tag must have been from some point after my parents’ marriage in 1966. When my father married my mother, he married a confessional Lutheran. My mother’s family had been among the earliest congregants of what was called the First German Lutheran Congregation, Unaltered Augsburg Confession, when it was incorporated in 1879 in Sioux City, Iowa (after having been organized two years earlier, in 1877). By the time my mother was born in 1944, the church was called St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, a member of the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States—the synod now known as the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. Eighteen days after she was born, my mother was baptized by the Reverend A. H. Janke. The church was the epicenter of the lives of my mother and her three siblings. And, as unlikely as it always seemed to me given my father’s indifference to religion, the church was the site of my parents’ small wedding, which was presided over by the Reverend A. C. Schroeder.
That my father once gave his faith as Lutheran on that dog tag must have been both a concession to my mother early in their marriage and an acknowledgment of his own lack of firm religious convictions: Since he could not confidently list another denomination, why not list Lutheran? In the first seventeen years of their marriage, my parents moved far afield of Sioux City: to Colorado Springs, where my father was next stationed; to Bowling Green, Ohio, where my father returned after leaving the Air Force; and, in time, to more permanent destinations including Upper Arlington, Cincinnati, and Columbus, Ohio, where I was born in 1983. With those physical dislocations came a spiritual dislocation: Undoubtedly influenced by my rational, no-nonsense father, my mother lost contact with the day-to-day, week-to-week practice of her faith. To my knowledge, she never attended another Missouri Synod church.
Such was the state of affairs into which I was born. Sometime after my birth, I was later told, my mother met with a Lutheran pastor about my baptism, but the sacrament was never carried out. We were a very respectable family—my father went into banking following his stint in the military—but our respectability did not extend to going to church even once in a while, such as on Christmas Eve or Easter morning. Yet, somehow, I perceived that my mother had retained her private faith. Around the house was a Lutheran Book of Prayer, across whose pages I freely scribbled. Later, when I was old enough to understand, she spoke with awe of the beauty of the altar of her home church, and she remembered with pride how she had learned Luther’s catechism in preparation for her confirmation—a momentous and frequently recounted episode from her young adulthood. Perpetually among the stacks of sheet music that sat beside her piano was the 1941 Lutheran Hymnal. I cannot even begin to guess the number of hymns and pieces of service music that I heard her play while I was otherwise occupied reading the collected works of John Updike or Kurt Vonnegut.
Music travels through a home even when you aren’t trying to listen to it, and in the fullness of time, the background hum of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” proved to leave a greater impression on me than the atheistic musings of Vonnegut. In my early twenties, I decided, for the first time, to try to recover my family’s lost religious heritage. I poked around the great denominations. I read works by Pope John Paul II, was delighted by the ascendancy of the conservative Pope Benedict XVI, and eventually attended a single Sunday morning service at a nearby Catholic church, which, regrettably, had adopted “contemporary worship.” My extreme distaste for such practices led me to the outwardly more reverential aesthetics of the Episcopal Church, which, in my imagination, carried with it a certain classiness owing to its proximity to the Church of England: the Book of Common Prayer, the royal family, England’s green and pleasant land, and all the rest. Even in the mid-2000s, the Episcopal Church was adopting and expounding a pernicious ideology that we would today call “woke,” but with great, unwarranted confidence, I supposed that the church’s beautiful hymnody would allow me to tune out its profoundly flawed teachings. I was baptized in 2007, when I was twenty-four. My mother was my sponsor.
More quickly than I could have predicted, I drifted from my newfound faith. I could blame the goofiness of the Episcopal Church, but above all, I think I was unwilling to let go of the things that I had always placed above the church—any church: the books I read, the movies I loved, the literary career that was, even then, beginning to take shape. In fact, my writing came to be an ironic impediment to my churchgoing: Because I wrote about moral and social issues from a conservative perspective—because I was, so to speak, on the Church’s side—I came to feel this absolved me of committing myself, personally, to whatever remained of my faith. A stray thought would periodically grip me—reviewing the St. Olaf Choir performing in an area cathedral for my local newspaper, I wondered, Why aren’t I in church for something other than a performance?—but I let it drift. The arrogance inherent in such a stance shames me.
After my mother died, I was stunned by the awful, unalterable finality of the loss. Part of my reaction can be attributed to the suddenness with which she took ill—five weeks elapsed from when she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in August to her death in September—but what bothered me the most was the way that her death instantly disallowed her future: her plans, her hopes, her dreams. All of the energy we invest into what might be in the next month, the next year, the next decade, can be rendered naught in an instant—in the twinkling of an eye.
That first sunless autumn after her death, I was undoubtedly looking for pieces of writing to validate my sorrow. Instead, I encountered a passage by Flannery O’Connor that suggested an altogether different way of comprehending such a loss. In a notebook entry composed after the death of her much-loved father, O’Connor wrote:
The reality of death has come upon us and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency like a bullet in the side. A sense of the dramatic, of the tragic, of the infinite, has descended upon us, filling us with grief, but even above grief, wonder. Our plans were so beautifully laid out, ready to be carried to action, but with magnificent certainty God laid them aside and said, “You have forgotten—mine?”
It was that last line, in which O’Connor cast aside her wishes (and her father’s wishes) and acknowledged the supremacy of God’s, that pierced my narcissistic woe: You have forgotten—mine? I began to wonder whether God had used the death of my last surviving parent—my beloved and cherished mother—to bring about a change in me, the mourner left warily and discontentedly behind. That I could ever be roused to believe such a thing from my self-pitying state surprises me, but something like that did happen.
I started to remember what my mother had said about her church. She had spoken of it—how else would I have remembered the names of those long-ago Missouri Synod clergymen, the Revs. Janke and Schroeder? I paged through the well-worn copy of her hymnal; I recalled how she had arranged for a pastor from her home church in Sioux City to preside at the graveside service for my grandmother. Then I remembered an LCMS congregation in my city that had a reputation for being liturgically traditional and doctrinally orthodox. In fact, during my woebegone sojourn in the Episcopal Church, I had momentarily mentioned this particular Missouri Synod church to my mother as a possibility, and she had eagerly phoned the church to ask about its services on my behalf—until I stubbornly steered myself back to the wayward Episcopalians.
When I began going to this church in December 2023, three months after my mother’s death, I was struck by how inexplicably familiar I found the tunes that accompanied the Divine Service. I had never before attended a Missouri Synod church, so why did the setting of the Gloria Patri—Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen—lodge itself in my ear so comfortably? Why did it seem as though I had heard the setting of the Nunc Dimittis somewhere before? How could it be that I hummed along to hymns that should have been completely unknown to me? Of course, I knew this music, however faintly, because I had heard my mother play it on her piano years and years ago.
After a period of catechesis, I was received, by way of adult confirmation, into my new church on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, Laetare Sunday. I received the Sacrament of the Altar for the first time on that day while the congregation was singing what has become my favorite hymn, “Feed Thy Children, God Most Holy”—another holdover from the 1941 Lutheran Hymnal preserved in the present Lutheran Service Book. Did my mother ever play it? I cannot say, but I sometimes find myself noting, when listening to a hymn I especially like, whether or not it had been included in my mother’s hymnal. Often my favorites turn out to be holdovers from 1941—a list that includes “Soul, Adorn Yourself With Gladness,” “Your Table I Approach,” and, on the Transfiguration of Our Lord, “From Heaven Above to Earth I Come.”
I am always at pains to say that I did not become a member of my church as some sort of “tribute” to my mother; I became a member because I came to believe the truth of our confession. But I can also say that, had it not been for my mother, and the faith God granted her, I would have never found my way to confessional Lutheranism. She had neglected the observance of her own faith—and her responsibility to impart it to her offspring—but, in bits and pieces, she had communicated it to me. And when she left me, she left behind a gift that I was free to recover.
It is unfortunate that so many parents of millennials failed to pass along the traditions that gave shape to their own lives. My mother grew up nourished by the Missouri Synod, and my father learned his life of discipline and self-control in the Air Force, but I had the benefit of neither. Yet I have their example, even if they did not apply it as thoroughly as they might have. Our parents give us things even when they do not intend to. No one could have guessed that my father’s dog tag that listed his faith as Lutheran would one day be discovered by his son, years after his death and not long after his wife’s. But as Flannery O’Connor knew, God had a plan.
