Tempests

She clerked in Mentink's IGA, a downtown grocery store where her all-over loveliness was on display. This old memory of mine has a particular setting--the downtown IGA, where one day Mom and I picked up groceries. 

We weren't right there when Mom said it. I'm quite sure we were on our way out or somewhere on our way home when she told me we'd just been waited on by an exemplary young woman, a champion of Christianity. I can't remember Mom's exact words, but what she meant to say was that Miss Churchill (no relation to the Prime Minister) had stood fast against worldliness by telling school officials that she would not attend the homecoming dance, even though she'd been elected homecoming queen. 

Dancing, in her mind and soul--and the minds and souls of lots of others in the 1950s Dutch Reformed world where I grew up--was verboten. What's more, those of us who shared her commitments weren't alone. Hundreds of bands of Protestant Christians back then warned its members against drinking and card playing, against movies and dancing. Refusing worldly amusements established a level of righteousness. 

What Mom was telling me that day, downtown, was simple: Miss Churchill was a true Christian witness, even something of a martyr, in a world in which her level of moral values was scorned. She'd turned down being Queen of the Oostburg High School Homecoming of 1957 (or so) because she believed, heart and soul, that dancing was sin.

I tell that story because all the ingredients are there for the same kind of brew that occurred here in the last few months with a committee's determination that Mama Mia! with its comic toleration of promiscuity, was, to some, inappropriate on a stage at a Christian school.  

I need to apologize. I was wrong. The Unity Christian High School Board had, I'm told, nothing to do with the decision not to allow Moma Mia! to use the facility at the school. I said they did. I'm told, in no uncertain terms, that they didn't. 

The decision belonged to a committee of eight, five of whom voted against the Tulip Festival's choice of a musical. Five determined Mama Mia! being staged in a Christian school meant a tacit acceptance of the sexual promiscuity at the core of the story. 

My take on what happened was false. I shouldn't have said what I said, and I'm sorry for talking about the Unity Board.

There's just a bit more to story of Miss Churchill, and the OHS Homecoming dance. Years later, I had to speak at a Christian school function in Denver. A woman I didn't know came up to say she too had grown up in Oostburg, that her name was Churchill, and that her father had been the preacher at the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

It all came back in a flash. Maybe I shouldn't have said what I did, but I told her I didn't know her when she and I lived just a block away. I told her that I was just a little kid back then, but that I remembered what my mother had told me just outside the door of Mentink's IGA, how she'd lauded that young lady's sparkling witness--we wouldn't have used the noun saint (that was Roman Catholic), but we could soften it: saintly, as an adjective or adverb.

Miss Churchill (not her married name) was shocked, not because I remembered that episode in her life, but because at that very time the Denver Christian school her son attended was, for the first time in its history, sponsoring a dance. She, understandably, was passionately against it. 

We both had to giggle--me, I'd imagine, a bit more than her.

The consternation the change in plans a committee's decision created here has likely subsided somewhat now, post-tulips. What's more, the remodeled downtown auditorium served the Festival well, it seems--and it's right there downtown, a far easier venue for the thousands of visitors who will come to the Festival in years to come. Life goes on. 

That some deride presumed self-righteousness is understandable. On the other hand, the five members of that committee who voted against Mama Mia! have the blessing of their own tried and tested moral convictions, the reward of believing that a few months ago now, they did the right thing. 

To call it all a tempest in a teapot is to belittle what happened. People with very strong contrary views approached what some of them believed was a significant moral question. 

But was it? I don't know if today Denver Christian has a prom or a dance, but I'm willing to bet they do.

Such cultural questions easily create twin horrors: living without a moral compass on one hand, and living with those who are sure they have them on the other. 

In communities of all kinds--even in families--those questions are questions with several answers, true multiple-choice.