So Garrison Keillor means to retire for real this time. It's time to say: happy retirement, Mr. Keillor; don't forget to put out the cat and back up the hard drive.
His show's new host plans to revamp "A Prairie Home Companion" into a more-music-less-comedy format. That's certainly a worthy goal from an entertainment standpoint, but it seems to me the proposal misses the heart of what has made "APHC" so valued by its audience: its stories. And thereby hangs a tale for us United Methodists.
I remember when I first became aware of "A Prairie Home Companion." I was working on what my editor liked to call "a little country weekly" in the town where I grew up. One Saturday morning – we always opened on Saturday mornings so working folks could bring in their classified ads – our part-time writer showed up wearing the first "Lake Wobegone" T-shirt I ever saw.
Her attire made an instant connection. "I love 'Prairie Home Companion'," I said. "Oh, so do I," she replied. "I always feel like I'm part of the story."
Community
Feeling "part of the story" seemed easier back then. Ours wasn't as small a town as it had once been by the time of my early adulthood, but it was still the kind of place where friendliness guided human interaction. It was the kind of town where your next-door neighbor, a cop, might give you a ride home in the squad car when he saw you walking on a steamy Florida afternoon. It was the kind of place where guys from the street crew would change your flat tire if you broke down near their truck. Where shopkeepers knew you were good for it if you came up a few pennies short of the bill. Where folks standing in line at the small movie house shouted their outrage to stop a cad from slapping a woman in the trailer park next door.
Yes, there were plenty of times when we were too much in each other's business. Still, although the social glue that held us together sometimes encased us like cement, comfort and even courage flourished in that sense of community. Whatever life might throw at you, somebody always had your back.
Now I wonder if what truly ails United Methodism today is a sense that we've fallen out of one another's stories. Maybe we've even fallen out of God's Great Story, the divine intention that Jesus outlined for us to build an earthly community where neighborliness, not legislation, forms the paramount value for our lives together.
And I wonder further: What might neighborliness – companionship, friendship, kindness, you name it – accomplish if it became the paramount value for the 2016 General Conference? It's like the time Mrs. Beaty borrowed your garden rake and left it out in the rain: even though she apologized, you resented the extra work of oiling and scraping off the rust, but you still took her a casserole when Mr. Beaty died, because that's what neighbors do. We share in one another's sorrows, even if it's just a chicken casserole and a shoulder to cry on.
Theologians might call this interaction the embodiment of grace – of getting mercies that you don't deserve, of giving mercies despite your hurt. Seems to me, that's what keeps us in one another's stories: giving and receiving grace in a merciless world.
I think Garrison Keillor understands grace better than any storyteller of my lifetime, and that's what has made "A Prairie Home Companion" so beloved. In contrast, we United Methodists have lost our sense of the grace that Methodism's founder John Wesley consistently preached. In other words, we've fallen out of our own story, and we're trying to reclaim it by forcing conformity rather than fashioning genuine community.
Perhaps if restoring grace to our common life is all that the 2016 General Conference accomplishes, it could be enough. I'm convinced that grace will lead us home.
Cynthia B. Astle
Cynthia B. Astle
A veteran observer of seven General Conferences, United Methodist Insight Editor Cynthia B. Astle will report from the 2016 General Conference scheduled May 10-20 in Portland, Ore.