Posts Tagged Hugh Bebb Jones

The feature Hugh’s Journals has appeared here on Sundays. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

Hugh was known as a “praying” pastor. He took prayer seriously and it was a significant part of his ministry. Even if I had never have been told this by those who knew him, I would have known it anyway from his journals.

Hugh “collected” prayers. He typed them up in his journals and on the pages of the small notebook he took with him to home visits, hospital rooms, and gravesides. Hugh believed that prayer had the power to heal, reconnect, and restore.

What is prayer ultimately but an invitation to live in the “holy space” of a  moment?

On a cold Sunday morning, following a week where so much tragedy has happened, and beginning a new week where unfortunately we know so much tragedy will no doubt happen again, a prayer passed along by the Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones, seems like the perfect thing.

Enjoy!

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The Rev. Hugh B. Jones’s Notebooks

The feature Hugh’s Journals has appeared here on Sundays. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

It has been awhile since I posted a page or two from Hugh’s Journals. For reader’s unfamiliar with the Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones, he is my wife’s paternal grandfather and was a Welsh Presbyterian minister and army chaplain. He was an intellectual, a fly-fishermen, and always a pastor. During his long reading life, he kept notebooks where he typed up quotes and passages that he could use in Sunday sermons, at funerals and weddings, or when he was visiting parishioners. My wife inherited some of these notebooks.

I have moved his journals up now to my own writing desk. My own journal of typed-up poems sits next to his. The multi-volumes of notebooks created by a Presbyterian pastor who loved language and poetry sitting next to the small but growing journal of one who was very, very briefly a Lutheran pastor who also loves reading and language.

You can see from Hugh’s date-notations that he returned to these lines often. The first time in 1940 and the last in 1960. 73 years after he first used them in a sermon, I post them here.

Enjoy!

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Welsh Presbyterian Church, Venedocia, OH

The feature Hugh’s Journals appears here most Sundays. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

The Rev. Hugh B. Jones was an inheritor of that flavor of Christian piety that viewed drinking alcohol as intrinsically incompatible  with a life of faith.  While it has always struck me as more than a bit odd that some of my Protestant brothers and sisters who most loudly decry Catholicism for its “works righteousness” are the ones who manage to come up with the most rules proscribing what a “Good Christian” can or cannot do (drink alcohol, dance, play cards,…), I have read enough church history to now be able to contextualize John Calvin and  the cultural undercurrents that gave rise to Spener, Pie Desideria, and the Pietist Movement that influenced so many non-Calvinistic churches.

Nonetheless, I would be lying if I said I had much sympathy with such theology. When the central sacrament of the church is bread and wine, it is difficult for me to understand any theological tangent that asserts that drinking wine is somehow wrong. It is the kind of logical inconsistency that I can never make peace with.

I can, however, make peace with faithful men and women who hold such ideas. Especially when they are as thoughtful and faithful as Hugh. Hugh belonged to a movement that believed that having been justified by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, a Christian’s life should in some way reflect that. And Hugh and Dorthy Jones’s lives did reflect that: in daily prayer, in reading scripture, in living a life worthy of Christ. Abstinence from alcohol –ultimately from sloppy drunkenness and all the bad things that come from that– was simply one more way to live your life faithfully to Christ. How can you not admire such a life?

Hugh’s Journal contain a number of quotes referencing his Calvinistic/Pietistical roots. Here is one such quote paired on a page with a nice poem from The New Spoon River.

Enjoy!

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The feature Hugh’s Journals appears here most Sundays. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

As has been said before here, reason and faith go together. Faith without reason leads to fanaticism, reason without faith leads to moral relativism… to death. The Welsh Presbyterian tradition to which the Rev. Hugh B. Jones belonged respected this delicate balance of Wisdom and Spirit. His reading bears witness to this.

Today’s excerpt, according to Hugh’s note, comes from the introduction to a book on astronomy and the origin of the earth. Hugh used part of this long excerpt apparently in a sermon on November 12, 1961.

I do not know what the text of the day was that Sunday, but with the advantage of 20-20 hindsight we can easily know some of what was in the news and in the air around November 12, 1961… and that 1961, in the middle of the Cold War, was the beginning of a many great changes for American culture.

• November 3, 1961, General Maxwell Taylor submitted his recommendation to JFK that the U.S. send in 10,000 troops to Vietnam.
• November 9, 1961, Theo Epstein saw the Beatles perform at the Cavern Club for the first time, Neil Armstrong set a speed record in an X-15 plane, and the PGA rescinded their “Caucasian Rule” opening professional golf for the first time to non-whites.

As a pastor, Hugh would have been sensitive to the anxiety the Cold War and the dawning awareness of the changing landscape of American culture caused his flock. In that context, this excerpt would have been very comforting indeed.

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The feature Hugh’s Journals appears here most Sundays. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

The Rev. Hugh B. Jones placed a high value on education, reading, and the intellectual life. His expansive reading bears witness to this… as do a number of his journal excerpts.

Today’s journal excerpt is from a Saturday Evening Post article by Vice. Admiral H.G. Rickover, the “Father of the Nuclear Navy.”  According to the date at the bottom of the page, Hugh included this quote in a sermon on the Sunday after Christmas in 1959, presumably in the context of talking about the “Wise Men from the East.” As his congregants were coming down from the celebration of the birth of the promised Messiah, Hugh felt it essential that they have in mind how inextricably mixed education, reason, and knowledge are with true faith. Faith is not after all the opposite of reason but its completion.

In an election year, when the American public education system is often debated, it is interesting to remember the lofty status that  men like Admiral Rickover… and the Rev. Hugh B. Jones… once placed upon the role of education in western culture.

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The feature Hugh’s Journals appears here most Sundays. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

As has been said before, Hugh read not only prolifically but also expansively. His journals include notes from theological journals, lay magazines and publications, novels and poems, as well as books of theology, philosophy and history.

He read always with a theologian’s eye and a pastor’s ear. The quotes he excerpted were one’s that he could use in sermons to help comfort or challenge the faithful who were in his charge, or as devotional aids for himself and his flock during times of personal and national crisis.

A member of “the greatest generation,” Hugh was a pastor through the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and the 1970s. Some of the most interesting and challenging decades in American – and world – history… and in the history of the church.

Today I am posting two smaller quotes that seem to distill much of the essence of Hugh’s notebooks and, hence, of Hugh himself, an uncommonly humble and perceptive intellect. Two quotes that the church… and the world… could use as much today as they did in Hugh’s time.

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The feature Hugh’s Journals appears here most Sundays. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

Today’s selection from Hugh’s notebooks is an excerpt from a Christian Century interview from 1959 with Archibald MacLeish about his play J.B. For those unfamiliar with J.B., it is a modern retelling of the biblical story of Job. Hugh was a voracious reader and encyclopedist: books of theology, biblical scholarship, sacred arts, and literature. There are in the few notebooks of his that I have, a number of references to MacLeish’s fine play and the book of Job.

Job is one of the most “modern” books of the bible… and along with Ecclesiastes the most “philosophical” and “human.” It’s central question of how a “good and just” God could allow good and just people to suffer has plagued the faithful and the philosophical for millennia. In the shadow of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, during the height of the Cold War, MacLeish wrestles poetically and artistically with the problem of evil creating a modern classic.

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The feature Hugh’s Journals appears here most Sundays. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

Today’s selection from Hugh’s notebooks is a favorite. Hugh shares a memory of his time in Edinburgh and a bit about his life with his bride, Dorothy.

One of Hugh’s classmates at Edinburgh was Holmes Ralston (Rolston?), theologian and bible scholar. I looked through the books my wife received from Hugh, but the commentary referenced in this notebook page is not among them. I hope wherever that commentary is, it still has the letter in it.

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The feature Hugh’s Journals appears here each Sunday. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

The Reverend Hugh B. Jones preached Easter sermons as a congregational pastor in South Dakota, Montana, and Minnesota, and as a chaplain to troops in North Africa during World War II. He would also have been a congregant at Easter services in Ohio and Wisconsin as a boy growing up a Welsh Presbyterian pastor’s son, and as a college student in Missouri, a seminarian in Illinois, and as a graduate student in Scotland and Palestine.

Since the Easter story is the ultimate point of Christianity, Hugh’s notebooks are filled with Easter and Easter-related quotes and texts.

Here are just a couple excerpts from Hugh’s notebooks, in honor of Easter. The first one is notated as being from an Easter sermon in 1933. The second one is a quote about the discrepancies in the Easter narrative from one gospel to another. Whether Hugh used this quote specifically in a sermon, he does not indicate.

Enjoy! And a blessed Easter to you all.

A quote used in Hugh’s 1933 Easter Sermon

 A quote about the discrepancies in Easter narratives between gospels

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The feature Hugh’s Journals appears here each Sunday. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

Hugh's Notebooks

Last week’s inaugural posting of Hugh’s Journals bore a number of unexpected fruits: an email from one of Hugh’s quite distant relatives in Australia, a number of nice comments and emails from Jones family members who I know or at least know of, and… another notebook that I knew nothing of at all.

Last Tuesday I met my father-in-law for racquetball. Before getting started, he opened a plastic bag and said “I don’t know if you have seen this notebook.”

It was the same style of notebook as those Sue has inherited, a bit less faded perhaps. But where the notebooks I am familiar with… and have been reading over the years… merely have a small notation inserted on the spine  (“1958 Quotations” or “Poems A – K”) this one had a faded picture of my father-in-law as a boy. Opening it up for a cursory look, I noticed that while the notebooks I have been reading are filled with pages of hand-typed quotations, the one from my father-in-law seemed more a scrap book. There were pictures, grade school report cards, and miscellaneous other documents taped and glued on pages as well as a few pages of typed text.

Later that night, I took the new notebook out and began looking through it. There is one page with two pictures of Hugh and one of his bride, Dorothy. There is a page with my father-in-law’s 4th grade report card from Cambria, Wisconsin, attached to it, and some pages with “From the Minister’s Study” columns that Hugh had written, presumably cut from some congregational newsletter.

My favorite page has two unusual items attached to it, one above the other. On the top, is part of an old parking citation from August 20th, 1945, from  the City of Staunton, VA, made out to “Mrs. Hugh B. Jones.” Below is a smaller, square piece of paper where, presumably an outraged Dorothy, had with meticulous care drawn a map showing where “Legitmate Parking” and “No Parking” were on “Beverly St.” And where her car, and other cars were parked. Whether she had drawn this to argue her case with the City of Staunton, or more likely, to send in a letter to Hugh who was still a chaplain in North Africa, I am not sure. She was, apparently, notorious for ignoring the usual parking conventions.

A few pages in, I found the page that I am posting today.

When I came up with the idea of doing something with Hugh’s notebooks, with the pages and pages of quotations and prayers that he had taken so much time to type-out and file, it was because I had always had a vague sense that something more should be done with them. But I never knew what or why.

When I came upon this page… typed double-sided, dated February 17, 1978… I finally knew why I had had that feeling all these years. Hugh wanted to do something with them.

A few words about the names in these two pages. Hugh and Dorothy were usually called by their grandchildren Taid and Nain, the Welsh words for “grandfather” and “grandmother.” Taid and Nain had two children: Daniel (Dan) who was named after Hugh’s father, and Elizabeth (Betsy). Daniel (my father-in-law) married DeLores and they had three children: Sue (my wife), Amy, and Chris. Betsy married Bill and they had three children: Kent, Mark, and Erick.

Hugh saw the notebooks of typed pages as a legacy…. a life-time of wisdom, and study, and faith that he wanted to pass-on to his children and grandchildren.

Over the years, I guess had come to think of them that way as well. Yet also as something more that just a family legacy.

Hugh was always a pastor and a preacher… a proclaimer of the Good News. The light of what he believed – of what he knew was true – did not go out when he died. It burns in some fashion in his children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren… as it burns in the children, and grand-children, and great-grandchildren of all the saints that have gone before.

When those who have gone before are as faithful and studious as Hugh, all of us – children of God – need to hear what they have learned.

Enjoy!

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