The Most Unforgettable Person I’ve Ever Met:
My Grandma Bennett
Although the descendant of Scotch-Irish Christians of the sterner variety, my maternal, Appalachian grandmother, Clara, knew how to smile. There she is in that 1902 family photograph of some 25 members of my familial forebears, from my great-great grandparents on down to my grandmother’s generation. It seems to be some special occasion because picture-taking back then was not a frequent activity. All are dressed in black, with the women wearing plain bonnets and the men sporting walrus mustaches. Twenty-four of them look as if the fear of the Great Jehovah is in them. There is not a suggestion of a smile on any of those faces; there’s not an inkling of a twinkling in any of their eyes. They are looking dead ahead for all eternity. They might as well have been cardboard cutouts, instead of flesh and blood creations.
The twenty-fifth member of the family, Clara, is holding the first of what would be her seven children, and Clara has a huge grin, by 1902 standards anyway.
I shall never know what the rest of the family thought of that grin when they saw the photograph. But for me, seeing that photograph the first time 35 years after my grandmother’s death, was a confirmation of the personality of the woman that I had known: a person of great joy and optimism.
And she was religious, just happier about it than the rest of her family. She read the Bibleevery day and had a glass of beer every night. I don’t know which made her happier. Perhaps one was a compensation for the other, or a complimentary gesture.
I trace my initial interest in wanting to study for the ministry from her, as well as my desire to sing and play the piano (the old upright player piano in her front parlor was the first piano I ever pounded).
Truly, she had a different perspective on religion than did her family, or most of the others in her tiny, rural village in Western Maryland. The whole place (all three streets of it) seemed to go into mourning on Sunday, the Lord’s Day. All but Clara. That is when her spirit beamed the brightest! That is when she sang those old evangelical hymns in church as loudly and as lustily as she possibly could. That is when that grin of hers got bigger and bigger the longer and longer the preacher went on about eternal salvation.
She adored religion. But this was no simple woman. She was a consummate psychologist even if she’d only had the bare essentials of a formal education. She knew, for instance, that people could use religion for all kinds of less than humanitarian reasons. They could cloak themselves in piety, mouth the proper prayers, and step back into the world with their cruelties neatly intact.
I shall never forget one Wednesday night prayer meeting in the social hall of our ancestral church when I was around eight years old. The time came for people to express themselves out loud in individual prayer, but to do so at the same time. We were seated on chairs when suddenly the preacher gave the cue and everyone except Clara and me jumped up. They took various bizarre positions around the room, assuming the most outlandish facial expressions, and vocalizing the strangest sounds. Some people were kneeling at their chairs while others were standing on them; some were turning around in circles; others were dancing; some were grunting or howling or breathing hard; others were staring with wide-open eyes as if they had seen old Beelzebub himself. Many were talking weirdly, something I later learned was called “speaking in tongues.”
Fortunately, our church did not believe in snake handling, or I quickly would have fled.
And my grandmother? She never got off her chair at that prayer meeting; she never spoke in tongues; she never danced around as if she had received the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. She just sat there and smiled that wide grin of hers.
“It’s okay, Donnie, you don’t have to do what the others are doing, not if you don’t feel it and mean it!”
No need to carry on about it! No need for pomp and circumstance, bells and whistles, statues and candles. No need for great theological tomes, robes, vestments, papal bulls, church councils, or dramatic personal testimonies.
Grandma Bennett found great joy in worshipping with her family and friends, even if she interpreted “spirituality” in her own way. And she taught me early on to do so as well. What a lucky fellow I was to have been her grandson!
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