Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [18]
At once she felt a great wave of love for Bob and an enormous sense of release. Of course she could live with anything as long as Bob was alive and healthy. At age thirty-eight, seventeen years into her marriage, the dark cloud lifted. She would remember it as one of the pivotal moments of her life. The phantom was gone. It seemed to her as if God had sent the message, at last answering her prayers. It reaffirmed her faith.
Mary had enrolled in Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church, about three miles from home. St. Luke’s, next door, was too far-out for her: they used handouts for services instead of the holy book itself. Walnut Creek Pres, as it was known, was founded in 1878, in the midst of a furious national debate about the merits of Darwinism and its theory that man was descended from apes. A century later, Walnut Creek Pres was still trying to cling to tradition while shepherding a flock of well-to-do urban expatriates living in semirural exclusion. But the city literally was growing around it into a minimetropolis, perhaps best symbolized by the massive Route 24/580/680 freeway interchange taking concrete form right at its doorstep. The 1970s brought the church fast growth, a membership of more than twelve hundred, and a host of issues that rattled the congregation.
Mary and the children were soon as involved with Walnut Creek Pres as they had been with the Baptist church in Danville. Mary taught Sunday school and went to a women’s Bible class on Tuesdays. The church had a strong social-educational program for young people, and all four Griffith kids took part.
Walnut Creek Presbyterian is one of three major Presbyterian churches in Contra Costa County. As is true of most other Protestant denominations, Presbyterianism has been wrestling throughout the twentieth century with far-reaching issues of traditionalism versus modernism. The traditionalist view, closely associated with evangelism, which is concerned with the rescuing of souls through Christ, holds to a literalist reading of the Bible as the sacrosanct word of God. The modernist view sees the Bible as a living document, revealed by God to holy scribes, yet subject to interpretation in keeping with changing times and customs.
A survey of Contra Costa County churches by the local council of churches in the late 1960s placed the Presbyterians in the “moderate” column when measured against an index of Biblical literalism.
Walnut Creek Presbyterian tilted to the conservative end of the spectrum. It was, for example, one of the last of the San Francisco Bay-area Presbyterian churches to accept women as deacons and elders (it did so in the early 1980s), and then only after the national church voted in 1982-83 to amend the Book of Order—the Presbyterian “constitution”—to force recalcitrant congregations to act. A bitter internal struggle over the issue ensued at Walnut Creek Pres, resulting in more than 220 parishioners’ splitting off and starting their own congregation.
The teachings at Walnut Creek Pres were in the evangelical, missionary tradition: The Bible was God’s word. Man was born a sinner. Through God’s grace, via a conversionary acceptance of the Lord Jesus, Man could enter the realm of salvation. In this construct Satan is alive and recruiting, and hell is a reality.
Walnut Creek Presbyterian was orthodox, but not fundamentalist in the aggressive or militant sense of that word—no fire and brimstone, no television ministries. It maintained a benign surface, was mildly liberal on some social issues, and accommodated a large staff that ran the gamut from progressive to doctrinaire. It tolerated individual differences as long as they were neither blatant nor disruptive. Even gay parishioners were accepted as long as they stayed closeted.
While Mary’s religiosity was probably more