When I Get to Heaven: The Lord Willing

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Prologue Heaven

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

For Mary

If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest

limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me.

—Psalm 139:9

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Without the dedication of Mary Rose Brown, this book would be little more than a thought in our father’s head and an eternal whisper of the spirit.

To Nat B. Read and Linda Read, we express our deep appreciation for their many sensitive suggestions and editorial improvements.

We are grateful to Nancy Pigott, our copyeditor and proofreader, for her long and caring efforts in creating a concise and readable body of text.

We also thank Rex S. Wignall, our pastor and friend, who helped to make our father’s first step into eternity, in hiker’s terms, a piece of cake.

FOREWORD

I first met the Reverend Howard Brown at our men’s Bible study at Bill and Linda King’s home in La Canada, California, where Bill had invited several of his friends together to study the Bible. The problem was that we did not have a teacher. I had attempted to fill in for a few meetings but we needed someone who was more qualified as a biblical scholar. Fortunately, one of the fellows in our group, Alan Mayer, was the son-in-law of a retired Methodist Minister, Howard Brown. He asked the pastor if he would be willing to be our teacher and Mr. Brown agreed. What a wonderful person he was! For his teachings, he portrayed various characters of the Bible and, using scriptures related to that individual, he took on that person’s life and personality. He even dressed in the appropriate clothing of the time. It was most informative and we soon learned how much he loved the Lord and what a great storyteller of the Bible he was. We all enjoyed his portrayal of biblical characters and, more important, we felt his love for us.

As I read this book, I am amazed at his vivid recollection of events, conversations, and happenings over his lifetime. It is almost as though he had a photographic memory of the entirety of his wonderful experiences. In his early years, he was a great practical joker, pulling many amazing pranks on his friends but always with love and concern for his ‘prey.’ He was a man who loved people, and people loved him—and these qualities are evident throughout the book.

In it, he takes us back to his childhood and then to his early years in the military, struggling to earn his wings as a World War II pilot and flying paratroopers and war supplies to the Pacific theater. Journals of his life intrigue us—through his years as a seminary student, then as a pastor and family man, through his retirement—and we become fascinated with this humble but deeply loving man. He has a wonderful ability to tell his own story, with all of the finely tuned details of a great read: the friends who were there with him; the sequence of events told progressively; and the quotes and quips of solid, genuine conversation are all conveyed in simple, clear, and captivatingly vivid prose.

When I finished the book, I had the sense that I had lived his journey with him and enjoyed a walk through each of his interesting life experiences. He was a wonderful man, a humble and deep man, who loved the Lord and loved people. I am privileged to have known him personally even for a short time, and through this book, I have come to know him for all of his vibrant life and am enriched because of it.

Senator Newton R. Russell (Ret)

January 2011

PREFACE

Not long before he died, our father gave us some advice on the business of living. Get on with it, he said, and that was what it was about throughout his ministry. For fifty-two years—from 1952 until 2004—he made his way through the tangled odyssey of religious life, the everyday paradox of the Christian on earth: the physical needs of the church versus the spiritual quest. He responded to every challenge with an impassioned vigor and a whirl of action. Fortify the budget; feed the hungry. Promote the church; visit the poor and the prisoner. Pack the pews; house the homeless. It all came together in one implausible world, and in it, he changed the status quo, heated up a room, brought down the house and forged an adventure every time. With Dad, it was about getting on with whatever was about to take place.

Early on, it was about getting on with the life of the church: board meetings and building funds, choir practices and women’s circles, potlucks and pancake breakfasts, all of which flourished in his hands. Yet he consistently made a place for the hungry, the weak and the destitute. We remember that in the 1960s, Dad stood before the governor of Arizona to help exonerate a wrongly imprisoned man who desperately needed to feed his family. Years later, he befriended the shy son of a church member, a silent, withdrawn young man, who felt disconnected yet responded to Dad’s care, and later became a Methodist minister. Humanity in all of its variations—renegades as well as shining stars—grew brighter somehow in his care.

Dad also took special care with his media connections, especially newspapers, and developed solid networks among his peers. We remember that he always seemed to manage a front-page feature when he moved to a new parish, but it had nothing whatever to do with spin. This was a way to reach out to people of all faiths, and he thrived in ecumenical organizations. He hung out with professionals of all walks: psychologists, police officers, civic leaders, even FBI agents. Dad tells of encountering a troubled couple during his tenure at Calvary Methodist Church in Uniontown. He enlisted the help of a federal agent to quell their influence, and then launched a successful fundraiser at the church, beating all odds and winning over the congregation.

In the West, his mantra of get on with it became a rallying call for believers and non-churched alike. In the early sixties, Dad led a band of young people on a rigorous four-day hike backpacking into the Grand Canyon. Along the way, he discovered an experience that he could not live without and continued the hike for thirty-seven years across five parishes. The event drew countless people to practice communion in real time and feel the presence of God in the midst of nature. Often hikers who had little or no church affiliation carried epiphanies and stories of great spiritual conversions back with them. Get on with it.

In 1967, traveling with a small group of Methodist ministers to Wonju, South Korea, Dad felt a profound tug on his spirit when a throng of the most destitute city dwellers gathered en masse to hear him preach on the life of Jesus, and thousands of hands went up in praise. Near the midpoint of his ministry in the 1970s, Dad again felt the power of the Spirit when his entire congregation at South Pasadena United Methodist Church knelt on the floor following a lay witness mission service.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, at parishes in Rialto, Sun City, and Winchester, California, his journey took on a numinous quality. He encountered diverse parishes where impoverished drug dealers and even gang members and bikers commonly sat shoulder-to-shoulder with established, well-educated professionals, forming perfect circles of believers, extraordinary Christians who worked together to further the mission of the church. He recognized the power and purity of leaders yet never shrunk from the polarity of affluent and poor. He offered free services for families who had never heard him preach or placed a penny in the offering plate.

They were small congregations, warm and inviting; he made friends, he turned inward. His prayers became long and unearthly, his sermons soared deep into the abstract, searing the rafters. There was fire in his voice: Look, the storm of the Lord! Wrath has gone forth, a whirling tempest; it will burst upon the head of the wicked.¹ Then softly, his words gentle as a tremor: I will be their God, and they shall be my people…for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.² He rocked the spirit from the pulpit with waves of emotion, his voice rising and falling like a thunderstorm. He preached from the Word, drawing on enigmatic passages: the healing of blind Bartimaeus or the spiritual kindling of the woman at the well. Through biblical stories, he stepped into the divine mystery of it all. Finally, he and our mother traveled to the Holy Land, where Dad preached to hundreds in Jerusalem on the Mount of Beatitudes and by the Sea of Galilee. We felt a deep sense of the presence of Jesus, he said.

His most important journey, though, was deep into the Holy Scriptures. Throughout his ministry, he developed the practice of memorizing long passages and performed his first dramatization, the Book of Job, in 1968 in a unique theater-in-the-round-style chancel in South Pasadena. For the next fifteen years, he developed a broad repertoire of dramas, performing the greatest words of the Bible in character: Isaiah and the Gospels, the Psalmist, the Life of Paul, the Son of God, and the prophets Daniel and Jeremiah. His single-act plays, accompanied by the music of popular classic composers such as Respighi, Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky, and at times by his own composition, Along the Surf at Daybreak, converted biblical prose into poetry. The effect was powerful and mesmerizing—the plays were a hit.

More than this, much more, was that Dad acquired a more insightful and intimate knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. He found the fire in his soul by centering on the discipline of solitude. For many years, he would sit alone in a dark sanctuary, forcing his mind back to God, reciting scriptural passages, until he found a powerful, wondrous peace. "Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit," said Carl Jung: we will eventually find God whether we seek Him or not. Find a place, said Frederick Buechner, and ask God to let you find Him. Dad studied the Word in the quiet of his spirit; he lingered in its depths. Karl Barth said that the Bible drives us out beyond ourselves into a new world, the world of God. There is a river in the Bible that carries us away, he says, carries us away to the sea.

During the first year of his retirement—the last year of his life—his journey took on the quality of an unfinished story. He rattled through old books and papers until he pressed against the edges of his own wellbeing. Driven by an unseen muse (or perhaps inspired by our lovely mother), he began to write. I presented him with a copy of the Writer’s Market and he poured through it page by page, eager to get his story into print. In retrospect, I had a writer’s appreciation of his sense of urgency to get things down, but we had not one clue that our father’s illness was creeping up on him, on all of us, and most of all, on the completion of his memoir.

This is his story and, though it travels easily through the chronology of his life and ministry, the pages run deep. Chapters rich with pithy stories and vignettes span a lifetime—like solid stepping stones through a broad stream—and employ myriad settings: a crowded bakery near his childhood home in Pittsburgh; an open field of poor farmers in South Korea; a rugged horse trail winding through the Superstition Mountains; and finally, the field of heaven. Stories from nine widely different parishes convey some of the finest moments that we shared with Dad; others are his alone.

In Chapter 12, a solemn piece entitled The Guiding Star, captures the spirit of the book with the story of two young lads who managed to steal a parishioner’s handbag and make off with the cash. Caught in a quandary, Dad weighed the risk of wrongly accusing the suspected boys—sons of members in good standing—against the folly of letting the whole thing go. Finally, Dad walks out the front door in the dead of winter. It was a bitter cold night, he begins, I bundled up good and…left the parsonage with a prayer in my heart. I love the tender hope of that one line, which also provides a touch of foreshadowing. He walks up one street and down another, relying entirely on God’s silent tugs. I could have turned left, but I turned right. I made another right turn toward Worthington and could have continued on this same street, but I turned left, down steep Worthington to Walnut. There again, he turns right and finds the boys, miraculously headed straight for him, shuffling through the snow with troubled souls.

We who shared his years on earth learned the benefits of walking with an old soul. He articulated great wisdom and yet, as expressive as he was, he was the master of silences. We remember his office at Desert Chapel: a small, bright room with built-in bookshelves. One evening he was putting his sermon together while Steve and I browsed the crowded library to find his book, The World of Albert Schweitzer. We poured through it asking many questions. The great civility of the man seemed discordant with the photos of malformed and leprous patients in remote Lamaréné. What would make a man leave a comfortable life in Alsace for the heat of equatorial Africa? we asked. One day we will know, he said, and nothing more.

A follower of Barthian theology, Dad believed in God as the source of all revelation. We are small and insignificant, he said—we barely weigh in on the scale of eternity. In these later years, this belief became manifest in his daily practice of Christ crucified on earth, or what Dietrich Bonhoeffer referred to as costly grace. Without the cross, said Bonhoeffer, grace is not valuable; it is insufficient. Dad invested himself in the torn lives of people around him, the poor in spirit and the weak, without regard to reward or remuneration. The essence of Christianity, he upheld, is the love given freely by a transcendent God, one who is beyond all human effort, who outdoes us in love, grace and forgiveness, and who changes us with His Spirit. He turns our mourning into joy. He loves us. Get on with it.

There were times during his last years that Dad seemed quite removed from the rest of us. We have often thought back to that evening at his office and our talk about Schweitzer, who wrote about the enigmatic merger of the supernatural with the natural in The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle. He is talking about early Christian eschatology, but I like the reference as it applies to Dad’s experience in his final year of life. Believers, says Schweitzer of Paul, cease to be natural men. They enter the process of changing to a supernatural state and begin to wear the appearance of natural beings as a kind of veil. In a mysterious fashion, he says, they are already raised with Christ.

In the end, it was about getting on with heaven. As Dad’s illness progressed, he gained extraordinary clarity of vision about his life beyond earth. He referred in casual conversation to agape and a serene conviction of the unseen. His reach toward God became an ongoing communion, his speech became sacrament; he sang of grace. He spoke openly of eternity and being in the company of Jesus, not in an intellectual way, but as though standing next to Him, engaged as with a friend in the living presence of Christ.

Dad found a pure realization that everything on earth is mere preparation for what is to come, not as theological prescription but as spiritual truth. Life breaks our hearts, Dad answered us once, to change us for the realm of God. When the Great Mystery brought His disciples to their knees, Jesus taught them an unending prayer—one that carried them from an earthbound journey to one of glory. As we muscle through the muck of everyday life, Jesus asks us to pray with importunity, with heart. Prayer—in cries, shouts, or whispers—draws us into communion with God, where Christ promises an experience of the Holy Spirit.

What we carry with us into the vast unknown—the indelible moments of love and grace experienced on earth—becomes that which finally saves us. It has taken us a while, more than a few years, to understand that what Dad wanted through this book of stories is to leave us with his unshakable sense of heaven as a place of infinite transformation, of discovery and hope, and to leave us searching for answers of our own.

Laura Hurst Brown with

Steven Howard Brown

May 2011

INTRODUCTION

We were only children when we first learned of our Dad’s love for the Lord. As a pastor, he made it clear to us that he was devoted to his life in the Methodist ministry. In the late fifties, we spent our summers at Jumonville family church camp in southwestern Pennsylvania. We all made the daily hike up the sheer path to the famous Cross of Christ. I remember the long, steep walk—it was a hard trek—but I recall even more vividly our time together at the top of the hill, with a sweeping view of the Laurel Highlands. We sat at the foot of the cross—Dad, Mom, my sister Laura, and I—silently taking in the beauty of God’s creation. There beneath a wide banner of sky and fair weather clouds, Dad became a different sort of being.

In his journey to connect with the living Lord, Dad found refuge in walks that led him closer to what he called the great mystery. Early in his ministry, Dad wrote a song—one of many in his career—entitled, What is Reality? In it, he pondered the question of life’s awesome mystery. Is it the sound of laughter—or is it pain and tears? Way down inside of me, the song goes, what is it that satisfies my longing? The lyrics ring with an air of mystery. He played the piano as he sang, melding dissonance with sweet harmony and capturing the wonder of a divine quest.

As we grew, so did Dad’s love for Christ, and as he discovered more deeply the grace of the Lord, his love became more passionate, his sermons succinct. I remember his wrestling with the weekly challenge of bringing God’s word to his congregation, and his painstaking efforts to resolve church conflicts. Struggling with pastor relations committees, boards of trustees and unhappy parishioners, it seemed, were part of the spiritual transformation. Yet we were busy being kids—too busy to realize how powerfully Dad’s transformation influenced those around him, and it would be decades before we understood how profoundly those people were changed.

Throughout our childhood years, we witnessed the metamorphosis of a post-World War II soldier and seminary student to a devoted spiritual leader, who came to spend much of his time in the heavenly realm. Years earlier, he had returned from war a different man. While his fun-loving nature, infectious laugh, and keen sense of humor were intact (he enjoyed a good practical joke), his more spiritual side had evolved. When Dad arrived in port at San Francisco in 1946 (he served nearly a year with the reconstruction efforts in Japan and Korea), he stayed with his sister Bettie in San Mateo before returning to Pittsburgh. He was the same Howard, she said, but the war had clearly changed him.

Within months of his homecoming, Dad enrolled in seminary courses at West Virginia Wesleyan College. His plans firmly in place for the ministry, Dad’s youthful dream of becoming a commercial pilot dissolved, but his love for flying lived on through his stories. He shared throughout his life that God had spoken to him while he was flying solo over the vast blue Pacific with a voice that was clear and definite. God wanted him to go into the ministry, enter seminary after the war and dedicate his life to serving Him: Dad’s resolve was rock solid. Years later he would confide, I knew better than to question the whisper in my soul. When God wants you to do something, you had better do it! His spiritual journey had begun.

As with every challenge he faced, Dad embraced the journey into the ministry with a sense of adventure. Following seminary, he spent many difficult years anguishing over church politics and overwhelming administrative concerns. He longed to connect with God on a deeper spiritual level that would guide him through the difficulties he faced as a pastor. With daily walks and a discipline of meditation, Dad’s relationship with God grew. Spending time alone with God in the early mornings at sanctuary enriched his soul, yet he wanted even more to find a way to excite others and share his passion for the Lord by building a faith-based church.

In the summer of 1959, while serving his second church in Pennsylvania, Dad set his sights on California for a Brown family vacation. During the cross-country road trip to the West Coast, we made a sightseeing stop at the Grand Canyon. Dad was struck by the way the sun hit the rock formations, creating the beautiful ever-changing shades of orange and red. The beauty of the canyon took his breath away. Here he felt a strong sense of God’s presence and believed that this corner of God’s creation was the most impressive sight this side of