Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.

• Exodus 20:16

“‘Do not steal. “‘Do not lie. “‘Do not deceive one another.

• Leviticus 19:11

God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and notfulfill?

• Numbers 23:19

“Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live long and that it may go well with you in the land the Lord your God is giving you.

• Deuteronomy 5:16

If the title rings a bell and the Scriptures look familiar, I recently published a post on Another Old Song – Blizzard of Lies.

I was lost in trying to think of what to do for a replacement for the “with a little help” series.  I mentioned last week that I found one lesson in a study guide where my wife answered the questions, but she went no further.  The writing is almost illegible.

But one day, soon after I scheduled last week’s post, I awoke in the middle of the night with an idea in my head.  Before the sun came up about three hours, I had written four things down.  I may have less than those four posts in the end, but it dawned on me how we are bombarded with a storm of one kind or another.

But as an introduction, I would like to discuss how we often tell lies without even knowing it.

It is easy to do that these days with the media telling the lies, and we repeat it.  The public school system is forced to portray this world without God.  That is not what the constitutional amendment meant on that subject, but teachers are either misinformed, or they are forced to say things that are not true.

Of course, there are the little white lies.  You are asked by a woman if she looks good in the dress she is wearing.  She looks horrible, but you are not going to say that.  Some of us are more convincing in the lie we say, but “In a line-up of baboons, you would stand out as the best” is not a very good response.

But there is another way we tell falsehoods.  It is related to those people who have been taught lies.

My parents were children of the depression.  Growing up in the South and in farming country, they could grow enough food to feed the family and provide seed for the next year’s crops.  I don’t know if they made their own cheese, but they churned the butter.  They had chickens for both the eggs and for meals containing meat, being very careful to maintain the flock and herd for the future.  And they hunted for rabbits, squirrels, and deer.  If they had anything in excess, they bartered with neighbors or just gave it away to someone in need.

Somewhere along in there, my mother’s mother supposedly had a nervous breakdown and my mother had to “become” the mother for her younger sister.  That is the way she told the story, but the two sisters were only three years apart.  I will let that exaggeration slide for the moment.  But whatever happened within my mother’s mind at that point made her hate her mother and be very strict with her three children.  She had plans for everyone, except me, and I got the worst of the strict lifestyle.

I am going to tell the story of my parents with all of its inconsistencies.  We all tend to exaggerate here, cover up for a wrong motive there, etc.  But I might save those for the next post published on Friday evening.  So, if I say something that has a two-year gap here or a strange change there, this is the way I was told, and questioning it was not honoring my mother and father.

And my mother thought it to be biblical that no one should ever leave their place of birth, a poor interpretation of the prodigal son parable, as an example.  When she graduated high school, she went to Memphis, TN to a business school to become a bookkeeper.  She loved the strict way the school was run.  Everyone wore business attire, with women even wearing a hat and gloves to class everyday.  The ritual of removing the gloves to type was part of class.  Yes, ritualistic to the hilt and that strict.  She justified her absence from the home, to care for her little sister even though her mother was there to do that.  She was staying with an aunt north of Memphis.  My Dad had gone to Mississippi A&M before it became Mississippi State University.  He played football and enrolled in engineering classes.  The war in Europe was brewing and according to him, he dropped out after the end of the first semester to get ready to go to war, something that did not happen for a couple of years.  He went to Jackson, TN where he worked on the railroad.  But once my mother graduated, he met her in Hernando, Mississippi, just south of Memphis, I suppose they met there to be married in Mississippi instead of Tennessee.  They went back to Jackson, TN.  When the war started, my Dad went home and enlisted with all his buddies from school.  By this time, they had a baby girl, who they referred to at times as their Pearl Harbor baby.  Sixteen months later, they had a baby boy.  I think that Dad had already left for the war by then.  My mother spoke of watching my Dad play baseball for the Fort Polk team at Fort Polk in southwest Louisiana, but according to her, she lived in northern Mississippi, too far to go just for the game.  That is where my father tore his shoulder, in a baseball game, although I have heard a half-dozen legends regarding his shoulder injury.  He hid the injury from the commander.  He wanted to fight but ended up running railroad depots behind the lines to help the resupply efforts.  But when my Dad went to Europe, my mother had a daughter and a son on the way or already born, and she lived at home with her mother and father.  It was about this time that her sister left to go to New Orleans for nursing school.  So, there was room for my mother and two children.  Pot-belly stoves for heat, but room.

My Dad was delayed in returning.  After the war, he ran a bulldozer, building the Tempelhof Airdrome in Berlin.  So, most families were reunited by the time he got home.  He stayed in the old hometown, staying in the National Guard.  When the Korean Conflict started, his National Guard unit was federalized and he went to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, to teach at the artillery school there.  The entire family went.  The war was nearing its end when his enlistment came up and he turned it down.  Jackson, TN was close enough for my mother to go home if a parent got sick, but in those days, most roads from South Carolina to Mississippi were gravel roads if not dirt roads.  Instead of a few hours as it is today, it took days.  Motels were just starting to be built along the major roads, so traveling was an adventure, and my mother had to go home.

I came into the world soon after their return.  My dad had already started a turkey farm when I was born, and he built a poultry processing plant.  We moved from a house next door to my mother’s parents to the farm in a house next door to my Dad’s parents.  When we lost the farm, we moved back into town to our previous house, but then my Dad got a job in southern Mississippi for a year.  My mother’s father died of cancer that year, and I think she never forgave herself for being a three-hour drive away.  We moved back the next Christmas after my Dad found a job in Tupelo, about eighteen miles from the old farm.  When my Dad went back on the road to work, we moved back to the farm, buying the farmhouse I had grown up in.  My mother was by the side of each of the remaining grandparents when they passed.  She did what she thought was the only unsinful way to live.

This is a long story to explain that my mother, by choice and her misinterpretations of Bible stories, had experienced practically none of the world from the standpoint of living anywhere other than home.  One year in school, staying with an old aunt.  Two years in Jackson, TN and about that much, maybe three years in South Carolina, and one year in Southern Mississippi.  The rest within thirty minutes of a parent or in-law that needed her to do something.

Thus, she went on vacation and thought everything she saw was debauchery.  It was not like home, thus rejected as sin and aberrant behavior.  Recently, it dawned on me that my mother had created her own religious denomination, Amish with Presbyterian rules and reading English translations of the Bible and using cars, television (my babysitter), electricity, indoor plumbing, and telephone.  Otherwise, all information that progressed beyond her childhood was rejected as sinful.

So, when I went off to college, philosophical and social discussions in class had me as this reactionary freak from a time long ago.  Besides taking Philosophy, the army was preparing me for being an officer and a gentleman and social skills were necessary.  Interacting with the seedy side of society was necessary also.  I did not fit in any conversations.  I did not seriously date anyone other than a local girl who also had farm parents that had never been away from home, but she dumped me without an explanation.  And then my wife, who liked weird guys, and I was the chief of weirdness.

Why was I weird?  My moral code was something more strict than the Pharisees would ever imagine, definitely from the 1800s.  And anything that my mother would not do was sin.

I have written a lot about my mother not wanting me to be born and hating my Dad for making her pregnant, hating me for her back slipping a disc while trying to overwork herself and thus lose the baby, etc.  But, let me give a note here of understanding rather than regret.

My mother did not think she was lying when she told me just the way things were.  Once she came to South Carolina to visit and one of the neighborhood children used the word “butt” meaning someone’s bottom (backside).  My mother almost became catatonic.  She told me I had to quit my job and move back to the farm.  My children would go to Hell hearing such language.  I was totally confused in that those same children used far worse language than that word.

And this is a long story, to come to one point only.  We sometimes lie to people because we do not know any better, choosing to live in a self-imposed fantasy where the world has never changed since you graduated high school.  Then, it is extremely hard to assimilate into society, as we find out that our mother lied about this, she lied about that, she lied in general.  But did she?  She said what she thought was the truth, and her idea of the truth only matched our hometown, and not really even then.  Our hometown had a lot of people who had never changed and the ones who did change tolerated the “set in their ways” bunch.

Still today, I have some things in my head that are in the category of “wrong.”  I am just now within the last ten-fifteen years enjoying a vocalist doing jazz improvisation in a song, but I cringe if anyone does that to the National Anthem – still thinking it shows disrespect or is getting close to that line.

So, as young parents, your children will think you have lied to them.  And maybe you have unintentionally.  I see what my grandchildren face in public school these days and I can only pray and weep for them.  In getting a good education, it will require an inner strength and good teaching at home.  But it will require wisdom.  God can provide that, but we are to honor those parents that might not be preparing us to stand firm while living in this fallen world.

Here is Susannah McCorkle singing Blizzard of Lies.  Susannah McCorkle does some improvisational changes in this song by Dave Frishberg, and Dave Frishberg played piano for the recording of the song.  I doubt if that was disrespect.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.