(AS DIAGNOSED BY BROTHER TONY AND PREACHER FITZWATER)
I have toyed with calling this essay “An Affair of the Heart” but that title would have been misleading. This is not a love story in any respect. It is a medical matter with ecclesiastical overtones. This combination of factors makes it a matter of major significance.
The story starts in my early childhood when my parents insisted that I accompany them to church on Sunday. The church services started at 9:00 AM with Sunday school and continued through the preaching which lasted until 1:00 PM. In many cases, there was an evening service as well. For the record, I am here to tell you that I regretted every single instant that I was forced to devote to listening to Christian theology as a child. The reason for my dislike pivots on the choice of churches offered by my parents.
Originally my parents were Southern Baptists, which of course is the branch of the Baptist Church that split from the main church after 1865 because of its support for slavery. From the Southern Baptists, they progressed to the Pentecostal Church, and then to the Nazarene sect. These were evangelical churches which encouraged shouts from the audience as the preacher spoke. There were “amens” and “halleluiahs” as well as “Give it to him!” when the preacher was excoriating Satan. When hymns were sung, it was not unusual to see people in the congregation waving their arms. Even as a lad of less than ten years, I thought this conduct was totally embarrassing.
Then in 1932 or 1933, when I was ten or eleven years old, my parents found a new church on Neustead Avenue in St. Louis. This church, called the Free Will Baptists sect, had taken over a building where the former church had gone bankrupt. The Free Willers had two characteristics at the outset. They addressed each other as Brother and Sister, including the preacher. And secondly, they banned piano accompaniment for the hymns that were to be sung by the congregation. There was a piano on the altar which I suppose had been inherited from the bankrupt church. But the cover on the keyboard was closed and no one attempted to play it. The reason for banning piano music was that the Free Willers had decreed that, in the time when Jesus was establishing the Christian church, there was no such thing as a piano. In an effort to be more holy and to authenticate the original Christian church, the Free Will Baptist Church on Newstead Avenue banned the playing of the piano.
Needless to say, the singing of the hymns was a catastrophe. There was no such thing as a pitch pipe so everyone started the hymns in his or her own range. There was nothing to follow as in the case of a piano or organ accompaniment. The hymns just wallowed in their agony. Even Brother Tony, the leader of the sect, noticed how badly the hymn singing was going. I suppose Brother Tony addressed this matter in prayer. In any event, on about the third or fourth Sunday of our attendance at the Free Will Baptist Church, we found Brother Tony attempting to lead the hymn singing with his trombone.
Apparently when Brother Tony went to high school some forty years earlier, he had attempted to play the trombone. When he attempted to play it on this occasion, he regularly missed the stops on the slide trombone. This resulted in slurring, which made the hymns such as “Amazing Grace” sound like New Orleans jazz tunes.
I did not endear myself to the church elders when I pointed out that there was no argument about not having pianos in the time of Jesus. But then I said that the people who attended the church came by streetcar, bus, and private automobile. Those vehicles did not exist in the time of Jesus either. My argument fell on deaf ears and the management of the church began to think of me as an infidel. Nonetheless, it would be 1900 years before Henry Ford and Walter Chrysler presented automobiles to the American public. That, of course, was of no significance to the church management.
The end came when Brother Tony decided that there should be a children’s choir. In spite of my advanced years, which totaled twelve or thereabouts, Brother Tony insisted on including me in this children’s choir which included six- and seven-year-olds. The first song that he wanted us to sing a cappella was “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” I assume that Brother Tony did not know how that tune was to be played on his trombone, therefore the children’s choir was left to sing it a cappella. The first verse goes like this:

A sunbeam, a sunbeam,
Jesus wants me for a sunbeam.
A sunbeam, a sunbeam,
I’ll be a sunbeam for him.

I declined to sing the sunbeam song. Declined is probably a much-too-polite term. In effect I told Brother Tony I refused to sing the sunbeam song. In the colloquy that then took place, someone said, “To hell with the sunbeam song.” I suspect that the someone was your old essayist. In any event, Brother Tony went to my father and instantly pronounced that my heart was full of carnality.
I imagined that carnality was a condition much like that which afflicts automobile engines that burn cheap gas. As the cheap gas was burned back in those days, carbon deposits would build up on the intake valves as well as the exhaust valves and the valves would not “seat” themselves well. The result was a condition called “blow-by” which greatly depressed the horsepower of the engine. The solution for carbon deposits was to pull the head of the engine and to grind the valves down to their proper size, knocking off the carbon deposits. The engine example was about the best that I could produce to imagine the carnality that had invaded my heart as diagnosed by Brother Tony. After a time, when I was perhaps thirteen years of age, I refused to attend church services at all and spent my Sundays hanging around Carl Schroth’s Flying Red Horse Mobil Gas Station. Brother Tony’s diagnosis of carnality was soon forgotten at the filling station.
Now we fast forward a little less than thirty years when my father, who had died, was to be buried. During his final illness, my father had been comforted by visits from a preacher who had a church in a neighboring town. His name was Hurley Fitzwater. Rather than having a preacher say a few words about the deceased person, the protocol in Baptist churches is for the preacher to deliver a sermon prior to the body being interred. Hurley Fitzwater did not command total respect from my mother in that she referred to him as “a jackleg preacher.” When preachers who have never attended a theological seminary say that they have received a call from God to preach, they simply stand up and start preaching. Hurley Fitzwater was one of those who had received a direct communication from God, which caused my mother to label him “a jackleg preacher.”
When they put a lectern at the foot of my father’s coffin, I suspected that we were going to be in for serious business. Preacher Fitzwater assumed his stance behind the lectern and announced that his sermon was going to be “There…the sun will not shine.” There was a dramatic pause between the word “There” and the rest of Fitzwater’s title. Nobody in the audience had any idea where that quotation came from and it is certainly not supported by biblical citation. But Preacher Fitzwater did not dwell on where the sun would not shine. Instead he labored us with descriptions of carnality. I knew that my mother was a holy person and had been that way all her life. My sister Verna sang in the church choir and was also holy. My two elder brothers, Charlie and Earl, were so holy that they lectured me from time to time on “getting right with the Lord.” Opal, next in the line of Carr children, did not attend the service, presumably because she had to attend to matters affecting her greyhound racing dogs in either Florida or Arizona. If Opal had been at the service, I am sure that it would have eased my mind because I assume that the assault on carnality would have been divided between Opal and myself. But I was alone. Knowing that thirty years earlier Brother Tony had diagnosed my case as a matter of carnality, I assumed that I was on the fast track to the hottest seat in Hell.
For the last seventy-five years or thereabouts, I have known that I have had a case of chronic cardiac carnality. Brother Tony said so, as did Preacher Fitzwater. That is good enough for me. Nonetheless, this spring I submitted to an echocardiogram of my heart to determine how the heart was working. The famed and world renowned cardiologist, Professor Dr. Beamer, took a look at the pictures and produced an extensive electrocardiographic report. The electrocardiogram measured such things as regurgitation, velocity of output, and the condition of the aortic valve as well as biorhythms and muscular development. Professor Beamer knows that I am not a Sunday school boy and that carnality has always been a threat to invade my heart. Significantly, carnality never seems to invade the gall bladder, the lungs, or the intestines. It always comes to rest in the heart. Yet in studying the echocardiogram, the renowned Professor Beamer failed to find the evidence that was so clear to Brother Tony as well as to Preacher Fitzwater. And so it is that I carry this heavy burden forward without the confirmation of the medical authorities. I will do the best I can in carrying this heavy load until Ippolito, the undertaker, comes to carry me away. I will accept this wearisome burden in good humor, and will be disturbed only if someone were to sing or hum “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” in my presence. In that case, I will strike him as hard as I can with my white collapsible cane.
E. E. CARR
May 22, 2007
Essay 225
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Kevin’s commentary: Well, that’s easily the worst song I’ve listened to in the service of Ezra’s Essays. Though in fairness I can’t exactly pretend that I wasn’t warned. That said, Brother Tony and Preacher Fitzwater have my sincere thanks — if it weren’t for them, there’s a very small chance that I would have had to go to church myself going up. Luckily for me, Pop’s experience with it was so bad that neither my mother’s nor my generation wound up having to sing about Jesus wanting us for sunbeams when we were kids. Cheers!