Prayer Is a Place: America's Religious Landscape Observed

Prologue

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I will be seventy years old on my next birthday and well past that mark by the time you begin to read what I have written here. What surprises me most about that accumulation of years is how light a thing they are, how much less impressive in reality than in the weighty sound of their summing. Seventy years and over should make a lifetime, should arrive at some kind of conclusion or constitute some kind of a whole. They should, but mine at least have not.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I can look back from here and say of my life, Had it not been for that, then this would never have been. Most of us have to arrive at no more than a third of seventy before we begin to discern a cause-and-effect relationship between single days and the years they make. Some of us—the lucky ones, perhaps, though I am not sure of that—even come fairly early to a kind of belief in the overall integrity of life. That is, we (for I am among this group) begin to trust the principle that the confusing, the painful, even the unbearable and destructive in life are movement within a pattern and toward some final end that is either good or nothing.

It is not so much, then, that I think my seventy-odd years have lacked continuity. Instead, my concern is with accurately describing the nature of their continuity; for my seventy have been more analogous to a string of knotted beads than to the flow of a river. That is to say that over the years there were choices made that unquestionably became me as well as the integrating thread for all the other choices, but the experience itself has been all about the beads.

I said something to this effect to an acquaintance a year or so ago, and he looked at me with more animus than I could ever have imagined his being capable of. You damned married women, he said. You have no idea how lucky you are, able to flop like that from one thing to another wherever your fancy takes you. With that he walked away, shoulders sharply erect and face glowering. I was so stunned by the resentment in his words that I was temporarily baffled by their logic. Later, of course, I began to appreciate the valid distinction that was buried in the rubble of his rage. I was, and for fifty years have been, married to Sam Tickle. We have had seven children together. We have buried one of them and long since reared the other six to adulthood. Over those years I have indeed moved from the domestic to the professional and back again as the need arose and, in my later years, from one occupation to another within the book industry, as the opportunity arose. In answer to my accuser, to whom I could not respond at the time, most of those early moves, if not the later ones, were occasioned by the circumstances and needs of a greater unit called Sam and Phyllis and the children. However worthy and natural a cause that may have been at the time, though, the end result has still been one of variousness and catenated segments.

I say all of this here because what follows is the story of one segment. It is the autobiography more of one of the beads—the last one—than of me. Admittedly, the circumstances of any story—the strange way of its coming to be—must always be told as well. This one is no different from any other story in that regard. The tale itself, however, begins in late 1992 and ends in 2004, a dozen years in which I found what was happening to me much less interesting than the amazing show I was watching and recording.

The years from 1992 to 2004 were the closing ones of a near half century in which American religion effected a reconfiguration and cultural repositioning that history will, I wager, see as having been more comparable to the upheavals of Europe during the Christian Reformation and preliminary to Counter-Reformation than to anything else. By the grace of God or, perhaps, by appointment—who knows?—I was standing on the street corner, pad and pencil in hand, paid to count the traffic as that animated and sometimes raucous parade went by. What follows here, then, is not a spiritual memoir. Rather, it is a first-person account of religion in those twelve years of passionate upheaval. It is a description of the landscape, both rural and urban, which was and became the grounding of all their activity. Of necessity, of course, the painting reveals the painter and the writing, the writer. So be it.

Lucy, Tennessee

Chapter 1

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All stories, even Once upon a decade ones, must continue with and in a certain place if they are to tell themselves completely. For this story, the place is Lucy, Tennessee … Lucy, where all things begin now and where, pray God, they will also arrive someday at their natural ending.

Lucy, when Sam and I brought our children here in 1977, was a clapboard, cinder-block, and tin-roofed village of no more than two dozen houses. It was surrounded by sparsely populated farmland and possessed of one aging general store, one magnificent old county school larger than the township, a railroad track with a spur, a Baptist church, a United Methodist church, two A.M.E. churches, and—incongruous as it may seem at first blush—a genuinely Anglican one. The school was testimony to the stature that Lucy once had enjoyed; the railroad with its spur was the explanation behind that stature.

Lucy had once been a bustling railroad stop for passengers and cargo on their way south and west toward Memphis. The general store had been both way station and café, while the village’s shade trees had functioned like oases in the midst of the desiccating heat of West Tennessee summers. But as with much of rural America, the coming of affordable cars, then of good roads, and finally of huge trucks had obviated the railroad and, thereby, the town, long before our arrival.

When Sam and I first moved to Lucy, we and such neighbors as we then had used to quip that Lucy was only twenty miles but over a hundred years removed from Memphis. The twenty miles have held constant since 1977, but the number of years has shrunk considerably. We old-timers are forced now to admit—with unstinting regret—that we live only about thirty years away from the city these days. We still operate off septic tanks, in other words, but by order of the Shelby County Health Department we all had to have our wells closed off and cemented up a few years ago, lest our use of them somehow contaminate Memphis’s aquifers. We still keep coal-oil lamps—or at least the Tickles do—handily placed about, though we lose power no more than twice or three times a year now. There is no television cable strung in to us and there are few fancy telephone wires, but satellites and cell phones have more or less obviated them as well. The old general store withered first into shut-down gas pumps and then into only a few shelves of staples before it finally closed; but it has been replaced by a thriving operation where the older men still gather every day for checkers and where the shelves bulge with every kind of tool or supply needed for restoring old houses to meet suburban expectations and for building new ones to meet a bludgeoning suburban demand. Most of us still grow our produce, but few of us still preserve it for winter. Instead, there’s a Wal-Mart just a few miles up the highway that sells us our winter provender handily as well as cheaper. Besides, for Sam and me at least, there is no longer any need … no need, that is, to prove a point.

He and I came to Lucy not to be villagers but to be a pair of her surrounding farmers. Sam is a physician—a pulmonologist, or specialist in diseases of the lung. For sixteen years, while he was building his career and I mine, we lived in Memphis in a kind of conclave of doctors and professionals that was, literally, almost within the shadow of the University of Tennessee Medical Center and the major hospitals that are its teaching as well as its healing hub. There was nothing wrong with that settled, tree-lined, well-maintained area. It still goes, in fact, by the name of Central Gardens, primarily because that is exactly what it is—central and as chock-full of pleasant gardens as of pleasant people.

Our concern in the mid-1970s, then, was not with the place where we were, but with who we were. If this, however, is to be an accurate record of things as they were then, I must qualify the we. In the long months before our leaving the city, the concerns Sam and I expressed to each other were all about who and what our children were becoming, not about us or ourselves. Only years later and in retrospect did I perceive that, as is often the way of parents, we were projecting onto the children shortcomings and lapses we ourselves were also suffering from, albeit ours were more negative than positive. That is, had the two of us had time to be more self-scrutinizing in those days of diapers and mayhem, I would like to think now that Sam and I would have also been concerned about who we as adults were not and about who we were not becoming in the midst of the affluence we found to be so limiting for our youngsters.

It was the time of America’s bicentennial, the time when patriotism was studied—too studied, one felt somehow, and not quite as naturally come by as once it had been. The dust of Vietnam was always on the mirror we looked at ourselves in; and there was the keening sigh, audible even in the city, of an earth being used, not tended. Sam and I sat down to supper each night with five children (Nora, our oldest, was a bride in 1976) who, being bright, knew exactly how much each dish on our table had cost at the market. We sat down as well with five children who had no more than a vague intellectual knowledge of where that food had come from prior to its arrival at the market. More disturbing than that, however, was that we sat down each night with children who had no knowledge, academic or otherwise, of what that food, that table, those eating implements, the walls around us, the clothes we wore, and the napkins we were using had cost in terms other than ones of money.

Because they were indeed bright children, good students and much-loved citizens of their world as well as southern in rearing, they understood the end worth of some things in terms of their utility and of many other things in terms of sentiment and familial heritage. They just did not—could not—grasp the initial cost of those things in nonfiscal terms. And because the stuff of life as they acquired it was being recorded in dollars, life itself was slowly but perceptibly coming likewise to be reported in dollars.

Sam and I watched with growing alarm even as, at the same time, we began to take long drives and scour the real estate listings. We were looking for that improbable thing: a farm big enough to sustain us, small enough to be run by people already working full-time, and near enough to the hospitals for him to be able to get to a patient in distress within a matter of a few minutes. We were looking for Lucy. When we found her—when we pulled across that cattle guard and I walked for the first time on the land that would become our farm—I was so sure, so blindingly, painfully, burningly sure, that I wept as I have rarely wept before or since. We were home.

The children, in the way of children, would call that place the Loosey, Goosey Farm while they were growing up here. Now, in the way of adults scorning the infantile in their own background, they call it the farm in Lucy, except they both say and write it as The Farm In Lucy, which I suppose is how it shall stay as long as there are Tickles living here either in time or in memory.

And so it was that we seven, ranging in age from two to forty-five, set about the business of joining our lives more immediately to the land’s. We still bought our staples—our sugar and flour, butter and coffee, etc. but I made our bread, and the girls and I canned, froze, or dried our produce. We bought our cloth and yarn and, except for uniforms, we made most of our own clothes out of them. Sam discovered and rescued an ancient orchard that had been lost under vines for years and gone fallow. He trimmed and watered it back to fertility, and we made our own sweets. The jellies came from the apples and peaches, the honey from the hives he and the boys tended near the tree line, and the jams from the blackberry brambles we cultivated as breaks to protect the gardens and orchard.

We put in a herd of twenty-some head and grew the hay and fodder to sustain them. The children—the boys more than the girls—despised tending cattle, but we all enjoyed eating the roasts and steaks and stews that were a portion of the end result. We pumped water and hauled off garbage. We buried the calves that didn’t make it and shot the coyotes and wolves that wanted to strike those that did. We laughed a lot and complained a lot, saw stars in a sky so dark at night that theirs was the only light, learned to chop wood and repair tractors, make do and … and, inevitably, become different.

Different had been the point, of course, the stated purpose behind our coming; but different tends to become a total, rather than a partial, thing. Within a matter of no more than five or six months, both our sons and our daughters could calculate the cost of their breakfast eggs in terms of how many times the rooster had flogged them as they’d gathered the things and, even worse—Yucky! I believe was their word—how many times they had had to empty, clean, and reline the soiled nests in the henhouse in order to get any eggs in the first place. Within a matter of less than a year, all of them over five could absolutely and painfully calculate what the okra on the supper table had cost in terms of itch and rash from its picking, or what the corn had cost in terms of stings from the saddleback caterpillars that inhabited the rows and mimicked the coloration of their stalks. Within two years they could calculate the cost of a hamburger in terms of a cow they had watched birthing, a calf they had fattened, and a yearling they had helped slaughter and butcher. Such things are graphic experiences. They command the attention and then, fairly quickly, they also command the conversation.

Sam and I went in and out of the city to our professional responsibilities, and the children in and out each week day to the parochial schools where they were still enrolled. But slowly, slyly almost, the locus of the days began to shift for each of us. Occupied in town, we still were restless to get home, to get back to the chores that had to happen if we and the animals were to eat, to reassume as soon as possible the ease of a common jargon and deeply physical experience, eager as well to move again, like water to its level, into that paradoxical expansion and diminishment of self that occurs in open space.

So it was that the Tickles—old and young alike—became the owners of two lives. We learned, each of us, to play both the role of City Mouse and the role of Country Mouse, the highway north toward Lucy or south toward Memphis becoming the symbolic portal between the two … which process was also how The Farm In Lucy became a state of mind as well as a plat of acreage on the Farm Bureau’s maps.

Chapter 2

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During our city years, I had taught, first as a visiting lecturer at Rhodes College in Memphis and then, for almost a decade, as Dean of Humanities at its sister institution, the Memphis College of Art. The years of teaching were good ones professionally as well as personally. In those days, a female academic dean was so rare a thing that no one, at least in our part of the world, had yet developed any kind of protocols and standards governing the consequences thereof. As a result, I taught and administered right up until the fourth Tickle was born in 1970, going immediately back to teaching and administering within a few days afterward. The new baby and his siblings were simply part of the college family as well as of its foyers and hallways. Many of my colleagues became avuncular playmates to the lot of them; and those connections have held as emotional anchors ever since, not just for me, but also for the now fully adult children who were their original source.

Beyond the fullness of range and derring-do that come from working in a receiving and sustaining place, the years at the College of Art gave me as well the education of eye and ear that are necessary parts of the writer’s craft. No one can give a writer—or for that matter a painter or a dancer or any other creative artist—the twist of personality or the skew of interpretation that are his or her fundamental content. The ability to see and hear the resonance between one’s content and one’s medium, on the other hand, can be taught. More to the point, they can be taught across the apparent, but ephemeral, barriers of aesthetic disciplines.

For young writers in those days, however, and especially for young writers living outside the northeast corridor, the opportunities for publication were limited. In the South, they were primarily limited in form and shape to poetry and to short, irregular, and usually poignant first-person essays. In outlet, the limitation was almost always to largely regional, usually newsprint journals. How many young writers were mowed down in those days by such circumstances no one will ever know. Only a romantic or a naïf, though, could have ever been benighted enough to think that talent alone would out, that the gift will always find its way. Not so then, and not so now. It was and is, rather, the lucky, the fortunate, the ones blessed by an apparently capricious circumstance in whom the talent will out. In all the others, the gift simply crumbles back into the dark from which it came.

How much of all this I actually could or did articulate to myself in my mid-thirties is unclear to me now. My suspicion is that I simply intuited most of it. But I most certainly understood enough of it to be prodded into action; and it was the professional artists around me who showed me how, whether they intended to or not.

Anyone who teaches in a professional school of art learns fairly quickly that the studio trash bins are the most relevant appointments on the whole campus. Into them go small gems and massive heartbreaks, class exercises that are more than what they are but still are exercises, sketches and fragments no longer of use to their creator but nonetheless still a pleasure to another’s observing eye. Sam and I have a farmhouse full of such refugee treasures, for in the mid- and late 1960s I excelled at trash-bin patrol. What I was scouring for, however, was not just the abandoned canvases or half-realized sculptures that drew the rest of the staff to scavenger there, but also the poetry. We human beings speak too often in hyperbole to always be taken literally by our friends and families. I know that. But in this one thing at least, I would like to be heard as speaking absolute truth: There was, in the 1960s, in the trash bins of the Memphis College of Art, more raw, visceral, compelling poetry than I have ever found, before or since, in any other single place.

Sometimes the throwaways of the students (and sometimes, I finally realized, the throwaways of the faculty) were only two- or three-line images. More often the work was a scrap or palimpsest of several lines, a sustained and orchestrated juxtaposing of voices or images. Occasionally I would come upon a fully realized construction that, once resolved, had lost its interest for its creator. In whatever category they fell, however, few if any of my finds were as accomplished in their craft as they were in their conception; yet their sheer clarity almost justified their jagged edges and roughly textured music.

Within a semester or two of becoming dean, I was hooked … hooked not just by the beauty being thrown away all around me, but even more perhaps by its origins. Why could youngsters no more than eighteen and nineteen years of age perceive their world with such surgical precision and awful beauty? How, given almost no prior training in verbal art, could they so economically grasp and then render the patterns and harmonies of what they perceived? And, the biggie: What would happen if we taught them?

It was the last question, mixed with a kind of philosophic fascination and a kind of moral mourning for the beauty being hauled off, unread, to the city dump, that would not let me go. At first, it was merely an issue on a list of many issues, but within a matter of a year or so, the question grew to be a cause. I cannot claim it as a private cause, however. Rather, in record time and with essentially no resistance, at least not as resistance is usually measured in academic or institutional affairs, a cadre of five of us on the faculty were seduced enough to begin working together on a plan. We would teach poetry, writing, and editing in the academic division; we would teach the art of the book as a physical object as part of the sculpture program; we would teach book design in the design departments, and book production in the advertising and printmaking ones. In short, we would establish a college press. How simple. Problem solved.

Looking back now, I don’t know whether I am more amazed by our naïveté or by our passion, especially by my own. From childhood I had loved—maybe even revered—words. I had snatched the time, a bit here and a bit there over the years, to produce a respectable number of those de rigueur newsprint-published pieces, and I was proud of them as well as grateful and encouraged by them. But the work being lost beneath my very nose to the local dump, the talent not being trained, the cycle and craft of production not being realized … Dear Lord in Heaven! These seemed to me so overwhelmingly prior (and fixing them so beautiful a thing) just then that I don’t think I ever once even doubted or hesitated. What those youngsters could natively do was much stronger, more vital, more laden than anything I could do at that point. Beyond that, what a college press could do for them was so much more empowering and enabling than any other outlet available to them that I plowed ahead in what was probably the only act of complete abandon in my entire life.

Saint Luke, though he is popularly celebrated as the patron saint of physicians, is also the patron saint of artists; and it was his benediction that four of us sought to invoke one spring day in 1971 when, standing in the printmaking department of the Memphis College of Art in front of two brand-new, top-of-the-line printing presses, we christened our idea, naming it St. Luke’s Press …

But St. Luke’s Press was not to be. Not there, anyway. Not at the college. And not for the five of us as a team.

What followed that giddy day of pipe dreams and self-congratulation in the printmaking department was six months of such destructive tragedy that not one of us would be left standing afterward. One personal disaster would follow another until we all were leveled. For me, near the end of that May, tragedy was the death of Philip Wade Tickle … Wade, the fifth of our children and the second of our sons. He died at two weeks of age, almost before we could know him, but not before I could love him with all the fierceness of every hope and purpose I had ever known.

In almost anesthesizing grief, I resigned, as had the others before me, and sank into myself and the husband and children I had. St. Luke’s lay a decayed dream, and any passion I might once have had was so stilled as to be completely forgotten. In the end, though, the idea of a publishing house would not let me be. In fact, as I began to heal, it was the memory of our excitement and of the possibilities we five had seen that became a rope of salvation for me, a route of escape from myself back into a world of meaningful activity.

My father, for whom Wade had been named, had left me a modest amount of money when he’d died in 1969. What, I wondered, what would happen if I were to gamble that money on establishing a publishing house independent of the College? Sam and I talked. I approached the College. Without the five of us who had been the structure of the thing, the school had neither the desire nor the staff with which to continue. St. Luke’s Press as a name and an idea was mine, if I wanted it. I called the two out of the original five colleagues who were still in Memphis and asked if they would like to go back to work for no money and out of sheer stubbornness. Being themselves as crazed as the idea was, they both said yes. Shortly thereafter, St. Luke’s Press became a legal entity, complete with a tax number and no offices. We brought out our first two books—one using work from the College and one I wrote about Wade’s death—in 1975; and for the next thirteen years I never looked back

The mid-1970s was the golden age of southern publishing; and even a cursory look at the record will show that most of the successful publishing houses in the South today had their origins around that time. For us, St. Luke’s began to take on life and influence almost from the first, though once again the we changed as staff came and went and as my own commitment and responsibilities increased. By 1982 St. Luke’s had become only one part of a corporation doing business as the Tickle Publishing Group. Sam, still working full-time as a physician and as a farmer, began to work full-time as group publisher as well. He and I were overseeing not only St. Luke’s, but also a book-production division (Shelby House), a medical imprint (Osler House), a belles lettres house (Iris Press) that we had bought from members of the faculty at the State University of New York in Binghamton, and our interest in a poetry house (raccoon books).

We were surprisingly successful. If we were not making any great amount of money, we weren’t losing any either. The day we made a front-page mention and an accompanying The Arts section feature in the New York Times for having discovered and published the original, precensored edition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, we had to admit even to ourselves that we had probably more or less arrived. We also had to admit that we were dog tired … hound dog tired, in fact, to use an inelegant, but graphically southern, expression.

Everywhere I looked, there was St. Luke’s or Iris or Shelby House or Osler or raccoon. The farm’s dining room had long since become our conference room. Half of the house’s big kitchen was now my office. The sitting room had been emptied out by 1979 or ’80 to make room for sales and marketing staff. What once had been a spacious garage for storing cars and farm equipment was now a cramped and inefficiently crowded editorial office. Shipping was up the road and across the highway in space we had rented in an old school building. Warehousing was in other rented space in Memphis. In a protective move to try to preserve some semblance of dignity to all of this, we had opened another office, attached to Sam’s medical suite in the city, where I met authors and publicity people and industry folk, hoping every minute of the time that none of them would ever ask to see the guts of the thing they were there to discuss. It was absurd … successful, but absurd. Beyond that, it was no longer an occupation of joy.

One wintry evening in early 1988, I was standing in our kitchen talking after-hours business on the phone while, at the same time, watching Sam try to cook something or other on a stove that was no more than twelve feet from my desk and five feet from a counter-high stack of book cartons. The man I was talking business with was Wayne Elliot, publisher of Peachtree Publishers in Atlanta. Suddenly, like a kind of madness or maybe just a