Chat with a Comrade

I took a day off today and phoned an old seminary friend, Nolan Brashear. Nolan attended Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University at the same time I did. We lived on the same dorm floor in Perkins Hall. Nolan and his wife now have two grown and married sons in their early twenties. Nolan was always full of spirit and restless energy and it is funny to think of that dark-haired, dark-eyed, mischief-making young man as a seminary professor on the brink of becoming a grandfather. It was Nolan who persuaded several other guys at Perkins to join him in smoking pipes behind Perkins Chapel. I once asked him, "What's the point of smoking pipes behind the chapel?" He told me, "It's part of being a guy." He apparently advised his pals that once they graduated and took churches, they would have to lead exemplary lives. This was their last chance to go wild.

Nolan told me that in those days he had visited his college friend Jim at Wesley Seminary in Washington DC. Jim and his buddies at Wesley had founded a fraternity called the Sons of Eli. They chose this name because of 1 Samuel 2, verse 12 in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. It reads, "Now the sons of Eli were worthless men..." The initiation ritual for fraternity membership was to go out at night to the statue of John Wesley, founder of Methodism, riding a horse. This statue stood in front of the Wesley Seminary administration building. The initiate had to climb on the back of the horse behind John Wesley and tell the dirtiest joke he knew. Nolan said that the Sons of Eli was the one thing that made him wish he had attended Wesley instead of Perkins.

As we chatted about times past and present, I reminded Nolan that he had once advised me to follow the St. Augustine Method of Ministry. Nolan was one of the smartest people in our class so I listened to him with wide-eyed respect. I asked him what St. Augustine's method had been. "St. Augustine got his call to ministry late in life," Nolan informed me. "Before he was called, he had twenty years of drunken debauchery. I recommend that."