I got the most pleasant of surprises at a funeral.
The service had reached the point where an Old Testament passage had to be read. The one selected was the 23rd Psalm. As the woman reading it pronounced each word, I found myself following along. I didn’t remember each and every sentence, but I remembered most of it.
I said along with the woman as she read, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
As the reading concluded, I sat in the pew and asked myself, “How did I remember that after all these years?”
My first memory of the 23rd Psalm is not from hearing it in a church, but in school.
I distinctly remember hearing a Miss Pemberton in my kindergarten class. The year must have been 1956, maybe 1957. The 23rd Psalm was the Scripture reading of choice for most days; somehow, the repeated readings must have been ingrained in me.
Sitting in that pew earlier this year, I marveled at how I was able to remember the passage, and I pondered this question:
What harm did the reading of all those passages of the 23rd Psalm do to me? The answer is none at all. But one day past Easter in the year 2010, all of us — even the ones who don’t consider ourselves very religious — might ask ourselves what harm has come from the 1962 Supreme Court decision that banned prayer and Scripture reading from the nation’s public schools.
Now before you dismiss me as some born-again nut job on a religious rant, some clarification is in order. I’m a Roman Catholic, but not a very good one. I haven’t been to confession in years and I attend Mass only sparingly. But I’ve listened to black senior citizens for years who swear that America went to hell in a handbasket once God or any mention of God was kicked out of public schools, with condoms being let in a short time later.
Ordinarily I would dismiss such talk as typical “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” (after the fact, therefore because of the fact) reasoning. This line of thinking is often flawed, but I believe the elders may be onto something this time.
They’re not the only ones who’ve noticed. In late 2007, a group of black men traveled from Baltimore to Philadelphia to hear the lame-duck mayor and police commissioner of that city talk. Both cities were trying to solve frighteningly high homicide numbers, with the victims mainly being young black men.
Both the then-mayor and then-police commissioner told the group that they’d been hearing from black Philadelphians that maybe the time had come to allow prayer and Scripture reading back in public schools. And these were two Democrats speaking, mind you. It’s amazing what a high body count will do.
Those elderly black folks remember what America’s black communities were like back in the days when we had school prayer. Yes, there was segregation. But there was also some kind of moral center.
Never would there have been a situation where a young mother could murder her 1-month-old son, bury him in a park, and some members of the community threaten the father for reporting the mother to police.
That’s exactly what happened to the father of the late Rajahnthon Haynie in Baltimore last month. There were actually people out to get the father for “snitching” on the mother.
It doesn’t quite sound like a generation inculcated with values of “goodness and mercy,” does it?
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
