Peter Gomes: Different Strokes at Memorial Church

A GOOD PREACHER gives himself away by his voice. His days are long and his duties unending, and laymen hang on every sentence he utters, expecting a commandment, or at least some inspiration-in-epigram. Answering a phone call at 3 a.m. with a hoarse "Jeezus Kerist! This had better be mighty important" can quickly send his young career to its just reward. So whether praying, consoling, or simply asking directions, his tone must always be confident, yet humble; loving, yet fearing; omniscient, yet uninitiated.

Peter J. Gomes, acting minister of Memorial Church since 1972, speaks in just this way, in a deep, comfortable New England-with-a-trace-of-Europe accent. As he preaches, jarring his listeners with references to the desperation of Steve McQueen in Papillon or the decadence of Holiday and Ramada Inns littering the countryside, his pleasant voice seems ready to burst at any moment into joyful music. And, in any Gomes service, it frequently yields to the temptation. Though he once wanted little from churches besides the music, Reverend Gomes has emerged as the right man for Memorial Church in a troubled era that seems to hold only wrong times.

THE EUROPEAN influence in Gomes's speech is not a souvenir from studies abroad. It was picked up from his father, a fisherman from the Cape Verdi islands who came to the United States at the turn of the century and married the daughter of a black family that had escaped to the north via the Underground Railway just before the Civil War. Gomes's parents settled in Plymouth--only minutes from the Rock--and raised their children amid the history and the religion of the old Pilgrim landing.

Gomes finds it strange that so many in Plymouth just knew all along that he would become a minister, because, in the end, it was a surprise for him. "I didn't have a strong religious upbringing," he says, "but I had a very consistent one. I had a grandfather who was a Baptist minister, and my mother's family were all very active, and I grew up with the assumptions that flow from an intimacy with the church."

Gomes enjoyed it enough to attend two churches--one in the morning among whites and the other in the evening with Plymouth's tiny black community. Still, suggestions that he become a preacher unnerved him. "I loved to talk and I liked the church," he says. "It was the ministers I didn't like. Either they were too arbitrary, or too cold, or they were just too fuddy-duddyish." Determined to escape the confines of organized religion, he left Plymouth for Bates College to study another love, history, and "let nature take its course."

"There was no Damascus Road sort of thing," he says now, as he tries to pinpoint when he decided to become a clergyman. "No lonely walk where I suddenly saw a light and recognized my calling. Rather than one, a whole series of events over a period of time literally ganged up on me until I concluded that there was no better way to use what gifts I had to meet the opportunities available.

"There were professors at Bates who asked me if my disinclination toward the church was because I didn't like the church or whether it was a delayed form of adolescent rebellion. That's kind of a dumb question to ask on one level, but it happened to be true in my case."

Gomes reconsidered his plans, weighed his spiritual needs and doubts, and concluded that a year or two at divinity school might cure him. Still, he hesitated, reluctant to subject himself to pressures for a commitment, unwilling to join any assembly-line for ministers. Fortunately, one professor had an alternative: "Don't worry about that. I think you ought to go to Harvard Divinity School," he suggested. "There you are religious in spite of the place, not because of it." Lured by the additional incentives of Widener Library and a generous scholarship, Gomes applied and ventured into what others warned him was a spiritual desert.

"There was general jubilation in my home town when it became known that I was going seminary, and many prayers of thanks," he recalls. "But when they found out that I was going to Harvard Divinity School, there were even more prayers. Because that was Godless Harvard, and no Christian who ever went in ever emerged intact. It was a place where raving atheists, secularists and agnostics ran rampant. Like the city of Nineveh, there were no righteous men to be found, and unlike the city, there weren't even any good cattle." But a baptism by fire was exactly what Gomes wanted.

True to its reputation Harvard offered more challenges than assurances to Gomes as a divinity student. "There was a certain resentment toward and intimidation by undergraduates, most of whom we thought to be 14 year-old geniuses from Tuscon, Arizona," he recalls. "There was a program in our junior year to come over and proselytize in the Yard. Very few of us signed up for that. It seemed like walking into the lion's den."

Gomes also found that Widener Library and Harvard's "smorgasbord of courses" did not hold solutions for either the world's problems or his own increasingly-agonizing spiritual concerns. "Problems of the soul and spiritual identity--one's place, one's function--these questions were not going to be resolved by academia," he reasoned. "I reached a new view of what the church can be."

GOMES RECEIVED his masters in 1968 and worked for the next two years as director of the freshman experimental program at Tuskegee Institute of Alabama, his only extended stay outside New England. In 1970, Harvard invited him back to serve as assistant minister to Rev. Charles P. Price, and he returned with both his new perspective on religion and his old stereotype of Harvard's Godless undergraduates intact.

"I have never found an image to disappear so quickly," he says. "Godless Harvard, I can say from my four-going-on-five-year tenure here, doesn't exist. Mind you, I'm not talking about my Sunday constituency, but from rather broad experience with students. But if there is no commitment to a particular religious expression, there is an incredible curiosity about and hospitality towards religious ideas.

"Students think seriously about religion, though not the way they did a century ago. They aren't going to fight great battles over the Trinity. But they are fascinated by the fact that religion is almost ineradicable. They wonder what has enabled it to persist all these centuries.

"When they find out you are a clergyman, they don't say, 'How can you believe this nonsense about virgin birth and physical resurrection?' They ask questions like 'How did you come to believe?' 'How is belief possible?' 'What does it do for you?'"

Harvard does not insult the devout as much as it assaults religion itself, and Gomes takes "the life of the mind" seriously. But by his own definition, a good preacher "is not apologetic about his role as a Christian in what is easily called a post-Christian age." Harvard offers an additional insidious pitfall: "You must deal with power," Gomes says. "Harvard is full of powerful people, but you must not be seduced or corrupted by power. You walk a very tight rope."

GOMES HAS kept his balance through his live-and-let-live style, which he describes as evangelical only in substance. "Stylistically, I have problems with the kind of aggressive evangelism which tends to be fairly indiscriminate and tends not to be supported by the religious community--I have great problems with Billy Graham.

"At the same time, I respect these people for preaching the Gospel as they see it...Different strokes for different folks, you might say."

At Harvard, that might as well be Gospel. The Stendahl Committee, formed at the suggestion of Reverend Price upon his retirement in 1972, has advised President Bok in a controversial report to dismantle the current one-minister church and replace it with a three-denominational system.

"The Stendahl Committee happened upon a model of ministry which was questionable when it was fashionable ten years ago," Gomes says. "Rather than ensuring recognition of true pluralism, it seems to freeze it at a certain point."

Critics of the report have echoed Gomes, citing all the religious groups excluded by the Stendahl system, and calling for a church with one minister--Gomes--and several other clergymen with non-paying, University appointments.

Currently, most denominations and interests are represented through speakers at Morning Prayers, a short daily service at 8:45 a.m. that dates back to the first years of the University. The music is refreshing and the speakers range from an Indian swami garbed in safron, who returns every year, to F. Skiddy von Stade Jr. '38, dean of Freshmen, who doesn't.

"There is a mind to constituencies in the University," Gomes says in explaining the haphazard selection process. "But it is not constituencies in the HEW sense of the word, with X number of agnostics and so on. I think when it does get to that point, we will have reached a very sad state."

THE LOW KEY renaissance Gomes has brought into the Church through the speakers and his own services has attracted a wider audience. "Our attendance is growing," he says proudly, "but more interesting is the fact that the congregation is changing. We are getting more undergraduates and young families."

Though Gomes attributes his success to the changing times, many of the new Memorial Church regulars oppose the Stendahl report only because of Gomes himself--they want Harvard to appoint him the official minister. They seem to be part of congregation attracted to a church more by the preacher than the God inside.