<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">I had missed seeing this article, Paul.<div class="">Thanks very much for forwarding it.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Kind regards,</div><div class="">Geri</div><div class=""><br class=""><div><br class=""><div class="">On Nov 14, 2018, at 9:24 AM, Paul Schrijnen via OE <<a href="mailto:oe@lists.wedgeblade.net" class="">oe@lists.wedgeblade.net</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">
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<!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:26.25pt;mso-line-height-alt:11.75pt;
mso-outline-level:1;vertical-align:baseline"><b class=""><span style="letter-spacing: -0.13333334028720856px;" class="">Article</span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1pt;" class=""> from the Texas Monthly, </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.13333334028720856px;" class="">December</span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1pt;" class=""> 2014. Written by Michael Hall</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:26.25pt;mso-line-height-alt:11.75pt;
mso-outline-level:1;vertical-align:baseline"><b class=""><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1pt;" class="">Man on
Fire</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:26.25pt;mso-line-height-alt:11.75pt;
mso-outline-level:1;vertical-align:baseline">For his entire
life, Charles Moore sought to heed God’s call to change a broken world—fighting
passionately for civil rights, helping the poor, and feeding the hungry. Until
one day, in a desolate parking lot in Grand Saline, he decided he hadn’t done
enough.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:26.25pt;mso-line-height-alt:11.75pt;
mso-outline-level:1;vertical-align:baseline">The strip-center parking lot where the Reverend Charles
Moore chose to end his life is as large as a football field and as lonely as
prairie, the cracked gray asphalt dotted with weeds, shards of glass, and
crushed Copenhagen cans. The faded yellow paint on the pavement recalls other
days, when the Dollar General here was a Piggly Wiggly and members of the Night
Prowlers, a teenage car club, would come park their hot rods and open the
hoods. Residents of Grand Saline (population 3,136) know the lot as the Bear
Grounds, and on Friday and Saturday nights, high school kids still gather to
hang out and play music on their truck radios. (“Bear,” as any of them can tell
you, was the nickname of Wayne Clark, a car buff who used to park his ’55 Chevy
here and watch the world go by on U.S. 80.) When the kids get bored, they pile
into their trucks and “take the loop”—pull out onto the highway, drive to the
west end of town, cruise through the Sonic, then drive back, past the Salt
Palace and the Salt City Inn. It doesn’t take long to complete this ritual
circle of small-town life. On any given Friday night, as many as two dozen kids
may meet at the Bear Grounds. </p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">But on the morning of Monday, June 23, the parking lot was
almost empty. Angi McPherson, a receptionist at Sophistikutz, a hair and
tanning salon next to the Dollar General, got to work at eleven and noticed an
elderly man standing some 150 feet away from the storefront. Dressed in khakis
and a pale-blue shirt, with thinning white hair and tortoise-shell glasses, he
didn’t exactly look out of place. He could have been one of the many locals
going to pick up a prescription at Economy Drug or a cane at BT Medical
Supplies, a few doors down.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Except that he wasn’t going anywhere. Monday is a slow day
at Sophistikutz, and as morning turned to afternoon, McPherson found herself
watching the man. Other shoppers came and went, but he stood by his car, a
Volkswagen hatchback, leaning against it with his ankles crossed, looking
toward the road. Occasionally he would walk over to a storage crate that the
Dollar General was using as it remodeled its store, and he’d lean against that
for a while. It was a hot, windless afternoon that only got hotter; still, the
man stayed out there.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Mallie Munn, one of the Sophistikutz stylists, noticed him
too. She saw him move the car a few times to other parking spaces, but never
too far away. He had stuck a few pieces of paper on the hatchback window;
maybe, she thought, he was selling it. He’d open the trunk and root around, as
if looking for something, then close it and go back to standing. He watched as
cars and eighteen-wheelers rolled by on their way to Dallas, seventy miles
west, and east to Mineola. Several times every hour, the earth would shake and
the air would fill with the deafening blast of a horn as a train approached on
the railroad tracks just across the highway. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Economy Drug and BT Medical Supplies closed at five-thirty,
and not long after that, the man’s movements became more deliberate. He began
to pace back and forth between his car and a particular parking space not far
from the road. Munn and McPherson, on a work break, went out to sit on the curb
in front of Sophistikutz. They were joined by McPherson’s boyfriend, Dewayne
Mosley, and their friend Steven Goggans, who had just gotten off work at BT
Medical. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">“Guys, what is he doing?” asked Munn as the four watched the
man lay a white foam cushion in the parking space, on the pavement next to the
concrete bumper. The man got on his knees. Munn, who had moved to Grand Saline
from Seattle, had seen Muslim cabbies stop their cars and get out, lay down a
mat, and pray, but she’d never seen anyone do that in Texas. “Is he pulling
weeds?” she asked. Was that a gardening cushion? <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">After standing around all day, the man now seemed full of
purpose. He began pouring something on himself—over his left leg, over his
shoulder, down his right side, and finally on his head. It was such a hot day
that maybe, the friends thought, it was water. But he was using a red can. “Is
that gas?” McPherson asked. She and Munn stood up. The four stared as the man
set the can aside and picked up something long and thin. “He has a lighter,”
gasped Munn. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">The man was still kneeling, his back straight. He raised the
lighter to his head.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype id="_x0000_t75"
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</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><img width="205" height="230" src="file:///private/var/folders/np/tbqwchwd3jxd0nsftv36m2bh0000gn/T/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0clip_image002.png" align="left" hspace="9" v:shapes="Picture_x0020_2" class=""><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" class=""><o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">For almost 75 years, Charles Robert Moore sought to hear,
understand, and heed the call of God, wrestling every day with the words and
deeds of Jesus Christ, trying to figure out how best to live. As a
preacher—whether his work took him to Austin, Chicago, or Maliwada, India—he
often ministered to those on the margins. As an activist, he sought to feed the
hungry and give a voice to those who didn’t have one. He could be bold and
fearless, confronting authorities and upending social expectations. Mankind, Charles
thought, had made a terrible mess of this world, and he felt an obligation to
help set things right. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">A child of the Depression, he was born on July 18, 1934, in
the tiny community of Union Springs, also known as Bugtussle, just down the
road from Grand Saline. His father, John, worked at the local salt mine,
loading sacks of rock salt onto the railroad cars that stopped next to U.S. 80;
his mother, Hertilene, managed various clothing stores. A smart, strong-willed,
and devout woman, Hertilene shaped her family’s spiritual life early; when
Charles was only four, his older sister, Lona, would sit him on a tree stump in
the front yard and read him Bible verses, making him recite the words of Jesus.
“And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them,” the two would
repeat, and “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Eventually the
family moved to Grand Saline, where they attended First Methodist Church, and
Charles distinguished himself in Sunday school with his knowledge of Scripture.
The shy, melancholy boy was inspired by Jesus, whom he saw as lonely and
heroic. He wanted to be a leader like his pastor, Brother Harold Fagan, and
soon became president of the youth fellowship.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles was bright, liked to read, and dreamed of being a
writer; his mother encouraged his studies so he could be the first in the
family to go to college. Though her son enjoyed the outdoors and working with
his hands—he and his friend Don Vickery would disappear for hours to swim in
local creeks and build go-karts and boats—he was also reflective. When he was
fifteen, he was sent as his Boy Scout troop’s representative to the
International Jamboree in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. During one of the
ceremonies, as he watched a spotlight shine on the American flag, he had an
epiphany: the image, he felt, was a sign that he should return home and preach
a sermon about the light of God. First Methodist gave him the pulpit one
Sunday, and the boy’s words were so compelling that the pastor encouraged him
to go into the ministry. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><span id="cid:AC444C2F-9B06-4C62-BE85-EA1FB0799C61"><Moore_A-photo-of-Charles-in-the-early-nineties.-Credit-ARCHIVAL_680.jpeg></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles loved Methodism, whose founder, John Wesley, had
also experienced an epiphany one day, when his heart was “strangely warmed” by
the simple understanding that all he needed for salvation was sincere faith in
Jesus. Wesley had gone on to articulate a stirring theology based on the
concept of divine grace, a gift from God that inspired a deep and actively
lived faith. Charles felt passionate about inviting others to experience this
grace, and by seventeen, he was preaching once a month at a nearby rural
church; two years later, after enrolling at Tyler Junior College, he was
preaching weekly at a small church in Starrville, just down the road. A
strapping, good-looking young man with a wide, innocent face, Charles had a
knowing smile that hid his intense determination to help his listeners be, as
Wesley once wrote, “habitually filled with the love of God and neighbor.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">It was the fifties, however—a time when African Americans
received very little love from small East Texas congregations, let alone status
as neighbors. Growing up, Charles had seen the sign out on U.S. 80 that read,
“N—er, don’t let the sun go down on you in Grand Saline,” and he had heard
stories of blacks who were assaulted and terrorized; an old white man in town
known as Uncle Billy had once buttonholed him and some friends and told them
how Grand Saline’s Pole-town neighborhood got its name: black men and women had
been hanged from a lynching pole there. Nevertheless, the civil rights era was
dawning, and protests and boycotts of segregated classrooms, buses, and
restaurants had begun around the country. In May 1954 the Supreme Court ordered
the integration of schools with its decision in <i class="">Brown</i> v. <i class="">Board of
Education. </i>Appalled by the prejudice he saw around him, that summer Charles
stated from the pulpit in Starrville that he agreed with the Supreme
Court. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">His words did not go unnoticed. One of the church’s trustees
invited Charles to his house. “Would you ever have a n—er in your home to eat
with you?” he asked Charles. When Charles said yes, the trustee angrily ordered
him off his property. Around that same time, preaching at First Methodist in
Grand Saline, Charles also managed to infuriate his home church. “In a sermon,
he attacked the prejudice in the community,” recalled his childhood friend
Vickery. “He encouraged the congregation to accept everyone as God’s children.
He hurt some feelings with that message, stunned a lot of people. He was told
not to come back.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">But Charles was already moving on. He had met a striking
woman from the neighboring town of Van named Patricia Tunnell; he and Pat, as
she was known, soon married, and in 1955 Charles transferred to Southern
Methodist University, in Dallas. The small-town boy was immediately impressed
with the massive oaks and perfect lawns of the campus; he later wrote that
Dallas Hall, with its columns and elegant rotunda, was “the most beautiful
sight I had ever seen.” He found the place to be a spiritual oasis too: the
following year, after graduating with a B.A. in English, he enrolled at SMU’s
Perkins School of Theology, where he was exposed to the writings of
contemporary theologians—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich,
Reinhold Niebuhr—who, like him, had wrestled with questions about God’s role in
the modern world and Christian responsibility. He also studied the
early-twentieth-century Social Gospel movement, which argued that genuine
spirituality should bring about the end of problems such as poverty and
prejudice. And because Perkins was one of the first graduate schools to
integrate—it did so in 1952, though the university as a whole wouldn’t follow
until 1962—Charles could discuss civil rights with students who were black.
“Perkins gave him a whole new vision of what he could do in the world,” said
Pat, who lived with Charles and their son Steve, born in 1956, in a family
dormitory. Charles graduated second in his class; he would later call SMU “my
soul’s home.” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><span id="cid:4B1EA653-7FEA-4B6D-9C43-01563C97CAD5"><Moore_Moore_Charles-preaching-from-the-pulpit-in-the-mid-sixties.-Credit-ARCHIVAL_680.jpeg></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Yet he was quickly faced with the realities of the world
when he became an associate pastor at First Methodist Church in Carthage, back
in East Texas. “Racial tensions were high,” remembered Jack Albright, a friend
and fellow local pastor, “and in East Texas, they were <i class="">very</i> high.” It
was 1959, and sit-ins at lunch counters and libraries were now taking place
throughout the South; in 1961 the Freedom Riders took their first bus and were
assaulted by churchgoing members of the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham, Alabama.
Albright and Charles would meet for coffee and discuss what to say to their
congregations about these events, knowing they couldn’t directly address
integration. “You had to be subtle,” recalled Albright. “It was a very
emotional issue.” When the men spoke about dignity and equality, they were
labeled communists; when Charles refused to participate in the community’s
annual blackface minstrel show, he and Pat received threatening phone
calls. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shape id="Picture_x0020_4" o:spid="_x0000_s1026"
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</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><img width="299" height="169" src="file:///private/var/folders/np/tbqwchwd3jxd0nsftv36m2bh0000gn/T/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0clip_image004.png" align="left" hspace="9" v:shapes="Picture_x0020_4" class=""><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" class=""><o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Before long Charles decided to leave East Texas and moved
his family to San Antonio, where he served at Jefferson Methodist Church and
then at St. Matthew’s Methodist Church. The budding integrationist yearned to
join the front lines of the civil rights movement in Mississippi and Alabama,
but he settled for making a smaller statement closer to home, reaching out to
the pastor of a local black church and arranging for a choir and preacher swap.
He soon faced his first genuine crisis: in 1964 a young man in his
congregation, a father of three whom Charles had counseled and gotten to know
well, killed himself. Charles was devastated. “He felt that if he had done his job
right, the man wouldn’t have committed suicide,” recalled Pat.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles was so affected that he began to question his
calling. Around this time, he received a visit from an old Perkins classmate,
Guy Garrett, who was entering a Ph.D. program in theology that fall at Boston
University. He knew how much Charles enjoyed studying theology himself—maybe,
Garrett suggested, he would like to join him. Charles said yes, and in 1965,
after securing a job at a church in West Roxbury, he again moved his family, which
now included a second son, Guy. He enrolled in postgraduate classes at BU and
Harvard Divinity School. “He’d been a pastor for four years,” remembered
Garrett, “and I think he was ready for a fresh start in a new place.”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">According to the gospel of Matthew, when Jesus began his
public ministry, two millennia ago, the first words out of his mouth were
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” His followers have been trying
to parse those charged words ever since. What is this kingdom? Is it inside us,
the advent of God’s reign in the human heart through faith? Is it some future
reality, one in which earthly powers are overthrown? Was Jesus preaching about
giving up one’s evil ways to be allowed entry into a celestial realm? For John
Wesley, who wrote often on the subject, the kingdom of heaven was both a
present reality and a future one. As Christians waited for God’s fully realized
empire to come, his present reign in their hearts—established by grace—would be
evidenced in large part by how well they cared for the world around them,
loving “every child of man, every human creature, every soul which God hath
made.”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">For the Ecumenical Institute, a radical Christian collective
Charles encountered in Boston, the kingdom of heaven was a reality that could,
and should, be built on earth right now. Soon after arriving in the city,
Charles attended an intense weekend seminar held by the EI, in which attendees
slept on cots, ate together, and—when they weren’t quoting Bonhoeffer and
Tillich—engaged in earnest theological discussions about renewing the church
and transforming the world. The EI believed in working from the ground up,
emphasizing community development, especially in the country’s ghettos. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles was captivated. No longer did he have to be a lonely
voice cautiously calling for change. The EI, led by a long-haired, guru-like
former Perkins professor named Joseph Mathews, was actually <i class="">doing</i>
something, in particular for black Americans. As he and Pat attended EI
seminars around New England, Charles grew more and more excited about fighting
racial injustice. In 1968 he informed his wife that he wanted to take on a
bigger role and move to the EI’s headquarters, in a ghetto on the west side of
Chicago. Pat was not enthused. “He sacrificed the safety of his family by
taking us there,” she said. But she understood her husband’s desire to go, and
she felt that following him was her duty. “He would focus on something,
especially a situation where he saw innocents suffering. He felt if you could
give yourself to solving a problem, you could find a solution.” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">The family sold their belongings and headed west, moving
into the EI’s compound in a gang-infested neighborhood, where armed soldiers
patrolled the streets in the wake of bloody riots following the assassination
of Martin Luther King Jr. The hundred or so EI members shared houses or bunked
in dorm-style apartments. Every morning, they rose at five-thirty, ate
breakfast together, and listened to a sermon. Then they went to work,
partnering with local residents to help build a preschool, a clinic, and a
community center. They also held seminars and brought in new members. Before
long, Charles had become one of Mathews’s right-hand men, recruiting wealthy
donors in the Chicago suburbs, giving sermons, and speaking at large
gatherings. “Charles was a charismatic person,” said Pat. “People really wanted
to follow him.” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles became known as one of the group’s skeptics, often
serious, always fearless about giving his opinion. “Heaven is authentic earthly
participation,” he would say. “This world is it.” He was constantly reading,
studying, and lecturing; when someone once asked what he did for fun, he
replied, “I read Tillich.” Eventually he became a teacher, or prior, leading
discussions about faith and the EI’s role in the world. “He was a good
teacher,” remembered Louise Singleton, who took a seminar at the compound and
became a friend. “He talked about things that were important, that touched your
life—things that maybe you weren’t comfortable talking about. He was mindful,
about his life and others’ lives.” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Over the course of four years, the Moores were sent to live
and work all over the Chicago area, in rich neighborhoods and poor ones.
Mathews then set about expanding the EI’s reach beyond the U.S., and in 1973 he
took Charles on a three-month scouting trip to England, India, Singapore, and
the Marshall Islands. The following year, Charles and Pat were sent to India to
lay the groundwork for the EI there. Though this required them to leave their
two sons behind, Charles did not hesitate; Steve, who was sixteen, was packed
off to an EI home in Montana, and Guy, who was eleven, moved in with a group of
EI families in Chicago. Pat was torn but still accompanied her husband. “I
thought maybe going to India would be the <i class="">it</i> he was looking for,” she
said, “the thing he could do that would transform the world.” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">The couple moved to a Bombay slum, where Charles taught
classes and searched for a village that would be receptive to the EI’s mission,
and after a brief return to the U.S., they lived in the village of Maliwada,
east of Bombay. While Charles networked with local leaders, Pat managed a
community center, rising at three in the morning to oversee the cooks preparing
food for villagers. “It was all about building a model,” remembered Pat,
“working with them on schools, clinics, water systems. I think lives were
changed.” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">But while Charles was inspiring others, he was losing those
closest to him. Over the two years that he and Pat spent in India, their boys,
shuttled among other families, felt increasingly abandoned. By 1976 Steve had
dropped out of high school and was on his own in Illinois; Guy was in the ninth
grade in Saskatoon, Canada, and skipping class. “I was in a foreign country,”
he remembered. “I didn’t know anyone at the school and needed direction. I
finally stopped going altogether.” Pat, meanwhile, was growing unhappy too; as
she helped others with their lives, she felt as if her own life was passing her
by. In 1977 she returned to the U.S. and retrieved Guy.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles, missing Pat and beset with intestinal parasites,
followed three months later. He asked the leadership of the United Methodist
Church to assign him a congregation and was sent to the small town of
Ingleside, near Corpus Christi. Though Pat and Guy moved with him, she left
Charles a year later, taking their son with her. Charles felt lost. “He felt
his work in India wasn’t done,” recalled Guy. “He wasn’t ready to give it up.
He needed to be around people who were suffering to have a purpose in life. He
needed to have that mission.”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">For the next few years, Charles drifted. From Ingleside he
moved to Corpus Christi to take a post as associate pastor at a black church,
St. Paul’s United Methodist. His roommate was a young local minister named
Stephen Bryant, who had heard Charles lecture in Chicago. “Charles threw
himself into things with abandon,” said Bryant, remembering when the pastor
went on a fast for the forty days of Lent—and then continued for several days
more. The two often talked late into the night. “He had a strong feeling he was
on the earth to make a significant impact, and he was searching for how to do
that.” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">A small Methodist retreat on Padre Island was Charles’s next
post, but that proved too monastic a life for him, so he moved back to his
childhood home in Grand Saline, where his mother had continued to live after
his father’s death, in 1978. Charles had grown depressed, and he would visit
Garrett, who was now in Dallas, trying to figure out what to do next. “Being a
normal pastor wasn’t fulfilling anymore,” said Garrett. “After the EI, he had a
more challenging view of what the mission of the church should be, a bigger
role in taking care of the poor. We’d talk about what he should do: Go back to
Chicago? Stay in Texas?” Charles also called Louise Singleton, his former EI
student, who lived in Denver. He was a wreck, so depressed that he couldn’t get
out of bed, he told her. Charles went to visit her and her husband, then agreed
to spend a week in a Colorado hospital psychiatric ward.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles was consumed with guilt over the way he had behaved
toward his sons. The brothers had been sharing an apartment in Houston, and in
December 1980 Charles wrote them a forlorn letter. “Once there was a man who
had two sons,” it began, “and he mistreated them badly.” He had been so busy
trying to save the world, he explained, that he hadn’t saved any time for them.
Now he tried to make it up to them, buying Christmas presents and visiting.
“We’d sit around and listen to Richard Pryor albums,” said Guy. “He loved those
records. He’d laugh until he fell out of his chair.” Remembered Pat, “It’s not
that he didn’t love his boys. But God as his calling was primary in his life,
period. Everything else came after.”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">By this time the EI had morphed into the Institute of
Cultural Affairs, an organization focused less on religious renewal and more on
secular community development outside the U.S. In 1981 Charles rejoined the
group, traveling around Europe, Africa, and India. In late 1982 he went on a six-week
trip, leading workshops and speaking in villages across the globe. In his
journal, he bemoaned the treatment of women, described what he saw in African
slums, and kept a record of his visits with health care workers, farmers, and
tribal chiefs. “I fluctuate between states of excitement over the possibilities
of human development and despair over the enormity of human suffering,
especially the inadequacy of my response to it,” he wrote. Feeling that the ICA
was becoming “spiritless and technocratic,” he quit in 1984, moving to London
to study church history. “I am trying to understand how humanity got to be the
way it is,” he wrote when he arrived. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">He was also on the cusp of fifty and trying to find himself.
He’d wake at four, write, read all morning, do research at the library, come
home, eat a cold dinner, and read novels until bedtime. He visited Charles
Dickens’s home, Karl Marx’s grave, and John Wesley’s chapel. He went to see the
statue of William Tyndale, who had been burned at the stake in 1536 for
translating the Bible. “This certainly shows how the giving of one’s life at
the right moment can be of great significance and that the argument against
martyrdom because of the uncertainty of its effect is not convincing,” he
wrote. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">When he ran out of money, Charles returned to Texas. He
spent time with Guy, who was now in Tyler doing manual labor and little else.
“We got pretty close,” recalled Guy, “because we were both having a hard time
figuring out what we were going to do next.” Charles asked the bishop for a new
church in 1986, but the Methodists had no vacancies. Instead Charles found a
federated congregation—Methodist, Presbyterian, and Church of Christ—in the
tiny South Texas town of Woodsboro. Though he liked the ecumenical nature of the
church and enjoyed ministering to the many elderly in the congregation,
visiting them at nursing homes and hospitals, after three years he asked for a
transfer, hoping to move to Austin. The closest he could get was another
federated church, this one in Lockhart. It was only an interim position, but
Charles took it. He was 55, a temp, and alone.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles regained his sense of purpose in 1990, when he was
offered a post at Grace United Methodist in Austin. He jumped at the chance to
lead the small church in a quiet neighborhood south of the river. When he
arrived, he found an aging congregation of about sixty members; the building
itself, constructed in 1914, was in disrepair. Charles got to work, rehabbing
the choir loft and installing stained-glass windows. He also fixed up an
educational annex. Out front, he placed a sign with a slogan that he credited
to his new wife, Linda, a real estate agent he’d met at a church workshop in
town and married that November: “An Old Church With New Ideas.”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles took a deliberate attitude of inclusiveness,
inviting everyone in the community to join his church or just use it as a
gathering place, including a Jewish Reconstructionist group and the Austin Rape
Crisis Center. Not long after the sign went up, a young gay man named Andy
Smith began attending services. Smith, like Charles, hailed from East Texas and
had graduated from SMU; the two hit it off, and Smith began bringing friends.
Despite the stance of the United Methodist Church on gays (“We do not condone
the practice of homosexuality,” read its Book of Discipline, “and consider this
practice incompatible with Christian teaching”), Charles went out of his way to
embrace his new congregants. He began preaching sermons on Sunday mornings
about how God’s gift of grace was meant for everybody, including homosexuals,
and even allowed use of the church for meetings of PFLAG (Parents, Families and
Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and rehearsals of the Capital City Men’s Chorus.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Standing at the pulpit with the air of a kindly professor,
Charles read his sermons from the page, speaking calmly, looking up from time
to time and cocking his head. His cadence was soothing—sometimes a trace of his
East Texas accent would sneak through—but it was what he said that moved
people. “Do I have to listen to endless flapdoodle about what the Bible says?”
he asked in a sermon about homosexuality. “How brainy does a person have to be
to understand that sexuality is not a matter of style but of substance—having
to do, that is, with the very core of personality?” He was neither a
fist-pounder nor a back-slapper. “He wasn’t trying to make people happy,”
recalled Smith. “He wanted to challenge us to think and explore our faith. He’d
say, ‘It’s not entertainment.’ ” Rich Brotherton, whose wife, Kathy, was the
church organist and choir director, also remembers those Sundays. “Every
sermon, you’d be humbled, moved, and inspired,” he said. “Charles would
crystallize thoughts in your head, and you’d come away thinking, ‘Exactly.’ ”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Soon all kinds of people were coming to Charles—men just out
of prison, women abused by their husbands, the marginalized and the down and
out. He provided motel rooms for homeless families and hired John Jordan, a
homeless man, as a caretaker. Jordan in turn founded SoCo Ministries, a group
that partnered with neighborhood churches to distribute lunches to those on the
streets. “Charles ministered to the underdog,” said Linda. “He didn’t relate to
people who had a lot of options and money.” Charles found deep fulfillment
attending to the sick and the dying, and he spent hours in the hospital,
sitting on the beds of those who were ailing, sometimes holding them close.
“When people suffered, he suffered with them,” recalled Kathy Renfro, a
congregant whose dying father Charles comforted. Linda believed he saved his
best writing for the dead. “His greatest gift was his eulogies,” she said. “He
could recreate the person in such a way that you’d laugh and cry at the same
time.”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">As before, though, Charles’s mission came before everything
else, and Linda grew frustrated when he wouldn’t take time off. “He put himself
on every committee,” she said. “It drove me crazy. On Wednesday night he’d
listen to the choir rehearse. I’d say, ‘Charles, they don’t need you!’ But he
had to have his finger in every pie.” In 1993 the couple split. “I was married
to Charles,” said Linda, “but Charles was married to the church.” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles threw himself into his work all the more, marching
in Austin’s MLK Day parade, joining the board of the Rape Crisis Center, and
taking part in protest vigils outside the Governor’s Mansion whenever someone
was set to be executed. When a new group called the Texas Coalition to Abolish
the Death Penalty (TCADP) needed a place to meet, Charles offered his church.
“Not many ministers would even talk about the death penalty,” recalled Dave
Atwood, the organization’s founder, “but Charles preached about it—and he
welcomed us. He was a groundbreaker.” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">It was gay rights, however, where Charles took his strongest
stand. In 1995, when the United Methodist Church convened a meeting of one
hundred bishops in Austin, he saw an opportunity and declared a hunger strike
to protest the denomination’s position on homosexuality, demanding a public
statement from the bishops that expressed “their concern about the mistreatment
of gay people, especially by church officials.” At the time, the issue of gay
rights had barely entered the national conversation—“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” had
become law just a year earlier—and Charles’s actions caught the attention of
the city. Thirteen days into his fast, the <i class="">Austin American-Statesman </i>ran
a long story on the sixty-year-old minister, noting how he’d lost fifteen
pounds and “walked with an older man’s shuffle.” The next day the bishops
drafted a resolution in which they reaffirmed that the practice of homosexuality
was incompatible with Christianity yet also called on “each United Methodist
congregation to be a place of hospitality where all are welcomed.”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles ended his strike. “It’s not all we hoped for,” he
told the <i class="">Statesman,</i> “but it’s a positive statement.” The <i class="">Austin
Chronicle</i> gave him an award that year for “Best Gandhi Imitation.” Grace
United by this time had grown to two hundred members, including families with
young children, and though not everyone was happy with Charles—some left the
church, others refused to tithe—his fast attracted even more congregants. “I
saw a news report and thought, ‘Here is a guy literally putting himself at
risk,’ ” recalled Steve Basile, a gay man who moved to Austin around that time.
“So I went to Grace. It was this eighty-year-old church with a crazy mix of
blue-haired ladies and people with tattoos and piercings.” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles thought the bishop would replace him, but his
contract kept getting renewed. So he grew bolder, devising a plan in 1997 with
two other local ministers, including his friend Lou Snead, to connect South
Austin churches with Travis County Health and Human Services to provide help to
the area’s homeless. In a meeting with other ministers to discuss the funds
they would raise, one pastor expressed concern that the recipients would try to
game the system. “Charles leaned on the table,” remembered Snead, “and said,
‘That sounds like blaming the poor. If we’re going to sit here and blame those
in need for their circumstances, I want no part of it, and I can’t see how
we’re going to call it Christian.’ ” The other pastor backed down. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles again refused to mince words a few years later, when
he was interviewed on <i class="">60 Minutes </i>about the “compassionate conservatism”
espoused by presidential candidate George W. Bush, saying that the concept
wrongly absolved the government of its responsibility. “Just like I wouldn’t
like to go back to the time before we had flush toilets,” he said, bemoaning
the era when only churches helped the poor, “I would not like to go back to a
time when the only kind of help anybody could expect would be from the
generosity of some religious group.”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">By the time the show aired, Charles was 65 and married for a
third time, to Barbara Pierce, the widowed mother of Kathy Renfro. He was also
ready to retire, an announcement that left his congregation heartbroken. “No
minister had ever had that kind of spiritual effect on me,” explained church
member Kathy Calnan. He was honored with awards by PFLAG and the TCADP, and on
Mother’s Day in 2000, two weeks before his retirement date, Charles delivered
one of his best sermons, in which he gave loving homage to the United Methodist
Church, despite the denomination’s unwillingness “to accept and enjoy her other
sheep, the children who are different from the majority of the flock.” He ended
it with a rousing promise. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">“I will not become hopeless,” he declared. “I will sing and
pray and work as long as breath is in me. . . . Someday, I know my mother
church is going to embrace all her children without reservation.”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Over the course of his long, wandering career, Charles had
been a prolific if occasional writer, filling journals, penning third-person
autobiographical pieces (“His life . . . had, nevertheless, been pretty much a
mess,” he wrote in one, noting the “failure of will and lack of
accomplishment”), and composing many poems. Some of his poetry was imagistic
(“Waves of grass / spread round / your / face”) and some topical (“You have
broken my heart / And the bones of my friends,” he wrote in a piece about
Dallas). About life in the ministry, he wrote: “The greatest paradox of all /
Is this mysterious call: / In providing something people need / We ourselves
don’t go to seed.” His plan in retirement was to write more consistently—maybe
fiction, maybe a book about his life. He and Barbara moved to a condo in Tyler,
and in between rough drafts he intended to make regular trips to Grand Saline
to fix up his childhood home, which he had inherited after his mother’s death,
in 1998. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">When Charles sat down to write, though, the words wouldn’t
come. He found himself struggling to make sense of his new life. For the first
time in decades, he had no flock and no pulpit. Nor could he find a church he
liked. “For several years after he retired, he wasn’t even sure there was a
God,” remembered Renfro. Still, he kept reading and studying, and after he and
Barbara moved to Sunnyvale, a suburb east of Dallas, in 2002, he would drive to
the Perkins library at SMU to do research. He preached a guest sermon for his
friend Charles Cox at Grace United Methodist Church in Dallas, and when his old
childhood friend Don Vickery got married, at First Methodist in Grand Saline,
Charles performed the wedding. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">His family also provided some solace. Guy, who by this time
had earned a GED, a bachelor’s degree, and a master’s in interdisciplinary
studies, had gotten married and settled in nearby Allen, just north of Dallas.
In late 2004 he and his wife had a son, Zach. “My dad was so happy,” recalled
Guy. “He would hold Zach and kiss him, and I’d think, ‘Who is this man?’ It was
healing to see that, because I never got that affection.” Charles and Barbara
moved to Guy’s neighborhood, just around the corner, to help care for Zach and
his little sister, Chloe, who was born in 2007. Charles would often take them
to the park, so proud and protective of his grandchildren that he petitioned
the city council to erect a stop sign on the street in front of the playground.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Still, dissatisfaction plagued him. He met Garrett regularly
over meals, and the two discussed and exchanged books—often works by the Jesus
Seminar, a group of scholars who proposed that Jesus was not divine at all but
simply a preacher who fought injustice. Charles also wrote frequent letters, to
the director of Baylor University’s Institute of Oral History to inquire about
the history of lynching in Grand Saline; to the director of a UMC online forum
about when the church’s language concerning homosexuality was introduced; and
to Bishop Janice Huie about opposing the death penalty. (“I will continue to be
vocal about the United Methodist stance,” she wrote back, “and I am pleased to
hear you are doing the same.”) Yet when Steve Basile, his old congregant at
Grace United, emailed him out of the blue in December 2010 to say that he would
always appreciate his “passion, faith, and commitment to equality,” Charles
confessed to feeling ineffectual. “I have not been active since retirement,” he
replied. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">In 2012 Charles began to suffer some severe gastrointestinal
issues, and he grew convinced that he was dying of cancer, as his mother had.
Though he was eventually diagnosed with celiac disease, those close to him
believe the ordeal sent him into a dark spiral. “On a deep-down level,” said
Garrett, “he was asking himself, ‘What did you do?’ It was gnawing at him. It’s
not like he saved the world—but who does?” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Unbeknownst to his friends and family, Charles had started
formulating a plan, a way to heed his call from God one final time. It required
the ultimate renunciation, an idea that he didn’t shy away from. “The calling
to self-sacrifice has been with me since Sunday School,” he wrote. “I’ve always
felt that death for a cause was my destiny.” His plan would involve one of the
oldest Christian symbols, one found in the very insignia of the United
Methodist Church—a symbol of purification, sacrifice, and the Holy
Spirit. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">This symbol, wrote Charles, represented “the light of
justice, the warmth of mercy and the radiance of walking humbly with that
Mysterious Power that gives and takes away, but also leads imperfect mortals to
a higher plane.” Others before him had used it as an expression of selfless
offering; Charles had never forgotten, back in the tumult of the civil rights
era, the world-famous images of the Buddhist monk Quang Duc, who had harnessed
the symbol’s power in 1963 to help bring down the South Vietnamese government.
With his plan, Charles would be relevant again and as fearless as ever. He
would transform the world and give himself completely. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">He would set himself on fire. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles decided to execute his plan at his soul’s home, the
SMU campus, on June 23, 2013. He penned appeals to both George W. Bush and the
dean of the Perkins School of Theology, William Lawrence, to be read upon his
death. He asked Bush for “a change of heart and mind” on the death penalty and
Lawrence for help changing the United Methodist Church’s official stance on
homosexuality. After quoting Tyndale, he wrote, “I aspire to be a son of
Tyndale’s sacrifice and hope to have daughters and sons in spirit who care
about these issues for which I decided it was necessary for me to die.” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">But he couldn’t do it. “My courage failed me,” Charles wrote
on July 19. “It isn’t easy to contemplate, let alone carry out, the ending of
one’s life.” On August 2, he wrote a second letter to Bush and Lawrence. Once
again, he couldn’t set himself on fire.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles abandoned the idea, but as fall and then spring
rolled by, he grew more and more withdrawn. He had thought Barack Obama’s
presidency heralded a new era, but now the gains of the tea party made him
despair. He spent less time with his grandchildren. He stopped reading books.
He walked around the house quoting Scripture, something he hadn’t done since he
was a boy. Barbara didn’t know what to do. “I want to tell him to snap out of
it!” she told her daughter. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles chose a new date: June 19, also known as Juneteenth,
the anniversary of the day in 1865 when Texas slaves learned they had been
freed. He began writing page after page in preparation. He left detailed instructions
for a memorial service, to be held at Faith Presbyterian, in which his friend
Lou Snead was to officiate and Kathy Brotherton was to play piano, not organ.
“I hope the TV stations in Austin will cover the service,” he noted. He also
wrote a letter to Barbara, apologizing for being “distant and irritable” and
expressing how excruciating it was to give up the “pleasures of life” with her.
“It isn’t important that I be remembered,” he wrote, “but that <i class="">someone</i>
cared enough to give up everything for the sake of others.” He asked her to
reach out to his son Steve. “Please tell Stephen that I am sorry we could not
relate in a healthy way, and I feel that I failed him badly.” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">His suicide letter was titled “An Appeal to Power.” “I am
laying down my life here today,” Charles typed on June 16, “in order to call
attention to issues of great human concern—especially homosexuality and the
death penalty.” He placed the letter on his desk, along with other papers,
including the business card of CBS News correspondent Bob Simon, who had
interviewed him for <i class="">60 Minutes, </i>and a 2013 <i class="">New Yorker</i> story about
self-immolations by Tibetans protesting Chinese rule. (One passage, describing
the deaths as “a sacrifice for a higher cause” that “should be viewed as
different from violence against others or from suicides committed out of
personal despair,” was underlined.) On June 19, Charles kissed Barbara goodbye
and drove to SMU. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">But once more, he couldn’t kill himself. Charles would make
two more failed attempts over the next three days, each time driving away from
SMU and each time adding to his rationale in letters. In one titled “Last
Appeal,” on June 20, he mentioned the recent fiftieth anniversary of the
Mississippi slayings of three civil rights workers, offering his death “to keep
the memory of those three brave men alive” and kicking himself for having done
so little about racism in his life. (A handwritten postcript on June 21 read,
“Another day gone by—another failure—but it is hard to face the flames.”) His
letter on June 22 invoked “economic justice, especially as it involves racial
prejudice.” He also apologized for creating “such a horrendous scene on this
beautiful campus.”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Perhaps because he could not bring himself to defile his
beloved school, Charles shifted his focus to his hometown. “O GRAND SALINE,
REPENT OF YOUR RACISM,” he titled his last letter. In it, he recalled the old
stories about Poletown and described how he’d never seen any black faces
growing up. “America (and Grand Saline prominently) have never really repented
for the atrocities of slavery and its aftermath,” he wrote. “What my hometown
needs to do is open its heart and doors to black people.” He ended by noting,
“Many African Americans were lynched around here, probably some in Grand
Saline: hanged, decapitated, and burned. . . . I have decided to join them by
giving my body to be burned.”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">On the morning of June 23, Barbara had a doctor’s
appointment. Charles begged her not to go, but she explained that it was
important and she’d be right back. Charles said he needed to go to Grand Saline
to check on the family house. Leaving behind his cellphone and his wallet, he
got in his hatchback, taking with him his last letter, which he intended to
place on the car window. He then headed east, driving on U.S. 80 into town,
past the Sonic and the Salt Palace, until he got to the Bear Grounds. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Charles was instantly engulfed in flames. As they burst ten
feet into the air, he made a sound—not a scream but a low moan, thought Munn,
like an involuntary physical reaction to unbearable pain. She and McPherson
rushed to call 911 as Goggans and Mosley ran toward the burning man. By the
time the two reached Charles, he was standing, arms raised, and stumbling
toward the road. He took about four steps, fell to his knees, then rolled onto
his back. Goggans took off his shirt to try to put out the flames; a man named
Buddy Lambert, who had rushed across U.S. 80 in a pickup when he saw the fire,
did the same. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">In the meantime, McPherson and Munn had found a fire
extinguisher and called out to Mosley, who sprinted over to grab it, then ran
back to Charles to smother the flames. By the time the flames were out, Charles
had been on fire for more than a minute. He lay on his back, knees bent and
head off the pavement, moaning. Except for his socks and sneakers, all his
clothes had been consumed. His nose was gone, his eyes were melted shut, and
the bones in his hands were exposed. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">The police arrived, then an ambulance and a fire truck.
Charles was taken to the town’s heliport and flown to Parkland Hospital, in
Dallas. With third-degree burns covering 85 percent of his body, he was induced
into a coma and put on a ventilator. When Barbara and Guy arrived, doctors told
them Charles wouldn’t survive, so the two requested that the ventilator be
removed. Charles lived for another 45 minutes. After a nurse put a sheet over
his body, Barbara hugged her husband. She and Guy prayed, then said their
goodbyes.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">When friends heard what Charles had done, they wept. Though
many of them couldn’t understand the feelings of failure he described in his
letters—“Charles was the quintessential example of a man trying to do
something,” said Sid Hall, a friend and fellow Methodist minister—they weren’t
entirely surprised by his actions. If anyone would choose such a deliberate
death, it was Charles. “He was prepared to take radical action at any time,”
said Stephen Bryant, Charles’s roommate in Corpus Christi. “His whole theology
was ‘You’re here for a reason, so throw yourself into your calling, and lay down
your life if needed.’ He would have agreed that to lose your life is to save
it.” Pat felt she knew why he did it. “He believed that people changed their
lives out of images, and he thought his death would create an image people
couldn’t erase from their minds.” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">At first, though, it seemed as if Charles’s death had been
utterly in vain. He had wanted so badly to make a statement, “suffering only
for a few moments but attracting worldwide attention,” he wrote—just like Quang
Duc. But Duc had alerted the international media beforehand, and the next day
his burning was front-page news all over the world. For his self-immolation,
Charles had chosen a mostly empty parking lot and a tiny group of startled
onlookers. The <i class="">Grand Saline Sun </i>ran a brief story on “an elderly man”
who had set fire to himself; Charles wasn’t named until two days later, when
the <i class="">Tyler Morning Telegraph</i> published a story headlined “Madman or
Martyr?” His story finally went national the following day, when the United
Methodist News Service picked it up, followed by the <i class="">Dallas Morning News </i>and
the <i class="">Huffington Post</i>. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Even then, many reactions, online and in Grand Saline, were
negative. Charles must have been mentally ill, reasoned one forum commenter, or
had a messiah complex or just wanted attention. He wasn’t thinking at all about
his family, to say nothing of the witnesses at the Bear Grounds, who were still
reeling from the horror they had seen. “For him to be a pastor, a man of
God—how dare he?” asked McPherson. Christians criticized Charles’s
theology—Jesus had already sacrificed himself to right all wrongs—and noted
that Charles could have kept working for the things he believed in. His death,
wrote a Ph.D. student in an online Methodist forum, “was needless and wasted.”
Besides, gay rights had never had more support, the use of the death penalty
was declining everywhere, and the country had a black president. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Friends and peers, meanwhile, searched for a way to
rationalize his last gesture. “His action was a symbol of solidarity with
people on the margins,” wrote Hall in an online essay. “His action was meant to
call us to respond.” In a blog post, a reverend in Denton named Jeff Hood
observed, “The courage of a passionate follower of Jesus can set the world
afire with love.” And indeed, Charles’s final words and deeds inflamed Grand
Saline, especially after Wendi Callaway, the editor of the <i class="">Sun, </i>posted
an editorial on Facebook on July 3 defending his actions as a wake-up call. “We
all know the history of this town,” she wrote. “African Americans were
tortured, hung from trees, hung from the Poletown bridge, decapitated and their
heads placed on poles in Poletown, burned alive, and God only knows what else.”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">She received more than one hundred responses, some thanking
her for raising the issue, sharing stories of local prejudice and pointing out
that in 2014 there were still almost no black residents in Grand Saline. But
others attacked her facts. In a long letter, which Callaway published in the <i class="">Sun,</i>
several civic leaders stated that, according to research by local historian and
author Elvis Allen, much of what she and Charles had written was based on “tall
tales and unsubstantiated myths.” There was no evidence of a lynching pole in
Poletown, they wrote, which in fact got its name from the saplings used by
Civil War–era settlers to build homes. They acknowledged that the era of
Reconstruction had been violent in the county, and that blacks and sympathetic
whites had been beaten and whipped, but there was no record anywhere—no
newspapers, historical journals, or oral histories—of a black person being
lynched or decapitated in Grand Saline.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">These facts probably wouldn’t have meant much to Charles.
Standing for hours on the cracked gray asphalt in front of the Dollar General,
he was answering the call he’d first heard just down the road some 75 years
earlier, in the words of Jesus. The Bear Grounds might not have been the best
place for his final sermon, but the parking lot fit with how he felt: lonely,
melancholic, a little heroic. “He didn’t want to just die of some natural cause
or get hit by a truck,” said Pat. “He wanted his death to count for something.
He wanted his life to count for something.”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">Unfortunately, no matter what Charles did in his life—no
matter how many fasts he undertook, hungry people he fed, communities he built,
parishioners he inspired, dying he comforted—he would never have thought it was
enough. For all the times he preached about God’s gift of grace and all the
times he extended it to others, Charles, it seems, felt little of that grace
himself. Bill Renfro, Kathy’s husband and a Methodist minister in Austin,
wishes he had had one last chance to talk to his friend. “I would have told
him, ‘Charles, you may not see the changes, but you’ve touched so many lives
and you’ve contributed to the progress of history,’ ” he said. “ ‘Partly
because of you, inclusiveness will one day be the byword in the Methodist
Church.’ ” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><div class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" class="">He paused. “But it wouldn’t have made a bit of
difference.” <o:p class=""></o:p></span></p>
<!--EndFragment--><div class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On 14 Nov 2018, at 11:44, A.M. Noel via OE <<a href="mailto:oe@lists.wedgeblade.net" class="">oe@lists.wedgeblade.net</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><a href="https://www.manonfirefilm.com/#trailer" class="">https://www.manonfirefilm.com/#trailer</a><br clear="all" class=""><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr" class="">A.M. Noel</div></div></div><br class=""></div></div><br class=""><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="">On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 6:43 AM A.M. Noel <<a href="mailto:anthonymarianoel@gmail.com" class="">anthonymarianoel@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br class=""></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr" class="">Mary google and it does have all the info about Charles Moore and what Edith is talking about.<br clear="all" class=""><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class="m_8943424573233964119gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr" class="">A.M. Noel</div></div></div><br class=""></div><br class=""><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="">On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 3:50 AM Mary Kurian D'Souza via OE <<a href="mailto:oe@lists.wedgeblade.net" target="_blank" class="">oe@lists.wedgeblade.net</a>> wrote:<br class=""></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="auto" class="">Would love to see the article. <div class="">Mary<br class=""><br class=""><div id="m_8943424573233964119m_5633368030601225128AppleMailSignature" class="">Sent from my iPhone</div><div class=""><br class="">On 14-Nov-2018, at 9:08 AM, Joan via OE <<a href="mailto:oe@lists.wedgeblade.net" target="_blank" class="">oe@lists.wedgeblade.net</a>> wrote:<br class=""><br class=""></div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><font size="2" face="arial" class=""><br class="">
<div style="font-family: arial, helvetica; font-size: 10pt;" class=""><br class="">
<br class="">
<div dir="ltr" class="">An article in the December 2018 issue of Sojourners magazine is about Charles Moore. It says that PBS’s Independent Lens will have a one-hour documentary, “Man on Fire,” online beginning 12/17/18 about his life.<br class="">
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