July Eldertorial: Jimmy Hodges

The following post is the Eldertorial featured in our church newsletter, the Amen Almanac, for July.  Each month, one of our Elders (those called by God and the congregation to guide our spiritual life together) writes a reflection on ways they see God at work in the world.

Religious Tolerances

Most folks reared in Appalachia in the early and mid-20th century as good and faithful inerrant Protestants had only limited ties to other religious groups. We were mostly of Scot-Irish and German descent and most of us never walked into a Jewish synagogue, a Greek Orthodox Church, or a Catholic cathedral.


For some fortunate quirk of fate, I was one of handful of Protestant children who had the opportunity to grow up in a small neighborhood of Park City in Knoxville where we Protestants were a minority. A breakdown of the various religions of the 22 families in the neighborhood would be 7 Jewish families, 8 Catholic families, 2 Greek Orthodox families, one Baptist family and the remaining few either Presbyterian or Methodists. My grandmother had little formal education, but she was most humble and loving of others, regardless of their ethnicity or religion. She taught me early on that Protestants were a very small minority group in the world and that, while we had faith and assurances that our religious doctrine was correct, we still had to be tolerant of others who also believed their religions ideas were correct. Therefore, my family often went to midnight mass at Christmas time and on occasion attended circumcision rites held in homes of our Jewish neighbors as invited guests.

While we neighbors all helped each other in times of hardships or losses, we also had our moments of conflict which added local color to the neighborhood. My Catholic neighbors could not eat fish on Fridays, and I loved to bring Blue Circle hamburgers to their front porches and boldly sit and wash them down with a small Coke and a Moon Pie, knowing they secretly wished they could partake of my feast. On St. Patrick’s Day the neighborhood would liven up when the Irish retired railroad conductor, Mr. Wellahan, became inebriated and dressed as a Leprechaun, which led Mrs. Busch, the immigrant Russian Jewish lady, to vent in her heavily accented English sprinkled with White Russian about the ills of strong spirits. I grew up listening to Mrs. Busch’s stories of carrying her two sons out of Russia on her back during the 1917 Russian Revolution. Harold Shersky, our Jewish neighbor next door, ran what came to be the famous Harold’s Kosher Deli on Gay Street, and often he would sneak over to our house on a Sunday afternoon when he would smell the pork on the barbeque spit that my grandmother was cooking for her own restaurant. He would beg for a pork sandwich, and out of Christian love my grandmother would slice him a large piece of pork. At times he was nabbed at the scene by his wife Atti who loudly reminded him of the religious laws forbidding such sinful acts. Many times Harold and Atti’s son, Martin Glenn, accompanied me to Vacation Bible School, and he would come walking home singing songs like “Jesus Loves Me” or “Onward Christian Soldiers.” This would cause Atti to launch into a tirade in which she expanded upon what the Rabbi say if he heard such ungodly songs! And lastly our noted Greek lady, Mrs. Regas, was always yelling to the top of her voice about why the Jews and the Catholics were all going to the lower regions because of one thing or the other. Later she would bring her delicious homemade desserts made with her old family’s recipes from Athens to all those she had earlier chastised, bringing peace once again to the diverse neighborhood.


On Sundays we all went our different ways praising God with Bibles in hand, and afterwards came back as neighbors filled with “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and temperance” (Gal. 5:22-23). My grandmother and other matriarchs and patriarchs of the old neighborhood would have agreed with the Episcopal priest, Rev. Lowell Grisham, who said in 2011, “I see Jesus in the Dalia Lama, and were we to meet, I would be honored if the Dalia could see the Buddha nature in me.”