I’m still working my way through the sermons Lloyd Douglas preached at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor during the University of Michigan’s 1919-1920 school year. Today I’m looking at an untitled sermon he preached on January 4, 1920. It was based on a passage from Christopher Morley’s 1919 novel, The Haunted Bookshop.
This was the kind of thing Douglas read for enjoyment. He subscribed to (and contributed anonymously to) the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine of essays for thinking people on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean (hence the name). Christopher Morley wrote anonymously for them, too, as well as for other magazines that gave him a by-line. In 1917, Doubleday Doran published Morley’s short book called Parnassus on Wheels, about a secondhand bookseller whose shop was mobile: a bookstore in a horse-drawn carriage. Although it was a story, it gave Morley many opportunities to talk about everyday life in America in the early twentieth century, as well as to make interesting comments on literature. In 1919, he published a sequel called The Haunted Bookshop, and it was a passage from this book on which Douglas’s sermon (on January 4, 1920) was based.
I’ll tell you about the sermon in my next post, but today I want to call your attention to a coincidence that no one could have noticed at the time. Although Douglas was well-known in religious circles and in some of the communities where he had served as a minister, he was not yet famous, nor did anyone know that he would become famous later on. So here is Douglas building a sermon around a text from Morley, an up-and-coming author whom he admired, little realizing that his own name would one day be better known that Morley’s and that, in a couple of decades, Morley would review Douglas’s novel, White Banners, in The Saturday Review of Books, arguably the most prestigious book review in the country at that time.
Douglas’s case is unusual, of course. Most people don’t live the majority of their lives in obscurity, then suddenly get “discovered.” It was Douglas’s fame that motivated the University of Michigan to keep his private papers, then motivated me to read them. Looking back on his life, I’m able to see this ironic “passing” of two “ships in the night.”
But Douglas believed that things like this happen to people like you and me, too. He thought there were connections between us that we might never find out about. Have you ever been far from home and conversed with a stranger, only to discover that you had a mutual acquaintance? “Small world,” we say. Or have you ever visited a social media platform like Facebook and discovered that a friend of yours is somehow connected to another friend of yours, and you didn’t know it? That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. It has come up again and again in my Lloyd Douglas research:
*Posing for a picture at the ceremony unveiling the statue of Lew Wallace in Washington, DC, little realizing that his novel, The Robe, would later be compared to Wallace’s novel, Ben Hur.
*Arguing in the press with filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille about his film The Godless Girl in 1918, not knowing that, twenty years later, he would be DeMille’s guest on his weekly broadcast, The Lux Radio Theater.
I could give other examples from his life, but you get the idea.
Maybe this kind of thing happened so much to Douglas because he was a busy man with many interesting projects involving lots of people and therefore was connected to so many folks informally. Or maybe it’s just more obvious in cases like his. Douglas thought so. He believed that we’ve all rubbed shoulders with people who are connected to us in ways we don’t know: not celebrities — just regular people who share our interests and concerns and would have been our friends if we had ever actually met them.
They could be the motorist we snarled at on the freeway earlier. Or they may be the person we envy way ahead of us in the long, boring line at the checkout counter. Perhaps they posted a comment on social media that annoyed us, but if we had met them under any other circumstances we would have hit it off with them.
How many other ships do we pass in the night? Douglas thought that those connections would often come to light – and coincidences would happen more frequently – for those who made Christ’s teachings their life-habit. And it seems to have been true for him, at least.
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 