The Glenn Hinson I knew

It's been a month since I joined a group of a hundred or so who gathered in the storied sanctuary of Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville to say goodbye to Dr. E. Glenn Hinson. Here was where giants trod and preached and ministered in the heyday of Southern Baptist life; when churches in the area benefitted from close ties with the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, back when the school celebrated robust and expansive theological inquiry and thought, so I've been told by those who experienced it. And on that day, one of those quiet and revered giants had come to rest and be remembered.

Those who know their Southern Baptist history know this heyday didn't hold, as a conservative backlash, reacting to progressive change in the mid- to late 20th century, sought to reclaim Southern Baptist churches and institutions from what the movement claimed was a drift toward liberalism. It succeeded, purging or otherwise compelling the liberal to moderate faction — comprised of administrators, denominational leaders, professors, churches and church members — from the denomination. And strangely enough, one of the flashpoints right in the middle of this fever-pitched battle was Dr. E. Glenn Hinson.

(Forgive me for the history lesson, but I'm just trying to paint the bigger picture here and to give some context of the man I met well after the dust had settled from the Baptist battles.)

I say strangely because the man I came to know, first in stories and then in person, was nothing like the battle-worn, lightning rod dissenter I might have imagined from the lore. Of course, age tempers us all and I met Dr. Hinson much later in his life. The Hinson I knew was mild and gentle, eager to listen before speaking, careful with his words. He was ever the teacher and mystic. To those who knew him best, I'm sure they would say he was both all at once — the kind and thoughtful historian/mystic/scholar AND the battle-hardened intellectual, driven by conviction and integrity.

I first contacted Dr. Hinson at the suggestion of my church history professor, Dr. Bill Leonard, after finishing my capstone research project on Thomas Merton. "He's the closest thing we have to a Baptist saint," Dr. Leonard told me at the time.

In his time at Southern Seminary, Hinson struck up a relationship with Merton and would bring groups of students to meet with him at the Abbey of Gethsemane in Bardstown. In April 2013, I first contacted him over email, saying that I had just finished my research project, and asking if he had any articles or research he could send my way and if it might be possible to meet someday.

Hinson gladly obliged to both, sending me a trove of articles and the address to his home on Upland Road, the house he had kept since his days at Southern. "I'd be happy to meet with you when you come to Louisville. Nice to make contact with you, Chris," he responded warmly.

We corresponded some more as I poured over the papers he sent me. As best as I can recount, I believe it was August of that year that we first met in person. At least, that's the date on the transcription he signed in my copy of his memoir, "A Miracle of Grace," which I bought ahead of our meeting.

While I'm struggling to recall the dates, I vividly remember the encounters we had. In that August meeting, I came to his cozy Tudor-style home, just a stone's throw from the seminary in the rolling green hills of Louisville's Alta Vista neighborhood. He was generous and hospitable as he showed me around his home, the pride and joy of which, for him, was a study he had created for him on the house's backside. It was a scholar's study if there ever was one — shelves of books and several grey filing cabinets, stuffed full of every paper he had ever written. As we talked over history, church, the Baptist battles and Merton, he would occasionally pause and rifle through the filing cabinets to find a paper on the subject we were discussing, making a copy of it and giving it to me to read.

His voice was shaky and often, when I spoke to him, he'd cup a hand to his ear. I later learned it was due to hearing loss he had as a result from an infection earlier in life. Still, I hung on every word. Occasionally, Dr. Hinson would even flash the wry smirk he was known for when he was trying to be clever, or when he reflected on a fond memory.

Before the visit ended, I showed him my copy of his memoir, which he graciously autographed: "To Chris, with gratitude for our common bond through Thomas Merton and with admiration, Glenn." We said we would go to Gethsemane together on my next visit to Louisville and that we'd be in touch.

(Photo by Chris Hughes)

To my great surprise, he kept the promise to visit the monastery in December of that year. We met once again at his home and piled into his car. Even in his 80s, Hinson insisted on driving, so I took the passenger seat. We didn't speak much on the drive. I learned through our first visit of his difficulty hearing, and had determined it was best to make your words count with Hinson. You had to speak clearly and know there was a good chance you would need to repeat them. An unwitting mumbler for much of my life, I decided it was better to just let him drive in the quiet, and we could converse when we were ready for it.

It was good preparation for the day ahead. The Gethsemane campus requires silence, save for a few common areas. The day was bitterly cold and grey, not the best for contemplation. But I didn't let that dampen my delight for our field trip. We met up with one of Dr. Hinson's acquaintances, a brother of the order with a stubbly beard and bald head who looked to be in his 50s or maybe 60s. We broke bread together — a simple vegetable soup for lunch — and then began exploring.

I had been to the monastery once before, but not like this. With our guide, we visited Merton's grave and then made the trek out to Merton's hermitage. The hermitage was a special request from Merton, Father Louis as he was known at the monastery, who asked for a space where he could be alone and write. After his books exploded in popularity, his abbot gave in to the request as Merton helped attract new visitors to the monastery and renewed interest in the monastic life.

Merton got his hermitage, an incredibly simple structure with very little furniture and a wood burning stove. It sits a good quarter mile or so away from the rest of the abbey, down a curvy road that winds through the hills and fields surrounding it. As we made our way down the path, our guide shared with us how Merton was not only a writer but a photographer as well and would often walk these same trails to photograph the birds and wilds surrounding Gethsemane.

Even on this chilly, midwinter day, I imagine Merton walking the trails in contemplation, and then sitting to write his meditation on waking with the birds for the first prayers of the day:

The first chirps of the waking birds mark the "point vierge" of the dawn under a sky as yet without real light, a moment of awe and inexpressible innocence, when the Father in perfect silence opens their eyes. They speak to Him, not with fluent song, but with an awakening question that is their dawn state, their state at the "point vierge." Their condition asks if it is time for them to "be"? He answers "Yes."

At the hermitage, there were few chairs, so we stood, asking questions about Merton. Before we left, our guide showed us a favorite practice of his when coming to the hermitage. He walked across the room to a shelf filled with books by Merton and grabbed one of the volumes of his personal journals. There, he thumbed through the pages until he finds that day's date, or as close to it as can be found, and read aloud the passage for the day. "I'm always interested in what he was doing or thinking about on this day," he explained.

It all felt so surreal, walking the same ground as Merton with someone who knew him, spoke to him and corresponded with him. It's a day I still treasure, even all these years later. As we walk out of the hermitage, the brother offers to take a photo of us with the camera I brought to document the trip. (I have no idea why it turned out the way that it did, but I can only guess that I was still groggy from the early trip and clearly wasn't ready for him to snap the photo.)

(Photo by Chris Hughes)

The next time I saw Dr. Hinson was three or four years later at the annual meeting for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Again, I should have a better memory of it, but I can't remember if it was Atlanta, or Greensboro or some other favorite CBF meeting destination, and I can't remember the year. All in all, it was a pretty unremarkable meeting, but even an unremarkable meeting with Dr. Hinson felt like a treasure.

I spotted him in the lobby of the convention from some distance, perusing the gift shop for some snacks before heading off to his next meeting. I approached him, telling him that he might not remember me, but we had connected those years before over Merton and visited the monastery together. Even with that small connection, Dr. Hinson still lit up. "Yes, I remember you!" he said without pause. We caught up briefly, talking about the CBF meeting and what he was up to, all while picking out M&Ms and sodas to take with us. I offered to pay at the checkout and after chatting for a few minutes more, he was off to his next thing.

As he walked away, I marveled at how Hinson was one of those people: one of those special people who when you bump into them in the hallway or at the convention gift shop have that rare ability to stop and talk to you as if you are the only person in the whole world at that moment. However brief the encounter, Dr. Hinson had a way of slowing things down and making it matter. You knew he meant it when he said, "Yes, I remember you!"

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another, even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world ... There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun!

In each of our meetings, it was clear to me that Merton had rubbed off on Hinson as he went about the world treating everyone as if they were shining like the sun.

Unfortunately, we lost touch after that meeting. I got swept up into full-time ministry work, with fewer trips back to Louisville and much less time for things like contemplating Thomas Merton. I moved back to Louisville in 2017, and even then, I didn't ever find a way to get my head above the relentless grind to meet with Dr. Hinson again. I did shoot him an email in May 2019 to which he responded graciously, but didn't follow up on meeting that time.

The last chance to connect, though I didn't know it at the time, was in 2019 when Crescent Hill Baptist Church held a lecture series in his honor. If you can't tell from my earlier fascination with Baptist heroes, I was elated for the chance to attend. Sadly, I wrecked my car on the way to the event and spent much of the day being devastated by its destruction.

It was not until COVID, as terrible as that sounds, that I felt my life slow down enough to think on Merton again, and that, naturally, led me to think on Dr. Hinson as well. He was good enough to add me to some kind of email list he had and over the years would occasionally update me with his new email address. I went digging and found the most recent edition of his email address update, then fired off a message, asking how he was doing and if it would be possible to meet.

As always, he was delighted to hear from me. "I've moved into the Episcopal retirement home, but they are not allowing visitors at this time. When they do, let's arrange for something."

My last message to Dr. Hinson was in December 2020. "I hope things are going well. I've tried diving into Merton's No Man is an Island recently, but it is a deep work. Please let me know if you will be teaching in the near future. I would love to find a way to join the class. Blessed Advent to you and your family. Best, Chris."

That email, to my dismay, went unanswered, though it's clear from every interaction that Dr. Hinson would not have ignored it. His email could've changed. His health could have declined, or some thousand other things could have prevented him from responding. It was 2020 after all, and we were all in disarray and spending all our energies just trying to stay sane, healthy and hopeful. But I am certain if he knew I had sent a message, he would've responded, the same as he would have done for anyone else he encountered.

Looking back now, I wish I had sent one more message, but hindsight works that way. And looking back, I also find myself thinking how Dr. Hinson would have been the perfect person for guidance on how to live in those times, and even now. The world, it seems, has been a frenetic ball of anxious energy for nearly a decade now, riven by pandemics of disease, racism, political differences, greed, violence and war. I imagine Dr. Hinson steadfastly assured in his faith in God, not in passive surrender but in active hope, the kind found in the words of Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." I hear him echoing what he always said was the imperative question for Christians in our splintered world: "What can we offer the world that the world doesn't already have more than enough of?" And as my life once again feels frantic and busy and all over the place, perhaps this time it's the perfect moment for more contemplation, not less, with Merton and with Hinson.

I'll just close by saying that there are richer, fuller, deeper tributes to Dr. Hinson, many that have been shared already. They point to a person so much more than what I've recounted here. I felt compelled to share this precisely because my relationship with Dr. Hinson was so little, yet his impact on me still feels so big. I was not a student of his, not a colleague, not a friend. I was just some random recent seminary graduate with a peculiar fascination with Thomas Merton and church history. In the grand scale of his life, I wouldn't even register as a blip, and still, somehow, he was my teacher too. And I am still learning from him.

Rest well, Dr. Hinson, and peace to your family. May your love energies join together with the great ocean of love energies binding the whole universe.