Free Good-bye and Amen by Beth Gutcheon Page A

handle it, and by God he was right. That TV show, that was a hell of a thing. I don’t think he prepared for it more than five minutes. He liked the pressure. They just turned the camera on him and he started to talk. It was always a performance. The women were crazy about him.
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    Clara Thiele I was on the stewardship committee. Normally people hate Stewardship Sunday, but his first year with us, Norman gave a sermon about prosperity consciousness that I still remember. And when we started the campaign to replace the roof, he was an animal. He loved doing the Ask. Bud and I would prepare the soil, and together we’d decide how much to hit each person up for, then we’d send Norman in there and he’d raise the number and close the deal and leave with a check in his hand. And people thanked him for coming!
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    Sandy Thiele My mom is kind of the pope of the congregation. She loved Mrs. Faithful because she’s Danish on her father’s side. Thiele’s a Danish name. There are a number of Danish families in the congregation who came here after the war, and Mrs. Faithful’s aunt was in the Resistance. I used to babysit for Edie, and Mrs. Faithful would tell me about Denmark. I’ve never been there.
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    Bud Shatterman Norman hit it off with the bishop too. The bishop wasn’t happy about all the ashrams and zendos and whatnot springing up everywhere. His daughter had shaved her head and started calling herself Sachidananda. The bishop made the mistake of preaching against “rotting Eastern religions” one time, and his daughter wrote an angry letter to the Rocky Mountain News that they printed. It took a while to calm that down. Norman never had time for meditation or any of that stuff, he was an action guy, an “open your mouth and let God speak through you” guy. Of course sometimes after he’d had a couple of belts he’d open his mouth and say things that were just as silly as the rest of us. But he had such self-confidence, and was always so sure he was forgiven in advance. He charmed you. And all of a sudden, when other churches were floundering, we had a dog in the fight. The Presbyterians and the United Presbyshadn’t spoken to each other in decades; they had to combine congregations and sell off one of the sanctuaries. There are expensive condos in it now; I have to shake my head every time I drive by. Meanwhile, we had a thriving church school, and a new roof, and had started raising money to fix the pipe organ.
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    Ted Wineapple When he’d been in Denver for four or five years, I began to understand how ambitious Norman was. It wasn’t just the TV show. He wrote articles for the church papers; he got himself on committees for the national church, he presented at church conferences. I remember a night in Atlanta, after an NNECA convention. He’d gotten a standing ovation. We stayed up into the wee hours with our friend Jack Daniel’s. I hadn’t known him to drink like that when we were at seminary, but some people respond to applause that way; he was wired. At about two in the morning, he said to me, “Ted, do you think I should go back to New York? That’s where the media is. That’s where you can really make your mark.”
    I wondered what kind of mark he meant to make—did he want to be a sportscaster or something? A talk-show host?
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    Monica Faithful Edith was in third grade, so we’d been in Colorado almost ten years when Norman began to think about New York. The dean at St. John the Divine was a friend, and he told Norman of a church in the Village whose rector was retiring. It wasn’t a rich parish but old and fairly famous, and it was very beautiful, the church itself very spare and pure, almost like a Congregational. We flew back there to attend a service incognito beforehe decided to try for it. Well, as incognito as you can be when you’re six five and you never met a camera you