“The enclosed was the
short memorial given at the alumni chapel service last May. I’ve been meaning
to get a copy to you, all this time.” --Helen Halsey Haroutunian to Charles
Halsey, Sr., December 12, 1954
It is hard for a man to argue any point on which he is
entirely convinced. I think that any one of us would feel that the attempt to
pay tribute to Jesse Halsey is doomed to failure. There is about all complete
conviction a kind of helplessness. And I think that Jesse Halsey would tell us,
“Don’t bother.” But that’s what we would expect from him for he was, indeed,
“great in all wise men’s eyes except in his own.”
Yet it is not for his good but for ours that we remember
this man of God. You men of the class of 1954 are the last student generation
to know what this means. For us, Uncle Jess has become the symbol of serenity
in a world where all hell seems to be breaking loose. Yet he is more than a
symbol. He is—in that phrase to which he gave new meaning—“a living hope.” When
we think of the ideal ministry we think of it in terms of Jesse Halsey, and
when we try to describe it we find ourselves using the words of Bunyan or
MacLaren, friends whom he taught us to know. So we ask your indulgence, Uncle
Jess. It’s good for us to remember you.
Jesse Halsey is a living hope because he knew what was in
men. He was not surprised by what he saw. When he looked at our faults he was
“unshockable.” When our wrongs were most shameful and we found it hard to face
ourselves, we heard from him: “I don’t condemn you; go, and don’t do it again.”
For he saw us not only at our worst, but he saw what was best in us. There was
one lad who drove to Seminary his first year who for three weeks didn’t unpack
his trunk because he wasn’t sure he belonged there. But Uncle Jess discovered
that boy before he discovered himself. One of my classmates wrote me last week,
“It is enough to say that it was Dr. Halsey who sensed that I needed help and
gave me the feeling that I had some possibilities.”
How could anyone help but see himself in a brighter light
when this matchless man troubled himself in his behalf? Can you forget him
trudging up with a tray to some student sick in bed on the fourth floor of
McCormick Hall? Do you remember him driving out with you to your student charge
at six o’clock on a Sunday morning to administer communion for you—after he had
prepared a pancake breakfast for you both at 5 a.m. in his own kitchen? And if
we ever wonder whether that kind of performance is worthwhile in our own
ministry and we conclude that it is, we can thank Jesse Halsey for making us
know it.
Dr. Halsey is a living hope not only because he knew what
was in man but because he knew the heart of God. I suppose that this man knew
the intimacies and heartbreaks behind the doors of more Presbyterian manses
than most of us will sense in our congregations in a lifetime. Like his Master
who suffered for us all, Jesse Halsey was hurt when we were hurt. Nor was his
own life immune to heartbreak. God knows. But God also knows that his servant
learned by suffering. For Jesse Halsey loved his God, and through him we have
loved God more. Did weakness and sin about in us? We know it did, but grace did
much more abound.
Jesse Halsey had faith. He had so much faith in God that he
possessed what we are apt to think is uncongenial to faith—common sense. I
presume it was as plumber to Dr. Grenfell that he began his formal preparation
for the Chair here at McCormick that he was later to fill. We who were his
students learned that Christian faith was nothing if it was not practical.
Because he believed in God’s providence Dr. Halsey didn’t consider that the
Almighty needed a mouthpiece to justify His every move. His prophet knew when
to keep still. He taught us there are times when you don’t say a prayer.
There is abundant evidence about us to shatter any delusions
we have of human goodness. What the world needs, we are being told, is Jesus
Christ, the Hope of the world. For me the hope of Christ in mortal form is
Jesse Halsey, because he not only saw men and God but he believed they were
meant to be together.
Take his love for the beautiful. You know how zealous he was
for the beauty of worship—that the service be done decently and in order. You
know how he delighted in the beauty of the ancient liturgies; or take his
handiwork in this chapel. You remember how bulbs and plantings began to sprout
at the doorsteps of Chalmers Place—and not only at No. 846. Are these man’s
attempt to worship God, or are these manifestations of the beauty of God in the
life of man? Whichever way you take it, for Dr. Halsey God and man were meant
for each other.
In the little booklet he prepared for servicemen he put this
quotation of Lincoln: “Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew
me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a
flower would grow.”
Not only on Chalmers Place, but in each of us he went about
finding the signs of God that we couldn’t see for the thistles. And we came to
realize that God meant us to live in a garden—not a jungle.
Circumstances permitted some of us to know him intimately
during our student days. For others, like myself, he was not truly known until
he came into our homes after we had got into the pastorate. When that happened,
as it did all too seldom, he became part of our home. My wife and young
children responded to the warmth of his presence. The children invariably were
at their best! After my own father died, he was to us in the truest sense of
the word a father in God to our family.
You will forgive the personal reference. I make it because I
think it reproduces what many of you know to be true. It is good for all of us
to remember that here was a man who knew men and who knew God and who believed
they were meant for communion. That is why for all of us in time of trouble
Jesse Halsey is “a living hope.”
By Donald C. Wilson
McCormick ‘45
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