c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

(UNDATED) On the face of it, our plan might seem absurd. Who would fly 1,500 miles to see a two-hour radio show?

But our upcoming destination is Minnesota and “A Prairie Home Companion.” Long have I dreamed of seeing a live broadcast of Garrison Keillor and his radio actors, musicians and, of course, the beloved monologue, when Keillor tells a tale from mythical Lake Wobegon, “the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.”

I discovered “Prairie Home” 23 years ago while driving across town to pick up a baby sitter. I was so captivated by the monologue that I kept the sitter waiting while Keillor spun a kindly tale of a town populated by “Norwegian bachelor farmers” and down-to-earth folks like “Pastor Inqvist, of Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church” and “Father Emil, of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility.”

With young children and no money, we would lay a picnic on the floor of our family room and listen to “Prairie Home” in front of a fire. Taped shows took the tedium and bickering out of long family drives.

Since its start in July 1974, one month before President Nixon resigned, the Saturday program’s audience has grown to 3.9 million listeners on more than 511 public radio stations. I have heard remarkable entertainers like guitarists Chet Atkins and Leo Kottke, singer Iris DeMent, the show’s own `Hopeful Gospel Quartet, visiting choirs, and musicians of every status and discipline, from classical to Cajun to country.

At times Lake Wobegon has seemed idyllic in comparison to where I was living. Mostly, it speaks to that side of me which wants to connect with life at the level of story, where regular folks do everyday things like seeing neighbors at the Chatterbox Cafe and complaining about winter.

My wife grimaced when Keillor told how the Lutheran council maneuvered Pastor Inqvist out of a well deserved trip to Florida. We knew that story firsthand. I felt faith’s essential nobility the night Father Emil reached across the Reformation and comforted his Lutheran friend after the self-righteous Bunsens were cruel to him. I glimpsed life’s center the day a Lake Wobegon family floated in anticipation as a Korean baby was carried down the chute at the Minneapolis airport and given to them for adoption.

I haven’t warmed up to the show’s mini-dramas, like “Guy Noir, Private Eye,” but the ads for Bertha’s Kitty Boutique, Powdermilk Biscuits and ketchup’s “natural mellowing agents” are wry treasures in a self-important world.

In Keillor’s town, people are narrow-minded and meddlesome, but they live close to life’s perplexing chaos and respond to it with patience and kindness. They help their neighbors, even when the folks next door are tiresome, because on the edge of an unrelenting prairie, neighbors are all one has.

Keillor weaves faith into his stories. It isn’t the hard-edged triumphalism that has come to dominate our religious landscape. Any preacher who stood in a Lake Wobegon pulpit and claimed to know “the truth” to the exclusion of all else would be exposed as a charlatan. Any congregation that demanded conformity, asserted its supremacy in doctrine and practice, and scorned the straggler would find itself empty of all but the hateful.

In Lake Wobegon, people have too much common sense for such grandiosity. They know that the winters are long and cruel, and one needs companions, not the smug serenity of right opinion. In the harshness and ambiguity of reality, there is no room for building a religious franchise at someone else’s expense. There is no room for that brand management which was corrupting the disciples even during Jesus’ lifetime.

Just as Jesus had no sympathy for his disciples when they tried to stop a healer from operating outside their bounds, townsfolk in Lake Wobegon might raise an eyebrow when a middle-aged neighbor buys a red sports car, but they would never deny his freedom to be today’s fool, for they might well be tomorrow’s.

In this pilgrimage to St. Paul, I want to see and savor the power of myth, that story beyond reality which vexes the literalists and purists but is far truer to reality than anything they offer.

DEA END EHRICH