Book Review: Beyond Barriers

A Fair Trade Book...Maybe

Title: Beyond Barriers

Author: Harold Morris

Date: 1987

Publisher: Word

ISBN: 0-84-9999-93-6

Length: 182 pages

Quote: “I want to ponder the past. I can't forget where I've come from or what God has done for me...I'd like to proclaim the present...what I've been saved for...I'd like to project the future...I have faith that there is good ahead.”

Once there was a bright, promising young athlete who got interested in drugs, thrills, joyriding with even more morally degenerate young men. When his so-called friends killed somebody, they asked him to drive the getaway car. When the three louts were caught, the other two claimed that Harold Morris had committed the homicide. Though Morris was a criminal in his own right, he also received two life sentences for crimes he had not committed. In prison, he became a Christian, recovered from his drug addiction, became a model prisoner...and eventually qualified for parole, which he'd been warned not to expect, serving less than ten years of those two life sentences. That is not the story of Beyond Barriers. That is the story in Morris's first book, Twice Pardoned.

At the end of Twice Pardoned readers learned that Morris, though now law-abiding and even an evangelical preacher, had developed cancer. Beyond Barriers tells the story of how he learned that he had cancer, went through chemotherapy, recovered, and supported an active evangelical ministry. He certainly had stories to tell.

Morris was divorced in Twice Pardoned. In Beyond Barriers we see how, although some fellow evangelicals thought he had a right to remarry, it just didn't happen. One pen friend who Morris imagined as “blonde, with long legs,” turned out to be just as likable as her letters made her sound, but unable to write those letters herself. Nurses wrote the letters while Morris's partner in evangelical campaigns only lived with severe, full-body cerebral palsy. Nevertheless, both of them enjoy being “inspirational” ministers, and at the end of the book they're still friends.

So the opportunity to be an active father may have passed Morris by. However, so many men are so weak, physically and morally, that no Real Man can completely avoid being a father-figure. Morris be-fathers, be-brothers, be-friends teenaged boys wherever he goes...even though he admits having scared one boy into good behavior by taking him to talk to a rapist in prison.

If there's something not to like about Morris's ever-cheerful account of his difficult yet blessed Christian life, it's probably that too many of us already think that this is what being a Christian means—being a full-time professional preacher or teacher, using talents other than the ones God may actually have given you. Maybe the musicians who lead the audience in song before or after an evangelical sermon, or the office manager at the Christian school, are seen as likewise dedicating their talents to God's service, but what about the people whose accounting talents are being used by a bank, whose gift of proofreading is on display in a law firm, or whose “people skills” have so far been used in selling shoes? Morris is offered a more lucrative job as a salesman and turns it down because he already has his effective, if not lucrative, ministry as a preacher. Does he come across as thinking he's doing something better than those who do well in sales but never have a ministry as a preacher?

I'd hope not. Jesus and John the Baptist, Paul and Peter, James, John, and Jude, told people no such thing. They seemed quite comfortable with, as Dorothy Sayers famously put it, the idea that it might be as wrong for people to leave their vocation of waiting on tables, and preach, as it was for the apostles to wait on tables. We are not told that Dorcas and Lydia gave up their textile work to preach, but that they used their textile work to clothe the needy and host the evangelical meetings.

Apart from that quibble...Morris is Morris. Not all people naturally like that ebullient, salesman-like personality so many churches imagine an evangelist needs to have. For some of us that hearty voice, confident manner, and enthusiastic handshake just scream “Abrasive, obnoxious, pushy pest! Make it go away!”

Peter was a great saint; Andrew, we suspect, was a greater one, because he had to live with Peter. For all those years while Jesus was grinding off the rough edges of which Peter's personality was naturally made, Andrew lived with Peter, and we're not told that he ever even seriously considered murder. Andrew was a great saint indeed.

Yet God did have some ultimate purpose in mind even for the likes of Peter, and God undoubtedly has some use for the too-loud, too-cheery, too-pushy evangelical types. I don't like them, myself, but then I don't need to like them. They are called to minister to those who do like them. If whatever they have in the way of spirituality is enough to smarten and sober up an addict, then obviously it's a good thing.

We know Morris was sincere because Morris was sober. He had not received the talents of Christians like Milton or Aquinas or C.S. Lewis, of Schweitzer or Elisabeth Elliot or Teresa of Calcutta, of Billy Graham or J. Vernon McGee or even Jerry Falwell. He was called to help salvage what addicts have left in the way of minds. That is a gift the spiritually sensitive, and well educated, might well envy.

What we the online reading community do not know is whether Morris is still living. He has no web site of his own; his publisher's web site went down for scheduled maintenance, promising to return to electronic life in August, but I'm writing this in September; search engines, given the terms "Harold Morris," suggest the popular search "Harold Morris author still living"--and nobody seems to know. 

I'm scheduling this post a few weeks ahead. Possibly, by the time it goes live, somebody will have found out whether this web site can still offer Harold Morris's books as Fair Trade Books. He wrote three (the one I don't physically own was Unshackled), all available at prices that allow this web site to offer our usual $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, and all three plus at least one more book would fit into one $5 package. If Morris is still living when you buy Beyond Barriers here, we'll send $1 to him or a charity of his choice; if you buy all three of his books here, we'll send him or his charity $3.