This was a piece I read on the radio my senior year of high school, 1984, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as the winner of a contest called, "The Voice of Democracy," put on by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
________________
"My Role in Upholding the Constitution"
Walton H. Hamilton, the author of "Constitutionalism," has written, "the genius of constitutions, written and unwritten alike, lies in usage." This statement, plain as it may be, is really the basis for my role in upholding the Constitution. I must insure that my Constitution is used in the proper way; and I must support my government and its Constitution, so that the structure does not fall but is sustained.
It is quite plain that before I can uphold the Constitution, I must know how it can be upheld. It also follows that before I can know how to uphold it, I need to know what I am upholding. The first step I must take in order to sustain the Constitution, therefore, is to learn the Constitution. I must know the Constitution before I can support it. I must know the ideology that spurred our forefathers to battle, such as the right of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I must know the principles of democracy seen in the Constitution, that is, rule by the people and for the people. Once I have accomplished this first step, I also have initiated the fulfillment of my role.
When I have learned the inner workings of my Constitution, I can support its theory and ideology, but remember that the genius of a constitution lies in its usage. It is, then, for me merely to know the Constitution. I also must know the applications of our Constitution, the first of which is our government. Once again, I can only uphold my government if I know what my government is and what it is involved in doing. The second step in upholding our Constitution, then, lies not only in learning how my government functions in and of itself but also in learning how it functions with the world. It is my duty, therefore, to keep informed on current local, state, national, and international issues. When I have learned these I have moved one step further in fulfilling my role.
Once I have learned what there is to be sustained, how can I sustain it? I can uphold the Constitution by living it! I must take the knowledge of the government and its issues and apply the Constitution to it; then, I must show this knowledge to the world.This duty compels me to participate in town and community meetings and speak out on what is right. It compels me to be willing to defend my country and die for its principles. Most importantly, it compels me to vote; for my vote is my voice, my voice of democracy that sustains my government and its Constitution. By being involved in all these things, I let my voice be heard fulfill my role in upholding the Constitution. Henry David Thoreau in speaking of slavery said, “if one honest man ... We're actually to withdraw from this copartnership ... it would be the abolition of slavery in America.” This statement is very similar to my role in upholding the Constitution. I must be that “honest man” who speaks out, and the Constitution consequently will be sustained.
If I fulfill these responsibilities, our nation will remain a living, breathing body. The Constitution is the mind of this body. It directs all of the body's activities. The upper part of the body is the government, using its arms and senses to react with its surrounding governments and with its voice speaking out to the world on behalf of the whole body. Finally, the people are the lower part of the body and the legs, supporting the weight of the entire body, holding up the government and the Constitution. If the nation is to move forward, they must lead it. We the people must lead it. Each person, no matter how small, must speak out with his “voice of democracy.” By being that one “honest man,” I can bring out the “genius” of our Constitution and fulfill my role as a citizen of the United States of America.
Monday, December 23, 2019
The World of Knowledge 1
previous post
1. I loved high school. If middle school was a somewhat lonely time on the margins, high school would bring only positive memories. "Here's to you alma mater, Fort Lauderdale High!"
While my mother generally drove me to school in elementary and middle school, my dad generally drove me to school in high school. We used to joke about him dropping me off a little away so that he could give me a kiss on the cheek. I really didn't care... that much.
I seem to recall that I needed to be there at 7:40. We had a tight schedule. Get up. Shower. He would have a bowl of cereal waiting with mom still sleeping. He would ask me things. In my grogginess I wouldn't always answer the first time. Then I would blurt out, "YES!" to his question. Then I would apologize for raising my voice.
2. As I recall, I was in honors English and Biology. I would graduate valedictorian of my class with all As for every semester in every class (I did get some Bs in the quarters but pulled them out for the semesters, by God's grace). There were a lot of AP and honors opportunities, so my GPA was something like 4.6. If I find out I'll correct this.
For honors English I had Mrs. Gauss. My mother and I went to an open house with her the first week of class. Mrs. Gauss basically said, "This class is hard. If you aren't willing to work and can't cut the mustard, you should get out now." I took it as a challenge. I believed I could rise to the challenge.
It was a tough class. This was before the internet. The book she used was New Building Word Power, a book I still have although it is in tatters. Interestingly, my sister Debbie had Mrs. Gauss with this same book as a senior some four years earlier. Debbie mostly did high school at Hobe Sound Academy, but she did the first semester of her senior year at Fort Lauderdale High.
What made the class/book so hard was that we didn't really know where to find the answers to some of the questions. My mother and I at times spent hours trying to track down questions like, where did the word bedlam come from, or the expression to "carry coals to Newcastle." Ironic that I would spend three years of my life later just a half hour from Newcastle!
I've sometimes wondered how much more I might know now if Google had been around in high school. On the other hand, it's just as likely I would have been distracted by social media and a host of other things. When I started blogging, you might argue that my scholarly writing decreased, although my popular writing increased. Perhaps in the end I should be grateful that my life was so boring in the early 80s.
We studied English grammar too, as I recall, in Mrs. Gauss' class. I had found English grammar difficult in middle school, but it began to click the second time around. Having Latin also helped. I heard once of a school that taught grammar by teaching Latin and I see the value of the thought. You probably do indeed learn English grammar the most by studying another language. To learn the categories of a new language, you often fill in gaps in your knowledge of English categories.
At the moment I am only remembering one book that we read in Mrs. Gauss' class, Watership Down. It was a social commentary based on a rabbit community. The rabbits who could think abstractly were viewed as a threat to the community. :-)
2. Another class I took was Geometry. The future salutatorian, Christina Carusi, was in the class with me. It was interesting because we were not in the honors section of geometry. We were in class with tenth graders. I've always wondered why. The teacher was very nice, but Christina told me once that she had mostly learned geometry from the questions I asked in class.
I've had a theory for many years that there are geometry people and there are algebra people. I was an algebra person. Algebra came extremely easy for me. I did well in geometry but it was much more challenging. I think it is, to some extent, the difference between a more inductive subject (geometry) and a more deductive one (algebra).
In my mind, these general skills also map to other subjects. Differential calculus was very easy for me, like algebra. Integral calculus was more like geometry--much more difficult. It seems to me that Greek is a lot more like algebra too, and Hebrew more like geometry.
3. I had a very nice teacher, Mrs. Nixon, for honors biology. We dissected a fetal pig, as I recall. The smell of formaldehyde still lingers in my memory. I was never a huge biology fan. I have warmed up to it a bit in more recent days as I tried to help my daughter in biology at Pepperdine. They cancelled the twelfth grade AP biology class before I got there. They dissected a cat. But it was not meant to be.
I believe I had American history with Mr. Packard my freshman year., although it could have been as a sophomore. In those days I had trouble getting history to stick in my mind. I think the main problem was that I had no real point of reference. I'm now in New York and I had the same thought this week that I've had before. How much easier it must be when you study American history and live in the northeast, where all these things took place. I thought the same when I was in England and Europe. How much easier it must be to remember these things when you can go and visit the places they took place.
I am not a detailed person by nature. I need a system, a structure to put minutia into. I remember the structure, the connections far beyond most people. The names for things have always been much harder. I am an off the chart N by Meyers-Briggs. I am a savant at the big picture. I must work hard at the details, and there is a rush when I have assimilated or processed them, as you would expect of what they call the "inferior function." Of course once I have assimilated a detail to the structure, I almost have it forever.
4. My uncle Paul would die in November 1980, my first semester of high school. His mother, Grandma Shepherd, had died the year before in a nursing home in Rossville, Indiana. Paul had developed myocarditis after an infection and had not given his body the proper rest thereafter. My last memory of him was in August of that year after Frankfort Camp. He was mowing tall grass on the site that was to become the new Trinity Wesleyan Church in Indianapolis. Why was he doing that when he had a heart condition?
He died Thanksgiving day. He ate Thanksgiving meal, laid down on the couch for a nap, sat up with a start and then died.
I remember studying for a test over the Civil War, I believe, on the trip to his funeral, the whole way up and back. The Battle of Bull Run. It was so hard to get the minutia to stick. I hadn't seen much snow in Florida. There were a few traces on the ground during the trip.
My uncle Paul's death was hard on my mother. They had been close. In fact, until we moved to Florida, he and his wife Betty had largely moved around Indianapolis as my parents moved. He had such a great heart. He was a selfless soul.
5. One of the final segments of Mr. Packard's class was required by law to be about the evils of communism. I remember him somewhat mocking the requirement. It seemed somewhat antiquated by that time. But it was the first time, I think, that I was exposed to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
We still lived under the threat of nuclear holocaust at that time, but it didn't seem as urgent as it might have in previous years. My family was exuberant at the election of Ronald Reagan, who seemed to make a lot of Americans feel better about the world. In keeping with the Republican background of my family, they had been fans of Richard Nixon and had believed him right up until he resigned. In fact, they almost believed he was innocent after he resigned. We see the same pattern now with the current president.
Similarly, Jimmy Carter was not really considered a Christian by my family. This was before Roe v Wade was fully fused with the Democratic party and the anti-abortion movement had not really taken off yet. It had mostly become tribalism. Republicans are Christians. Democrats are evil. There was a historical basis for it, I believe, in the Civil War, but those origins were now long in the past. It had mostly become a matter of tribe rather than issue, in my opinion.
There was the movie, The Day After, which came out in late 1983, my senior year. It was a pretty scary movie that tapped into my apocalyptic fears. It produced feelings not too dissimilar from those after watching the rapture movies. To this day, apocalyptic series like The Walking Dead get in my head. I dream them while I'm awake.
I wrote a piece at some point for Mr. Packard arguing that the American form of government was the best form of government because it combined all the strengths of the other forms. It had a president, which brought the strengths of a monarchy. The people voted for their representatives, which had the strength of a democracy, but it used representatives, which was far more efficient than everyone voting on everything. Mr. Packard wrote on the paper that I should try to have it published.
In my senior year, I entered a contest with the Daughters of the American Revolution called, "The Voice of Democracy." The winner would read his or her piece on the radio and get a small scholarship. I entered and won the contest with my essay.
6. There were electives I was able to take that I loved in high school. I took two and a half years of Latin in high school with Ms. Mrozek. Little did I know that I would end up getting an MA in Classical Languages and Literature about ten years later. When I entered the University of Kentucky for that program, I had not had any Latin from high school so had to get back up to speed on my own using Wheelock's Latin.
I remember some English test, maybe in the tenth grade, where I had done fine on my exam essays but couldn't remember the title of the book. One of my "friends" who was also in Latin asked Ms. Mrozek what it would tell her if a student didn't know the title of a book over which someone was taking an exam. She said it would tell her they hadn't read the book.
Well, I did read the book. I read every last book I was required to read in high school, even if I had to stay up half the night to do it (and I often did because of procrastination). This is an indication of my mind. I often know what's in a box but I can't remember the name of the box. You might say I have trouble with random access memory. I have never forgotten my mother's name, but it could happen on a really bad day.
I also signed up for electronics with Mr. Brandt. He was a jolly old soul who was quite large. In retrospect I would say it was a vocational training class. We made progress on our own working through the Navy Basic Electricity and Electronics workbooks. They were very simple and very great. I was learning physics from a practical perspective.
I would take three years of it. The final year I built a power supply that would convert wall current to the kind of current that could be used for a circuit board. In those days Radio Shack sold transistors, diodes, capacitors, transformers. It was just as everything was beginning to be put on integrated circuits. Integrated circuits would put thousands of transistors on a small wafer. They would make possible tremendous technological advances... and take all the fun out of electronic hobbying.
The Christmas of my senior year, my parents bought me all the parts to build a hexidecimal computer, including a central processing unit. I went through a Radio Shack book on Digital Electronics. Those things were so stimulating. But as usual I would never build the computer. And what would have been the point?
As a graduation present, my dad bought me a Commodore 64 computer. I never really learned how to use it, unfortunately. All I could do was some BASIC programs like the loop.
10 Print "Eat me."
20 Go to 10
Mr. Brandt had a good sense of humor. I remember him saying, "You know you're in trouble when, your senior year of high school, your dad starts telling you what a nice den your room is going to make."
1. I loved high school. If middle school was a somewhat lonely time on the margins, high school would bring only positive memories. "Here's to you alma mater, Fort Lauderdale High!"
While my mother generally drove me to school in elementary and middle school, my dad generally drove me to school in high school. We used to joke about him dropping me off a little away so that he could give me a kiss on the cheek. I really didn't care... that much.
I seem to recall that I needed to be there at 7:40. We had a tight schedule. Get up. Shower. He would have a bowl of cereal waiting with mom still sleeping. He would ask me things. In my grogginess I wouldn't always answer the first time. Then I would blurt out, "YES!" to his question. Then I would apologize for raising my voice.
2. As I recall, I was in honors English and Biology. I would graduate valedictorian of my class with all As for every semester in every class (I did get some Bs in the quarters but pulled them out for the semesters, by God's grace). There were a lot of AP and honors opportunities, so my GPA was something like 4.6. If I find out I'll correct this.
For honors English I had Mrs. Gauss. My mother and I went to an open house with her the first week of class. Mrs. Gauss basically said, "This class is hard. If you aren't willing to work and can't cut the mustard, you should get out now." I took it as a challenge. I believed I could rise to the challenge.
It was a tough class. This was before the internet. The book she used was New Building Word Power, a book I still have although it is in tatters. Interestingly, my sister Debbie had Mrs. Gauss with this same book as a senior some four years earlier. Debbie mostly did high school at Hobe Sound Academy, but she did the first semester of her senior year at Fort Lauderdale High.
What made the class/book so hard was that we didn't really know where to find the answers to some of the questions. My mother and I at times spent hours trying to track down questions like, where did the word bedlam come from, or the expression to "carry coals to Newcastle." Ironic that I would spend three years of my life later just a half hour from Newcastle!
I've sometimes wondered how much more I might know now if Google had been around in high school. On the other hand, it's just as likely I would have been distracted by social media and a host of other things. When I started blogging, you might argue that my scholarly writing decreased, although my popular writing increased. Perhaps in the end I should be grateful that my life was so boring in the early 80s.
We studied English grammar too, as I recall, in Mrs. Gauss' class. I had found English grammar difficult in middle school, but it began to click the second time around. Having Latin also helped. I heard once of a school that taught grammar by teaching Latin and I see the value of the thought. You probably do indeed learn English grammar the most by studying another language. To learn the categories of a new language, you often fill in gaps in your knowledge of English categories.
At the moment I am only remembering one book that we read in Mrs. Gauss' class, Watership Down. It was a social commentary based on a rabbit community. The rabbits who could think abstractly were viewed as a threat to the community. :-)
2. Another class I took was Geometry. The future salutatorian, Christina Carusi, was in the class with me. It was interesting because we were not in the honors section of geometry. We were in class with tenth graders. I've always wondered why. The teacher was very nice, but Christina told me once that she had mostly learned geometry from the questions I asked in class.
I've had a theory for many years that there are geometry people and there are algebra people. I was an algebra person. Algebra came extremely easy for me. I did well in geometry but it was much more challenging. I think it is, to some extent, the difference between a more inductive subject (geometry) and a more deductive one (algebra).
In my mind, these general skills also map to other subjects. Differential calculus was very easy for me, like algebra. Integral calculus was more like geometry--much more difficult. It seems to me that Greek is a lot more like algebra too, and Hebrew more like geometry.
3. I had a very nice teacher, Mrs. Nixon, for honors biology. We dissected a fetal pig, as I recall. The smell of formaldehyde still lingers in my memory. I was never a huge biology fan. I have warmed up to it a bit in more recent days as I tried to help my daughter in biology at Pepperdine. They cancelled the twelfth grade AP biology class before I got there. They dissected a cat. But it was not meant to be.
I believe I had American history with Mr. Packard my freshman year., although it could have been as a sophomore. In those days I had trouble getting history to stick in my mind. I think the main problem was that I had no real point of reference. I'm now in New York and I had the same thought this week that I've had before. How much easier it must be when you study American history and live in the northeast, where all these things took place. I thought the same when I was in England and Europe. How much easier it must be to remember these things when you can go and visit the places they took place.
I am not a detailed person by nature. I need a system, a structure to put minutia into. I remember the structure, the connections far beyond most people. The names for things have always been much harder. I am an off the chart N by Meyers-Briggs. I am a savant at the big picture. I must work hard at the details, and there is a rush when I have assimilated or processed them, as you would expect of what they call the "inferior function." Of course once I have assimilated a detail to the structure, I almost have it forever.
4. My uncle Paul would die in November 1980, my first semester of high school. His mother, Grandma Shepherd, had died the year before in a nursing home in Rossville, Indiana. Paul had developed myocarditis after an infection and had not given his body the proper rest thereafter. My last memory of him was in August of that year after Frankfort Camp. He was mowing tall grass on the site that was to become the new Trinity Wesleyan Church in Indianapolis. Why was he doing that when he had a heart condition?
He died Thanksgiving day. He ate Thanksgiving meal, laid down on the couch for a nap, sat up with a start and then died.
I remember studying for a test over the Civil War, I believe, on the trip to his funeral, the whole way up and back. The Battle of Bull Run. It was so hard to get the minutia to stick. I hadn't seen much snow in Florida. There were a few traces on the ground during the trip.
My uncle Paul's death was hard on my mother. They had been close. In fact, until we moved to Florida, he and his wife Betty had largely moved around Indianapolis as my parents moved. He had such a great heart. He was a selfless soul.
5. One of the final segments of Mr. Packard's class was required by law to be about the evils of communism. I remember him somewhat mocking the requirement. It seemed somewhat antiquated by that time. But it was the first time, I think, that I was exposed to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
We still lived under the threat of nuclear holocaust at that time, but it didn't seem as urgent as it might have in previous years. My family was exuberant at the election of Ronald Reagan, who seemed to make a lot of Americans feel better about the world. In keeping with the Republican background of my family, they had been fans of Richard Nixon and had believed him right up until he resigned. In fact, they almost believed he was innocent after he resigned. We see the same pattern now with the current president.
Similarly, Jimmy Carter was not really considered a Christian by my family. This was before Roe v Wade was fully fused with the Democratic party and the anti-abortion movement had not really taken off yet. It had mostly become tribalism. Republicans are Christians. Democrats are evil. There was a historical basis for it, I believe, in the Civil War, but those origins were now long in the past. It had mostly become a matter of tribe rather than issue, in my opinion.
There was the movie, The Day After, which came out in late 1983, my senior year. It was a pretty scary movie that tapped into my apocalyptic fears. It produced feelings not too dissimilar from those after watching the rapture movies. To this day, apocalyptic series like The Walking Dead get in my head. I dream them while I'm awake.
I wrote a piece at some point for Mr. Packard arguing that the American form of government was the best form of government because it combined all the strengths of the other forms. It had a president, which brought the strengths of a monarchy. The people voted for their representatives, which had the strength of a democracy, but it used representatives, which was far more efficient than everyone voting on everything. Mr. Packard wrote on the paper that I should try to have it published.
In my senior year, I entered a contest with the Daughters of the American Revolution called, "The Voice of Democracy." The winner would read his or her piece on the radio and get a small scholarship. I entered and won the contest with my essay.
6. There were electives I was able to take that I loved in high school. I took two and a half years of Latin in high school with Ms. Mrozek. Little did I know that I would end up getting an MA in Classical Languages and Literature about ten years later. When I entered the University of Kentucky for that program, I had not had any Latin from high school so had to get back up to speed on my own using Wheelock's Latin.
I remember some English test, maybe in the tenth grade, where I had done fine on my exam essays but couldn't remember the title of the book. One of my "friends" who was also in Latin asked Ms. Mrozek what it would tell her if a student didn't know the title of a book over which someone was taking an exam. She said it would tell her they hadn't read the book.
Well, I did read the book. I read every last book I was required to read in high school, even if I had to stay up half the night to do it (and I often did because of procrastination). This is an indication of my mind. I often know what's in a box but I can't remember the name of the box. You might say I have trouble with random access memory. I have never forgotten my mother's name, but it could happen on a really bad day.
I also signed up for electronics with Mr. Brandt. He was a jolly old soul who was quite large. In retrospect I would say it was a vocational training class. We made progress on our own working through the Navy Basic Electricity and Electronics workbooks. They were very simple and very great. I was learning physics from a practical perspective.
I would take three years of it. The final year I built a power supply that would convert wall current to the kind of current that could be used for a circuit board. In those days Radio Shack sold transistors, diodes, capacitors, transformers. It was just as everything was beginning to be put on integrated circuits. Integrated circuits would put thousands of transistors on a small wafer. They would make possible tremendous technological advances... and take all the fun out of electronic hobbying.
The Christmas of my senior year, my parents bought me all the parts to build a hexidecimal computer, including a central processing unit. I went through a Radio Shack book on Digital Electronics. Those things were so stimulating. But as usual I would never build the computer. And what would have been the point?
As a graduation present, my dad bought me a Commodore 64 computer. I never really learned how to use it, unfortunately. All I could do was some BASIC programs like the loop.
10 Print "Eat me."
20 Go to 10
Mr. Brandt had a good sense of humor. I remember him saying, "You know you're in trouble when, your senior year of high school, your dad starts telling you what a nice den your room is going to make."
Sunday, December 22, 2019
Awakening 4
previous post
15. Until the summer before I turned 14, my pastor was my brother-in-law, Dennis Waymire, my sister Patricia's husband. [1] He is a smart guy and through him I grew up with the holiness preaching of the early twentieth century Pilgrim Holiness Church. By the 70s, a good deal of the Wesleyan church had been changing. Women were increasingly wearing pants and cutting their hair. Younger Wesleyans were going to movies even though it technically was against the rules.
I grew up with the values of the earlier Pilgrim Church. I felt like I had an old soul. I felt awkward around my own generation. My parents were older when they had me. Their friends and heroes tended to be older. Three of my grandparents were born in the 1800s. I have sometimes thought of myself as a religious bridge to the early twentieth century.
There were some older Wesleyans in my home church. Fort Lauderdale was a place where some Wesleyans were going to retire. There was Clayton Luce, who was the brother of the founder of the Bluebird Bus company. He was an old time Methodist pastor deeply connected to places like Asbury College and Indian Springs Camp meeting. It was a treat to go out on his boat once. From him I believe I inherited some old volumes of Adam Clarke.
There were the Bradleys, another old time Wesleyan Methodist couple. My dad would become the executor of his will. From him I inherited some of the old time Methodist classics by Daniel Steele and other holiness writers of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
My brother-in-law's preaching was the preaching that these retired preachers remembered from the days of their youth. His library, rooted in the texts of Frankfort Pilgrim College and then Hobe Sound Bible College, were the classic holiness texts. It was in his library, I believe, that I was first introduced to the three volume H. Orton Wiley series on Christian Theology. From my mother's library, who had herself a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Frankfort, I was first introduced to Ralston's Elements of Divinity.
Another couple that attended our church in their retiring years were Ken and Marceil Bostic from Indiana. They would end their days at Colonial Oaks in Marion, where I got to see them in a different phase of my life. They were long time benefactors and supporters of Indiana Wesleyan and were delighted when I went to teach there.
16. I remember my sister telling me at the dugout of the 13 year all star baseball game that she, Denny, and my two nieces were moving to Lakeland to pastor there. That was a little sad. We had every Sunday lunch together with them. Every Sunday night we ate together after evening church, often at our house. I have good memories of the nights my dad would deep fry tacos.
Of course I can also imagine it is nice to have independence. I can imagine it would have been nice to have some Sunday lunches when it was just them.
Baseball was my go-to sport from farm league to little league. It was four or five years of baseball. I was all star every year. My first year was in farm league, and I played catcher all year. Then I played little league for three years, I think. One of my coaches called me "lightning" because I could often make it to first on a line drive to the left side. If they bobbled the ball at all or hesitated in the slightest, I was on base.
At some point I played every position. I only did pitcher one game in farm league. I may have experimented with the infield my second year but I was mostly a left or center fielder. I could get anything anywhere in my zone. One time a ball bounced off the left fielder's mit and I caught it between my legs. Another time in left field I lost it in the sun and got hit in the head.
My mother has memories of her father playing baseball at the property of R. G. Flexon outside Russiaville with all the Frankfort Bible College students there. He apparently had played baseball at Wabash College in the 00s.
17. After Denny left, our next pastor was Bob Weaver. He didn't stay too many years, but our church grew significantly. And he modernized us significantly too. Those were the years of Evangelism Explosion out of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. Those were the days when John Maxwell began to dance with the Wesleyan Church.
I remember Maxwell coming to the Minister's Retreat while he was still in the Church of Christ in Christian Union. He made a joke about how much easier it was to say "Wesssleyan" than "churchofchristinchristianunion." We would use his materials that divided up the church into:
19. My final memory to mention in this period is my attendance of the 1978 youth conference in Urbana, Illinois. I hung out a little with the group from Trinity because my cousin Carl Shepherd was a youth sponsor. I remember Jimmy Johnson talking about what to do when you were tempted to lust after a girl. He suggested praising God. :-)
But as usual I felt rather alone for most of my time there. I think I rode over with the Trinity group and felt really out of place. My parents must have been in Indiana for Christmas, probably staying at my uncle Paul's house. He had a great house with woods in the back.
It seems to me I heard some more secular music I liked on that trip.
[1] For a short time, a man named Richner had been our pastor in Fort Lauderdale. I believe he was a Wesleyan Methodist originally who had been the founding pastor.
15. Until the summer before I turned 14, my pastor was my brother-in-law, Dennis Waymire, my sister Patricia's husband. [1] He is a smart guy and through him I grew up with the holiness preaching of the early twentieth century Pilgrim Holiness Church. By the 70s, a good deal of the Wesleyan church had been changing. Women were increasingly wearing pants and cutting their hair. Younger Wesleyans were going to movies even though it technically was against the rules.
I grew up with the values of the earlier Pilgrim Church. I felt like I had an old soul. I felt awkward around my own generation. My parents were older when they had me. Their friends and heroes tended to be older. Three of my grandparents were born in the 1800s. I have sometimes thought of myself as a religious bridge to the early twentieth century.
There were some older Wesleyans in my home church. Fort Lauderdale was a place where some Wesleyans were going to retire. There was Clayton Luce, who was the brother of the founder of the Bluebird Bus company. He was an old time Methodist pastor deeply connected to places like Asbury College and Indian Springs Camp meeting. It was a treat to go out on his boat once. From him I believe I inherited some old volumes of Adam Clarke.
There were the Bradleys, another old time Wesleyan Methodist couple. My dad would become the executor of his will. From him I inherited some of the old time Methodist classics by Daniel Steele and other holiness writers of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
My brother-in-law's preaching was the preaching that these retired preachers remembered from the days of their youth. His library, rooted in the texts of Frankfort Pilgrim College and then Hobe Sound Bible College, were the classic holiness texts. It was in his library, I believe, that I was first introduced to the three volume H. Orton Wiley series on Christian Theology. From my mother's library, who had herself a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Frankfort, I was first introduced to Ralston's Elements of Divinity.
Another couple that attended our church in their retiring years were Ken and Marceil Bostic from Indiana. They would end their days at Colonial Oaks in Marion, where I got to see them in a different phase of my life. They were long time benefactors and supporters of Indiana Wesleyan and were delighted when I went to teach there.
16. I remember my sister telling me at the dugout of the 13 year all star baseball game that she, Denny, and my two nieces were moving to Lakeland to pastor there. That was a little sad. We had every Sunday lunch together with them. Every Sunday night we ate together after evening church, often at our house. I have good memories of the nights my dad would deep fry tacos.
Of course I can also imagine it is nice to have independence. I can imagine it would have been nice to have some Sunday lunches when it was just them.
Baseball was my go-to sport from farm league to little league. It was four or five years of baseball. I was all star every year. My first year was in farm league, and I played catcher all year. Then I played little league for three years, I think. One of my coaches called me "lightning" because I could often make it to first on a line drive to the left side. If they bobbled the ball at all or hesitated in the slightest, I was on base.
At some point I played every position. I only did pitcher one game in farm league. I may have experimented with the infield my second year but I was mostly a left or center fielder. I could get anything anywhere in my zone. One time a ball bounced off the left fielder's mit and I caught it between my legs. Another time in left field I lost it in the sun and got hit in the head.
My mother has memories of her father playing baseball at the property of R. G. Flexon outside Russiaville with all the Frankfort Bible College students there. He apparently had played baseball at Wabash College in the 00s.
17. After Denny left, our next pastor was Bob Weaver. He didn't stay too many years, but our church grew significantly. And he modernized us significantly too. Those were the years of Evangelism Explosion out of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. Those were the days when John Maxwell began to dance with the Wesleyan Church.
I remember Maxwell coming to the Minister's Retreat while he was still in the Church of Christ in Christian Union. He made a joke about how much easier it was to say "Wesssleyan" than "churchofchristinchristianunion." We would use his materials that divided up the church into:
- Andrews - the evangelists
- Timothys - the disciplers
- Barnabases - the encouragers
- Abrahams - the prayers
I think I may have heard that this was originally an idea of Keith Drury. I could be wrong. I participated, going door to door evangelism with a mentor. "If you died tonight, would you have the assurance of going to heaven?" I don't know that we got a lot of results from that approach.
Weaver started a bus ministry. At its peak, we had two buses going on a Sunday morning. I became involved with one of them. We would do door-to-door visitation on Saturday on eighth ave. Eighth ave was a very poor, mostly black neighborhood at that time, as I remember. On Sunday mornings I was a runner. I would run to the door, knock. Then run back to the bus.
We sang all sorts of fun songs in those days. "Oh, you can't get to heaven... on a 747... oh, you can't get to heaven on a 747. Oh you can't get to heaven on a 747, aren't no airports up in heaven. All my sins are washed away I've been redeemed." We had a pretty vibrant children's church too.
I remember going skating once. Going to a skating rink was a little controversial, I guess mainly because of the kind of people there. I remember them playing secular music at the rink--"Kiss on My List." I remember one time he had a contest and the winning team--maybe whichever group of kids brought the most visitors--got to throw water balloons at him dressed up like a clown.
Bob was also CCCU and from Ohio. I have little doubt but that he had taken a few lessons from John Maxwell. There were of course comments about how the church declined in attendance after he left. Some would say you shouldn't build a church on gimmicks or around a personality.
Of course God gives us all different gifts. He had gifts. I don't think he did anything wrong. There are likely people in the kingdom of God today because of his ministry. He was probably more of a salesman than I would be as a pastor.
But there were other pastors after him under whom the church dwindled to almost nothing. Did they serve God better? Whether we like it or not, some people are more gifted at attracting people to church than others. That doesn't make them more or less spiritual, but their ministries will generally grow more.
"Principled" people often complain about them. "People shouldn't come to church to be entertained." No, but don't complain that no one comes to your church if it's boring. If your services are boring, chances are your church will dwindle. Just the facts, ma'am. Complain to God all you want as your church dwindles and dies.
18. My dad was a little off put by the fact that the pastor mowed his lawn in shorts, but he always cooperated as treasurer with whoever the pastor or district superintendent was. My dad was not someone who particularly liked change. As I've said, like his mother he was a book-keeper by personality. In the army he had ended as a Sergeant Major.
It was always amusing on trips when my mother would see something and suggest a side trip. He was much more interest in staying on task and getting to the destination. But he always did whatever she wanted. He might grumble about going to visit someone out of the way, but he was always glad after he did. In that regard my son Tom is a little like him, although Tom as yet is not a book-keeper. :-)
18. My education from middle school to high school was an incredibly exciting time of learning for me. In the next chapter I'll talk about how much I loved high school. I soaked up everything I could. My brain was a sponge, I remember such incredible stimulation with exciting new idea after idea. After the initial "I want to be a fireman." There was a brief "I want to be a nuclear physicist" then "I want to be a doctor, maybe even a thoracic surgeon."
My Christmas wishes were often books. Gray's Anatomy, The Anatomy Coloring Book, The Unabridged Webster's Dictionary, The Great Ideas set.
I worked in the office in the seventh grade at Sunrise Middle School. I did Junior Achievement (didn't enjoy it as much--we made and sold "frustration pencils"). In the summer after the seventh grade I took violin lessons at Sunrise. In middle school my mother continued to drop me off to school. They didn't want me to have to ride the bus.
Weaver started a bus ministry. At its peak, we had two buses going on a Sunday morning. I became involved with one of them. We would do door-to-door visitation on Saturday on eighth ave. Eighth ave was a very poor, mostly black neighborhood at that time, as I remember. On Sunday mornings I was a runner. I would run to the door, knock. Then run back to the bus.
We sang all sorts of fun songs in those days. "Oh, you can't get to heaven... on a 747... oh, you can't get to heaven on a 747. Oh you can't get to heaven on a 747, aren't no airports up in heaven. All my sins are washed away I've been redeemed." We had a pretty vibrant children's church too.
I remember going skating once. Going to a skating rink was a little controversial, I guess mainly because of the kind of people there. I remember them playing secular music at the rink--"Kiss on My List." I remember one time he had a contest and the winning team--maybe whichever group of kids brought the most visitors--got to throw water balloons at him dressed up like a clown.
Bob was also CCCU and from Ohio. I have little doubt but that he had taken a few lessons from John Maxwell. There were of course comments about how the church declined in attendance after he left. Some would say you shouldn't build a church on gimmicks or around a personality.
Of course God gives us all different gifts. He had gifts. I don't think he did anything wrong. There are likely people in the kingdom of God today because of his ministry. He was probably more of a salesman than I would be as a pastor.
But there were other pastors after him under whom the church dwindled to almost nothing. Did they serve God better? Whether we like it or not, some people are more gifted at attracting people to church than others. That doesn't make them more or less spiritual, but their ministries will generally grow more.
"Principled" people often complain about them. "People shouldn't come to church to be entertained." No, but don't complain that no one comes to your church if it's boring. If your services are boring, chances are your church will dwindle. Just the facts, ma'am. Complain to God all you want as your church dwindles and dies.
18. My dad was a little off put by the fact that the pastor mowed his lawn in shorts, but he always cooperated as treasurer with whoever the pastor or district superintendent was. My dad was not someone who particularly liked change. As I've said, like his mother he was a book-keeper by personality. In the army he had ended as a Sergeant Major.
It was always amusing on trips when my mother would see something and suggest a side trip. He was much more interest in staying on task and getting to the destination. But he always did whatever she wanted. He might grumble about going to visit someone out of the way, but he was always glad after he did. In that regard my son Tom is a little like him, although Tom as yet is not a book-keeper. :-)
18. My education from middle school to high school was an incredibly exciting time of learning for me. In the next chapter I'll talk about how much I loved high school. I soaked up everything I could. My brain was a sponge, I remember such incredible stimulation with exciting new idea after idea. After the initial "I want to be a fireman." There was a brief "I want to be a nuclear physicist" then "I want to be a doctor, maybe even a thoracic surgeon."
My Christmas wishes were often books. Gray's Anatomy, The Anatomy Coloring Book, The Unabridged Webster's Dictionary, The Great Ideas set.
I worked in the office in the seventh grade at Sunrise Middle School. I did Junior Achievement (didn't enjoy it as much--we made and sold "frustration pencils"). In the summer after the seventh grade I took violin lessons at Sunrise. In middle school my mother continued to drop me off to school. They didn't want me to have to ride the bus.
19. My final memory to mention in this period is my attendance of the 1978 youth conference in Urbana, Illinois. I hung out a little with the group from Trinity because my cousin Carl Shepherd was a youth sponsor. I remember Jimmy Johnson talking about what to do when you were tempted to lust after a girl. He suggested praising God. :-)
But as usual I felt rather alone for most of my time there. I think I rode over with the Trinity group and felt really out of place. My parents must have been in Indiana for Christmas, probably staying at my uncle Paul's house. He had a great house with woods in the back.
It seems to me I heard some more secular music I liked on that trip.
[1] For a short time, a man named Richner had been our pastor in Fort Lauderdale. I believe he was a Wesleyan Methodist originally who had been the founding pastor.
Saturday, December 21, 2019
The Awakening 3
previously
12. I remember at some point of middle school thinking about how far away the end of high school was. Six years seemed like an eternity back then. As an adult, six years flies like water down a fall. Now as a parent, the years of my children's lives have flown like a brisk wind. They were little and now they are gone.
I don't have detailed memories of many classes in middle school. I remember Mr. Dallas, a kind old teacher who seemed to have trouble seeing. The students would have all sorts of fun with him. They would ask him if he was going to the Marlin Beach hotel that weekend, a hotel near the beach that I guess had a particular reputation. He didn't seem to know what they were insinuating. Some favored student they called, "Mr. Dallas' boy" (JV King?). Mr. Dallas didn't seem to know they were poking fun at him.
Sunrise Middle School was well integrated. I had a number of African-American teachers--Mr. Dallas for social studies, Mrs. Carter for pre-algebra, my Algebra I teacher also. I remember being especially bored and spending a lot of time drawing and flying spaceships during class.
13. Star Trek was a favorite show to watch in reruns. I would identify with Spock. It wasn't just his interest in science or my love of knowledge. He had trouble managing his emotions. He aimed not to let them control them. He aimed to be perfectly logical and objective.
As good Wesleyans, we did not go to movies. The only movie I went to from birth to seminary was Cinderella as a fifth grade trip, and my mother went with me as a class sponsor, as I recall. When the 1979 Star Trek movie came out, I wasn't able to see it. In fact, I often didn't get to see those big event movies even when they came to TV, because we didn't watch television on Sunday.
Having a TV in the first place was a fairly big deal for my family. My dad's father had the old holiness position that Christians shouldn't have a "boob tube." My father long suspected that his dad didn't visit our home for a long time in Indianapolis because he thought we have a television hiding in my dad's huge stereo/record player. They did come to visit after I was born, I guess.
So we had a small black and white TV. There was a color TV that I ruined by sticking a huge magnet my dad had up to the screen. During high school they would let me watch MASH reruns from the dinner table after a certain point of the dinner.
There were strong anti-violence and language rules. My oldest sisters would turn the volume down if they sensed a gunfight coming on Bonanza or some such show. There's a story of my oldest sister running to stop my dad from turning off the TV when someone fired a gun. She was pleading--"It was in self-defense!" I guess that was a testimony to my father's mother's family, who were all quietists from the Old German Baptist Church. My uncle Eugene was a "man of peace" in WW2. He served in the military but was a conscientious objector to fighting.
But my father had a personal conviction against watching TV on Sunday. He believed he would spend all day watching television on Sunday, football and such. So to set the day aside for worship, we didn't watch TV on Sunday.
Not that there was the variety of options that we now have. There were only four or five channels. The down side was that the really big movies like Star Wars always debuted on a Sunday night. I didn't see Star Wars for many many years, probably into my married life, except perhaps in bits and pieces.
I didn't mind missing Star Wars so much. To me it was pure fantasy. Star Trek imagined a future that was actually possible through developments in science. When flip phones came out, it was not lost on me that this was an instance of life imitating art. Would we have had flip phones if there had not been communicators on Star Trek?
When the movie Star Trek came out, there was an elderly woman in our church who somehow recorded the movie on a cassette tape. I listened to that thing over and over again. I had a good deal of it memorized long before I ever saw it, some years later. "And I'll have you, doctor, as your continued predilection for irrelevancy demonstrates."
14. We did not buy or sell on Sunday. Occasionally my dad would have the opportunity to get extra money from working a disaster, such as one time when a hurricane hit New Orleans or when there would be a lot of hail damage somewhere. But he wouldn't work on Sunday.
He was an insurance adjuster in his early days in Florida and traveled all over south Florida with his Polaroid camera assessing car damage first for Motors Insurance Corporation (MIC) and then for GMAC. His office was initially on Federal Highway not far from the old Searstown and Port Everglades.
One time a man who was drunk walked into his office and asked for money. "What you need," my dad said, "was to stop drinking." The drunk man responded, "Thank you for those kind words." My dad immediately felt bad for the man, who clearly wasn't in control of his life. He took him to a diner nearby and bought him a meal.
We were allowed to stop at a restaurant if we found ourselves traveling to Indiana on a Sunday. I felt like my dad secretly enjoyed being able to eat out on Sunday. Early in my marriage, my wife and I always felt like my dad was disappointed when we actually cooked for him on Sunday. "If the ox is in the ditch" on the Sabbath the rule went, you could get him out. So my dad was not an absolutist on these old holiness rules. He made exceptions.
I also came to think the "free will offering" was funny at Frankfort Camp. They needed to provide meals on Sunday for the people, but they couldn't charge them because that would be selling food on Sunday. So they had a free-will offering. Sunday meals were free but there was a sign there with the cost so you could give a "donation." :-)
12. I remember at some point of middle school thinking about how far away the end of high school was. Six years seemed like an eternity back then. As an adult, six years flies like water down a fall. Now as a parent, the years of my children's lives have flown like a brisk wind. They were little and now they are gone.
I don't have detailed memories of many classes in middle school. I remember Mr. Dallas, a kind old teacher who seemed to have trouble seeing. The students would have all sorts of fun with him. They would ask him if he was going to the Marlin Beach hotel that weekend, a hotel near the beach that I guess had a particular reputation. He didn't seem to know what they were insinuating. Some favored student they called, "Mr. Dallas' boy" (JV King?). Mr. Dallas didn't seem to know they were poking fun at him.
Sunrise Middle School was well integrated. I had a number of African-American teachers--Mr. Dallas for social studies, Mrs. Carter for pre-algebra, my Algebra I teacher also. I remember being especially bored and spending a lot of time drawing and flying spaceships during class.
13. Star Trek was a favorite show to watch in reruns. I would identify with Spock. It wasn't just his interest in science or my love of knowledge. He had trouble managing his emotions. He aimed not to let them control them. He aimed to be perfectly logical and objective.
As good Wesleyans, we did not go to movies. The only movie I went to from birth to seminary was Cinderella as a fifth grade trip, and my mother went with me as a class sponsor, as I recall. When the 1979 Star Trek movie came out, I wasn't able to see it. In fact, I often didn't get to see those big event movies even when they came to TV, because we didn't watch television on Sunday.
Having a TV in the first place was a fairly big deal for my family. My dad's father had the old holiness position that Christians shouldn't have a "boob tube." My father long suspected that his dad didn't visit our home for a long time in Indianapolis because he thought we have a television hiding in my dad's huge stereo/record player. They did come to visit after I was born, I guess.
So we had a small black and white TV. There was a color TV that I ruined by sticking a huge magnet my dad had up to the screen. During high school they would let me watch MASH reruns from the dinner table after a certain point of the dinner.
There were strong anti-violence and language rules. My oldest sisters would turn the volume down if they sensed a gunfight coming on Bonanza or some such show. There's a story of my oldest sister running to stop my dad from turning off the TV when someone fired a gun. She was pleading--"It was in self-defense!" I guess that was a testimony to my father's mother's family, who were all quietists from the Old German Baptist Church. My uncle Eugene was a "man of peace" in WW2. He served in the military but was a conscientious objector to fighting.
But my father had a personal conviction against watching TV on Sunday. He believed he would spend all day watching television on Sunday, football and such. So to set the day aside for worship, we didn't watch TV on Sunday.
Not that there was the variety of options that we now have. There were only four or five channels. The down side was that the really big movies like Star Wars always debuted on a Sunday night. I didn't see Star Wars for many many years, probably into my married life, except perhaps in bits and pieces.
I didn't mind missing Star Wars so much. To me it was pure fantasy. Star Trek imagined a future that was actually possible through developments in science. When flip phones came out, it was not lost on me that this was an instance of life imitating art. Would we have had flip phones if there had not been communicators on Star Trek?
When the movie Star Trek came out, there was an elderly woman in our church who somehow recorded the movie on a cassette tape. I listened to that thing over and over again. I had a good deal of it memorized long before I ever saw it, some years later. "And I'll have you, doctor, as your continued predilection for irrelevancy demonstrates."
14. We did not buy or sell on Sunday. Occasionally my dad would have the opportunity to get extra money from working a disaster, such as one time when a hurricane hit New Orleans or when there would be a lot of hail damage somewhere. But he wouldn't work on Sunday.
He was an insurance adjuster in his early days in Florida and traveled all over south Florida with his Polaroid camera assessing car damage first for Motors Insurance Corporation (MIC) and then for GMAC. His office was initially on Federal Highway not far from the old Searstown and Port Everglades.
One time a man who was drunk walked into his office and asked for money. "What you need," my dad said, "was to stop drinking." The drunk man responded, "Thank you for those kind words." My dad immediately felt bad for the man, who clearly wasn't in control of his life. He took him to a diner nearby and bought him a meal.
We were allowed to stop at a restaurant if we found ourselves traveling to Indiana on a Sunday. I felt like my dad secretly enjoyed being able to eat out on Sunday. Early in my marriage, my wife and I always felt like my dad was disappointed when we actually cooked for him on Sunday. "If the ox is in the ditch" on the Sabbath the rule went, you could get him out. So my dad was not an absolutist on these old holiness rules. He made exceptions.
I also came to think the "free will offering" was funny at Frankfort Camp. They needed to provide meals on Sunday for the people, but they couldn't charge them because that would be selling food on Sunday. So they had a free-will offering. Sunday meals were free but there was a sign there with the cost so you could give a "donation." :-)
Friday, December 20, 2019
Awakening 2
The previous post
_______________
5. In the middle school years, the brain reaches a point of new development. I attribute the crazy behavior of middle schoolers to these brain developments. Abstract reasoning develops. Children are able to think in ways they haven't thought before. They have more strength than they had before. Their ability to exercise their own wills seems to reach new heights.
I suspect that middle schoolers sometimes think that, because they are having a thought for the first time, they assume no one else has ever had that thought. They assume their parents have never experienced what they are experiencing. They assume their parents don't know anything and have never learned what they are realizing and learning for the first time.
I have thought of this with cheating. A middle or high schooler (or even college student) might think, "I'm going to cheat in x way and the teacher/professor won't know the difference." Now sometimes a person might get by with it. But often a person gets caught, the thought not occurring to them that the same tricks have probably been tried on the teacher a thousand times by previous students... who also thought they were having the same bright idea for the first time.
I have found this with plagiarism even among adult students. If I might be frank, a professor usually notices if a paper suddenly starts sounding way more intelligent than the student's papers normally do. A beginner at a subject may think they know more or have greater insight than they do. An actual expert can spot the blind spots immediately. (Of course I shake my head at what I consider the blind spots of many scholars too, and I'm sure I have them.)
So when a paper from a student who does not typically have great insight suddenly becomes profound, a professor starts searching around to see if the student has stolen material from some other source. All it usually takes is a Google search. I can't tell you how often a poor thinker gets caught at plagiarism because their paper suddenly becomes uncharacteristically good. This reflects a lack of self-awareness on the part of the student.
This dynamic is true on every level. We often do not realize when our thoughts are defective. A more experienced or more insightful person can see it, but we often can't. This is always the case with God, who patiently endures our embarrassing yet arrogant ignorance.
6. Unfortunately, the middle schooler these days may be right that their parent doesn't know anything. A vast number of adults seem to be children with a bank account. They have not matured beyond their high school days. They just got old enough to have the freedom to do whatever they want with the money they have. No one is grading their papers, but they are still getting Ds without knowing it.
Many adults have forgotten what it was like to grow up and so simply repeat the mistakes of their parents. You occasionally come across a parent in a public store talking to a child as if the child is developmentally old enough to have a clue what the parent is saying. To the child it must amount to something like, "Blah, blah, blah, smack." Even pastors sometimes over-theologize the actions of young children and see carnal intent at resistance to a parent's will.
One of the most insightful classes I took in college was developmental psychology in May term at Southern Wesleyan with Hal Robbins. The brain develops. The way many Christian parents engage two year olds and the way they overlay it theologically with thought of sinful natures more likely reveals their own ignorance and parental inadequacies than the theological state of the child. It actually can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as they create wrathful children on the basis of their own lack of understanding. And they do it in the name of Christ.
7. So middle school is often rough. My year of substitute teaching (1996-1997) was a rough year as I mostly found myself in middle schools in south Florida. If you're a bully, middle school often goes fine. I still remember the names of the two middle school boys who, one Halloween night, forcibly extracted my candy and mask from me.
As I said, I did not particularly distinguish myself in elementary school. I got all good grades but I wasn't put with the gifted kids in the transition to middle school. My mother used to say that she was glad I didn't have that pressure. One of the brightest of my classmates burned out in early high school.
So they put me in the ordinary math class in the sixth grade. I had perfect scores. I also seem to remember some kid behind me using my ears as motorcycle handles from time to time. I seem to remember a lot of ear flicking in those days. Lunch often involved toe stomping contests amongst friends.
We came to a point of decision at the end of the first quarter. The math teacher thought I should be in the advanced math track. We came to a point of decision. I didn't want to move. I wanted the status quo. We fear change. But I wouldn't be on track for honors courses in high school if I didn't change ships now.
It was a hard decision for my mother, but they switched me. It was an important fork that completely changed my future. I got a few Fs initially, and then resumed As. Then it was pre-algebra in the seventh grade, algebra 1 in the eighth, geometry in the ninth, algebra 2 in the tenth, trig and analytic geometry in the eleventh, and calculus in the twelfth.
8. I believe it was during middle school that I was first exposed to scientific creationism. At some point Henry Morris would come to Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church for a creation-evolution debate. I was excited by the subject, disappointed by him. I felt he spent more time quoting people than actually presenting evidence.
I was being formed by both fundamentalism and the public schools to think like a scientist. Interestingly, creationism claimed to play on the same playing field as modern science. That is to say, it accepted the rules of scientific investigation but argued that science pointed to creationism. Josh McDowell would soon take the same approach to apologetics--Evidence That Demands a Verdict.
These days were long before I was exposed to Karl Barth or neo-orthodoxy, which rejected evidence or argument as a basis for faith. My faith-formation assumed the central role of evidence, logic, and the scientific method. Morris and McDowell argued that the evidence, following the normal rules of inductive and deductive reasoning, compelled faith. This was also the approach of C. S. Lewis, who wrote books like Mere Christianity with arguments for God.
I have retained this epistemology despite my exposure to Barth and then later post-liberalism. I do not believe that the evidence demands the verdict of faith, but I believe that faith is reasonable. I believe that, in general, we should follow the evidence to its most likely conclusion. In fact, I believe that evangelical Christianity, because it has so often taken contrarian positions counter to solid expert positions (often without expertise itself) has not only discredit its claims to be interested in truth but it has made evangelicals highly susceptible to charlatans selling conspiracy theories.
I remember in Mr. Nelson's eighth grade science class coming up with what I thought was a clever argument. [1] I remember thinking, "Wow, that's a really smart thought." It was like the first time I thought I had a really clever thought on my own.
The thought was, "If humans evolved from apes, why do we still have apes?" The classmate I was arguing with got the teacher's attention. "Mr. Nelson..." He responded in a pastoral tone. "Well, evolution doesn't really argue that we evolved from apes but that both apes and humans evolved from a common ape-like ancestor." My first clever thought turned out not to be very clever at all.
It was also in eighth grade science that I learned from the girl next to me the Rapper's Delight--"I said a hip, hop, the hippie to the hippie, the hip hip a hop and you don't stop a rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie the beat."
There was no secular music really in my home. My dad listened to country gospel (the Saturday evening radio show was called "God's Country" on Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church radio). The only secular music I really knew I heard in elevators and public spaces. We did not think positively of the Beatles (John Lennon's murder was not consequential in my home, nor the death of Elvis).
I remember the whole backward masking hype over Stairway to Heaven. Living in the shadow of Dr. D. James Kennedy's church, my teens were spent at one of the centers of the culture wars and the forging of the Moral Majority. I grew up in the shadow of the rising abortion movement, anti-globalism, scientific creationism, and fundamentalist apologetics.
9. I had shop, home ec, and art in middle school. In shop I learned how to use a band saw, how to sand things, what the basic tools were. In home economics I learned to sow and made an apron. In art I made a clay rhinoceros (and its baby) that I only threw out finally in our move to New York.
The art room, as I recall, had a dark room that was really neat. You went into a chamber whose door was cylindrical. You turned it to get in and it did not let any light into the dark room because by the time you could rotate the opening around there was no longer any opening to the classroom. I must have developed a picture in there, although I don't remember what of.
10. I had not participated in any of the summer teen camps of the Florida District. At twelve years old (1979), I finally did. My next street over friend Steve Corso went as well. My brother-in-law Dennis Waymire was in charge of the camp, which made it a more comfortable experience for a painfully shy boy.
I remember being alone. I was often alone. There were people around me. They were in groups talking to each other. A girl I had a crush on from my home church was there, with her boyfriend from my home church. I remember the last night. It seemed everyone was having fun with their groups. I was alone.
These days, I'm pretty good with alone. I am rarely alone. I have a wife and family. But I no longer have a problem with alone. In fact, it has been a little funny in the past when someone will find me sitting reading or writing at a restaurant by myself and feel the need to invite me to sit with them or feel like they need to join me. I am good with alone.
The last night of that camp was one of the more unique experiences of my life. The final worship service was interrupted because one of the teens was behaving strangely. The leaders of the camp, including my brother-in-law, were called to help. We were all told to pray.
The word that came back to us that the young man was demon-possessed. For example, he had shown an unusual strength to resist several men. He was particularly resistant to prayer. I would hear later that a doctor had also suggested that what was happening was not an ordinary mental event. I will not draw a conclusion on what was really going on, but it certainly was a memorable event!
11. That was also the summer we went to the Philippines to visit my sister Juanita. It was my first time out of the country. I was impressed by the squatter's huts and the missionary compound. The missionaries in residence were the Meeks and the Turners. We went up to the Bible school at Rosales--I remember how in just a couple days a creek went from something I could step over to a river you wouldn't want to try to cross. We went up to another Bible college at Sinipsip, where I believe it was mildly snowing because of the elevation.
By the way, the only time it snowed in Fort Lauderdale was 1974. I was in the second grade. We all went outside from class to see it.
We also traveled west to the China Sea. I remember the discomfort of peeing into a hole in the ground. Then I slipped and got a little poop on my three piece suit. I think it was a creamy green suit.
I remember talking about how culturally insensitive some visitors from the States were. They expected the standards of living that we have here. Some expected to be served, perhaps not even realizing that they looked down on the people as inferior. It's a kind of ignorant soft prejudice. You poor people. We have come to help you, in our greatness and benevolence.
This is, by the way, a danger of short term missions trips. First, Americans sometimes think that they are superior and are the great benefactors. Second, they have no real sense of what a burden they can be to the people they visit, how unreasonable their expectations can be. In the meantime, the people probably understand their visitors better in some ways than those visitors understand themselves. Issues of race are the same today--majority culture often is ignorant of its own ignorance although it is overwhelmingly obvious to the minority culture in its midst.
That trip was probably the beginning of an understanding of how culture works, and it set me up well for a life of travel and living abroad.
[1] I had Mr. Nelson in the sixth grade as well. I remember feeling grown up in the sixth grade when we changed classes every hour, as opposed to being with the same teacher in the same classroom most of the day.
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5. In the middle school years, the brain reaches a point of new development. I attribute the crazy behavior of middle schoolers to these brain developments. Abstract reasoning develops. Children are able to think in ways they haven't thought before. They have more strength than they had before. Their ability to exercise their own wills seems to reach new heights.
I suspect that middle schoolers sometimes think that, because they are having a thought for the first time, they assume no one else has ever had that thought. They assume their parents have never experienced what they are experiencing. They assume their parents don't know anything and have never learned what they are realizing and learning for the first time.
I have thought of this with cheating. A middle or high schooler (or even college student) might think, "I'm going to cheat in x way and the teacher/professor won't know the difference." Now sometimes a person might get by with it. But often a person gets caught, the thought not occurring to them that the same tricks have probably been tried on the teacher a thousand times by previous students... who also thought they were having the same bright idea for the first time.
I have found this with plagiarism even among adult students. If I might be frank, a professor usually notices if a paper suddenly starts sounding way more intelligent than the student's papers normally do. A beginner at a subject may think they know more or have greater insight than they do. An actual expert can spot the blind spots immediately. (Of course I shake my head at what I consider the blind spots of many scholars too, and I'm sure I have them.)
So when a paper from a student who does not typically have great insight suddenly becomes profound, a professor starts searching around to see if the student has stolen material from some other source. All it usually takes is a Google search. I can't tell you how often a poor thinker gets caught at plagiarism because their paper suddenly becomes uncharacteristically good. This reflects a lack of self-awareness on the part of the student.
This dynamic is true on every level. We often do not realize when our thoughts are defective. A more experienced or more insightful person can see it, but we often can't. This is always the case with God, who patiently endures our embarrassing yet arrogant ignorance.
6. Unfortunately, the middle schooler these days may be right that their parent doesn't know anything. A vast number of adults seem to be children with a bank account. They have not matured beyond their high school days. They just got old enough to have the freedom to do whatever they want with the money they have. No one is grading their papers, but they are still getting Ds without knowing it.
Many adults have forgotten what it was like to grow up and so simply repeat the mistakes of their parents. You occasionally come across a parent in a public store talking to a child as if the child is developmentally old enough to have a clue what the parent is saying. To the child it must amount to something like, "Blah, blah, blah, smack." Even pastors sometimes over-theologize the actions of young children and see carnal intent at resistance to a parent's will.
One of the most insightful classes I took in college was developmental psychology in May term at Southern Wesleyan with Hal Robbins. The brain develops. The way many Christian parents engage two year olds and the way they overlay it theologically with thought of sinful natures more likely reveals their own ignorance and parental inadequacies than the theological state of the child. It actually can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as they create wrathful children on the basis of their own lack of understanding. And they do it in the name of Christ.
7. So middle school is often rough. My year of substitute teaching (1996-1997) was a rough year as I mostly found myself in middle schools in south Florida. If you're a bully, middle school often goes fine. I still remember the names of the two middle school boys who, one Halloween night, forcibly extracted my candy and mask from me.
As I said, I did not particularly distinguish myself in elementary school. I got all good grades but I wasn't put with the gifted kids in the transition to middle school. My mother used to say that she was glad I didn't have that pressure. One of the brightest of my classmates burned out in early high school.
So they put me in the ordinary math class in the sixth grade. I had perfect scores. I also seem to remember some kid behind me using my ears as motorcycle handles from time to time. I seem to remember a lot of ear flicking in those days. Lunch often involved toe stomping contests amongst friends.
We came to a point of decision at the end of the first quarter. The math teacher thought I should be in the advanced math track. We came to a point of decision. I didn't want to move. I wanted the status quo. We fear change. But I wouldn't be on track for honors courses in high school if I didn't change ships now.
It was a hard decision for my mother, but they switched me. It was an important fork that completely changed my future. I got a few Fs initially, and then resumed As. Then it was pre-algebra in the seventh grade, algebra 1 in the eighth, geometry in the ninth, algebra 2 in the tenth, trig and analytic geometry in the eleventh, and calculus in the twelfth.
8. I believe it was during middle school that I was first exposed to scientific creationism. At some point Henry Morris would come to Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church for a creation-evolution debate. I was excited by the subject, disappointed by him. I felt he spent more time quoting people than actually presenting evidence.
I was being formed by both fundamentalism and the public schools to think like a scientist. Interestingly, creationism claimed to play on the same playing field as modern science. That is to say, it accepted the rules of scientific investigation but argued that science pointed to creationism. Josh McDowell would soon take the same approach to apologetics--Evidence That Demands a Verdict.
These days were long before I was exposed to Karl Barth or neo-orthodoxy, which rejected evidence or argument as a basis for faith. My faith-formation assumed the central role of evidence, logic, and the scientific method. Morris and McDowell argued that the evidence, following the normal rules of inductive and deductive reasoning, compelled faith. This was also the approach of C. S. Lewis, who wrote books like Mere Christianity with arguments for God.
I have retained this epistemology despite my exposure to Barth and then later post-liberalism. I do not believe that the evidence demands the verdict of faith, but I believe that faith is reasonable. I believe that, in general, we should follow the evidence to its most likely conclusion. In fact, I believe that evangelical Christianity, because it has so often taken contrarian positions counter to solid expert positions (often without expertise itself) has not only discredit its claims to be interested in truth but it has made evangelicals highly susceptible to charlatans selling conspiracy theories.
I remember in Mr. Nelson's eighth grade science class coming up with what I thought was a clever argument. [1] I remember thinking, "Wow, that's a really smart thought." It was like the first time I thought I had a really clever thought on my own.
The thought was, "If humans evolved from apes, why do we still have apes?" The classmate I was arguing with got the teacher's attention. "Mr. Nelson..." He responded in a pastoral tone. "Well, evolution doesn't really argue that we evolved from apes but that both apes and humans evolved from a common ape-like ancestor." My first clever thought turned out not to be very clever at all.
It was also in eighth grade science that I learned from the girl next to me the Rapper's Delight--"I said a hip, hop, the hippie to the hippie, the hip hip a hop and you don't stop a rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie the beat."
There was no secular music really in my home. My dad listened to country gospel (the Saturday evening radio show was called "God's Country" on Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church radio). The only secular music I really knew I heard in elevators and public spaces. We did not think positively of the Beatles (John Lennon's murder was not consequential in my home, nor the death of Elvis).
I remember the whole backward masking hype over Stairway to Heaven. Living in the shadow of Dr. D. James Kennedy's church, my teens were spent at one of the centers of the culture wars and the forging of the Moral Majority. I grew up in the shadow of the rising abortion movement, anti-globalism, scientific creationism, and fundamentalist apologetics.
9. I had shop, home ec, and art in middle school. In shop I learned how to use a band saw, how to sand things, what the basic tools were. In home economics I learned to sow and made an apron. In art I made a clay rhinoceros (and its baby) that I only threw out finally in our move to New York.
The art room, as I recall, had a dark room that was really neat. You went into a chamber whose door was cylindrical. You turned it to get in and it did not let any light into the dark room because by the time you could rotate the opening around there was no longer any opening to the classroom. I must have developed a picture in there, although I don't remember what of.
10. I had not participated in any of the summer teen camps of the Florida District. At twelve years old (1979), I finally did. My next street over friend Steve Corso went as well. My brother-in-law Dennis Waymire was in charge of the camp, which made it a more comfortable experience for a painfully shy boy.
I remember being alone. I was often alone. There were people around me. They were in groups talking to each other. A girl I had a crush on from my home church was there, with her boyfriend from my home church. I remember the last night. It seemed everyone was having fun with their groups. I was alone.
These days, I'm pretty good with alone. I am rarely alone. I have a wife and family. But I no longer have a problem with alone. In fact, it has been a little funny in the past when someone will find me sitting reading or writing at a restaurant by myself and feel the need to invite me to sit with them or feel like they need to join me. I am good with alone.
The last night of that camp was one of the more unique experiences of my life. The final worship service was interrupted because one of the teens was behaving strangely. The leaders of the camp, including my brother-in-law, were called to help. We were all told to pray.
The word that came back to us that the young man was demon-possessed. For example, he had shown an unusual strength to resist several men. He was particularly resistant to prayer. I would hear later that a doctor had also suggested that what was happening was not an ordinary mental event. I will not draw a conclusion on what was really going on, but it certainly was a memorable event!
11. That was also the summer we went to the Philippines to visit my sister Juanita. It was my first time out of the country. I was impressed by the squatter's huts and the missionary compound. The missionaries in residence were the Meeks and the Turners. We went up to the Bible school at Rosales--I remember how in just a couple days a creek went from something I could step over to a river you wouldn't want to try to cross. We went up to another Bible college at Sinipsip, where I believe it was mildly snowing because of the elevation.
By the way, the only time it snowed in Fort Lauderdale was 1974. I was in the second grade. We all went outside from class to see it.
We also traveled west to the China Sea. I remember the discomfort of peeing into a hole in the ground. Then I slipped and got a little poop on my three piece suit. I think it was a creamy green suit.
I remember talking about how culturally insensitive some visitors from the States were. They expected the standards of living that we have here. Some expected to be served, perhaps not even realizing that they looked down on the people as inferior. It's a kind of ignorant soft prejudice. You poor people. We have come to help you, in our greatness and benevolence.
This is, by the way, a danger of short term missions trips. First, Americans sometimes think that they are superior and are the great benefactors. Second, they have no real sense of what a burden they can be to the people they visit, how unreasonable their expectations can be. In the meantime, the people probably understand their visitors better in some ways than those visitors understand themselves. Issues of race are the same today--majority culture often is ignorant of its own ignorance although it is overwhelmingly obvious to the minority culture in its midst.
That trip was probably the beginning of an understanding of how culture works, and it set me up well for a life of travel and living abroad.
[1] I had Mr. Nelson in the sixth grade as well. I remember feeling grown up in the sixth grade when we changed classes every hour, as opposed to being with the same teacher in the same classroom most of the day.
Wednesday, December 18, 2019
The Awakening 1
For the previous post, see here.
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1. It was a rather strange event, during a winter camp meeting at Brooksville in January 1977. We went to the morning service. We had lunch. I took a nap in the modular home of Lucien and Ruby Brown. I woke up in a start, terrified. It was an awakening.
The friendship of my parents with the Browns went back to Indiana. They were older than my parents, old time Pilgrims. They came and visited us in Fort Lauderdale a few times. My dad was a pretty busy man with his work (we used to joke about the old song, "When you coming home, Dad?" and then later, "When you coming home, son?") Lucien was retired and so had the time to work on a tree house for me.
The first tree house he built was in the birch tree in the front side yard. Later he would build a fort for me where my swing set had been.
I went to sleep blissfully ignorant. I woke up terrified for my soul. I don't know whether some brain connection finally connected. Some might say it was conviction by the Holy Spirit. I went to sleep fairly carefree. I woke up in a state of fear for my soul that would continue off and on into my time at seminary over ten years later.
2. It is probably not quite right to say that I did not have some terror prior to that day. In 1970, Hal Lindsey had published Late Great Planet Earth, the precursor to the Left Behind series of the 90s. We had watched two reel to reel films [1] at church on Sunday evenings in the 70s based on Lindsey's work--A Thief in the Night and A Distant Thunder. I found these apocalyptic films terrifying as a child.
In the first film, a wife is talking to her husband when he stops responding. His electric razor is still in the sink but he is gone. The rapture has happened. All Christians have disappeared from the earth. Those who are left now face the seven year tribulation.
I've already mentioned that my grandfather Shepherd was a dispensationalist prophecy teacher. This particular approach originated in the 1800s with a British man by the name of John Darby. It is quite ingenious in the way it stitches together disparate passages from across the Bible. I have often told students that I wouldn't dare tell God not to fulfill Scripture however God might want. After all, some of the fuller meanings in the New Testament are only tangentially related to what those passages originally meant in the Old Testament.
However, Darby's system has little to do with what those passages meant originally. There is no clear place where a seven year tribulation is taught. Revelation 7:14 does not say in Greek "the Great Tribulation" but these are they who have come out of great tribulation. You only get to the number seven when you add the 3.5s of Revelation 12 and then equate it to a supposedly missing week in Daniel 9.
Similarly, there is no singular "antichrist" in 1 John. The beast of Revelation is equated with the "man of lawlessness" in 2 Thessalonians, but is this correct? And are these figures from the first century rather than a yet unfulfilled future? The New Testament never says the temple will be rebuilt. The prophecies of a rebuilt temple in the Old Testament were fulfilled in 516BC and there is no place for a temple after Christ's atonement (Rev. 21:22).
This goes back to what I said about having a lot to work through when I began to study the Bible seriously.
3. The films terrified me. For a season I would not let my mother out of sight at Kmart, for fear she would be taken in the rapture and I would be left behind. Even playing outside on the sidewalk I would occasionally go back inside to make sure my mother was still there. One day in the sixth grade I was so fearful that they sent me home for the day (I may have had a slight fever too).
My mother gave me a little box of Scripture promises. There were verses like Joshua 1:9 and Jeremiah 29:11. They didn't help a lot but they helped a little. This is something I have come to believe about these sorts of mental states. No reason will help much. But perhaps these sorts of things help a tiny bit. They are greatly appreciated in retrospect.
My soul experienced great torment and fear off and on for the next decade. I was afraid to sleep by myself. I was afraid of the dark. I would pray over and over, "Lord, please forgive me if I've sinned. Lord, please forgive me if I've sinned." I could not think of any sin act I had done, unless it was a lack of faith shown by the fact that I asked God to forgive my sins over and over again.
What if I couldn't remember my sins? Then I couldn't ask forgiveness for them! If I couldn't ask forgiveness for them specifically, was I doomed never to find forgiveness and thus inevitably faced hell!!! These were the kinds of irrational torments of my soul in those days.
What if I didn't read my chapter of the Bible for the day? What if I didn't have devotions? What if I didn't pray before I went to sleep? I often failed at these and thus guilt heaped upon guilt.
4. I was obsessed with having a moment I could call "getting saved" for sure. There was a song at Frankfort Camp meeting--"It was on a Monday, somebody touched me." We were supposed to stand up on the day we were saved. I felt guilty for standing up on "It was on a Sunday," because I really didn't know. I figured it probably was on a Sunday... that is, if I was truly saved! Eventually they added a verse, "I don't know what day it was but somebody touched me."
I wreaked havoc even in college with this doubt. I horrified my girlfriend not only with uncertainty over whether I loved her or not--it was an intellectual question and I wanted to be honest. I did not know what love was. After we broke up I decided that I did. :-)
But I also horrified her with the question of my salvation. One day on the ride home from church I told her I wasn't sure if I was saved or not and spent the whole lunch time in the student center praying for some sort of assurance. A verse that didn't help much but helped (that my mother gave me) was "If our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts and knows all things" (1 John 3:20). I don't know if that's what John meant but I like the interpretation.
There was a moment in my teens, going up the outside stairs of the house in Fort Lauderdale, that I felt a peace. That's the moment I pegged my salvation on. Of course I now think I was saved the whole time. Theologically, I do not believe there has been a moment in my life when God would not have taken me into eternal life. Before I was awakened, God would have taken me in my ignorance. I have moved toward him every moment sense.
I will stop short of saying that all this torment was Satan, although it could have been. I suspect it was something developmental. I'm just glad it's over.
[1] I got certified in middle school to run a reel to reel projector. :-)
_____________
1. It was a rather strange event, during a winter camp meeting at Brooksville in January 1977. We went to the morning service. We had lunch. I took a nap in the modular home of Lucien and Ruby Brown. I woke up in a start, terrified. It was an awakening.
The friendship of my parents with the Browns went back to Indiana. They were older than my parents, old time Pilgrims. They came and visited us in Fort Lauderdale a few times. My dad was a pretty busy man with his work (we used to joke about the old song, "When you coming home, Dad?" and then later, "When you coming home, son?") Lucien was retired and so had the time to work on a tree house for me.
The first tree house he built was in the birch tree in the front side yard. Later he would build a fort for me where my swing set had been.
I went to sleep blissfully ignorant. I woke up terrified for my soul. I don't know whether some brain connection finally connected. Some might say it was conviction by the Holy Spirit. I went to sleep fairly carefree. I woke up in a state of fear for my soul that would continue off and on into my time at seminary over ten years later.
2. It is probably not quite right to say that I did not have some terror prior to that day. In 1970, Hal Lindsey had published Late Great Planet Earth, the precursor to the Left Behind series of the 90s. We had watched two reel to reel films [1] at church on Sunday evenings in the 70s based on Lindsey's work--A Thief in the Night and A Distant Thunder. I found these apocalyptic films terrifying as a child.
In the first film, a wife is talking to her husband when he stops responding. His electric razor is still in the sink but he is gone. The rapture has happened. All Christians have disappeared from the earth. Those who are left now face the seven year tribulation.
I've already mentioned that my grandfather Shepherd was a dispensationalist prophecy teacher. This particular approach originated in the 1800s with a British man by the name of John Darby. It is quite ingenious in the way it stitches together disparate passages from across the Bible. I have often told students that I wouldn't dare tell God not to fulfill Scripture however God might want. After all, some of the fuller meanings in the New Testament are only tangentially related to what those passages originally meant in the Old Testament.
However, Darby's system has little to do with what those passages meant originally. There is no clear place where a seven year tribulation is taught. Revelation 7:14 does not say in Greek "the Great Tribulation" but these are they who have come out of great tribulation. You only get to the number seven when you add the 3.5s of Revelation 12 and then equate it to a supposedly missing week in Daniel 9.
Similarly, there is no singular "antichrist" in 1 John. The beast of Revelation is equated with the "man of lawlessness" in 2 Thessalonians, but is this correct? And are these figures from the first century rather than a yet unfulfilled future? The New Testament never says the temple will be rebuilt. The prophecies of a rebuilt temple in the Old Testament were fulfilled in 516BC and there is no place for a temple after Christ's atonement (Rev. 21:22).
This goes back to what I said about having a lot to work through when I began to study the Bible seriously.
3. The films terrified me. For a season I would not let my mother out of sight at Kmart, for fear she would be taken in the rapture and I would be left behind. Even playing outside on the sidewalk I would occasionally go back inside to make sure my mother was still there. One day in the sixth grade I was so fearful that they sent me home for the day (I may have had a slight fever too).
My mother gave me a little box of Scripture promises. There were verses like Joshua 1:9 and Jeremiah 29:11. They didn't help a lot but they helped a little. This is something I have come to believe about these sorts of mental states. No reason will help much. But perhaps these sorts of things help a tiny bit. They are greatly appreciated in retrospect.
My soul experienced great torment and fear off and on for the next decade. I was afraid to sleep by myself. I was afraid of the dark. I would pray over and over, "Lord, please forgive me if I've sinned. Lord, please forgive me if I've sinned." I could not think of any sin act I had done, unless it was a lack of faith shown by the fact that I asked God to forgive my sins over and over again.
What if I couldn't remember my sins? Then I couldn't ask forgiveness for them! If I couldn't ask forgiveness for them specifically, was I doomed never to find forgiveness and thus inevitably faced hell!!! These were the kinds of irrational torments of my soul in those days.
What if I didn't read my chapter of the Bible for the day? What if I didn't have devotions? What if I didn't pray before I went to sleep? I often failed at these and thus guilt heaped upon guilt.
4. I was obsessed with having a moment I could call "getting saved" for sure. There was a song at Frankfort Camp meeting--"It was on a Monday, somebody touched me." We were supposed to stand up on the day we were saved. I felt guilty for standing up on "It was on a Sunday," because I really didn't know. I figured it probably was on a Sunday... that is, if I was truly saved! Eventually they added a verse, "I don't know what day it was but somebody touched me."
I wreaked havoc even in college with this doubt. I horrified my girlfriend not only with uncertainty over whether I loved her or not--it was an intellectual question and I wanted to be honest. I did not know what love was. After we broke up I decided that I did. :-)
But I also horrified her with the question of my salvation. One day on the ride home from church I told her I wasn't sure if I was saved or not and spent the whole lunch time in the student center praying for some sort of assurance. A verse that didn't help much but helped (that my mother gave me) was "If our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts and knows all things" (1 John 3:20). I don't know if that's what John meant but I like the interpretation.
There was a moment in my teens, going up the outside stairs of the house in Fort Lauderdale, that I felt a peace. That's the moment I pegged my salvation on. Of course I now think I was saved the whole time. Theologically, I do not believe there has been a moment in my life when God would not have taken me into eternal life. Before I was awakened, God would have taken me in my ignorance. I have moved toward him every moment sense.
I will stop short of saying that all this torment was Satan, although it could have been. I suspect it was something developmental. I'm just glad it's over.
[1] I got certified in middle school to run a reel to reel projector. :-)
Sunday, December 15, 2019
Blissful Ignorance 4
previous post
8 (cont). Frankfort holds a special place in my childhood memory. In the early days there were condemned buildings to sneak into. There was the old boys dorm and the old chapel with a walk in freezer. There was the basement of the old administration building with things in formaldehyde. I remember something shocking in a jar--was it a brain?
There was softball, exploring in the woods. There were corn fields. There were Frankfort friends that I only saw once a year. In the early years, there were my Dad's parents. There was my mother's family, including my favorite Uncle Paul.
I have few memories of my first four years living in Indiana. One is of spending the night with my sister Patricia and her then new husband Denny Waymire in a trailer at Frankfort Wesleyan College. It must have been late summer 1971. They had just returned from their honeymoon. Probably not a good idea.
9. The evening services at Frankfort were very formative. Most services ended with an altar call of some sort. There would be a final song in which those who needed to get right with God would walk forward to the front of the "tabernacle" and kneel at a long bench that stretched across the front of the building. Eventually, these altar calls would become a matter of great inner turmoil. I was a painfully shy child. The idea of stepping out in front of this mass of people was terrifying, paralyzing.
I may have gone once. One time I went up to the second row after the thousandth verse of "Just as I Am" was over. Not that I had anything I knew to confess or repent of. The question of being willing to go itself became the struggle--as well as the fear that I did have some sin in need of forgiveness. It was quite an unhealthy process about which I'll say more in the next chapter.
It was easy growing up to get a sense of "two trip-ism." It's the mistaken sense that the heart of being a Christian is checking off two boxes for two trips to the altar. [1] First, you go forward to get "saved." Then you go forward to get "sanctified."
You could of course go forward for other things as well. If you sinned or were struggling with something, you could go forward for forgiveness or to ask for the power to become victorious over the sin. You certainly might want to pray for a need or have a "burden" on your heart about something. People sometimes would surround you to help. They might lay hands on you.
10. Brooksville, Florida was another key location of my youth. Not only were the district conferences often held there in the summers, but we sometimes went to winter camp meeting there. Hobe Sound camp meeting was also in the winter. One could still see running of the aisles there in those days.
At Brooksville was a waning collection of retired general officials and other all stars of my church's past. These were my heroes of the faith--and those of my parents. It was at Brooksville that I saw former Wesleyan Methodist General Superintendent Roy Nicholson. These were people like P. F. Elliott, Arthur Bray, Flora Belle Slater and Daisy Buby. Foster Piatt was still district superintendent. He pretty much founded the district with his own hands. Eventually J. D. Abbott settled there.
Brooksville and Hobe Sound seemed to me like vestiges of the old Florida. Hobe Sound had armadillos. The roads were not paved. Micah Travis and I have a childhood memory of him, me, and his older brother coming across a snake just off the Brooksville grounds on an abandoned railway track that was no longer in use by then. District conference was where I met the Bodenhorn sisters Stacey and Stephanie in my early high school years. Some guy sold rocks in a house in the furthermost road. That was long before they expanded the village.
11. Looking back Fort Lauderdale and Wilton Manors where we lived still seemed young. My parents bought our house in 1971 for $25,000. Integration had not been without conflict around 1960, but I did not perceive any struggle once I arrived. Sunrise Middle School was very integrated.
For much of my elementary school years, I walked the two blocks home from school every day. My mother took me in the morning, as I recall. She worked as a volunteer in the nurses office.
My years at Wilton Manors Elementary School were mostly happy. Mrs. Giddens for kindergarten, with Mrs. Stokes for music. I hid under the bed before the first day of kindergarten, still four years old. I was afraid to leave the safety of home. Mom had the choice of putting me in early or waiting a year. She thought it was better to get me started. I guess I cried the whole first week but then gladly went from the second week on.
Mrs. Welsh for first grade. One of my first friends in the neighborhood was a boy named David Dibble. He lived near the first banyan tree I had ever seen. It was fantastic to climb in! For my part, we had a mango tree in our back yard (I wasn't able to climb it yet in the first grade), and a River Birch on the front right side I called the paper tree. My dad loved mangos, although his diabetes would interfere with his consumption soon enough. I hated mangos because of the afterbite. The only mango I have liked was in Sierra Leone, a green one.
Another early friend was named Joseph. He was horribly jaundiced and I think eventually died of leukemia. At church there was a boy named Joey Fancher, who I think also died when I was in college.
12. There was a tree on the side next to the flat roof over our shed. At a certain point of growth, I jumped from the roof to the tree. I think I jumped from the roof to the ground once, about ten feet. There were times of exploring during elementary school. At one point my next street neighbor friend Steve Corso and I (I think it was him) crawled under the elementary school. Another time we climbed up on the roof of the Grand Union grocery store and found a trampoline in someone's yard on the way down. I felt horribly guilty about doing these things, but they were exhilarating.
At one point we dug a pit in the back yard by my swing set and covered it with a board. The sand was soft white once you got down a foot or so. I got in the pit and Steve or someone covered the board with sand. He went and got my mother and asked her if she knew where I was. Of course I was there! Once I told her I was forbidden from doing that again.
There were other trees on Steve's street that were great to climb because you could go from one to the other down the line. It was a field owned by the Presbyterian Church on 26th street. Of course it's hard to recognize these things today without a keen eye, the place is so overgrown with people. The library is still there on the corner of 5th ave and 26ths, I believe.
There was a 7-eleven where 5th ave hit Wilton Drive. It's where I later bought my comic books and could play Asteriods and later Galaga. I had boundaries, 26th on the north, Wilton Drive, the road west of the elementary school. Every once and a while I would propose an expansion of boundaries to my father. He really didn't care, I don't think, but he would sign the proposal and notarize it.
I only remember lying twice in my first ten years of life. One was when I asked mom if I could go to 7-eleven. I knew she would assume it was the one on Wilton Drive. But I meant the one near K-Mart up 6th ave. I confessed that evening because I felt guilty. The other one was not quite so blatant. I didn't correct someone who thought I had intentionally given the wrong answer.
I started "The Fighting Team" during those years. I would later feel convicted about the name and would put out a fleece. If I could find a hammer that had gone missing, I would change the name. I later found it in the mango tree, just where I'd left it. I changed the name to The Future (organization) Team, so I could keep the letters TFT.
It eventually became TOFT Electronics, a subsidiary of Schenck Enterprises along with Schenck Airlines and The Schenck Medical Foundation. There might have been one other subsidiary.
I drew up papers for the business and, of course, always had my dad notarize the signatures. My cousin Tim LeBaron would be in it. At some point I buried the papers in a box with a map to find it. I think I later dug it up, but that box was eventually lost and never found. It's of course possible it was thrown away. Then again, it could still be buried somewhere on the east side of the house at 547 NE 24th St, Wilton Manors, Florida.
My friends and I played superheroes and I tried to draw them. Captain Universe was the strongest (with an orange towel for a cape). His father was Captain Grenade, and he had a son called the Lightning Kid. I found school horribly boring. I did a lot of drawing and fantasizing in my head.
13. Somehow I had a bad experience with my initial second grade teacher. Don't remember who that was. They moved me into Mrs. Standard's class after Christmas. The fall teacher, as I recall, reacted to my shyness and fearfulness with harshness. It's interesting that my daughter Sophie had a similar experience in the first grade and switched teachers too.
I had Mrs. Baker in the third. She seemed gruff but was going through a divorce. I remember passing notes by putting them in books along the window for someone else to pick up (Kim Kirkpatrick? David Roberts?). Some of my Wilton Manors friends and acquaintances would graduate from high school with me (Cathy Laurenzi, Clark Trainor).
Mrs. Geyman in the fourth and Mr. Guinn in the fifth. I really liked Mr. Guinn although I struggled with his multiplication speed drills. Speed at thinking was not my strong suit. I believe it was David Roberts and I who raced to see who could read more Hardy Boy novels. He pretty much won. He was so much faster than I that I wondered if he was fibbing a little. But, then again, I was a horribly slow reader at that time. I would say there wasn't much to distinguish me as a student or thinker at school in elementary school.
Mr. Guinn was a runner. I was awestruck that he ran five miles every morning before school. He was perhaps my inspiration to start running later on. Between my parents and me, we somewhat stayed in touch and he would later express congratulations for my achievements in high school.
14. My Grandma Shepherd came to be with us a little in the mid 1970s. My grandfather had died of bone cancer in 1963 and after Frankfort College closed in 1972, it must have been somewhat of a lonely place. At some point she moved out of the house in front and rented it out, living in a tiny place in the back. It flooded at one point and many memories were lost.
My great aunt Nora lived for a time in a silver, metal trailer on my grandmother's property. Aunt Nora was born in 1880, which seemed astounding to me at the time. Grandma Shepherd was my grandfather's second wife. His first wife and he had been Quaker ministers in Michigan, but she died in 1916. He was 11 years older than my grandmother.
At one point Grandma Verna came to live with us in Florida for a spell, along with Aunt Nora. I remember Aunt Nora for her vanilla wafers, for having me memorize the presidents of the United States and for the goodnight saying, "Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite."
She was a hyper-Republican and at least one of her three husbands had been involved in politics in Sullivan, Indiana (she outlived them all). Of course my great-grandfather had fought in the Civil War from the north, so our family was firmly the party of Lincoln. No doubt they couldn't see the inconsistencies of the side the Republicans came to take in the civil rights era. From the 1960s on, the Democrats were more reflective of Lincoln on those issues, and there was a strong migration of southern Democrats to the Republican party from 1950-1980 (e.g., Strom Thurmond).
Aunt Nora had a picture of the three (at that time) presidents who had been assassinated--Lincoln, Harding, and McKinley. It used to sit upstairs in Fort Lauderdale.
Aunt Nora ended up in California, dying at the age of 97. Grandma eventually went back to Indiana to a home in Rossville, where she would die in 1979 (a year before her son Paul). I wanted to build her a plane to take her back. I started nailing wood together. My mother told me I couldn't build a plane like that. I was rather annoyed with her for dashing my dreams.
15. There would be many other projects that my father patiently bore, none of which reached its intended conclusion. There were the worms I was going to raise. (He must have regretted buying me subscriptions to Popular Mechanics and Popular Electronics for the ads in the back for such things). We didn't get beyond buying a tub. I had a paper route that he and mom ended up doing most of the work for.
At one point I wanted to build a remote control airplane, but I lacked any knowledge at all to do so. I was going to use the aluminum from cans for the exterior. In the late 70s, my dad bought a volume a month from Grand Union of the new Funk and Wagnall's encyclopedia for me. But it didn't say how to build a remote control airplane.
I loved my parents, both of whom were smart people, but I felt like if I had only had someone who could teach me these things. I felt like I had no one to guide me in my scientific ambitions. My youngest children have suffered a little with my delight in the math and science they have studied. Unfortunately, I'm afraid they may have felt pushed a little in that direction. That's thankfully all cleared up now with them headed in the directions that are appropriate for them.
16. Although I clearly was a fearful child, those were blissful days. The religious bubble in which we lived afforded me a sense that we were incredibly special to God. We understood God on a level that the vast majority of people did not. I didn't grow up thinking that there were many Christians outside of my small Wesleyan bubble. From the perspective of my worldview, the other kids at school were not Christians. But these were times of blissful ignorance--I didn't think much about it.
8 (cont). Frankfort holds a special place in my childhood memory. In the early days there were condemned buildings to sneak into. There was the old boys dorm and the old chapel with a walk in freezer. There was the basement of the old administration building with things in formaldehyde. I remember something shocking in a jar--was it a brain?
There was softball, exploring in the woods. There were corn fields. There were Frankfort friends that I only saw once a year. In the early years, there were my Dad's parents. There was my mother's family, including my favorite Uncle Paul.
I have few memories of my first four years living in Indiana. One is of spending the night with my sister Patricia and her then new husband Denny Waymire in a trailer at Frankfort Wesleyan College. It must have been late summer 1971. They had just returned from their honeymoon. Probably not a good idea.
9. The evening services at Frankfort were very formative. Most services ended with an altar call of some sort. There would be a final song in which those who needed to get right with God would walk forward to the front of the "tabernacle" and kneel at a long bench that stretched across the front of the building. Eventually, these altar calls would become a matter of great inner turmoil. I was a painfully shy child. The idea of stepping out in front of this mass of people was terrifying, paralyzing.
I may have gone once. One time I went up to the second row after the thousandth verse of "Just as I Am" was over. Not that I had anything I knew to confess or repent of. The question of being willing to go itself became the struggle--as well as the fear that I did have some sin in need of forgiveness. It was quite an unhealthy process about which I'll say more in the next chapter.
It was easy growing up to get a sense of "two trip-ism." It's the mistaken sense that the heart of being a Christian is checking off two boxes for two trips to the altar. [1] First, you go forward to get "saved." Then you go forward to get "sanctified."
You could of course go forward for other things as well. If you sinned or were struggling with something, you could go forward for forgiveness or to ask for the power to become victorious over the sin. You certainly might want to pray for a need or have a "burden" on your heart about something. People sometimes would surround you to help. They might lay hands on you.
 |
| Wesleyan Village If you turn left on the main street at bottom, the second building on left on the end toward the field is the apartment my Dad always tried to get for district conference. |
At Brooksville was a waning collection of retired general officials and other all stars of my church's past. These were my heroes of the faith--and those of my parents. It was at Brooksville that I saw former Wesleyan Methodist General Superintendent Roy Nicholson. These were people like P. F. Elliott, Arthur Bray, Flora Belle Slater and Daisy Buby. Foster Piatt was still district superintendent. He pretty much founded the district with his own hands. Eventually J. D. Abbott settled there.
Brooksville and Hobe Sound seemed to me like vestiges of the old Florida. Hobe Sound had armadillos. The roads were not paved. Micah Travis and I have a childhood memory of him, me, and his older brother coming across a snake just off the Brooksville grounds on an abandoned railway track that was no longer in use by then. District conference was where I met the Bodenhorn sisters Stacey and Stephanie in my early high school years. Some guy sold rocks in a house in the furthermost road. That was long before they expanded the village.
11. Looking back Fort Lauderdale and Wilton Manors where we lived still seemed young. My parents bought our house in 1971 for $25,000. Integration had not been without conflict around 1960, but I did not perceive any struggle once I arrived. Sunrise Middle School was very integrated.
For much of my elementary school years, I walked the two blocks home from school every day. My mother took me in the morning, as I recall. She worked as a volunteer in the nurses office.
My years at Wilton Manors Elementary School were mostly happy. Mrs. Giddens for kindergarten, with Mrs. Stokes for music. I hid under the bed before the first day of kindergarten, still four years old. I was afraid to leave the safety of home. Mom had the choice of putting me in early or waiting a year. She thought it was better to get me started. I guess I cried the whole first week but then gladly went from the second week on.
Mrs. Welsh for first grade. One of my first friends in the neighborhood was a boy named David Dibble. He lived near the first banyan tree I had ever seen. It was fantastic to climb in! For my part, we had a mango tree in our back yard (I wasn't able to climb it yet in the first grade), and a River Birch on the front right side I called the paper tree. My dad loved mangos, although his diabetes would interfere with his consumption soon enough. I hated mangos because of the afterbite. The only mango I have liked was in Sierra Leone, a green one.
Another early friend was named Joseph. He was horribly jaundiced and I think eventually died of leukemia. At church there was a boy named Joey Fancher, who I think also died when I was in college.
12. There was a tree on the side next to the flat roof over our shed. At a certain point of growth, I jumped from the roof to the tree. I think I jumped from the roof to the ground once, about ten feet. There were times of exploring during elementary school. At one point my next street neighbor friend Steve Corso and I (I think it was him) crawled under the elementary school. Another time we climbed up on the roof of the Grand Union grocery store and found a trampoline in someone's yard on the way down. I felt horribly guilty about doing these things, but they were exhilarating.
At one point we dug a pit in the back yard by my swing set and covered it with a board. The sand was soft white once you got down a foot or so. I got in the pit and Steve or someone covered the board with sand. He went and got my mother and asked her if she knew where I was. Of course I was there! Once I told her I was forbidden from doing that again.
There were other trees on Steve's street that were great to climb because you could go from one to the other down the line. It was a field owned by the Presbyterian Church on 26th street. Of course it's hard to recognize these things today without a keen eye, the place is so overgrown with people. The library is still there on the corner of 5th ave and 26ths, I believe.
There was a 7-eleven where 5th ave hit Wilton Drive. It's where I later bought my comic books and could play Asteriods and later Galaga. I had boundaries, 26th on the north, Wilton Drive, the road west of the elementary school. Every once and a while I would propose an expansion of boundaries to my father. He really didn't care, I don't think, but he would sign the proposal and notarize it.
I only remember lying twice in my first ten years of life. One was when I asked mom if I could go to 7-eleven. I knew she would assume it was the one on Wilton Drive. But I meant the one near K-Mart up 6th ave. I confessed that evening because I felt guilty. The other one was not quite so blatant. I didn't correct someone who thought I had intentionally given the wrong answer.
I started "The Fighting Team" during those years. I would later feel convicted about the name and would put out a fleece. If I could find a hammer that had gone missing, I would change the name. I later found it in the mango tree, just where I'd left it. I changed the name to The Future (organization) Team, so I could keep the letters TFT.
It eventually became TOFT Electronics, a subsidiary of Schenck Enterprises along with Schenck Airlines and The Schenck Medical Foundation. There might have been one other subsidiary.
I drew up papers for the business and, of course, always had my dad notarize the signatures. My cousin Tim LeBaron would be in it. At some point I buried the papers in a box with a map to find it. I think I later dug it up, but that box was eventually lost and never found. It's of course possible it was thrown away. Then again, it could still be buried somewhere on the east side of the house at 547 NE 24th St, Wilton Manors, Florida.
My friends and I played superheroes and I tried to draw them. Captain Universe was the strongest (with an orange towel for a cape). His father was Captain Grenade, and he had a son called the Lightning Kid. I found school horribly boring. I did a lot of drawing and fantasizing in my head.
13. Somehow I had a bad experience with my initial second grade teacher. Don't remember who that was. They moved me into Mrs. Standard's class after Christmas. The fall teacher, as I recall, reacted to my shyness and fearfulness with harshness. It's interesting that my daughter Sophie had a similar experience in the first grade and switched teachers too.
I had Mrs. Baker in the third. She seemed gruff but was going through a divorce. I remember passing notes by putting them in books along the window for someone else to pick up (Kim Kirkpatrick? David Roberts?). Some of my Wilton Manors friends and acquaintances would graduate from high school with me (Cathy Laurenzi, Clark Trainor).
Mrs. Geyman in the fourth and Mr. Guinn in the fifth. I really liked Mr. Guinn although I struggled with his multiplication speed drills. Speed at thinking was not my strong suit. I believe it was David Roberts and I who raced to see who could read more Hardy Boy novels. He pretty much won. He was so much faster than I that I wondered if he was fibbing a little. But, then again, I was a horribly slow reader at that time. I would say there wasn't much to distinguish me as a student or thinker at school in elementary school.
Mr. Guinn was a runner. I was awestruck that he ran five miles every morning before school. He was perhaps my inspiration to start running later on. Between my parents and me, we somewhat stayed in touch and he would later express congratulations for my achievements in high school.
14. My Grandma Shepherd came to be with us a little in the mid 1970s. My grandfather had died of bone cancer in 1963 and after Frankfort College closed in 1972, it must have been somewhat of a lonely place. At some point she moved out of the house in front and rented it out, living in a tiny place in the back. It flooded at one point and many memories were lost.
My great aunt Nora lived for a time in a silver, metal trailer on my grandmother's property. Aunt Nora was born in 1880, which seemed astounding to me at the time. Grandma Shepherd was my grandfather's second wife. His first wife and he had been Quaker ministers in Michigan, but she died in 1916. He was 11 years older than my grandmother.
At one point Grandma Verna came to live with us in Florida for a spell, along with Aunt Nora. I remember Aunt Nora for her vanilla wafers, for having me memorize the presidents of the United States and for the goodnight saying, "Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite."
She was a hyper-Republican and at least one of her three husbands had been involved in politics in Sullivan, Indiana (she outlived them all). Of course my great-grandfather had fought in the Civil War from the north, so our family was firmly the party of Lincoln. No doubt they couldn't see the inconsistencies of the side the Republicans came to take in the civil rights era. From the 1960s on, the Democrats were more reflective of Lincoln on those issues, and there was a strong migration of southern Democrats to the Republican party from 1950-1980 (e.g., Strom Thurmond).
Aunt Nora had a picture of the three (at that time) presidents who had been assassinated--Lincoln, Harding, and McKinley. It used to sit upstairs in Fort Lauderdale.
Aunt Nora ended up in California, dying at the age of 97. Grandma eventually went back to Indiana to a home in Rossville, where she would die in 1979 (a year before her son Paul). I wanted to build her a plane to take her back. I started nailing wood together. My mother told me I couldn't build a plane like that. I was rather annoyed with her for dashing my dreams.
15. There would be many other projects that my father patiently bore, none of which reached its intended conclusion. There were the worms I was going to raise. (He must have regretted buying me subscriptions to Popular Mechanics and Popular Electronics for the ads in the back for such things). We didn't get beyond buying a tub. I had a paper route that he and mom ended up doing most of the work for.
At one point I wanted to build a remote control airplane, but I lacked any knowledge at all to do so. I was going to use the aluminum from cans for the exterior. In the late 70s, my dad bought a volume a month from Grand Union of the new Funk and Wagnall's encyclopedia for me. But it didn't say how to build a remote control airplane.
I loved my parents, both of whom were smart people, but I felt like if I had only had someone who could teach me these things. I felt like I had no one to guide me in my scientific ambitions. My youngest children have suffered a little with my delight in the math and science they have studied. Unfortunately, I'm afraid they may have felt pushed a little in that direction. That's thankfully all cleared up now with them headed in the directions that are appropriate for them.
16. Although I clearly was a fearful child, those were blissful days. The religious bubble in which we lived afforded me a sense that we were incredibly special to God. We understood God on a level that the vast majority of people did not. I didn't grow up thinking that there were many Christians outside of my small Wesleyan bubble. From the perspective of my worldview, the other kids at school were not Christians. But these were times of blissful ignorance--I didn't think much about it.
Monday, December 02, 2019
Blissful Ignorance 3
previous post
4. But my father did survive World War 2. My parents did meet. They had four daughters from 1948 to 1958 and thought they were done. Then they were surprised to have a boy in 1966, as of someone born out of season.
I grew up around "old people." My father was almost 42 when I was born. My mother was 40. I was born about a month premature. It was a dry birth as my mother's water broke about a week before I was delivered. There were medical students in the room to observe when I was finally born. They wouldn't do it that way today.
My sisters were pretty much out of the house when I was born, except for my youngest sister. But I have only the faintest memories of her living at home. All of my sisters did some or all high school at a Bible school of some sort. My oldest sisters went to the high school at Frankfort Pilgrim College, living with my grandmother off campus. My youngest sister did several years at Hobe Sound Bible College. These were all old school holiness places, buns and all.
5. They were all very "conservative." The meaning of the word conservative basically depends on what you're conserving. Conservative Quakers don't baptize. Conservative Catholics worship in Latin. Conservative holiness women used to wear skirts and put their hair up in buns, "Wesleyan wads" if you would.
I grew up already a generation in the past. The Wesleyan church of my youth was more the Pilgrim Holiness Church of the fifties or early sixties in some respects, not really the Wesleyan Church of the seventies. I grew up thinking that women who cut their hair had either "backed up on light" or simply didn't know any better.
I have always been a people-pleaser. I had not a rebellious bone in my body that I knew of. I think my mother at one point thought I was rebelling against my youth but I didn't experience it that way. My transition from the holiness world of my childhood to a more mainstream Wesleyan identity was very painful in some respects. It was driven, in my opinion, by a commitment to truth and some paradigm challenging experiences.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Until I was twenty, I was pretty much zealous for the traditions of my elders.
6. The first ten years of my life were pretty happy, as far as I can recall. My mother's philosophy of child-raising, at least with regard to me, was not to provoke her children to wrath. She did not force me to do things and mostly didn't need to. I was not resistant, for the most part. My wife would strongly suspect I was spoiled growing up.
The first four years of my life were spent in Indianapolis, in the church that would become Trinity Wesleyan Church. In my time, it was Northside, in what is now a much different part of Indy than it was then. Of course even then my family drove twenty minutes from Carmel to the church for every service. As so many churches did, it would move to the suburbs around 1980. We could ponder possible socio-economic and racial dimensions to this move but I won't.
I have few memories of Preston Drive in northern Indy. Four year old walks with my father to a fire hydrant on College Ave no doubt to talk about deep subjects. Almost getting run over by our car when I put it in neutral in our driveway. I'm told I used to shoot with my fingers at Pastor Art Davis while he preached. As foreshadowing, I'm told I used to preach up a storm on a mound in our backyard.
My father used to bounce me on his knee, "I rode my horsey and I went to town, and when I got there, my horsey broke down." On the "down," he would drop his knee. I did it with my kids too. He would also sing, "Kenny's my boy. He's the only boy I've got. All my other boys are girls. Kenny's my boy." I sang it to my son too, substituting "Tommy." Another thing he would do is the little piggies. "This little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy ate roast beef, and this little piggy had none. And this little piggy went 'wee, wee, wee' all the way home." Of course I did that with my kids as well.
7. About a month before I turned five we moved to Florida. My dad worked for what would become GMAC, General Motor's Assurance Corporation. He was immensely responsible, a book-keeper by personality, like his mother. He had been the District Treasurer for the Indiana Central District of the Wesleyan Church. He would become the same for Florida and served for thirty years. In that time I saw him transition from a six-inch thick ledger to Quicken Books electronically.
I hope my Hoosier friends will forgive me, but even in the tribal days of my teens I was grateful to grow up in Florida. Even when I still quite a "holiness Wesleyan," it seemed to me that there was a certain narrow-mindedness to the Wesleyans of Indiana Central. Perhaps I will have further thoughts on that later. I felt that growing up in south Florida somehow gave me a bigger picture of the world.
Nevertheless, we did not lose contact with the world of my parents' past. Growing up, almost all of our vacations had to do with the church in some way. Every four years my father was a delegate to General Conference. That took us to places like Wichita, Kansas and Lake Junaluska, North Carolina. We went to Brooksville Winter Camp. We went to Hobe Sound Bible Camp. We went to district conference.
Two trips of great interest as a child were the trips to visit two of my older sisters at Brainerd Indian School around 1976 and the Philippines to visit my sister Juanita in 1978. The Wesleyan Church would later issue an apology to native American Wesleyans for the cultural insensitivity associated with our work at Brainerd. Many who had worked there did not see it and probably still don't to this day.
Don't get me wrong. I believe that the intentions of those who worked at Brainerd were good. They provided education, which was good. I believe most of the students there probably loved their teachers. The problem was not intention--at least I hope not. The problem was a lack of self-awareness.
Growing up in somewhat of an unreflective tributary of Christianity would later, in my opinion, give me a really good grasp of what I would call "pre-modern interpretation." It is an inability to see that you are reading the Bible as a mirror for what you already believe. The Bible is extensively a set of proof-texts that give a divine imprimatur for your group's traditions, beliefs, values, and practices. The Bible is proclaimed to be the authority, but it is really much more a sociological mechanism for giving divine sanction for your tribe's identity.
In my late 20s, I sometimes thought to myself that I might have been spared some of my faith crisis in those days if I had been born in a bit more of the mainstream. On the other hand, I'm not sure that we necessarily start out more self-aware in any tradition. Education with an open mind is what tends to make a person more self-aware, and such education almost always involves deconstruction of tradition. Nevertheless, it is still possible that I would have struggled less. I don't know.
8. The most significant trips of all were the yearly pilgrimages to Frankfort Camp. The college was closed in 1972, I believe, but the camp meeting continued. While camp meetings began to close, I grew up in this time machine into the holiness movement's past. Running the aisle's, shouting hallelujah--I caught the tail end of that phenomenon just as J. D. Abbott and others were moving the church toward doing everything "decently and in order." (I was actually named after his son.)
4. But my father did survive World War 2. My parents did meet. They had four daughters from 1948 to 1958 and thought they were done. Then they were surprised to have a boy in 1966, as of someone born out of season.
I grew up around "old people." My father was almost 42 when I was born. My mother was 40. I was born about a month premature. It was a dry birth as my mother's water broke about a week before I was delivered. There were medical students in the room to observe when I was finally born. They wouldn't do it that way today.
My sisters were pretty much out of the house when I was born, except for my youngest sister. But I have only the faintest memories of her living at home. All of my sisters did some or all high school at a Bible school of some sort. My oldest sisters went to the high school at Frankfort Pilgrim College, living with my grandmother off campus. My youngest sister did several years at Hobe Sound Bible College. These were all old school holiness places, buns and all.
5. They were all very "conservative." The meaning of the word conservative basically depends on what you're conserving. Conservative Quakers don't baptize. Conservative Catholics worship in Latin. Conservative holiness women used to wear skirts and put their hair up in buns, "Wesleyan wads" if you would.
I grew up already a generation in the past. The Wesleyan church of my youth was more the Pilgrim Holiness Church of the fifties or early sixties in some respects, not really the Wesleyan Church of the seventies. I grew up thinking that women who cut their hair had either "backed up on light" or simply didn't know any better.
I have always been a people-pleaser. I had not a rebellious bone in my body that I knew of. I think my mother at one point thought I was rebelling against my youth but I didn't experience it that way. My transition from the holiness world of my childhood to a more mainstream Wesleyan identity was very painful in some respects. It was driven, in my opinion, by a commitment to truth and some paradigm challenging experiences.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Until I was twenty, I was pretty much zealous for the traditions of my elders.
6. The first ten years of my life were pretty happy, as far as I can recall. My mother's philosophy of child-raising, at least with regard to me, was not to provoke her children to wrath. She did not force me to do things and mostly didn't need to. I was not resistant, for the most part. My wife would strongly suspect I was spoiled growing up.
The first four years of my life were spent in Indianapolis, in the church that would become Trinity Wesleyan Church. In my time, it was Northside, in what is now a much different part of Indy than it was then. Of course even then my family drove twenty minutes from Carmel to the church for every service. As so many churches did, it would move to the suburbs around 1980. We could ponder possible socio-economic and racial dimensions to this move but I won't.
I have few memories of Preston Drive in northern Indy. Four year old walks with my father to a fire hydrant on College Ave no doubt to talk about deep subjects. Almost getting run over by our car when I put it in neutral in our driveway. I'm told I used to shoot with my fingers at Pastor Art Davis while he preached. As foreshadowing, I'm told I used to preach up a storm on a mound in our backyard.
My father used to bounce me on his knee, "I rode my horsey and I went to town, and when I got there, my horsey broke down." On the "down," he would drop his knee. I did it with my kids too. He would also sing, "Kenny's my boy. He's the only boy I've got. All my other boys are girls. Kenny's my boy." I sang it to my son too, substituting "Tommy." Another thing he would do is the little piggies. "This little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy ate roast beef, and this little piggy had none. And this little piggy went 'wee, wee, wee' all the way home." Of course I did that with my kids as well.
7. About a month before I turned five we moved to Florida. My dad worked for what would become GMAC, General Motor's Assurance Corporation. He was immensely responsible, a book-keeper by personality, like his mother. He had been the District Treasurer for the Indiana Central District of the Wesleyan Church. He would become the same for Florida and served for thirty years. In that time I saw him transition from a six-inch thick ledger to Quicken Books electronically.
I hope my Hoosier friends will forgive me, but even in the tribal days of my teens I was grateful to grow up in Florida. Even when I still quite a "holiness Wesleyan," it seemed to me that there was a certain narrow-mindedness to the Wesleyans of Indiana Central. Perhaps I will have further thoughts on that later. I felt that growing up in south Florida somehow gave me a bigger picture of the world.
Nevertheless, we did not lose contact with the world of my parents' past. Growing up, almost all of our vacations had to do with the church in some way. Every four years my father was a delegate to General Conference. That took us to places like Wichita, Kansas and Lake Junaluska, North Carolina. We went to Brooksville Winter Camp. We went to Hobe Sound Bible Camp. We went to district conference.
Two trips of great interest as a child were the trips to visit two of my older sisters at Brainerd Indian School around 1976 and the Philippines to visit my sister Juanita in 1978. The Wesleyan Church would later issue an apology to native American Wesleyans for the cultural insensitivity associated with our work at Brainerd. Many who had worked there did not see it and probably still don't to this day.
Don't get me wrong. I believe that the intentions of those who worked at Brainerd were good. They provided education, which was good. I believe most of the students there probably loved their teachers. The problem was not intention--at least I hope not. The problem was a lack of self-awareness.
Growing up in somewhat of an unreflective tributary of Christianity would later, in my opinion, give me a really good grasp of what I would call "pre-modern interpretation." It is an inability to see that you are reading the Bible as a mirror for what you already believe. The Bible is extensively a set of proof-texts that give a divine imprimatur for your group's traditions, beliefs, values, and practices. The Bible is proclaimed to be the authority, but it is really much more a sociological mechanism for giving divine sanction for your tribe's identity.
In my late 20s, I sometimes thought to myself that I might have been spared some of my faith crisis in those days if I had been born in a bit more of the mainstream. On the other hand, I'm not sure that we necessarily start out more self-aware in any tradition. Education with an open mind is what tends to make a person more self-aware, and such education almost always involves deconstruction of tradition. Nevertheless, it is still possible that I would have struggled less. I don't know.
8. The most significant trips of all were the yearly pilgrimages to Frankfort Camp. The college was closed in 1972, I believe, but the camp meeting continued. While camp meetings began to close, I grew up in this time machine into the holiness movement's past. Running the aisle's, shouting hallelujah--I caught the tail end of that phenomenon just as J. D. Abbott and others were moving the church toward doing everything "decently and in order." (I was actually named after his son.)
Friday, November 29, 2019
Blissful Ignorance 2
previous post
I was born at a very young age. And before I did anything else, I was born.
1. Of course God had been quite busy for quite an eternity before I emerged into the world. My existence is contingent. God's is necessary.
This is one of Aquinas' arguments for the existence of God that I like quite a bit. It makes sense to me although I don't consider it definitive from where I sit in the peanut galleries. It actually reminds me a little of Anselm's ontological argument for God, although in a more plausible form.
All that exists around me has a contingent existence. I know of nothing in my sense experience that has to be. But if the existence of all real things was only contingent, then it would be possible that nothing would exist. But if it were possible for nothing to exist, then nothing could ever come into being. Therefore, at least one thing must exist whose existence is necessary. And this, we call God.
Of course a cosmologist might respond that matter/energy cannot be created or destroyed. Does that make the existence of matter/energy necessary? I would respond that God created it. Then I am affirming by faith that it is not necessary even though it appears so.
Then there is the idea that particles can briefly appear and disappear as a function of quantum vacuum fluctuations. Some suggest that perhaps the universe is the result of one such fluctuation on the smallest of scales before the great expansion. Seems rather far fetched to me.
2. So I am a contingent being. What if my father had died in World War II? What if he and my mother had never met? The world would have gone on just fine.
I come from solid Hoosier stock. My mother and father were born and lived the early half of their lives in Indiana. Both sets of their parents were born and died in Indiana.
My mother's nineteenth century ancestors were Hoosiers, from the Sullivan area. Whether Shepherd, Rich, Wall, Shelburn, or Wright, they were in Indiana by 1850. The Shelburns went back to a man who was in Jamestown by 1640. Family tradition is that he came over with Captain John Smith, although he is not found on any manifest.
The Shepherds were my mother's maiden namesake. They would seem to be Scots-Irish Quakers who came over from northern Ireland in the early 1700s. Family tradition is that they made their way to southern Indiana by way of North Carolina, I would guess from the Guilford County area.
My Grandfather Shepherd was a teacher at Frankfort Pilgrim College, a graduate of Wabash College in 1907. He was an orphan at 14 when his father died. His mother had died when he was six, in 1889. His father had been injured in the Civil War escorting an unruly soldier to the brig. A horse had stepped on him in a ruckus.
My father's family were also Hoosier settlers. His mother's family on all sides were Old German Baptists from Carroll County in the Camden area. They migrated from Germany in the 1700s. His father was of Dutch descent, coming over to New Amsterdam in the 1600s before the British took over and made it New York. You can still see the name Schenck in that part of Brooklyn.
My inherited pronunciation, by the way, is SKANK. I have since gone by SHANK to protect my wife and children. But my Dad used to tell people it was pronounced like "skunk" with an A.
3. Both my parents' family were deeply religious, deeply Christian, deeply holiness. One of my best friends in early high school was Derek Heinemann. He wrote in my yearbook that I was the most religious person he knew.
Both my grandfathers were preachers in the Pilgrim Holiness Church, a Wesleyan denomination birthed in the early 1920s out of a snowball of small holiness groups that grew out of revivals around the turn of the century. My father's dad was a church planter, an entrepreneur of sorts. He wasn't book smart by any means, and I remember him as a gruff, no-nonsense man. He was a firebrand, a man of law rather than grace.
My other grandfather pastored a number of churches during the Depression, when the college was closed. He was a teacher of end times prophecy, a thorough dispensationalist. A soft, humble man who was generally the last to get paid. He apparently only believed sex was for procreation.
I was born at a very young age. And before I did anything else, I was born.
1. Of course God had been quite busy for quite an eternity before I emerged into the world. My existence is contingent. God's is necessary.
This is one of Aquinas' arguments for the existence of God that I like quite a bit. It makes sense to me although I don't consider it definitive from where I sit in the peanut galleries. It actually reminds me a little of Anselm's ontological argument for God, although in a more plausible form.
All that exists around me has a contingent existence. I know of nothing in my sense experience that has to be. But if the existence of all real things was only contingent, then it would be possible that nothing would exist. But if it were possible for nothing to exist, then nothing could ever come into being. Therefore, at least one thing must exist whose existence is necessary. And this, we call God.
Of course a cosmologist might respond that matter/energy cannot be created or destroyed. Does that make the existence of matter/energy necessary? I would respond that God created it. Then I am affirming by faith that it is not necessary even though it appears so.
Then there is the idea that particles can briefly appear and disappear as a function of quantum vacuum fluctuations. Some suggest that perhaps the universe is the result of one such fluctuation on the smallest of scales before the great expansion. Seems rather far fetched to me.
2. So I am a contingent being. What if my father had died in World War II? What if he and my mother had never met? The world would have gone on just fine.
I come from solid Hoosier stock. My mother and father were born and lived the early half of their lives in Indiana. Both sets of their parents were born and died in Indiana.
My mother's nineteenth century ancestors were Hoosiers, from the Sullivan area. Whether Shepherd, Rich, Wall, Shelburn, or Wright, they were in Indiana by 1850. The Shelburns went back to a man who was in Jamestown by 1640. Family tradition is that he came over with Captain John Smith, although he is not found on any manifest.
The Shepherds were my mother's maiden namesake. They would seem to be Scots-Irish Quakers who came over from northern Ireland in the early 1700s. Family tradition is that they made their way to southern Indiana by way of North Carolina, I would guess from the Guilford County area.
My Grandfather Shepherd was a teacher at Frankfort Pilgrim College, a graduate of Wabash College in 1907. He was an orphan at 14 when his father died. His mother had died when he was six, in 1889. His father had been injured in the Civil War escorting an unruly soldier to the brig. A horse had stepped on him in a ruckus.
My father's family were also Hoosier settlers. His mother's family on all sides were Old German Baptists from Carroll County in the Camden area. They migrated from Germany in the 1700s. His father was of Dutch descent, coming over to New Amsterdam in the 1600s before the British took over and made it New York. You can still see the name Schenck in that part of Brooklyn.
My inherited pronunciation, by the way, is SKANK. I have since gone by SHANK to protect my wife and children. But my Dad used to tell people it was pronounced like "skunk" with an A.
3. Both my parents' family were deeply religious, deeply Christian, deeply holiness. One of my best friends in early high school was Derek Heinemann. He wrote in my yearbook that I was the most religious person he knew.
Both my grandfathers were preachers in the Pilgrim Holiness Church, a Wesleyan denomination birthed in the early 1920s out of a snowball of small holiness groups that grew out of revivals around the turn of the century. My father's dad was a church planter, an entrepreneur of sorts. He wasn't book smart by any means, and I remember him as a gruff, no-nonsense man. He was a firebrand, a man of law rather than grace.
My other grandfather pastored a number of churches during the Depression, when the college was closed. He was a teacher of end times prophecy, a thorough dispensationalist. A soft, humble man who was generally the last to get paid. He apparently only believed sex was for procreation.
Not Quite a Genius 1
Preface
1. I can have a somewhat morbid personality, with a tinge of hypochondria. It is a little joke in my family. It's not that I am surprised to have lived past fifty years. It's just that I have been preparing for death for a couple decades.
I have written a lot about myself in various places--blogs, Facebook, and such. Not that there is anything significant about my life. One possible title for my autobiography might be, "The Life of No One in Particular." I am just an intellectual hoarder. I want to preserve as many memories of the past as possible. One of the greatest losses in a person's death, at least to me, is the loss of their memories. A little history dies with each person. Frankly, a lot of history dies with each person. It can never be recovered, at least not on earth. This saddens me.
The electronic age makes possible the preservation of so much more. Papers must be discarded. Old trophies and plaques deteriorate. They become a burden to families for those who preserve them. But no one begrudges the perpetual storage of electronic words.
So I have done the thought experiment. If I were to find out suddenly that I was dying, would I have time to write my reflections on my life? Probably not. I would probably be to preoccupied with the things having to do with dying. And of course many deaths come without warning. I am traveling a good deal later today, as I write these first notes. Stuff happens.
My intention is to capture my thoughts and reflection on life here, particularly on my life. I have had many a pleasant wandering. My life has been full of privilege and joy. Not that I am a happy person. I am a melancholic. I live from emotional highs to emotional lows. I have never been diagnosed with anything. I take no medication for anything. It is simply the case that I have not always felt what is a truly wonderful life.
In high school they told me my IQ was 139, I think. It could have been 138. At times I feel stupid. At times I feel smart. Most of the time I just feel like I'm doing my best to get through life. Growing up I did not feel any smarter than anyone else.
However, I've sometimes joked that I was one point short of a number they've called genius IQ. It's really quite meaningless. But I've joked that they should put on my epitaph, "Not Quite a Genius." It somehow seems to capture something about myself. Sometimes above average. Not quite excellent.
1. I can have a somewhat morbid personality, with a tinge of hypochondria. It is a little joke in my family. It's not that I am surprised to have lived past fifty years. It's just that I have been preparing for death for a couple decades.
I have written a lot about myself in various places--blogs, Facebook, and such. Not that there is anything significant about my life. One possible title for my autobiography might be, "The Life of No One in Particular." I am just an intellectual hoarder. I want to preserve as many memories of the past as possible. One of the greatest losses in a person's death, at least to me, is the loss of their memories. A little history dies with each person. Frankly, a lot of history dies with each person. It can never be recovered, at least not on earth. This saddens me.
The electronic age makes possible the preservation of so much more. Papers must be discarded. Old trophies and plaques deteriorate. They become a burden to families for those who preserve them. But no one begrudges the perpetual storage of electronic words.
So I have done the thought experiment. If I were to find out suddenly that I was dying, would I have time to write my reflections on my life? Probably not. I would probably be to preoccupied with the things having to do with dying. And of course many deaths come without warning. I am traveling a good deal later today, as I write these first notes. Stuff happens.
My intention is to capture my thoughts and reflection on life here, particularly on my life. I have had many a pleasant wandering. My life has been full of privilege and joy. Not that I am a happy person. I am a melancholic. I live from emotional highs to emotional lows. I have never been diagnosed with anything. I take no medication for anything. It is simply the case that I have not always felt what is a truly wonderful life.
In high school they told me my IQ was 139, I think. It could have been 138. At times I feel stupid. At times I feel smart. Most of the time I just feel like I'm doing my best to get through life. Growing up I did not feel any smarter than anyone else.
However, I've sometimes joked that I was one point short of a number they've called genius IQ. It's really quite meaningless. But I've joked that they should put on my epitaph, "Not Quite a Genius." It somehow seems to capture something about myself. Sometimes above average. Not quite excellent.
Sunday, November 17, 2019
Reminiscences: 1975-76, 1978
The violin on the left was hers. If I have the story correctly, she bought it off a man in Indy who had played in John Philip Sousa's band. It was my first violin.
I played violin in the fifth grade, as I recall, for Mrs. Stokes at Wilton Manors Elementary School in Florida. I was also in the Florida Singing Sons that year. We sang excerpts from The Sound of Music. Interestingly, I found it difficult to memorize all the words to the songs.
I have sometimes joked that I have a phonographic memory. I do well remembering tunes, harmonies, percussion. My family will attest that I am not so good at getting the lyrics correctly, a source of great irritation to my wife. I can whistle Mozart (as one Houghton student remarked coming upon me on the sidewalk). I can't always get the words quite right to some song I've sung for years.
I had Mrs. Stokes, as I recall, as my Kindergarten music teacher. (Mrs. Giddons was my main teacher for Kindergarten).
2. I took violin lessons along with a couple other students at Sunrise Middle School in the summer of 1978. I don't remember the name of the teacher. I picture him as a somewhat short man with a mustache. I did not practice, I hate to say. My parents got me the slightly larger violin to the right at some point in there.
This was always my difficulty in those days. Short span of attention. A woman in the seat in front of us at a church concert in Vero Beach once asked my mother if I'd been checked for hyperactivity. I suspect I was just being a child and the woman needed to take a chill pill. :-)
My mother's approach was not to force me to learn piano and such. When I expressed interest, she gladly gave me music or a lesson. So to whatever extent I can play the piano (which is not much), I am mostly self-taught. I hated having to follow the fingering of the lessons. Why can't I hit the notes however I can hit the notes?
Of course I agree with the words spoken to me often then--"When you're older you'll wish you had practiced." I knew she was right then and I agree with her now. I have become much more disciplined over the years as my metabolism has slowed down. Youth is, alas, wasted on the young.
3. I think I learned "Turkey in the Straw" in fifth grade (1975-76). I can probably still screech it out. I tried to learn a little vibrato in the seventh grade summer (1978), but I never mastered it.
As for the piano, I was inspired by my brother-in-law, Dalbert Walker. He introduced me to Rondo Capriccioso by Felix Mendelssohn. I got to where I could play quite a bit of the beginning of it just hammering it out on my own. My mother had of course helped me much earlier memorize Fur Elise. Somewhere in there also was Debussy's Claire de Lune. Pieces I aspired to but never attained were Liebestraum by Franz Liszt and Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C Sharp Minor.
This latter piece was a favorite of the man who lived two houses down west from us in "the woods." He and his wife had so many trees around their house that you could hardly see in. It was intentional. But as they got older they became friends with my family. They gave Dalbert a grand piano. Because of the first three notes, he called the Prelude the "O My God" prelude. They were quite explicitly atheist, the only atheists I knew in those years. But they were very nice people and became somewhat reflective in later life, as I recall.
I still tell myself that I will return to the piano when I am retired.
As a note to myself, the man next to us west was Mr. Pritchard. Tony was across the street. The Wilkersons lived across from the woods. The Hartmans (Jennifer's grandfather) and Verdigams across 6th avenue.
Books I've Read/Skimmed
So that I don't forget in my end of year summary, I wanted to jot down some books I've read or skimmed this year that I haven't mentioned.
1. Prisoners of Geography
2. Range
3. Ask
4. The Language of God
5. The Lost World of Genesis 1: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate
6. The Lost World of Adam and Eve
7. When Science Meets Religion
8. Religion and Science
1. Prisoners of Geography
2. Range
3. Ask
4. The Language of God
5. The Lost World of Genesis 1: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate
6. The Lost World of Adam and Eve
7. When Science Meets Religion
8. Religion and Science
Saturday, November 16, 2019
Reminiscences: Ichthusman (1990-92)
Moving affords you the chance to see items from your past. I'm not quite sure what to do with all of them. But I thought as I sort through things I might catalog snippets of my life.1. I believe it was during the years I was a teaching fellow at Asbury Seminary that I occasionally played the role of Ichthusman at the summer Ichthus festival at the old campground just east of Wilmore. Ichthus was started by Bob Lyon as a kind of Christian version of Woodstock.
I was not exciting enough as a student to be asked to do something like this, but as a Greek and Hebrew teaching fellow I found my stride for the first time in my life. In fact, I would say those two years were probably the happiest of my life. I don't think I was especially thought of as funny before I started teaching Greek. (although my menu-boards at seminary may be a future post)
I did always have a penchant for superheroes and capes, however. I don't know how the idea emerged. I would come out on stage with the Velcroed white shirt and blue pants to the left, which I bought at some goodwill store of some kind. Then "Lust Boy" or "Sin Man" would come on stage. Then off with the outer clothing and Ichthusman to the rescue.
I found most of the pieces to the outfit in my current move. The toilet cleaning gloves were thrown away several years ago. At one point I had the idea of parachuting into the campground, an idea that was quickly dismissed not least for insurance purposes.2. Close friends, an opportunity to teach with a little money, a stimulated mind, Lexington nearby, running, the naivete of youth in a sheltered world--these were great years. I started an MA in classics at UK in the spring of my first year as teaching fellow and would finish in 93. I found my master's hood from the University of Kentucky as well.
I actually proposed to my wife Angie under "High Bridge" during Ichthus in 1998, four miles south of Wilmore at the Kentucky River. She was a youth pastor at the time and took the Main Street United Methodist youth of her church to Ichthus. It was a cold and rainy set of days, as I recall. That was near the end of my first year teaching at IWU.
3. My educational path in those days was similar to that of Joe Dongell. He had graduated from Central Wesleyan College before me (now Southern Wesleyan). He had gone to Asbury. He had become a Teaching Fellow. He had gone to the University of Kentucky to do an MA in Classical Languages and Literature. I think I even had the same full tuition scholarship there that he did.
Of course he was superior to me at every step. In those days I always felt like I was playing catch-up. When I finished a degree, I felt like I was finally ready to start.
I adjuncted for Midway College (now Midway University) near Louisville a couple times around 92-93. It was still a college for women at that time. They were mostly nursing students. I followed the textbook and syllabus of Robert Miller, who had been a member of the Jesus Seminar. I thought it interesting at the time that he would have someone from Asbury teach. Another teaching fellow had done it before me, although I don't remember who.
I remember arguing in class for the virgin birth by saying that Paul believed it and he was close enough in time to the situation to know. It later occurred to me that Paul never clearly mentions the virgin birth in his writings :-) Galatians 4:4 is hardly explicit. The paradigmatic lapse indicated to me that I had been viewing the Bible as one book with a single author rather than as a collection of books with different authors.
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