Sunday, July 14, 2013

Search for Decoder Rings


In the mid-1950s I was very active in the Methodist Church in my hometown in Kentucky. It was the hub of my social life and provided some grounding for me as I tried to figure out who and what I was.

In college in 1962, the Wesley Foundation, also affiliated with Methodist Church, became the hub of my social life. The grounding shifted. I started reading at Tillich and Kierkegaard and Bonheoffer and their ilk as a result of my involvement with the Wesley Foundation. I say “read at” because I was not equipped to read and understand these guys, but it seemed they had important things to say so I kept plugging away at them. I also got tuned into Hoffer as well as the beginnings of liberation theology and social justice.

Meanwhile, in my Freshman English classes I started reading at Transcendentalists and Existentialists, and going to movies that I did not understand. I did understand that they held messages that, if I could decode them, would be important.

I also spent some time in college reading at the Bible (not in Aramaic or Hebrew of course—I did not have the languages), knowing there were messages there as well, if I could decode them.

Several of my friends, the ones who weren’t majoring in philosophy or accounting, were looking into Divinity School, so I learned about Vanderbilt, The University of Chicago, and the crown jewel of the genre, as determined by the elite of Western Kentucky State College, Yale.

Since college I have read at other philosophers, the Qur’an (not in Aramaic of course), Zen, Taoism, and such, looking for codes, or at least decoder rings, while fantasizing about spending a year studying things mystical at Chicago, in Kyoto, cruising the Greek Islands, and, most importantly, spending time at Yale.

As the years passed, religion gave up on me. I maintained a belief in a metaphysical power, but its manifestation in temporal organizations created by humans ran counter to my understanding of that power.  In plain English, I fell out of love with the religions created by preachers, priests, and theologians.

I became a management professor in the early 1980s, put aside fantasies of studying the metaphysical through the lenses of the temporal,  and focused my attention on management literature, some of which purported to contain wisdom and answers. The good news was that this literature was easy to read and understand. The bad news is that is was easy to read and understand, and contained no decoder rings.

Last week I spent two days at Yale University’s Divinity School, attending a conference on “Practical Wisdom” as it relates to the application of things spiritual to the practice of management. In attendance were international CEOs and business school faculty and administrators representing fundamentalist Christians, Catholics (including Jesuits and Benedictines), Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, and a couple of Humanists. I served on a panel discussing the notion of “timeless leadership”.

The conference did not last a year, and only involved Yale, not Kyoto, Chicago, or Vanderbilt. But it was Yale.

The really important thing is that this two-day experience tied an earlier me (the searcher of the 1960s) to a more recent me (the management-professor-turned-cynic of the 21st Century) in some satisfying ways.

There are people over the world, not just theologians and philosophers, but business people and professors as well, who continue to look for decoder rings, to search for meaning in the world into which we have been thrown. This encourages me because I believe that search forms the essence of being human.

In September I will mark 69 years on this earth, this time around at any rate. I wonder how many people live to see pieces of their earliest fantasies, especially those we have discarded, realized in their old age as a part of a pattern. I am worried that most do not. I am giddy about the fact that this kid from Kentucky did.



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