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 21^st 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.

Sensuality and Weather

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In the late 1950s I sang in the Methodist church choir.  Wednesday night was choir practice night, a night when Tobby Burklow, Edd Hust, Edna Earl Vilines, and others would get together to practice songs for Sunday’s service. I was the youngest singer, and under the tutelage of Tobby Burklow learned to sing church tenor. This was my social life on Wednesday nights.

Choir practice never lasted more than an hour and a half.  But what frequently happened afterward became much more important, and memorable to me over time. The night that greeted me on these nights was inviting and demanded my attention. I remember these winter nights being cold and dark, the air thick with humidity, driving rain and sleet.

In those days my winter coats were never a match for the winters they faced, a result of my lack of money to buy good heavy coats, and my teenage need to look better than I thought cheap weather-efficient coats offered. I also owned one pair of shoes, bought for looks rather than service.

So generally I was not prepared to exchange the warmth of the softly-lit church for the darkness and damp that awaited me.

Rather than being put off by the weather, however, I remember embracing it, being in no hurry to walk home. The rain and sleet caressed my face, dripped off my nose, crept up my pant legs,  and soaked my feet. Shivers greeted my body and joined with the tenor line to “Holy, holy, holy” (number one song in the old Methodist Hymnal) rolling around in my mind.

At my house, when it got dark, my daddy went to bed. When my daddy went to bed, everyone in the house went to bed as well. In the winter, darkness came as early as 5:00. So, when I got home on those cold Wednesday nights my momma and daddy were asleep, the coal stove banked for the night hours earlier, the un-insulated three room house wrapped up on the outside with a coating of ice.

I remember opening the front door as quietly as possible, the task made easier by the fact that we never locked the door. One did not make noise in my house. If Big John were awakened, I was in trouble.

Dripping and shivering, still enjoying the feeling, I would quietly make my way through the living room to the kitchen, where I slept.

We didn’t use sheets when I was growing up. I slept between heavy blankets. My bed sat against a window. I would quietly open the window just an inch or so and slip between the blankets. The sound of the rain outside, but at my fingertips, complemented the experience of my shivers warming the bed, and consequently me, as I lay in my dry warm nest.

This was pure innocent sensuality. And it has shaped me considerably over the years.

I own several pairs of good shoes now and my winter coats are well made for the weather in which I find myself. My house is warm and comfortable. I sleep in a bedroom.

But when it is cold and rainy and dark, as it was one night last week, I will grab a drink and a blanket and go sit on my deck and feel the damp cold creep into my consciousness, welcome the shivers, feel the water drip off my nose, and wallow in my now not-so-innocent sensuality. Occasionally, the tenor line from that first song in the Methodist Hymnal will join me.

I wonder at the early sensual experiences that shape our lives.