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

-->

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.

Santa Claus

In the early 1950s my father lost his last job in the mines. He was in his early 50s and unable to find work. He picked up odd jobs here and there, and that, plus money my mother earned in a factory, kept a roof over our head (we did have a few holes in the walls and windows) and basic food on the table.

Money was hard to come by.

For several Christmases during that time, around the first of December, my daddy would say, “Well, things are really tight this year; if Santa Claus don’t come, we won’t have Christmas.” He said this seriously. I took him seriously. I was ready to get nothing. It was OK. The Methodist Church provided me the songs and festivities, and the religious trappings were emotionally and spiritually stimulating. I can still smell the pine and candle, and can still feel what it was like to put on white robes and sing Christmas songs with the choir.

My parents did not go to church so we did not share these experiences. My parents did like Christmas, though, and we had a tree, decorated with old trimmings that brought tears to my momma’s eyes as she remembered Christmas with her parents and brothers and sisters and with my two older sisters.

But money was always a problem, and Santa Claus was always seen as the answer to the problem.

Every year, sometime around December 23 or 24, my father would go to Household Finance and borrow money. Every year he’d go to a bootlegger and buy a couple of half-pints of whiskey for his own spirits and our entertainment—I’ll leave that to another day. Every year he’d tell my sister to figure out what it was that I wanted (as well as her two kids, Karen and George), take the HFC money, and go buy the Santa presents, or as close as possible, given money constraints.

It never was much, but I still appreciate the idea, even though I understand that my father spent the next year paying back the money he had borrowed, resulting in him and my momma having to scrimp on other things.

Every year Santa Claus came to my house, and to Karen and George’s house. And it was always magical.

So, I never admitted to “not believing” in Santa Claus until I was about 10 years old.

As these memories come to mind, I’m wondering about Santa Claus.

Last Saturday I attached a pillow around my waist (pillow gets smaller each year), donned the famous red suit, hair, beard, boots, belt, hat, glasses and attitude and went to Zahn Financial Services in Golden, Colorado. I have been Santa there every year for the past five years or so. There are a few kids who have shown up each year, so I’ve watched them grow over that time. Each time I dress in that costume and sit by the decorated tree handing out small gifts, I see the magic expressed in the eyes of the young kids, and the very real desire of the nine and ten year olds to bring back the magic.

I wonder if most of us who grew up as I did have spent their lives trying to recreate the magic brought on by Santa Claus.

I wonder how much money Christian zealots have made trying to convince us that they have the keys to this magic.

And I wonder how much money fathers and mothers have borrowed and spent trying to keep the magic alive.

But mainly, at this time of the year, particularly, even as I wonder about these things, I am grateful to my parents, and my sister, for showing me the magic of Santa Claus, and the gift of giving that embodies  the season of Christmas.

Talking About Religion

On March 24, 2012, a Reason Rally will be held on the Mall in Washington. Its focus is on atheism, among other things.

 Started me to wonder, again, about religion.

My parents were Primitive Baptists, although they seldom went to church. They were believers, although my daddy believed with some skepticism. “Watch them preachers,” he’d say. “If they pull their watches out at the beginning of the sermon, it’s gonna be a long one.” He also said more than once, “Watch out for preachers that pass the hat before their sermon. That ain’t right. Let me hear what you have to say before you ask me for money.”

I went to church with them a few times, but my interaction with the church came mostly from funerals. I did go to a baptism once, though. The baptismal, I guess you’d call it (where people get dunked) was in the form of a large glass tank of water behind the pulpit. My daddy wasn’t crazy about that. “If you’re gonna do it, the preacher ought to have to break the ice off Tradewater River and hold you down in it ‘til you feel the spirit.” I honestly do not know whether either of my parents were baptized.

Somehow or other, when I was about six years old I got connected with the United Methodist Church. We lived on Baptist Hill (go figure), which was about a mile or so from the church. On Sunday mornings I walked down the rock-road hill and over to Cedar Street by myself to attend Sunday school and church.

This was the start my wondering about religion.

The Providence Methodist Church provided me an opportunity to develop myself spiritually, without hell fire and damnation, without a focus on the “thou shalt nots” , but with a focus on caring, love, and spiritual development. Rice Sutherland, Wendell Johnson, an array of smart pastors, and other adults were role models.

The Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) provided me with a social life I would not have had otherwise. I was a shy kid, did not smoke or drink (again, go figure), did not have a car, and had no money. I was active in school during the week, but Sundays were devoted to the Methodist choir and MYF.

In my youth, I committed myself to “full-time Christian service” during several revivals. I even thought about becoming a minister—that’s another story for a later date.

In college, the Wesley Foundation became one important hub for spiritual and social development. It was there that I was exposed to Buber, Kierkegaard, Tillich. And civil rights. It was heady times.

My love affair with religion started to fall apart during my last year of college. Nothing dramatic happened. My wondering just caught up with me.

Since my experience was mostly Christian, that’s where most of my questions reside. Understand that I am not a theologian, not a divinity student. Just a wonderer.

I wonder, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, how can his creations (humans) presume to speak on his behalf? Are we, the people who establish religions and sects, really that arrogant?

I wonder why Christians, who profess to believe that every single sentence of the Bible is the inspired word of God, pick and choose from among those words only those concepts and ideas that we like, or can use as tools to disparage, persecute, and in many cases, kill other human beings?

I wonder, why a lot of Christians focus only on the Old Testament from which to develop those destructive tools? Isn’t the New Testament the Bible for Christians? Didn’t Jesus condense the 10 Commandments of the Old Testament into two, each of which dealt with love?

I wonder at the amount of money collected by religious leaders, who use the money to build idols of themselves in the form of cathedrals and giant buildings and billboards with their names and faces plastered on them?

I wonder why religious sects create large bureaucratic organizations and behave as corporations focused on profits and survival of the sect?

I wonder why politicians find religion to be such a cudgel in the fulfillment of their power trips?

I wonder why religious leaders feel the need to condemn those with whom they don’t agree?

I wonder why humans feel the need to construct God in our image?

It is no wonder to me why atheism has blossomed. 

I am not an atheist. I believe in the existence of a metaphysical force that is responsible for the universes. I can’t prove it; don’t feel the need to try. Don’t think this force cares particularly (yeah, I’m being anthropomorphical—if that’s a word that can be used to talk about “the force”) whether I believe in it or not.

I don’t know about a hereafter or what the rules are for being a part of it.  I do know that treating all living things with respect and love in THIS life is crucial to my well being—again, can’t prove it, but know it.

I know that faith, as practiced, has brought peace and solace to a lot of people. And as I write, there are hundreds of “preachers” and other believers out there who are feeding the hungry and helping feed the spiritual needs and faith of people, without asking for money or allegiance.

I also know that religion, in all its sectual forms, has been responsible, and continues to be responsible, for the misery and deaths of millions of people, while breeding and blessing greed, hubris, and hate among human beings. 

I believe my daddy was right to be suspicious of preachers/politicians wearing three-thousand dollar suits and insincere smiles and uttering hate-filled words, while holding their hands out looking for ever more money to build ever bigger power bases to do ever more destruction.

My belief in God continues to be strong, even as I wonder about it. My belief in religion and its leaders has been dead and buried for a long time now.