Where I was 10, 20 , 30, 40, and 50 years ago

I was at James Wiser's blog and surfed to Jeni's web site where the meme of the day is where one was 10 * n years ago where n = 1, 2, 3, ...

Ten years ago I was playing with some really bright light emitting diodes at work for exciting fluorescence from thermographic phosphors. I was running out of projects at work and it was getting kinda tight. The previous few months had been very stressful. I held on by doing various odd jobs and about six months later things took a turn for the better and they have stayed that way ever since. Older son marched in the band at football games.

Twenty years ago I was recovering from an infection that hit me while teaching a short course at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City on the effects of Nuclear Radiation on Electronics and preparing to go to do an experiment at Pratt Whitney in Hartford, CT that was later published in an IEEE journal. Read Jung's Man and His Symbols on the airplane there and back. My younger son was 3 months old and as some of you know that point in a parent's life is very intense. The older son was 5. Oh for those days.

Thirty Years ago I was on about the 6th draft of my dissertation and preparing to spend Thanksgiving in Oak Ridge, TN looking for a place to live. I had accepted a job at Oak Ridge. and we are still here! My wife and I were in our third month of living in her parent's camper trailer. Our lease in Charlottesville had ended that August. We were parked at an idyllic campground at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Took walks every day. Marvelous.

Oh no! Forty years ago I was a senior in high school in Rector, AR (population 1600) taking my first physics (there were 3 of us) and chemistry classes. The summer of love had just ended a way far away in San Francisco.

Fifty years ago, I was in the 2nd grade at Guyer Park Elementary School in Lansing, MI. and I can see in my head TV images of rockets blasting off and a cartoon depiction of Sputnik circling the earth.

In commemoration of this meme. Here are the Yardbirds doing "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" It came out forty years ago. It is the best piece of British psychedelic music there ever was.

August 1962 - Football and Salvation

Richard Beck has started an internet meme on his blog here. He begins it with a reference to me:

"Steve in his comment to my last post, tells a story from his faith journey when he realized that there were Christians beyond the borders of his faith tradition. I have a similar story. But before I tell it, I'd like to try to start my first internet meme.

There are some psychologists who suggest that our personality and worldview is influenced by and symbolized by evocative childhood memories. Primal memories often loaded with emotion, good or ill. Some have suggested that these early childhood memories affect our theological beliefs."

Then Richard requests we reply to his post with links to our stories on our own blogs. He says

"So, here's the meme. Tell a story on your blog (or here if you don't have one) that you consider to be a primal theological memory in your life. The rules:

1. This should date from childhood to adolescence.
2. It should be a memory that you think symbolizes or has directly affected your theological development. And this could be theological movement forward, backward, sideways, or just different.
3. Encourage others to share their memories."


I have another memory to relate. It was August of 1962 and I was not quite yet 12. We were sitting in the car outside the gym watching senior high school football players emerge from the building. It may have been that we were waiting for them to finish so that we junior high kids could go in and get our uniforms. We had Junior Highs in Arkansas and I was a 7th grader and so the football adventure was just beginning. I recall the star fullback walking out and possibly my Dad commented about him. The young fellow would go on to rush for over a thousand yards and the team would go 8-4. It would be the best year for the Pocahontas Redskins until my youngest brother, then 2, would, as quarterback and safety, lead them to the State playoff semifinals 15 years later. My Dad loves his family and the Lord and just behind that he loves sports. He was leading the state in scoring for this our home town 7 games into his senior season before an ankle injury took him out the rest of the season. At this point he was 32 and could have still shown those football players a thing or two except that a collision that involved an asleep-at-the-wheel trucker ruined Dad's right knee two years earlier. Even now, all these years later that incident still has effect. He had a hip replacement recently and is due for new knee when he can get around to it. He has been quiet about it, but he loved us so much that he endured great pain to pitch us batting practice growing up and even play a little basketball.

Sitting there in the car, Dad began talking about spiritual matters and his desire to teach everyone the truth. I can't remember specifics. That is something he did and does often. He may have said something about desiring that all those healthy young men be taught the truth and be saved. That's part of the gist. It was a heady time for the churches of Christ. We had been growing rapidly for several decades. Not sure where I got this but my impression is that there were 16 congregations in that county of 12,000 people at about that time. And we were beginning to make a splash in the culture. Pat Boone had another hit song that summer, it was about Speedy Gonzalez. This was before he transitioned to a more charismatic style of Christianity, eventually identifying with an ascendant evangelicalism.

It was a great time to be alive. Well, for most everyone, their youth was a wonderful time. Life was so immediate and analog. John Glenn circled the earth 3 times. The Telstar satellite enabled the first live transatlantic broadcast very close to the day I'm thinking about. And I was becoming a big boy, going to high school (grades 7 to 12 in the same building) and was going to play football and march in the band. Guys were talking about girls more. That mystery was beginning to beckon as it never had before.

Its hard to not project back my present feelings to that moment so I won't elaborate too much. But I'm pretty sure I remember feeling some pity for these fine young men and discomfort or puzzlement at the justice of it. And I wondered at my good fortune at being in the right spot to get the right teaching. For sure, I have replayed that scene in my head often in the intervening 45 years. So it was important whatever my first impressions and however my memory may have augmented the situation. It must've been significant in my life and develoment because after so many years a conscious vestige of it is still with me.

What's yours?

Joy at Work

I found this to be meaningful. From Dennis Bakke's web site. These are the first six of 10 ten items. See the remainder of this list here.

1. When given the opportunity to use our ability to reason, make decisions, and take responsibility for our actions, we experience joy at work.

2. The purpose of business is not to maximize profits for shareholders but to steward our resources to serve the world in an economically sustainable way.

3. Attempt to create the most fun workplace in the history of the world.

4. Eliminate management, organization charts, job descriptions, and hourly wages.

5. Fairness means treating everybody differently.

6. Principles and values must guide all decisions.
....

Madeline L'Engle

This is lifted from Radical Congruency. I've never read this lady but it now looks to me like I should.

Madeline L’Engle [Daniel]

Posted Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 8:39 PM by Daniel under News

The ever-wonderful Madeline L’Engle passed away on Thursday. She was 88.

I grew up reading, and loving, the Wrinkle in Time books. She was a beautiful soul.

“Why does anybody tell a story? [It has] something to do with faith - faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

May her memory be eternal.

(NYT)

Embrace Uncertainty - William James and Me

Rummaging through my desk at home on Labor Day I found the summer issue of the Wilson Quarterly. Not sure when it arrived, it must have been several weeks at least. It is the case that the last half of each issue's ~120 pages is devoted to short essays and reviews of interesting periodicals and books. As always, I read this entire section first and then worked backwards to the larger full length articles in front of the magazine. After reading for awhile and as dusk dimmed the light coming through my window, I almost tossed the magazine, thinking I'd given it its due. Then I came upon an article on William James.

The title was One Hundred Years of Pragmatism and it was by a doctoral candidate from Yale, Theo Anderson. Having recently read a bio of James as evident from recent posts, Anderson's summary provided me with added perspective on this man's meaningful life. At this juncture in time when America was becoming industrialized, bureacratized, and modernized, James was a forerunner of that post modern humility that notes our human limitations is grasping reality. Anderson gives a quote without specific attribution:

Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with but where on this moonlit and dream visited planet are they found?

It seems that for most of my life I've been pulled in two opposing directions: the orthodox vs the modern Enlightenment. James, who retired 100 years ago this year, found an alternative path that resembles the postmodern. He affirms that life is worth living. His life was a testimony that truth is not a fixed, immutable, and certain thing. It is time dependent. It is a verb. It is a "provisional, evolving relationship between ideas and consequences..." "Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events."

Today's Quote

As Boccaccio said in his “Life of Dante” (1374), “Everything that is acquired with toil has more sweetness in it.”

From this article suggested to me by George.

A Mother-Sea of Mind - Cosmic Consciousness

Amidst twelve hour work days, home and church projects, I finally finished the book on William James last night. As usual, I awoke around 3 am, surfed the internet for a while, then took on the final twenty pages or so. It was better reading this book in small chunks so I could spend several days savoring what I'd read.

Man, this is beautiful.

"that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves, and Conanicut and Newport hear each other's fog-horns. But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so, there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir." p. 509

Harold Bloom on The Gospel of Thomas

I haven't said anything about the GThom in a while. Here is a quote from Harold Bloom. It introduces us to a new category of Jesus and thinking regarding the beginning and eschatology.

"Whatever surges beneath the surface of the Gospel of Thomas, it is not a Syrian Christian wisdom teaching of the second century. The ascetic accepts creation, but always upon the basis of having fallen from it, and always with the hope of being restored to it. That is hardly the aspiration of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. Like William Blake, like Jakob Böhme, this Jesus is looking for the face he had before the world was made. That marvelous trope I appropriate from W.B. Yeats, at his most Blakean. If such is your quest, then the Gospel of Thomas calls out to you."

Who we are has to do with where we have come from, where we began. That is why we are interested in Genesis. That is why we are interested in the Big Bang. These have everything to do with how we perceive ourselves and how we choose to live.

Below is from the Gospel of Thomas translation and notes from Patterson Brown's website Metalogos. These are probably pertinent verses to Boom's thesis.

18. The Disciples say to Yeshua: Tell us how our end shall be. (Ps 39:4) || Yeshua says: Have you then discovered the origin, so that you inquire about the end? For at the place where the origin is, there shall be the end. Blest is he who shall stand at the origin— and he shall know the end, and he shall not taste death. (Isa 48:12, Lk 20:38, Jn 1:1-2, Th 1; T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: Little Gidding: ‘The end is where we start from’; Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody: ‘What kind of journey is the life of a human being that it has a beginning but not an end?’)

50. Yeshua says: If they say to you: From whence do you come?, say to them: We have come from the Light, the place where the Light has originated thru itself— he [stood] and he himself appeared in their imagery. If they say to you: Who are you?, say: We are his Sons and we are the chosen of the Living Father. If they ask you: What is the sign of your Father in you?, say to them: It is movement with repose. (Isa 28:12 30:15, Lk 16:8, Jn 12:36, Th 27; Bhagavad-Gita 6.27: ‘When his mind is tranquil, perfect joy comes to the person of discipline; his passion is calmed, he is without sin, being one with the Infinite Spirit’)

So, where our origin is, our end will be. And, our origin is the light. We come from the light and we return to the light.

Apothegm from Emerson

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Ralph Waldo Emerson


But some of us have a harder time of it than others. Then again the real issue is which apples are good and which ones aren't.

Reasoned Argument is a Surface Exhibition from Subconscious Depths

Robert Richardson below describes some of what William James was thinking as James was putting together the Gifford lectures for delivery in 1901-2 at the U. of Edinburgh. These became a book still read today, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

That these feelings - intuitions- come from something other than day-light reason does not disqualify them as valid experiences. James is at some pains to show that these "unreasoned and immediate assurances(s)" are "the deep thing in us, the [reasoned] argument is but a surface exhibition." p 395 William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism

My point, we (that includes me) often think we have followed inexorably the path of reason when it is really the case that our motivations/conclusions/beliefs come from out of our personal , subconscious depths.

Words/Expressions from William James

stream of consciousness

time-line

one great blooming, buzzing confusion

bitch-goddess success

pluralism

healthy minded

live option

the moral equivalent of war

These are cited by author Robert Richardson in his biography as originating with James.

In my dim past I learned that James was a philosopher who promoted pragmatism. I have always felt the appeal of pragmatism, to some extent. It must be in part due to his influence and also to my having been born and raised in the U. S.

Some Quotes of William James

Richard Beck recommended a book to me William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. Life is busy and it has taken me 6 weeks to read the first 300 pages, what with vacation and 10 hour work days and all.

Here's some good stuff. I googled William James and got some of these quotations from the Quotations Page:

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

Jesse Beams - Illustrious U. of VA Physics Prof

I met Dr. Jesse Beams during my time at the U. of VA. I've heard that he was in the running for a Nobel Prize and came very close. Here is a story about him. It was related by a technical staff member Milt Branham probably in 1976.

One day, in the morning, Jesse opened the door to a lab and found several students inside studying. He said "Boys, the morning is the best time to do research." (accent on first syllable).

Another day, in the afternoon, again he opens the door and says "Boys, the afternoon is the best time to do research."

One evening, yet again, he pokes his head in the lab and responds to guys there studying "Boys, the nightime is the best time to do research."

I was a young newlywed at the time I heard this and at the time was just starting out on my own research. This wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear. Thought it was depressing as well as the story that he would attend the first half of the Saturday UVA football games with his wife and then leave her and go back to the lab for the second half. I was a young man, a newlywed and wanted to have fun and live life.

He was still working in his bed in the hospital almost to the day he died.

I work all the time now and now I know perhaps how he felt. He was a great man. But, in the workaholic aspect I do not want to emulate him. I've been getting close lately though.

Thank God for Failure

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird quotes a poem by Bill Holm titled August in Waterton, Alberta.


Above me, wind does its best
to blow leaves off
the aspen tree a month too soon.
No use wind. All you succeed
in doing is making music, the noise
of failure growing beautiful

Quote by John Haught

Developments in geology, evolutionary biology and cosmology have left no doubt that the whole of nature, and not just our planet and human history, have an essentially narrative character.

John Haught at Metanexus site.