Spiritual Autobiography

homeSpiritual Autobiography
Prepared for Dr. James MacClendon, 1981
Graduate Theological Union

This spiritual autobiography paper was written in 1981 for a course at the GTU. I was asked to write a spiritual autobiography, followed by a couple of pages indicating possible areas of future study. The original was then slightly edited in 2002 before posting it on my web page. I added a couple of retractions to the original, placed in brackets.
Spiritual Autobiography
I was born in 1942, and made my first significant breakthrough when I was sixteen. I read several of Freud's basic works, including Totem and Taboo, and two more volumes concerning mistakes, errors, and dreams. At that point I began to think critically. But critical thinking was the consequence of a decision that I made about the age of thirteen, the decision to start paying attention to the world around me. Until then, I carried on an intense fantasy life, and often appeared to my parents as if I were in a dream.

As a result of Freud I developed a theory of life which I had worked out by the time I was nineteen. I have a younger brother, Jack, seventeen months younger than me. We both went to the same college, the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. While at Sewanee we frequently talked about our childhood, and those conversations, my memory, and my observations of the world in general, plus the impetus of Freud, provided the groundwork for the theory.

The basic idea of this theory was that my parents, particularly my father, had broken my spirit by the time I was about eight. I now know there was more to it than that, but at the time, it seemed true. The notion that my dad " broke my spirit," may seem a bit extreme, and requires a look at my parents and our way of life when I was a child.

My parents were from Middle Tennessee. They were raised on farms where they worked very hard. They both went to Cumberland College, a small college in Lebanon, Tennessee. My mother once told me that she and dad and one other student were the smartest students at this college, based on aptitude tests given to all students. Both did extremely well academically, and went on to get Master's degrees. Dad, on the basis of a national exam, went to California Institute of Technology where he earned a Masters in meteorology.

Their intellectual ability propelled them out into the world, but they never abandoned certain aspects of their rural background. There is a spirit of isolationism, extreme self reliance, and hard work that can characterize country people. As a result, my younger brother and I were raised in a condition of constant grinding, physical toil. My two youngest brothers, I was the oldest of four, escaped this work to some degree. While very small we began washing clothes and floors. I can remember being on my knees, washing the kitchen floor. The floor seemed immense. We stood on chairs to do dishes, and I remember grinding the soap made from grease, ashes, and lye. When Richard, my second brother, was born in 1949, we were busy snapping beans the moment Dad brought him home from the hospital. I was seven, Jack five. When granddaddy Palmer died, we were painting chairs when the news arrived.

In the very early days we were allowed to play a little bit, but by the age of ten, life had become very hard. Just recently we visited my aunt who lives in Livermore, California, and she, shaking her head, said she had never seen children forced to work as hard as we did.

I was born strong and aggressive. My mother used to say that she had never seen a child as stubborn as I. In her words, I was born with "the will to live." As a result, when I got a bit older, I refused to go along with all the work, and other things as well. I received innumerable spankings, and this began when I was quite small.

Once, when I was about seven (1949), we were in the garden hoeing. Although we lived in the city of Alexandria, Virginia, there was a lot near our house and dad rented it from its owner. We used it to grow a garden. The owner appeared one day as we worked. We stopped for a moment, my dad talking to the man. Without noticing it, I stepped on a tomato plant. Dad ordered me to move. I did, and accidentally stepped on another. I was sent home. From then on, I was never allowed in the garden. Dad and Jack would go over there to work, and I would sit on the front steps and watch, feeling absolutely wretched that I had been so clumsy. One day we had a fire in the house. It was quite impressive, starting in the basement. The firemen came, and while they put it out, Jack and I sat out front watching the crowd that had gathered across the street. There were scores of them. Years later, when Jack and I were in college together, Jack told me he had started the fire. We had both gotten sick and I had gotten well before Jack did. Mom let me out, but not Jack. He retaliated, lit the fire, and that was that. Our parents never knew how it started.

My folks had almost no real friends. They almost never went anywhere to visit people. Once, when I was around thirteen, we had a family over to dinner. On another occasion, two men from Latin America were visiting dad at work. They had dinner with us one summer evening. We cooked hamburgers on a grill we had built in the back lot. By then, we were living in Kansas. My folks were alone in a strange world, far from Middle Tennessee. They worked without stopping. They had no entertainment, no radio, no TV, and no movies.

They were both religious. My mother was a fundamentalist, my father a strict Presbyterian. They never smoked, cussed, drank, lied, were unfaithful, or stole. I think they were afraid of the world around them, its moral decadence. In 1952, when I was ten, we moved from the city of Alexandria, Virginia to a small farm outside of Kansas City. I think this was due to my dad's fear of his children being raised in the corrupt city. Once there, the work started in earnest and the isolation was maintained. We were raised with few friends, without money, without car privileges, and without the opportunity to be with other kids our age after school.

I can remember only two times when I received affection from my parents, or sensed they might love me. Once my father gave me a hug when I waited up for him one night, and my mother once held me after I had been electrocuted. I might have a faint memory of playing on my father's lap, but that was too long ago. In actual fact, I have no memory of feeling loved as a child. I do remember, however, my parents doing things for me. For example, my mother let us make a little "fort" out of newspapers pinned together when Jack and I were about seven. And later, my dad would hit us fly balls in the side lot.

From the beginning I was physically punished, slapped and spanked. I can remember being slapped awake in the morning because I overslept, being slapped at the dinner table, and slapped for dropping things. One afternoon, while we were still in Virginia, my brother Jack dropped a bottle of medicine on the floor. It broke, splattering in all directions just as my mother came through the door. She immediately blasted me across the face. I said that Jack did it. "Oh," she said, turning around and walking out. I was about seven. This and many other events caused me to think my mother didn't love me. This caused me a great deal of suffering as a child, until about the age of ten when I quit agonizing over it. I simply decided she really didn't love me, that she loved Jack more, and there was nothing I could do about it.

In the beginning I used to go right through the whippings and the slaps. But then, one day, around the age of five, dad went out front to cut some switches. I remember feeling afraid. He was going to switch me across my bare legs. After that, I became afraid of punishment. I came to hate the fear, that I would be so weak. After I developed the theory that my dad had broken me, I often thought that was the turning point, the day I turned from strength to weakness, from courage to fear.

My parents had strong wills. They would go on no matter what. To the best of their ability, they did not deviate to the left or the right. My father would come home from working all night at the weather bureau, and then put in six hours hard work with us during the day. He would be tired, ashen, but stubborn and persistent. His chief saying was, "It's hard but its fair." Or sometimes he would say we were "fighting the reds," the "reds" being the communists, the great enemy of that era. Furthermore in their own way, my folks had integrity. They treated us the way they treated themselves, and although I consider my childhood a wasteland in so many ways, it was no worse for me than for them.

These difficult circumstances coupled with my stubborn, rebellious, and sensitive nature, made my life very difficult. From the very beginning I had trouble sleeping. I would lie in the bed shaking from the tension. At times, I would wake up, feeling terrible things all around me. I would fight them in the dark. To get myself to sleep, Jack and I would sing together. My favorite was "Home on the Range." When I was very small, about three, I was convinced my parents were saying bad things about me. I would sneak out of bed to listen to them. I heard nothing. Because of the insomnia, I had trouble functioning in the daytime.

After I read Freud, I reached the conclusion I was severely repressed. My energy was spent shoring up a wall of resistance against the hostility inside of me, a hostility directed toward my father for breaking my spirit. Keeping the wall in place required energy, and without energy, I was like a zombie. At about the age of eleven, I began to feel as if I were looking at the world through a plate of glass. I called it the "plate glass feeling." It was as if I couldn't touch anything, feel things, engage life. I only watched, noticed, observed, and analyzed, but even that was limited. I was like a zombie, keeping the wall in place. For that reason, I was constantly forgetting things. I seemed dreamy, I couldn't see things right in front of me.

This condition was made worse by my mother's strict religion. At about twelve, I quite going to church with my dad and went to my mother's church. I couldn't understand the sermons at my dad's church, but those at my mom's church were quite simple. God was watching all the time, waiting for the least mistake, waiting to send you straight to hell. Nothing was fun, no dancing, no dating, no hanging round, no cussing, no smoking, no nothing. It seemed to me that my mother lived this code perfectly. She appeared good, and when she slapped me awake, it was because I deserved it. I was the bad person, the one who wouldn't wake up, pay attention, remember what needed to be done. As a result, the Freudian theory that the basic fault lay in a subconscious conflict between my id and my superego, played out as a conflict between my dad and me, made sense to me. That was the problem, why I couldn't sleep, why I kept making mistakes, why I could seem so dumb. Furthermore, the theory made sense out of a number of dreams that I was having at the time. Some of these dreams were sexual, and of course, sex was a big thing for Freud. The Freudian theory made sense of things, and I began to believe it.

As a result, at about the age of sixteen, I came to the conclusion that my basic personality had been forced underground by the age of eight. Before then, I was strong and rebellious. In grade school, I was stronger and faster then any of my classmates. I could easily beat them up. But by the age of ten, I was weaker than others. At that time, I got beat up for the first time in my life.

The development mentioned above seems to be moving me toward death, or at least impairment. There were also forces in the direction of life. Many years later I read Fannon's Wretched of the Earth. In it he discusses how the oppressed take out their frustration on each other the Saturday night violence found in the bars and slums all over the world. I read Fannon in 1968, and thought at once of my childhood, of how I used to beat Jack up quite a bit. One time, however, when we were visiting relatives in Tennessee, the cousins were having a pillow fight. I was slugging it out and blasted my brother pretty hard, he staggered up against a door. As I was moving in to finish him off, I looked at his face. There was fear written all over it. For some reason I didn't hit him, and further resolved not to hit him again. I was about eight at the time. In part, this may have been a response to my mother's affirming the worth of kindness and Christian ideals.

Some time after that, my brother and I became friends. When really young, my parents let us play some, but when we moved to Kansas, the work really got hard. We moved when I was ten, in 1952. Jack and I made a pact against Daddy, at first never to tell on each other, and then silently, without ostensibly agreeing on it, it turned into a war. It was a war of passive resistance on our part. We never volunteered to do anything, showed little initiative, and did only as told. This made working together difficult.

We built a room onto the side of our house and started the work with three trowels. Very early on, one of them got lost. Dad wanted to know who lost it. Jack said he hadn't lost it. I knew I hadn't. As a result, dad never bought another trowel. We spent two more years working with two trowels. This meant that one of us stood around doing nothing half the time. Daddy wouldn't let the person without the trowel sit down. It was usually me. I seemed to be the least competent. I can remember many afternoons and dark twilights, standing there in the cold and dark, aching tired and wishing I could sit down. But Jack and I banded together, and in later years, my twenties, I used to think that if he had turned against me I would never have made it out of there sane. He never ran me down, or made remarks about me. In fact he rarely said anything to anybody. He was silent almost all the time. People thought he was strange. Every now and then he would say something, and sometimes he could say very funny subtle things about my parents which they didn't understand. Then he and I would giggle uncontrollably. It was a strange experience. I used to tell my friends about it when I got older. Everyone thought it strange. But, in his own strange way, Jack helped me.

Although we really started working hard in Kansas, I can't help but feel that things eased up there in some way. My parents seemed a bit more relaxed. They weren't so tight money wise. We bought a radio, mother got involved in the PTA trying to improve the quality of our education. Sometimes Dad wouldn't make us work all the time and would hit fly balls to us. We would have picnics out in our side lot. I liked that. We went to some plays, the Starlight Theater, and mother took us skating every now and then with the church group. It was never black and white. It was people doing the best they could with what they had.

Further, I made a decision to come out of my dream world at thirteen. Until then, I had carried on a continuous fantasy, stories I created in my mind. I started paying attention in class and discovered I could do well in mathematics with little effort, that I actually had some brains. Up until then I felt I had been unfavorably compared to my brother Jack. He learned to read at four, was reading David Copperfield at six, and was basically a genius. I had trouble reading, but once started, I read voraciously. I remember seeing my brother carrying a bucket of water down to the cow with a book in one hand. At thirteen, I began to observe the world around me, but not as a participant, or a wholehearted one at any rate. By that time I already had the plate glass feeling. I became very self conscious, as do many at that age, and felt socially incompetent. This was the basic truth, as we had very little social contact. There was some social contact through the church, but that was difficult as we were pretty much on the outside in that environment. Later in high school, I noticed fellow students carrying on small talk, something I couldn't do. I wondered how they got so smart about so many things.

When young, before the age of ten, I used to ask my mother all the time if she loved me. She always said, "yes." But I could never believe her, given some of the things that were going on. I felt she preferred Jack to me. Perhaps she didn't, but I took the brunt of the struggle. Jack told me years later the he felt guilty about not fighting back. We lost so many struggles that we got so we wouldn't ask for anything. For example, in the tenth grade we couldn't stand our haircuts anymore. Dad cut our hair to save money, and he always butchered it. After every haircut, other kids made fun of us. A classmate offered to cut our hair for twenty five cents after school. We would of course miss that time working. We had a great test of wills, but Daddy wouldn't let us go home with someone after school. The whole thing was very humiliating, having to ask him. Presumably, we never showed weakness in our family. After that, I resolved never to ask him for anything. But anyway, after reading Freud I realized the whole thing was a matter of instincts, of super egos, and the ego trying to steer a precarious way in an animal world. It explained everything, made it rational, and left no question beyond further analysis. This made the whole thing bearable because I could rationally understand it. It was as if no one was really at fault, since at bottom, we were basically complex animals. That was really most interesting.

The happiest times of all were in Tennessee. We went there for two weeks every summer. My folks were often happy there, especially my mother when visiting her family. We would all gather, aunts, uncles and cousins down on granddaddy's farm. I never had to work while there. In the daytime the cousins would go to the creek (the branch in middle Tennessee parlance) where we would catch crayfish, go swimming, and mess around. We got a bit out of line at times, killed a chicken by drowning, (Jack and I engineered that feat by getting my cousin to experiment with a chicken under water), and jumped around in the hay in the barn. At night the stars would be shining. We played piggy wants a signal or red rover. I could hear the grown ups talking, see the lights on my uncle's cigarette butts, and would sense a great clean world around me where all belonged at home. On Sunday we would go to the Church, the fundamentalists Church of Christ. People used paper fans with pictures of Jesus on them, and we sang songs like "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," the "Old Rugged Cross," and others. Sometimes I would find myself close to tears, as if a great hymn were taking place somewhere, and I at last had just begin to hear it. Over at my father's parents things were a bit depressed. But even there we were happy. Jack and I played all day long by ourselves. They lived on a farm as well, and we could roam at will. Once we visited in winter. I can remember the cold, a Saturday night in winter, with the wind blowing through the cracks in the floor. We were all huddled in the front room around the stove. The Grand Ole Opry was on. I was happy then. I loved the country music and all of us together.

There was one thing that happened that didn't seem to fit Freud's theory, or if explained, failed to do justice to the sense itself. On certain days, unexpectedly, I would be absolutely overwhelmed with beauty and sadness. Sometimes there were particular causes. One time when very young I heard a country song, I couldn't have heard it more than once or twice, and never since. I was seven or eight and it made an indelible and profound impression . The words were as follows:
I had a home one time, I left it all behind
And I'd go back home, if I could clear my mind.
Crying, crying, all of the time
I've got a broken heart, I've got a tangled mind.
When we were still living in Alexandria, I used to go off by myself and sing this song over and over. I would burst into tears, and hide so no one could see me. I seemed to be touched by almost anything sad. I saw my first movie at about seven. It was shown during school in the auditorium. It was "Heidi." Halfway through the movie Heidi gets lost on the mountain. I found myself sobbing uncontrollably. At that point the film was stopped so the reel could be changed. The lights were turned on. The little kids sitting around me started staring at me. I felt the same way when I first read "The Ugly Duckling," and my favorite piano piece, which I played over and over was "Long, Long Ago." As I played it I would at times be overwhelmed with a haunting sense of sadness, as if something beautiful and good had been irrevocably lost. There was one story that I particularly liked: "The Musicians of Brennan." It concerned some animals who befriended each other, and journeyed along to find a home. When I got out to Kansas these experiences seemed to intensify, and involved a cosmic and transcendent sense. It seemed some days as if the sky would open up, that all would be free, a haunting beauty would pervade the world with intense sadness. Everything would come together in harmony, every blade of grass, the wind, the sunlight streaming in from the sky. These sensations of sadness, beauty, and joy would become so intense that it seemed that I would live forever. In moments like that it was good to be alive, worth everything it seemed.

Nevertheless, in looking back on my childhood I often wondered if the good outweighed the bad. Many days it seemed like a wasteland, the dominant image being a cold wind or the dead of winter. I remember day after day, waking up in the freezing cold. We slept on the back porch where the temperature fell to zero in the winter time. I would crawl out of bed, eat oatmeal, force myself out into the cold to carry water to the cow. We milked her outside in a stanchion. I would huddle under her udder with the north wind on my back to clean the dung off her tits. Then force myself to school, and then home to work on after dark with Dad and Jack, scarcely talking, and then eat, study and go to bed. That was life, cold emotionally cold, spiritually cold with my parent's hard religion, physically difficult.

In reflecting on life I have often wondered why we continue to live and go on. I have searched back looking for some enduring goodness to affirm, to give life worth and dignity. A few years I wrote down some of the events of my childhood. My narrative began with these words which express one basic question of this paper:

When I was ten years old we moved out to Kansas and I used to like the weather there. In the summer time it would get pretty hot, but sometimes the wind would blow and the clouds would come up out of the West. I would feel the wind blowing through my body, like something was breaking up inside, and the land would open up with the trees blowing in the wind. When the sun shone through the blowing clouds the whole sky would be singing, and I would run by with the wind so glad that I would almost cry. Later on in life I would remember the open land, sky, and clouds and think about those days. Sometimes I would get the wide open feelings of the mid West, something beautiful and empty, but clean. It was the clean I liked the best, and the wind. I guess the wind can blow you clean. When I was in graduate school, by the fifth year anyway, I was pretty depressed all the time, and angry, and I used to get up in the morning and dance to myself, listening to Leadbelly on my record player and thinking about the water washing up on the Florida beaches where I had been once or twice before. Then, every now and then, faint nostalgic feelings would come across me, feeling of the mid West and the weather out in Kansas. I would remember the old days, as if something good had happened then. But I really don't know if something good had ever been or not, or rather as if the days beneath the Kansas skies expressed the things that had never been, good things, or perhaps the good that always seemed to pass away.

Time came to leave home. My Dad had decreed that I go to the University of the South, created to produce Southern gentlemen as a new Oxford of the South. I was admitted early, and some belongings were sent to the University. Just before I left Dad taught me how to drive. The day came to leave. Mother took me down to the bus station in Kansas City. It was a hot day and the city seemed dirty. She pulled up to the curb, the engine was still running. I got out and looked back in to say goodbye. She looked at me and said: "Well Rob, we didn't know if you were going to make it or not, but I guess you turned out all right." I said goodbye and she pulled away from the curb. I walked in and got on the bus. My childhood had ended.

I used to wonder what she meant by her remark. I think she was referring to my dreamy incompetent state, or to the fact that I several times got violent headaches and nerves. She was probably relieved that I had pulled out of it somewhere along the line.

I really liked going to college and was actually fairly happy and cheerful for a few years. After the original shock I made some very good friends. One of them was named Ralph. We used to have some wonderful conversations. I hadn't intended to join a fraternity, but did. Sewanee was a very socially conscious school. There was a pecking order. My fraternity was near the bottom, and I was near the bottom. I didn't much care about that, people considered me out of it, or religious, or whatever. But I had never really seen social stigmatization before. When in grade school in Kansas, I used to hang with some of the black kids. There was a bunch of them living just North of us. But there weren't any at Sewanee, and students were calling other students "gimps." That was alien to me and I didn't like it. Consequently, I ignored those socially above me, and befriended anyone I pleased, regardless of who they were. Some of my frat brothers didn't like it, but I made some great friends and had wonderful times.

Ralph and I had some interesting conversations. Very early on I decided or felt that the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me were the experiences of beauty and sadness that I had known when young. I also noticed that I wasn't having them any more. I used to wonder if they were simply "oceanic feelings" (quoting Freud), or whatever. I began to find traces of these ideas in numerous places. I was touched by Plato's allegory of the cave which raised the possibility of a transcendent world. A poem, "Intimations of Immortality," raised the same question. Ralph and I discussed these things, and I was amazed to learn that he had similar impressions. After a few months at Sewanee I ran across the word "mysticism," and read a book on the matter. It was interesting. But I couldn't help but notice, at least according to this book, that the mystics spent years in "dark nights," severe deprivations and penances, and somehow that didn't strike me as the way of truth. Something else was needed, another way. I wondered about it all the time.

People thought at first that I was sort of religious. I never swore, knew initially nothing about girls, didn't drink, was polite, and basically considerate up to a point. But after I had been there a while I changed my religious beliefs, though initially maintaining my standard or morality. I read Dostoevski's The Brothers Karamazov. It made a powerful and extraordinary impression. I was particularly shaken by Ivan's conversation with Alyosha. In this conversation Ivan proposed to his monkish brother that God was either evil or impotent. He then described in brutal detail the suffering of a little child, locked in an outhouse by his parents, covered with feces. With deadly earnestness Ivan went on, demanding that God not be good on the basis of the one child, much less the millions who have suffered hideously day after day for all known recorded human history. Alyosha was alarmed and frightened by his brother's arguments. He cried out that Ivan would come to no good end with these terrible ideas. But one thing seemed clear to me: Alyosha never refuted Ivan's argument, never. And therefore I joined Ivan and gave up religion, although it always interested me.

Throughout this period I rapidly became disenchanted with the academic process. The first few weeks I was there I studied and was making very good marks, but after a while the academic pursuit began to irritate me. I had initially wanted to study philosophy, but became disenchanted with the introductory course. I began to suspect that all our cognition wasn't going to get us anywhere. So much of the academics at Sewanee was a sort of snobbish game, with people trying to be intelligent. I determined to study what interested me whether or not it was in the curriculum, and spend my time as I pleased. Doubtless this was a rebellion against life as I had known it, yet I still think, deeper than that, that Sewanee did not have a social vision except for those of the right pedigree. I used to ask people all sorts of things, and wait to hear a valid word, and got very little. Furthermore, and this is hindsight, I don't think I could have taken the pressure of success. I was so tense, had been so tense for so long, that any kind of competitive situation such as tests made me so nervous that I could hardly function. I could do well, but could do equally well with little or no preparation. So I decided to study as I pleased, and ended up making A's in things like math or philosophy which required thinking ability, and D's in history which required memorization. I spent my time reading, talking to people, playing sports, and extending my analysis of the world which had begun with the reading of Freud.

At some point during that first year, I made another decision. While reading Freud I had been attracted to the idea of determinism. This seemed like a sensible theory. Nevertheless I rejected determinism. I don't really know why. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that such a theory could never be verified one way or the other. It was useful in forming hypotheses about the world, but the more I observed reality the more mysterious it seemed to be. The summer after my freshman year I had a long discussion with a girl from Smith in which I argued against determinism. But I think something more was behind my thinking. I had decided that the only real things were those that could be experienced. I would not believe in God or anything unless I had some sort of direct evidence of its existence. Furthermore, I would not clutter up my experience with unnecessary concepts. If life gave itself as mysterious, it was mysterious, although it at the same time seemed riddled with a secondary causality. I suspect there was an existentialist influence. Further there is an anti intellectual element in my family, a rejection of this world, with its comprehensive intellectual systems, its social prestige, its excellence, and its wealth. The "got rocks," was the term my mother used, referring to very successful wealthy people. Perhaps that was an influence.

In my junior year I read another book that made a very deep impression, Dostoevski's The Possessed. This was an incredible book. In it a man named Kirilov, an anarchist or perhaps a socialist, declared that if there is no God there is no law. To prove his point he committed suicide. I was struck by the intensity and logic of his argument. Obviously there can be "laws" without God, but where do they come from? They come from us, from our will, or from our nature. (Another thing I didn't like about determinism was that it led to a strange ethical contradiction it didn't do justice to the apparent autonomy of the will). In any event, if the laws were no longer holy, I could break them. In the same book there is the story of a duel. As the antagonists are about to shoot each other, one suddenly perceives a vision of universal love. In an instant he realizes the folly of his action. He laughs, lowers his gun, and allows the other man to fire. It at once struck me that the way to truth is in action, in intensity of experience, and that is the path I began to choose.

My brother, Jack, came to Sewanee one year behind me. We began to form a nucleus of friends. There was Ralph, Hudgins, Jack, Drew, and me. We had other friends as well. These people were quite gifted and we had the most interesting discussions. Ralph told me one time that although people were awed by my brother's brains, that I had my share of talent as well. He was a great and loyal friend, as were Drew and Hudge. Drew and Ralph graduated and went to Vanderbilt to begin Ph.D.'s in theoretical physics. I would often hitch hike down there for the weekend. We had wonderful parties with the Vanderbilt girls. During the day discussions would rage over every imaginable topic. These were some of the happiest times of my life. There was a quality in our being together, in our spirited thought and fun, that I have never been able to recapture. Those were great and happy days.

With women, I was a little slow in the beginning, but with time, began to pick up steam. Whenever I was with someone, they would seem the most captivating women in the world. I acted as if they were so good looking and fun loving that I could hardly stand it. I myself would adopt a hell raising lets have fun attitude, that ultimately communicated a feeling that I really didn't care what they did. If they didn't want to have a good time with me, it was their loss as much as mine. My relations with women gathered in intensity.

One afternoon Ralph came up to Sewanee and said he had met a rather amazing girl. We were walking up the driveway across from the dining hall. I asked what was so amazing about her. He got evasive and asked if I would like to meet her. I said sure. Next weekend I went down to Nashville and met a girl by the name of Elizabeth. She was a bit overweight, just a tad, but real cute. She was also the most extraordinary woman I had ever met in my life. We began an amazing intense interaction. It seemed as if I had become very acute. I remembered everything, honed in on her with every cell in my body. She was cute, girlish, giddy, and brilliant. She was a triple major in English, history, and sociology, a recognized writer on campus, and president of the student association. Her father was a millionaire orange grower back in Florida and she drove a big car. We went crazy for each other. In no time at all she told me she loved me. I wasn't used to that, no one had ever said they loved me. I had never ever felt that I was loved. It swept me away. I believed her, that she really did love me. I was intensely happy, forgot everything, and went wild for her. I never said that I loved her, the words never crossed my lips, but finally I did. We went down to Florida together. Her family lived in a nice big house. I saw her bathroom. It was large and the counter was crammed with innumerable bottles, powders, and all kinds of stuff. It made me feel strange.

One night when we were together she started crying. I asked her what was the matter. She was afraid things would come to a bad end for me. I wanted to know what she meant by that. She told me a long story, one boyfriend after another, and how she had broken them, one after the other. I listened. The last man to fall in love with her had been a Jewish professor who had been through the concentration camps. It had become a campus scandal. Shortly after the scandal began, he died in a car crash. I didn't say much, simply said not to worry about it, that I would be all right. But I started analyzing her. I analyzed everyone I met, and actually, had begun to try to figure her out from the day we met. I got strong vibes around the house that her father was very possessive, that she was intimidated by her younger sister who was dumb but incredibly good looking, that she felt inferior as a woman, and hence went out proving herself time after time. She as much told me all these things while we talked, and many other things as well. Our relationship began to unravel. She had wanted to get married. I had declined but under her winsome charm had agreed. I had given my heart away. But then she began to say things to the effect that we were far apart socially, that I could never support her in her way of life, or even understand it. She was strangely religious, Catholic, and I didn't go for that. All these hints came up one after another. I fought them all, but began to crumble inside. Then she started talking about what a nice young man one of my fraternity brothers was. He was nice, very cultured, sort of good looking in a weak way, wealthy and not too bright.

One afternoon we drove back from Nashville and she let me off in Manchester. I needed to hitch hike the rest of the way. I got a ride to Monteagle, about ten miles from Sewanee. There nobody picked me up. Night came. I started walking back to Sewanee. Everything came crashing down on me. I started crying in the dark. I hadn't cried in years. I cried hard for a long time, and found myself repeating uncontrollably, "I'm so bad, so bad, I am so bad."

I got to Sewanee and saw my friend, Walker. He was my friend and talked to me. I lay in my bed for about three days, thinking, and decided that was that. I went downstairs, called her up, and said I needed to talk to her that weekend. That weekend was her sorority annual festival or something. I told her we were finished. She got ugly mad, then crying, saying that I would regret the whole thing. I said nothing. Just ended it, finished it. We never got together again. A few months later she sent me a one act play she had written She had won a contest with it. In it a bare footed young man in a tuxedo breaks up with the one he loves. He is very cold about it, analytical. She dies inside. At the time I thought her portrayal was a bit overdone, but in retrospect I can see that although I was hurting on the inside, on the outside, in terms of action, I was as cold as ice. After that a profound and deep sadness came over my life. I lived increasingly in the shadow.

I was taking Shakespeare that semester. It was my last semester at Sewanee. We read Anthony and Cleopatra. I had flunked first semester Shakespeare and don't know why I took it again the second semester. Anthony falls in love with Cleopatra. He is crazy about her. Caesar can't understand it. Formerly, Anthony had ruled the world, a great warrior. Caesar said of him that he would "drink the stale of the gilded puddle and eat the bark of trees." But what had happened to him? He gave his heart away, and with his heart, his kingdom. Caesar set out to take the kingdom by power, while Anthony in love, failed to make the necessary effort to tear himself away from Cleopatra and defend himself. In the final battle, Anthony, at the crucial moment, when victory hung in the balance, cries out to Cleopatra, "My kingdom for a kiss." And there I thought lay the most crucial question of all. For what good is it to live without love, and what good is love without staking everything you have on it? But if you do that, what if it destroys you? I knew that if I had stayed with Elizabeth, I would have been destroyed. It was a great question, but I had chosen Caesar's way. I could have stayed on with her a little longer and had some crazy happy times with lots of pain, but I had chosen Caesar's way and that was that. I wondered about it all the time.

Right after we broke up, I had several dreams of extraordinary violence. This interested me and I started reading Jung. In one of his books a young woman has a dream in which she approached a dark lake while a cool wind begins to blow. As I read the account of the dream a chill swept through me, a sense of fear, and I began to wonder if there might be something to Jung's ideas on the unconscious, the need to enter the unconscious in order to attain wholeness.

One afternoon Ralph and I went to a record store and he bought a Joan Baez record. One of her songs has these opening lines:
At my door the leaves are falling
A cold wind will come.
Sweethearts go by together
But I still miss someone.
Every time I heard that song I felt very sad, and it came to represent not only the end with Elizabeth, but the end of my friends, all our good times together, great conversations, and parties. We were all about to graduate. One evening Ralph and I were taking a walk. We got to talking about everything that had happened. He said he thought hard dark times were coming for all of us. It frightened me to talk to him, and I wondered if it were really true.

At the start of my junior year I had taken a senior level theoretical math course. It was a proof course, which requires intuition and logic, and although I was new to this sort of mathematics, I very quickly became one of the best in the class. I enjoyed theoretical mathematics. It was easy and somewhat fun. I didn't know what to do with myself, and so I majored in mathematics. Then, for the lack of something better, I decided to go to graduate school. My overall academic record was poor though good in math, my options were limited. My major professor suggested the University of Kansas where they had an outstanding group theorist. I went there.

Things were strange at KU. I hardly talked with anyone for months. I was living in a boarding house and talked to one of the boarders from time to time. But mostly I just sat and thought, read books, studied some mathematics, and exercised. I did very well in mathematics in the beginning since I studied. I was moved into the advanced group theory class, or rather asked to read its text on my own, which I did.

I ran into a philosophy major who suggested I attend a philosophy class. I did so. It was taught by a man from Scotland and was basically the positivist approach to reality. I liked that approach. It made a lot of sense to me, and seemed to have the same sort of sense about it as does mathematics. Nevertheless I couldn't fit its theories in too well with the intense feeling of sadness and beauty that I had known as a child, or the perceptions about Jung. Perhaps they could have been harmonized at a logical or theoretical level, but considered qualitatively, they were two different approaches to reality, two moods and perspectives. I wanted a total harmonious system.

Just before leaving Sewanee I had read Shakespeare's The Tempest and considered it one of the most beautiful things I had ever read. In the play there is a dumb monster, but this dumb monster in his sleep dreams the most sublime things, or perhaps he hears them, sweet sounds, twanging instruments, so haunting and beautiful that when he wakes he weeps to sleep again. As I read this I found myself crying, and began to wonder if there might be a "beyond." The course in positivism limited itself to human experience, and I couldn't let go of that. Whatever it was, it had to be real.

Towards the end of my first year at KU I met a very beautiful Jewish girl named Ilene. She was physically strong and passionate, with a brooding intense nature. I was haunted and captivated by her. We had really wonderful times in many ways. After a while she threatened to break up with me unless I said I loved her. I couldn't say that because something in me seemed to be dead. Our happiest and most intense moments made me sad. I lay in my room and thought, and decided that within the conventional meanings of the term, that I did love her, so I said so. But I couldn't help but think that my positivist thinking was a cop out.

One afternoon as I was lying in my room, I looked out the window and chanced to see a person who had been the student body president in our Junior High eighth grade. I went out and said "Hello," and we started talking. He hadn't changed in ten years. It was weird. It was in the eight grade that I had walked the aisle in mother's fundamentalist church after being tormented for months with the fear of going to hell. Now I was in graduate school, and doing and thinking things I would have never dreamed of. It made me feel kind of strange. I wondered what would happen if I kept on going and never stopped anywhere. I realized that the former student president had accepted the basic American values, his chief problem was that he had spent more than he had, at his wife's insistence, in order to have a nice house, car, and furniture. I cared nothing for these things. I wore the same clothes every day, which had become rags, ate the same things, and lived increasingly like an animal.

The year passed. Ilene transferred to the University of Wisconsin. I became more and more alone, spending my time reading books, doing less mathematics, and playing my guitar. I had made two friends, one Schiefelbusch, who went on to the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. in mathematics, and the other Markstein who was in the doctoral program at Kansas. Markstein and I were kind of alike. When we didn't have girl friends we got together, played gin and scrabble, and talked about things. He thought I was strange, but we really liked each other. I found out all about him, especially how his parents came from Austria during the War. They were Jewish and had fled Hitler. I also dated his sister.

I bought a cheap car and drove up to see Ilene. We drove to California. It was a strange trip. Then we took highway one down the coast. In San Luis Obispo the generator went out. There was no way to get another soon, and Ilene needed to get back to school. I bought a short fan belt and bypassed the generator and ran the fan off the drive shaft. This meant we couldn't use the lights and had to drive off the battery. We would drive like crazy in the daytime, park on a hill, spend the night, jump start it in the morning and keep going. Every day or so we had to have the battery recharged. In Colorado the engine blew up. We hitchhiked to the Denver airport. She got on a plane. We stared at each other just before she walked away. She had large beautiful brown eyes. I kept going alone and spent the night in my sleeping bag beside the road. The stars were beautiful that night. The next day I was back in Lawrence, Kansas, and got together with Schiefelbusch who hadn't left yet for Chicago.

The next fall passed very rapidly. I lived alone in the top of a hippy house. Everybody there was smoking dope, but I stayed alone. I was indifferent to comfort and society and ate the same thing every meal for months mackerel out of a can, wheat bread, orange juice, some beans and cheese. Late that summer I found a Black Diamond watermelon. It was the best watermelon I ever had. I sliced off a big piece of it every day for a couple of weeks.

Time passed quickly. My major professor had told me six months earlier that I needed to write a masters thesis. He suggested that I read everything written on wreath products and summarize the matter. He gave me a ten page article. I eventually read it. When he suggested another article, I read about five pages of it and got an idea that might generate some original theorems and save me months of tedious research. After a couple of weeks I came up with a number of new theorems. It then became a matter of writing them down which I did. I got a Masters.

That Thanksgiving, Drew came out to visit me and we went up to the University of Nebraska to visit a friend named McClanahan. We couldn't find him, but heard he was at a party. We found the party. Everyone was drinking, doping, and dancing. I joined in. After a while I saw an unusually alive, well built, good looking blond. We started dancing and I started kidding around with her. We had an intense attraction and had a wonderful time together. The next weekend she broke up with her boyfriend at the University of Chicago and came down to be with me. She was the most powerful girl I had ever met, somewhat unscrupulous, and determined. We got along very well and I respected her. Her name was Ramona.

We broke up after the semester and she went back to Washington State where her parents lived. My major professor was moving on to Michigan State and I was to go with him. I drifted through the summer and flew out to visit Mona in Seattle. We took a trip all over the West in her car and ended up in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was beautiful up there in late summer. The sky was open, the sun always seemed to be shining and we were pretty happy for a while. She wanted to get married but I wouldn't do it. It didn't seem right to me. It was a convention that people broke when they wanted to. Why not live together until tired of each other. We broke apart and I hitchhiked to East Lansing, Michigan carrying everything in a metal suitcase without a handle. I carried it on my shoulder. On the way I got picked up in a pick up with some little children in the back. There was some hay in the truck bed, and they were laughing because the wind was blowing straw all over the place. I laughed too. Just before I got picked up I noticed some little butterflies playing on some rocks. I hadn't seen that kind of little butterfly since I was a little boy playing in Tennessee. It made me think about how transitory life was. Everything passing away.

I first recall that feeling when I was about twelve. We were driving to Tennessee and stopped to eat a bite at a roadside picnic table. I wandered over to a nearby fence and started looking at the ground. There was a bottle top there, and all of a sudden it hit me that someone I didn't know had passed that way and left no identity as to who they were, only the sign of their passing by. This made me feel sad, and in later years gave me an intense desire to live as hard as I could. I often remembered the biblical quotation that all flesh is as grass, the wind blows, the sun comes, and we pass away to be forgotten. I often wondered if there was anything eternal that never dies.

When I got to Michigan life got sort of strange. I was feeling dead inside. It was awful. In my anomie, I ended up living in a basement. There was no furniture there. It rented for twenty five dollars a month. I happened to find a mattress lying by the side of the road. I dragged it down there. There was a little area where the concrete was raised, and I put the mattress there. The drain from the toilet above would overflow but the raised concrete kept me dry. There was a single light bulb and I lay there and thought and thought. The people living above me were crazy. One of the girls, exceedingly homely, was trying to get pregnant and having men in all the time. Her bed was always thumping above me. She wanted me to go to bed with her but I didn't have the heart to try. I was reading all the time, and started reading books of a philosophic or religious nature in the attempt to get out of my hole. I felt absolutely dead. On campus I kept thinking that I saw Mona walking around. That seemed strange to me.

After a while I read a book that had a devastating impact on me. It was Colin Wilson's The Outsider . Colin Wilson describes the outsider personality. It is a person who is extremely alienated and alone. He suggests that a mythic way of looking at this personality is to hypothesize that they had once seen a vision of haunting beauty and joy, and that afterwards the vision is forgotten but still active in its effects. As a result, they continue to live in a world that seems pale and drab by comparison. These people are bored, they don't know what to do with themselves, and they often end up doing intense things in order to arouse themselves to life. I had never encountered a description that seemed to speak so directly to how I was living and feeling. I really didn't believe that I had a vision, but it did seem as if I felt like I had one. On the other hand, I suspected that my anomie in the basement might have simply been the result of breaking up with Mona, or perhaps there was a psychological explanation of some sort. I didn't know. One thing did seem clear from the book. None of the outsiders described in the book ever got out of their hells. They all, in one way or another, ended up destroying themselves. There was apparently no solution to the darkness that had progressively seized upon my soul for some years. I began to feel doomed, that there was no hope for me, and that my life was manifesting a gradual decline, which was, indeed, the case.

As I thought about these matters I began to wonder if I should get back with Mona. I couldn't make sense out of my thinking I was seeing her on campus, except perhaps I really did miss her. But I hated the idea of marriage, and secondly I suspected a desire to see her was an attempt to break out of my growing isolation. On the other hand, I found myself more attracted to her than any other girl I'd known. I really didn't know why, she was the most forceful woman I had ever known, and we had the greatest impact on each other. I decided to act before it was too late. We got married.

The first year of marriage was pretty happy. We talked a lot and had lots of fun. My thinking was evolving rapidly. After a few months of marriage, Mona and I went down to the University of Chicago to visit her old boyfriend, Charlie, whom I liked as well. Schiefelbusch was there and we all got stoned together. The very first murmurings against the war in Vietnam were just beginning, and I ran across a student at Chicago who was convinced that the world was headed toward destruction. I asked "why." He mentioned the bomb, dwindling resources, the cold war, expanding population, etc. I asked what should be done about it. He suggested that we blow up a few things. I thought about that. I began to ask him where he was from, and in an apparent spirit of being friendly, found out about his early life and family. He was from Arkansas. He was bitterly antagonistic against his family, particularly his father, and that made me suspect that he was projecting his unresolved aggressions against his father onto the society at large, particularly the authority of the government. Nevertheless, even if this were true, what he was saying still might be the truth. Furthermore, I had become increasingly restless over recent years about the fact that I wasn't doing anything with myself, just drifting through. My brother Jack once said that all he ever hoped for out of life was to get through and have a reasonably good time. So I decided that I would investigate the war, the bomb, and everything of a political, social, historical and economic nature.

I started out just trying to find out about the war in Vietnam. I read voraciously and talked with people from all over the world. As I read a dreadful picture emerged. While a child we never discussed politics or the world's condition, and for some strange reason, I never thought to look at the world in the large. I began to wonder why the war had occurred, and this led to reading history, then Marxist thought and economics. Something happened to me at that time. It is possible to read about the world's suffering and pass over it, or through it, with the mind. I was not able to do this. The more I read about the war, the napalming of children, the mass murders in Russia, the slaughters in Africa, the horrible suffering in China due to imperialism, the more my heart and mind filled up with the terrifying reality of suffering. I began to go mad. Every bit of information hurt my feelings and drove me into a rage. I remember standing in a store and looking at a little child in a picture. She had been burned by napalm. I felt so sick inside that I could hardly bear it. Further, as I read about the bomb and pollution, and the dwindling resources, the more probable it seemed to me that we were going to destroy ourselves. Most of the social scientists were very pessimistic. It was the time of apocalypse, and I found myself experiencing its horrors within me. Life became a torment. I tried to figure out what to do about it, and who was at fault. That became almost impossible. The left was putting out one line and the administration, Nixon and many of the academics, were putting out another. I read and read, thought and thought, and talked to people, and finally decided that we could not win the war in Vietnam. I didn't trust anyone, as I long ago decided that most people would fool themselves and bend truth to their own advantage if their welfare was at stake. Nevertheless as far as the war was concerned, I reduced it to elementary considerations, basic facts of history, and decided that it could be won only by blasting the Vietnamese into the Stone Age. That was probably true. I began to demonstrate against the war. I joined The New University Conference and worked in their endeavors. During one demonstration I made a speech on the steps of one of the buildings at Michigan State, right across from the police administration building. The police were filming everything we did. This was at the time when the Nixon administration was using the IRS and other organizations to harass the students. The fear of the government was at its height, and many in the leftist movement were convinced that it was only a matter of time before we were all rounded up.

At this time a shift occurred in my consciousness. I began to get sensations of doom, cosmic perceptions of destruction. These impressions were very powerful and terrifying. I felt horrible. It required all my energy to keep going. I became a physical and sexual addict. Sensations could calm me down, intense sensations, and I had to have them all the time. I would often go out swimming in the nearby quarry, even late in the fall, and the water would feel like fire on my body. At night I would wander around, thinking all the time. Then things began to change, things I cannot talk about because of those I now love. I got into some very heart rending and intense matters, things that haunt me still and break my heart. Something inside of me irrevocably snapped civilization, marriage, ordinary decent ways of living were gone for good or so it seemed.

Little by little I began to feel that the ordinary ways of doing things would not suffice, that something had to be done. I decided not to take any more drugs. I was never much into it, but even a moderate amount didn't feel right to me. I got the sensation I wasn't coming back from trips to where I started, and I noticed that so many who used drugs were passive pot heads. I also decided that the guy from Chicago was probably right. He had since been picked up by the government for smoking dope. Mona and I began to have bitter fights. I could see that we had gone different ways. There was no way to go back. I was determined to go further into the anti war movement, planning violence against the government, and she could not go with me. She shouldn't do so for her own sake. I left graduate school and got a job for the summer of 1969 teaching math at Sewanee. It was to be the last summer with Mona, after that I was going on my own. It was the saddest summer of my life. I really love Mona. That fall she went to Europe and I hitchhiked around with my younger brother, Richard. One night, driving by myself in a car, I got to thinking about my mother and how hard she had worked for us when we were children. All of a sudden I saw and felt clearly that she loved us. I started crying. I had always intellectually recognized that mother loved us in some sense, but I never felt it before. I was selling her down the river by taking the course of action that lay before me.

Mona got back from Europe. It was time to break up. We participated in the great march on Washington in the fall of 1969. Just before that I had the worst apocalyptic vision ever. I was in Gaithersburg, Maryland, visiting a friend, walking by myself near the freeway. It seemed as if the whole world was covered by a terrifying power of universal destruction. This power had a sexual component, and the great power was connected to me in a strange and haunting fashion. The cars whizzing by on the interstate, the field itself, the sky, all seemed alive and headed towards destruction. Mona and I broke up. We lay in bed for three days, talking, fighting, weeping and finally did it. I decided to go see Ralph, to see if he knew of any solution besides violence. I found it difficult to take action because I never knew the truth. Were my feelings the result of upbringing, was the government actually destructive of the people's best interest, was Marxist thought an accurate analysis of imperialism? I never ever knew, but felt compelled to do something.

I went to see Ralph. He had become a Christian. He started talking about Jesus, computers, the logos, the spirit, structure. He is one of the most brilliant people I had ever known. He was involved in the charismatic movement and said that he had seen miracles. This interested me but did not impress me. I at once thought of explanations besides the divine one. For instance, the miracles could be caused by some sort of perturbation in a world soul due to the strange times in which we lived. I began to do even more intense and risky things. But I also began to listen carefully to Ralph. I had always doubted that violence against the civil authority was really going to do any good, they would always win, but felt so compelled to do something that I couldn't think of anything else to do. The idea of "one in a million" had crossed my mind many times.

Nevertheless, Ralph affirmed that idea that Jesus could do things, help people, that God was real, and that he could be experienced. Ralph was absolutely determined in the matter, and I had to respect him because I knew that he had seen as much pain as I. We went to visit one of his religious friends. They all seemed to live in big houses, upper middle class, educated, and the very people I couldn't stand. I felt they cared nothing for the poor and oppressed, nor for the course of the world. This friend of Ralph's amazed me. She started talking as if she really knew God. God spoke to her, directed her, and challenged her to lead a new life. This made a powerful impression. I began to suspect that perhaps there was something here. Perhaps if there was a God, and if he loved us, then perhaps he could do something about the situation. I was partly mad, but not so mad as to realize that my perceptions of reality were only relative, that things may not be the way they seemed.

After a few days it occurred to me that I had committed myself to trying whatever lay before me. That had been one result from reading The Possessed, and therefore, integrity demanded that I give myself to Christ to see if he was the truth. I decided to do so, and prayed to Jesus, that if he existed, that he show himself to me. I adopted the faith as a working hypothesis. Later I found that passage in John's gospel where Jesus says he will reveal himself to those who keep his commandments. I determined to search out the truth of the matter to the end. At the same time, I had moral problems to sort out. I didn't believe the Bible was the inspired of God, that is of a different logical order than committing oneself to the unknown. But I had decided to seek Jesus and therefore, I would do whatever might be needed even if I wasn't sure of it. I decided that I would devote myself to basic things, eating, sleeping, praying, being with friends. If unsure about the ethics of something, I would try to avoid it.

After asking Jesus Christ to reveal himself to me, and deciding to seek him, there was a sudden shift in my consciousness. It all happened in one day. I knew evil existed, that was obvious, but I never experienced it as a personal reality. That night I had a dream in which an evil demonic shape attached itself to my neck and tried to kill me. I awoke unable to move my neck and in real pain. Perhaps it was a pinched nerve or something. Further I seemed to be in some sort of a force field, or haze, my perceptions were distorted, things seemed weird, and worst of all I felt all around me a horrible evil presence that was bent on my destruction. I was sick with fear. It was one of the most horrible feelings of my life. I told Ralph about it. He frequently lived in this sort of reality, and we began praying desperately to get out of this hell. We tried to find, without success, some of his friends to help us. The next day I felt better but was very afraid. Ralph suggested that I see one of his friends who had been healed from an auto wreck and had a ministry of the laying on of hands for healing and exorcism. That made sense to me as I was aware, and had been since I was sixteen, that I was a distorted person and needed help.

I liked Ralph's friend. He was an architect, a relaxed and enthusiastic fellow. He laid hands on me and started to pray. I felt evil spirits being torn out of my body, glimpsing them suddenly leaving me to the left. Suddenly the heavens opened up and I was blasted by an overwhelming vision of God. On the left I saw the world covered with wickedness, and to the right, above, there was God as a raging fire of light directed against the world. I realized in an instant that God was going to destroy the world. My first impulse upon seeing God was to roar to my feet, violently enraged, speaking in an unknown tongue, but then I was struck down by the intensity of God. As a result of this experience I came to the conclusion that God was going to destroy the world.

This initial vision precipitated an imbalance in my personality. In a way it was a horrible thing, and I would never want to go through such a thing again. The effect was to release a fire inside me, an energy, that illumined dimensions of myself that I had never been aware of before. I entered what the mystics call dark night of sense, although I didn't know that at the time. This encounter lasted, in its first phase, for one and one half years. It was a decent into hell and I was in torment for most of that time. I lived by will alone and one other factor which will be mentioned shortly.

The vision left me somewhat blasted and irrational. I was overwhelmed. God existed. I thought people would be amazed to learn this fact. My cousin called me up. He was getting a Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Massachusetts. My brother Jack had called him to see if there was anything that could be done for me. My friends thought I was gone. In my blasted state I told my cousin what had happened. He related this story to his professors, telling them that I was the "most ripped up person" he had ever known. They said there was no hope for me. After a few weeks I realized my vision meant nothing to most people, that they only considered me fanatical at best. Further, I began to suspect that many of the charismatics I saw were not really solid in their faith. Therefore I decided to say little, and only speak when my awareness of the situation called for it. I realized that almost no one would understand me, and that, in order to communicate, I must be with people as they are while still preserving the vision. This was a very difficult undertaking, and seemed impossible, but I set out to do it. Further, my experiment of asking Jesus to show himself to me was not concluded. I wasn't going to say anything that I hadn't tested, and tested hard. After a few weeks it became obvious to me that the vision of God as fire could have been an hallucination.

Truth was and is important to me. While at Michigan I used to wonder all the time as to what theories, or combination of them, accurately interpreted reality. It wasn't just an academic question. If the ultimate basis of the world's problems is psychological, then perhaps we all need therapy. If the fundamental category is economic and social so that personal problems stem from being alienated from the means of production, then perhaps we need revolution. If our problem is sin against God and others, then we need forgiveness and God. What is the truth? What is ultimately real? To answer that one needs to think about epistemology. But the vision of God, and the whole question of knowing God in the first place, raised most acutely the issue of epistemology. I had not read Hume but I was familiar with the gist of his argument.

After praying and thinking about it for some time, I decided I needed to make an absolute commitment to Mona, if she were still willing to get back together. I went to visit her and told her what little I knew about the Christian faith. She was interested and we got together. We heard about jobs in Ocala, Florida where there was a very active Christian community. We went there and lived for about a year and one half.

Right after the vision I was plunged into another world. I was assaulted by evil, evil that lived in me, that was personal, that sought my destruction. I quickly recognized that it had been there all along, working covertly, organizing my perceptions, guiding my thoughts, bending my will. My determination to quit my former life style had deflected these powers from their intents and purposes. Under the light of the vision, which seemed to live in me, these powers emerged into consciousness with terrifying power. The most powerful force that had driven me for years was rage. This had reached such proportions that I could barely control myself. This was the force that created the evil visions of total destruction. The logic of this force was simple: There is no love in the world, purity of death is better than this rotten loveless world, and freedom can be achieved by destroying this world to the ground, and then (this part is illusion), we build a better one. This spirit was forecast by Dostoeveski in The Possessed and is a power that is present in the world today. When this spirit first emerged into my consciousness I was terrified. I awoke one morning in abject fear, sensing a menacing presence. I went to an early morning communion and the power diminished, but returned with renewed fury that afternoon. That night, a few people, including Al Durrance, the Episcopal priest of that church, laid hands on me and cast this demon out in the name of Jesus. It was discerned as the "spirit of antiChrist." After it was cast out, my mind spontaneously generated set of memories showing its presence throughout my life. It began in childhood, in my cold childhood world. It was the love deflected, a force that had yet to die into indifference.

In combating the spiritual powers that were released in me by the vision of God, I came to rely upon certain modes of grace. The process itself involved memory, and I made regular confessions of my sins as they emerged. I forgave those who had hurt me. I took regular communion, prayed with friends, and received counsel with prayers about once or twice week. I had a number of demons cast out of me. The process had its own dynamic. I pursued issues as they arrived. Throughout this period I never had the least sense of the love of God. Many times I descended straight into hell. One night my level of torment reached terrifying proportions. I ran down to the Church to pray. I was feeling like a monster, and remembered how I had wept over Mary Shelley's Frankenstein . When I got near the Church, I felt as if I couldn't live much longer due to the pain, a terrifying physical and spiritual anguish, physical pain all over my body, dreadful thoughts, electrical feelings like discharges out of my limbs, a desire to mutilate myself, and more. Suddenly it seemed as if there was a friend with me who would suffer in my stead. I screamed out "Put it on Jesus," and was shocked with the intensity with which I desired that he suffer. Instantly, the pain, all of it, vanished. On some occasions, when I felt that I had lost my mind for good, that I was never coming back, and that I would live this way forever, I suddenly sensed Jesus' presence, so real, so steady, gazing at me with a steadfast strength that overcomes the world. I came to believe that he had descended to the depths of hell and conquered it. Much more could be said at this point, many things happened, my point is simple: Jesus saved me.

Throughout this period I had the most dreadful feelings toward God. I believed with Ivan that he could do far more about the human condition, assuming he had the authority and desire. I went down to the Church night after night and insisted on the answer to the matter of theodicy. Through the vulnerability of my own spirit had I received a bit of the world's suffering within me, and that is what ultimately had driven me so dreadfully at Michigan State. I wanted an answer. I demanded one. God must justify himself, or the whole thing collapses. It seemed to me that Manicheanism was a much more accurate description of the human conditions, with the spirit of Jesus being the good principle. Nothing happened. Silence. The silence lasted for months. After a while, however, I began to have some very simple thoughts. Perhaps God was saying to me:

Rob, you have valid grounds for raising this issue. Let me ask you something? You know that you do not see into the mystery of my relations with anyone, whether its my fault that they suffer, or theirs, or the devil's, or whatever. Let us begin with ourselves, settle that and then look on others. Do you wish to receive love from me and become friends, and would you still desire it even if it seemed for the present that the whole world were going to hell?

That seemed a fair question. I thought on it for sometime, and said "yes."

Time passed on. I passed through one reality after another, things that I had sensed for years. I never had a good day, the best days were bad depressions. One day I had a particularly rough day, a bad day in hell. I was reading St. John of the Cross at the time, and noticed he claimed that God would normally end the dark night at some point. Before I went to bed that night I begged Jesus to stop this kind of world. That night I had a dream. My life in story passed before me. The dream began in my mother's fundamentalist church. Suddenly I knew I had to get out. Jack and I got up and left. As we came out of the church, sinister beings began to pursue us. We ran away. We crossed some railroad tracks, and then we split up. I ran straight, Jack went right. I never saw him again. I came to a house, sort of like a nunnery. The nuns were friendly and said they would put down pepper so the beings couldn't smell me. They tracked by smell and sight. Gradually I learned it was a house of prostitution and began to have a delicious time with the ladies. Then I discovered they had invited the sinister beings in the house. They were accomplices. I ran down to the basement where I found some children playing. The evil beings came after me but I jumped in a car and drove off at breakneck speed. Some of the children were with me. The car had no brakes. I decided never to slow down and drove on through traffic and stop lights. Eventually I stopped. I came to place where I had been many years before, so I chose to go another way. The evil beings continued to pursue me. I ran into a hotel room. I thought I was safe, but looking out the window, saw one of them shoot at me. The bullet missed and hit a cross in the room. The cross absorbed the bullet. I took off my clothes, put on some other clothes that were draped there on a chair, and emerged on the street. I was invisible to the sinister beings. I awoke after the dream convinced that I would never go to hell again. This happened in 1971. A reality that had enveloped me my whole life had dropped away. My perceptions of the world and reality were totally reorganized. I was free from pain. I was alive, still alive, and we had yet to lose.

Today, 2002, many years later as I slightly revise this 1981 essay, I have never returned to the hell I once knew. I have had ups and downs since then, but this paper has attempted to describe a reality emerged in my life, that should have killed me, that had its roots in my earliest childhood. It is almost completely gone.

Mona and I had a hard time getting along. We fought a lot. We started forgiving and asking forgiveness. That was powerful, especially asking forgiveness, and then later we came to fundamental decision, giving way to God with our decisions, praying for his guidance, and submitting to each other. This was very helpful. We quit trying to get our way, or defending ourselves. We reached that decision in 1972. Things got much better after that, and we have been helping each other ever since.

I got a job in Jacksonville teaching in a high school. Mona started a program with my cousin, the one who was getting a Ph.D. in psychology. He had entered a hell of his own, but had come to Florida to see what we were doing. He received the baptism in the Holy Spirit and was healed. So he stayed. He and Mona started a program for the blind. We all had good times there. Ralph and his wife Nancy were living in Jacksonville as well, and we had the most interesting discussions. Life was bit rough at times as all of us were still a bit wrecked, but not like before, so we had hope. I made a deep impression on the students at the high school. I didn't say much. I became their friend and made the effort to accept them just as they were. I still couldn't handle adults. I found it difficult to be in the world, often feeling like a person from another world. My perceptions of reality had changed after going through the dark night. I saw that people weren't ultimately selfish as I had long believed, but a mixture of good and evil. Almost everyone was unconscious of big blocks of what was going on in and around them, and this leads to so much unhappiness. After the dark night I was living in a new world and it took a while to get adjusted. I soon learned to say little of life as I had known it. People are afraid of God, and to many, my way of looking at things would be incomprehensible. But I loved the students, and we had the most happy times together. I am a natural teacher and love having students and getting to know them.

I was still pretty tense. That summer, the summer of 1972, I decided to confront the tension head on. I decided to spend six or seven hours a day sitting in silence, or praying, but without outside stimulus. Mona was working. I would sit all day on the porch, and then do the housework just before she got home. I found myself reflecting on two issues. The first one: "Did I know that God existed?" I went through this from every angle I could think of, including my understanding of such things as positivism, mental breakdown (I had read big chunks of Laing and Jung, as well as William James), theoretical systems (the issue of hierarchy of categories, the lesser being an epiphenomenon of the ultimate), the issue of solipsism, and so forth. This was most interesting. I think I ultimately got back to the sort of decision I had taken with respect to determinism in college. Namely I had experienced something. It was possible to explain it with number of theoretical systems, but ultimately the thing itself gave itself as irreducible. Furthermore, there was still something there, perhaps something numinous in my memory, but almost faintly present, though qualitatively present in a different way than trees and other things. Much more could be said, but after that I knew that I knew. The second issue was what to do with myself. Did I want to keep teaching high school? I decided not, and began to wonder about going to seminary. Friends had encouraged me, so we began the process.

Time passed quickly. Mona had a hard time sleeping, but finally got over it. I passed my psychological exams and other requirements and prepared for seminary. Throughout this time I would still be thinking from time to time about the issue of theodicy. I couldn't see any way to resolve the problem on the basis of evidence. How could a finite amount of evidence affirm the character of God, even if the evidence were all good, which it isn't? God could do something entirely different tomorrow. At one point I read some Pascal and was totally unimpressed with his argument of wagering one's life that God existed, simply because there was nothing to lose by such a gamble, and quite possibly something lost if he did exist and one didn't make the wager. To me it was quite conceivable that loving God could turn out to be the worst course of all, a course that would lead to heartbreak and disappointment if God were not love. It could be that God "rewards" those who love him with a kick in the face. Better to keep to oneself, perhaps he would respect that and leave a person alone.

Furthermore, committing oneself to Jesus seemed qualitatively different than committing oneself to God. At that time Jesus seemed perfectly good to me. He had helped me, taken my suffering, cast out my demons, taught me how to be with other people, given me life. Yet, what about those millions who starve to death each year? Where is Jesus then? I am certain they are begging for mercy. Is he just a local spirit that has permeated certain elements of western civilization? Ultimate peace and security cannot be guaranteed without believing in an ultimate source of power over all, and that power must be good. My sole sense of God had been given in the vision, and what little I had read. But I was skeptical of what I read and heard from others. Nevertheless, after a while, certain ideas occurred to me. If all the evidence had equal weight, then God is good and evil. Perhaps, however, all the evidence doesn't have equal weight, perhaps, as God originally suggested to me, some of the evidence belongs to human sin, the devil, or whatever. Where then is the decisive evidence? If that evidence is Jesus, if he is the Son of God, the image of the Father, then God is good since I knew that Jesus was good. After I cried out, "Put it on Jesus," and my suffering vanished, I had come to love him. Therefore, the theodicy question, in my mind at least, hung on the question of the divinity of Christ. If he were God's true Son, the one who reveals God's real character, then God is good like Jesus. Just before we left for seminary I sat on the couch with Mona and prayed one of the most earnest prayers of my life. I had to know one way or another about the divinity of Christ. It was an issue that mattered. I had become convinced through the new perceptions given after the dark night, that people's behavior, society, and the course of history were shaped by spiritual powers. If God is good and the ultimate actor in history, then all is well. If not, there is no hope. After the dark night I could not be a humanist.

I arrived at seminary with a number of basic questions. After reading William James, I knew I was a particular spiritual type which has always existed. I wanted to know how much of what had happened to me was a result of my particular psychological disposition, or does the Gospel offer everyone a qualitatively different life, and were there limits to it? I was especially interested in the grounds of revelation, epistemology, particularly the issue of whether revelation is given apart from sense impressions. I wanted to know the nature of God's action to the world, miracles, and in what sense the Kingdom of Heaven could be said to exist. I also hoped for some direction on how to proceed in regard to social, economic, and political matters. Finally, I wanted to develop a systematic theology. These were the basic issues and I worked hard on them the whole time I was there. I made some headway. This is not the place to go into description of my thinking at seminary. I will say only a few things.

The foremost impression, gained from the entire scope of seminary education, was that the aim of the Christian gospel is to offer salvation through Jesus Christ. Salvation is restoration of shalom. It is wholeness, health, sanity, full relations with God and others. I came to the conclusion that salvation is impossible within the limits of human life, that grace is required for human life to be reconstituted.

Conceptually, the primary obstacle to believing in grace is the deterministic spirit found in certain modern concepts of causality. I have investigated this matter for several years and feel that modern theology and biblical hermeneutics have been hamstrung by not being open to what James calls "crass supernaturalism." That is, God can act beyond the normal observed course of events. So many theologians I have read have failed to affirm the miraculous power of God. All of them affirm that miracles do not prove divinity. I agree. God could redeem Berkeley tomorrow, and that would still leave millions in abject misery. Yet these theologians fail to emphasize that God is love, that Jesus is love, and that we are foolish to set limits on this love by failing to affirm the possibility of miracles in our own time. As far as I am concerned I am alive because of miracle, and I have observed that the preaching of the early Church was victorious because it affirmed the grace of God and power to do something about the human condition. There is overwhelming evidence for this affirmation.

Secondly, the Enlightenment was just that enlightenment. I suspect, and this is a hypothesize which explains many things to me, that this enlightenment was the creation of a particular form of consciousness. I developed an enlightened consciousness by the age of fourteen. It is observational, descriptive, and manipulative. It is not the only way of looking at the world. Prior to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, many people didn't experience the world that way. The later years of my life manifested a breakdown in that form of consciousness. Even so, a great deal of theology and biblical studies are carried out in the spirit of the Enlightenment. From what I can tell, enlightenment consciousness focuses the personal energy of the self in one area, the mind, behind the eyes, rational. Scripture cannot be understood fully from that perspective. Succinctly put, Scripture does not need to be completely demythologized, we need to be remythologized. That Scripture was written by fallible human beings was obvious to me. But the core of Jesus' teaching, the rough events of his life, and his power over evil, these are all essential for salvation, and can be verified today by people who take them seriously and start praying with and for each other. Not to believe that the gist of the biblical events is at least possible, is in my mind, to limit the possibility of salvation. New Testament studies and theology have failed in my opinion, to make that affirmation strongly enough. I say this only for the sake of those who suffer. Everyone suffers.

One of the most interesting books I read in seminary was Arnold Come's Human Spirit, Holy Spirit. This is an outstanding book. In it he links revelation to sense impressions. God spoke through incarnation. I found a similar idea in Eliade's concept of hieraphony. This sheds light on a number of things. I saw that my original vision of God and the glimpses of Jesus were not accidental. They were manifestations through memory, but memory conditioned in a certain way. In the case of the vision, it was the hell fire and brimstone God of my mother's Church, my father's stern Calvinism, and the general violence of life as I had known it. Therefore the vision had only relative significance. Its real impact was the cleansing of myself. [Since 1981, when this was first written, I have changed my mind a bit on this matter. I now think I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire. The fire cleansed me, illuminating my soul in depth so I could repent and be delivered. God appeared as fire because I was utterly in sin and opposed to his will. In fact, I hated him.]

The visions of Jesus were effects of Christ's presence given through the laying on of hands for inner healing wherein the destructive processes of my life were interwoven through verbal prayer with the historical events of Jesus' life. It is actually a form of contemplation, but many sufferers don't have the capacity for contemplation and need help. The appearance of Jesus coincided with those dimensions of my existence where evil reigned, and which had been given to Jesus in prayer. This redemptive process was no accident, happening out of the sky, but rather it was the result of a Christian community seriously responding to ministry in the name of Jesus, and refusing to acknowledge anyone as a hopeless case.

A second interesting idea I encountered in seminary was Otto's idea of Holy. This laid the foundation for an epistemological solution, and helped found many of the ideas I had mulled over while sitting out on the porch and thinking about God's existence. More could be said. [Have also changed my views here, thanks to Barth and orthodoxy.]

Before and during seminary, except for the sense of the presence of Jesus in 1970, and a few other times, I lived in what certain mystics call aridity. I never felt the love of God, and when turning my eyes inward, I perceived an inner wasteland. This was my inner world leveled after the dark night. Nevertheless, I seemed to function very well and progressed rapidly in my ability to love other people and enjoy life. Right after my arrival at Virginia in 1973, I was elected president of my class, and later president of the student body. I had very good friends there, really liked most of my professors, and enjoyed my studies. I wasn't really ready to be student body president, and if I had was given the choice again, I would not have done it. As student body president I had some responsibility for our communal life. That caused me some trouble. It was so difficult to reconcile the reality of the gospel as I was learning it to the facts of our communal life. That was tough, but Mona and I survived and did well.

One of the most exciting adventures was the investigation into the historical Jesus. I took reading course on my own to investigate the gospels more thoroughly. After seminary, I read Sweitzer' Quest for the Historical Jesus. I also read C.H. Dodd and others and was deeply moved by the portrayal of Jesus as one who held apocalyptic beliefs. I discovered that this apocalyptic mentality is not unique. It characterizes a peculiar form of mental breakdown as discussed in Antoine Boison's Exploration of the Inner World: Study of Mental Disorder and Religious Experience. I concluded, however, that there is a vast difference between Jesus and a street crazy. Jesus perceived fully the reality of evil, but he conquered it, day after day, in his own person through temptation, teaching, healing and exorcism. This ministry gave him the real experiential basis for believing the Kingdom was imminent. The crazies know no peace. Jesus was and is peace.

Part way through my middler year a number of things began to come together. I began to see the sweep of biblical and church history written large. I was especially interested in the Old Testament prophets and their wrathful God who would consume all wickedness by fire. I began to see that this was only a partial revelation. The whole sweep of theological education centered on Jesus Christ as the Son of God and image of the Father. I concluded that the final revelation of the truth of this statement could only be verified on some final eschatological day, but in the meantime, one could chose whether or not to abandon oneself to God as revealed in Jesus. One can chose to believe. My believing doesn't make it ultimately true, but it does commit me to give my heart away to God as revealed in the dynamics of the Spirit. That is faith. Purely empirical sight is not given to us. Given empirical facts, the world as it is, I cannot see how one can affirm that God is good. But there is more to it than that. While at seminary I sometimes sensed a terrible suffering all around me. This was something more than suffering humanity. When we got to the prophet Hosea, I saw that God suffered for Israel. I saw that the "lamb slain from the foundation of the world" is a symbol for the eternal suffering of God. I began to see that God suffers because Jesus suffered on the cross. I felt the suffering of God. As I was sensing this, I saw so clearly why Jesus must be the Son of God, the revelation of God's character. If he is God's Son, then God is as Jesus. He suffers for us and with us as on the cross, but suffering is not the final word. By resurrection from the dead, God in Jesus Christ has overcome suffering. The final word is joy. This joy is nearly indescribable. These illuminations came to me with striking intensity. For the first time in my life, I began to sense the love that exists within the cosmos. I remember one day especially. I was driving home from Washington D.C. on the Interstate, only miles from where a few years before I experienced the worst vision of apocalypse. All around me the world was transformed into beauty and joy, not just sorrow as it had always been, but love conquering sorrow, love giving life, and love making friends of us all. I experienced this with the greatest intensity at the celebration of the Holy Eucharist with the seminary community. It seemed at times as if we had entered heaven, sat down together, and shared in the messianic banquet of the Lamb. After that, I knew that God was love, and felt for the first time in my life, a degree of peace at being in the universe.

Not long after this I had a dream. I was standing on a small hill, looking at a mountain. A landslide had opened the mountain, and inside, it blazed with hot molten rock. I needed to walk to the far side of the mountain. The only way forward passed by the mountain, so close I knew I would be destroyed. But I had to go forward, just as time bears us on. I went forward, expecting to die. As I went forward someone went with me and I passed the mountain unharmed. I knew it was Jesus who had placed his cross between my sin and the cleansing wrath of God that I had seen in the vision of God as fire. I had this dream not long after sensing the love of God, and particularly, after reflecting upon and studying the Pauline doctrine of justification. One of my professors, FitzSimmons Allison, is the one whose teaching enabled me to see this. I cannot thank him enough. Ultimately, justice reigns in the universe, but without the sacrifice of Christ, I would have been doomed.

Since then life has been fairly mundane. The first year in the ministry was difficult, but once I learned what I could do and started doing that, it became fun. I was the rector of an English speaking congregation in Guatemala for two years. We had a good time and progressed to some degree in the Christian faith. All sorts of people were in that parish and it had a very good spirit. I especially enjoyed preaching, teaching, and being with people. For quite some time I had been thinking about further work in theology and spirituality. I suspected my thought and experience can have some relevance to contemporary theology.

Just before I left Guatemala one of my agnostic friends said he would come to church if I would witness to God's work in my life. He said witness meant facts, and as an engineer, he accepted facts. I am not in the habit of talking about myself, so people there didn't know much about me. But, after two years, they had grown to trust and love me. So I witnessed on a Sunday, a milder version of what is in this paper. I addressed myself to two issues: concrete acts of God's love, and the question of theodicy. Many of the people thought it was the most dramatic and wonderful thing they had ever heard. They got happy and excited. I was surprised. We had good time there and I was sorry to leave.

While at seminary I didn't have time to gain much insight into one issue that concerned me, the matter of transforming society, or the Christian's work in the political and social world. My best advancement was to do field work at the Church of the Savior in downtown Washington. This remarkable and innovative church has combined catholic spirituality and social concern in order to improve the quality of people's lives in the Washington, D.C. area. I have thought of looking at social concern in the light of apocalyptic thought. I would also like to look at spirituality in that light, and feel I need to take some spirituality courses here at GNU. I have done some reading in this area, St. John of the Cross was very helpful to me at one point, but I know very little. My ultimate objective is to formalize a message of God's love and communicate it effectively to people.

One problem with that objective is that Christian affirmations such as "Jesus loves you" have lost their power. I have often thought of writing a novel to show the relevance of the basic Christian affirmations in the context of a personal and social history. [I did it.] That would have power, and it would also provide a good springboard for raising significant theological and spiritual issues. A number of issues have occurred to me in the course of this paper.

One matter that interests me that I forgot to mention is the matter of religion and psychology. While in Clinical Pastoral Education, I came to suspect that the methods used by psychology, and by the Church in its pastoral counseling, were quite ineffective compared to the methods I learned in Ocala. Exorcism with counseling is very effective, but counseling or therapy alone is less so. I have thought about this quite a bit and once wrote a paper arguing that the methods of pastoral counseling cannot be simply borrowed from psychology, but must reflect in some way the source of grace. Secondly, I really believe that numerous breakdowns are symptomatic expressions of a neurotic relationship to God, and to tell a person that the trouble is their inter personal relationships or their upbringing is only half the truth. Some go mad before God because they are without God.

Finally, my theological interest and direction may not be in your field of interest, if so, please let me know and steer me as you see fit toward those who can best enhance my potential. Your concern and advice is appreciated. This has been my best course and I have enjoyed it immensely. Thank you.

The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.

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