Ramblings of a Professor

We don’t know much about earthly beginnings or the creation of the atmosphere beyond the big bang theory, the biblical creation stories, or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet, that mysterious origin we have yet to decipher plagues many people, including me. On a physical plane, I can trace myself to what my parents tell me and pictures of my childhood I can one day digitize into the Internet archeological realm. But historically and scientifically, the psychological disappearance of reality puzzles me positively and negatively. How do we arrive at any absolute presence of the beginning and matter on this earth in our existence? But, more importantly, how did I survive moving from a little utopian dream to a big city nightmare?

My first existence began at the University Church of Christ in Conway, Arkansas and continued to other places, such as Garnett Church of Christ (Tulsa, Oklahoma), First Free-Will Baptist Church (Tulsa), First Christian Church (Tulsa), First Baptist Church (Fayetteville, Ar), and a few other short pitstops along the way. Presence existed in many forms in these religious institutions focusing on a fundamental view of Christianity. I must say with complete honesty that I received positive and negative experiences in these places no different from any other place. If I were raised by hippy parents, I personally believe I would still have negative perspectives, for that creation is part of the social structure and defining all as individuals.

Positive experiences include: meeting compassionate friends and colleagues with shared ideas; forming an ethical framework of life; feeling an intense emotional experience to the divinity within me; learning the importance of music touching my soul deeply; reading any text with clarity and critical thinking; and arriving at a developing independent thought.

Now at thirty-six years old, I can recollect these memories with nostalgia and importance. My strongest memory is sitting around of table of children and tackling the Book of Job with the help of two adult teachers. Raised Church of Christ, I focused much at that Conway church on reading a text and interpreting its literal meaning. At the time, we did not focus on the concept of God actually betting with Satan that Job would endure the pain. While that thought might be blasphemy to question, my brain glossed over this paradox rather quickly. Nor did we focus on Job as an allegory of the Israelite struggle with maintaining a geographical location. I had not heard of the State of Israel and its issues until high school and college, when I already began doubting my fundamentalist background. We, however, understood the conclusion of Job. A story is not a story without a climax and a resolution of conflict. Job receives his blessings multiple times over and lives happily ever after by not rejecting the Abrahamic God. It was like a Star Wars episode to me. If you fight long enough for the Republic, eventually truth will reign out, and the hero will destroy the darkness surrounding him or her. What if Job had died would be a question I would have posed many years later.

My mother always said, “We just have to trust and have faith in God.” In other words, though we have certain free will, there is a Master Plan of existence called fate or predetermination that also guides us in specific future directions. Though she continually spoke these pleasing words, I took them at face value as comfort only because my mother stated them. She could have said anything. She could have said, “Run, Forrest, Run,” and the words would have impacted me with the same rich meaning and context as a child.

My beginnings were somewhat pure. I lived in the country near Lake Beaverfork, and ideal place to begin an existence. No big bang theory or Darwinian evolution pounded my thoughts as I ran up and down our little neighborhood Treasure Hills or visited the Lost Creek that may have forked somewhere into the lake. Mixed with this fundamentalist religious childhood, I lived like Emerson describing the forests of Walden. I was spiritual through the church music in the town of Conway, Arkansas, and my other beginning sought its path down a nature trail and acting like a mild version of Huckleberry Finn without any rascal element to my personality. I walked alone with my walking sticks, climbed the wild oak trees, or walked across a dead tree probably struck once by lightning and a hard windstorm. Never did I see a mountain lion. Never did I see a coyote. Only dozens and dozens of squirrels and birds to catch my eye with my German Shepherds tracking a direction for my transcendent beauty. I lived in the Garden of Eden.

Imagine living this heavenly existence your entire life! Beyond falling out of a tree and banging my head against a series of buried rocks, my life was perfection. God surrounded me with very few issues arising. I hummed the songs we sang in church along with American Top 40s we listened to in our Green LTD Ford on the return drive to our forest neighborhood. Somehow, my childhood ignored the resignation of Richard Nixon, the attempted idealism of the democratic Baptist Jimmy Carter, the economic crisis surrounding me, and a return to trickle-down economics under the new Republican Ronald Reagan. Politics, science, or any kind of deep inquiry did not exist in the school system nor my own world. The closest I understood politics happened in the 2nd grade. The teacher Mrs. Gates wrote two Presidential names on the board, and the class voted. We chose Ronald Reagan; he had some movie with a monkey I had seen with my father on the Public Broadcasting System.

Enough with the utopian reality. I remained aloof for twelve years. In fact, as a grown man, I am amazed how few people received such an ideal realm to live. Money was difficult to make in the small town of Conway, and my father and mother moved our family to their hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma so that they could support a family. Suddenly, my dark questions began.

My dark questions turned into depression, anxiety, and fear living in a completely different and large city. Perhaps every child experiences this situation of losing a part of the identity by moving and finding new friends. The new church, Garnett Church of Christ, frightened me. The building was circular with the pulpit in the center; the preacher learned well how to turn 360 degrees without feeling awkward on the podium; Marvin Phillips was a professional evangelical minister with the ability to pronounce the love of Jesus on television, too. We moved from a small church with a familiar identity to a large crowd of existential believers singing and praising around me while I sat next to my mother waiting for us to return to our new home still foreign to me and without any grand forest whatsoever but a distant pond, roaming cattle, and the howling of coyotes at night. This was not my home.

That first summer, I read the entire Bible on my own. The Book of Psalms kept me company with strength and perseverance. I became more introverted even when school began, but slowly through this move to the city, my simple country beliefs faded from me. Still, I had a large soul and new identity trying to corrupt it, but I remained buried in this large cocoon bubble called a metropolis, even though the size of Tulsa is nothing like Tokyo or New York City. I was just a lost child in a large world.

When religion and the countryside was stripped from me, the new me formed like a perpendicular line going into a new direction but still connected to the original line. My Freudian center remained attached to the line like the wonderful essence of nature still hovering in the wind, the only movement I still felt from my childhood experiences, but the rest of my experiences surprised me.

Church became a confusing paradox. The youth minister, a reformed drug addict, molested a child or two in the church. Garnett Church of Christ split, and my parents went away to a newly found church only to be disappointed with the ministers, who one memorized and plagiarized sermons from the radio and the other who ran off with a teenager and later was thrown into jail. Attending my friend’s church, I experienced another minister falling away from God and seeing another church split because of differences in personalities and conflicts that should have been avoided. I cannot blame God for any of these situations. After all, we are only human beings struggling to ascertain the meaning of the Absolute we cannot understand fully.

Sadness continued to creep in. Christianity, mixed with human beings and institutions, gave me little hope anymore. Praying to Jesus was like a blank stare to me, and my soul once redeemed somewhere in the Arkansas hills was trapped in a large city that expanded in multiple directions–none for me!

Years passed. Poems written directly to God. Science and the Big Bang studied at length. However, in the end, what is left now is a drifter walking down a road without directions. There are moments from my past that challenge me in the face of the presence, but they drift away as soon as they arrive. Nights now in Oklahoma City exist when I drive down these city streets with the windows down, and I hear the purity of my childhood gracing the face of tattered age, and I forget exactly where I am. Though on the road, I flashback to my childhood eating Cheerio’s without the sugar and looking out my back window. The birds line up to eat the sunflower seeds and other bird food my father placed out there every day and night. I picked up my spoon every morning then and loved the birds hovering in front of the kitchen window facing out toward the distant forest.

I awake from my dream and drive down Northwest Expressway in the northern part of Oklahoma City. There are a few churches on the side of the road, but no community I want to touch anymore. I am a lonesome pilgrim now with many scars from the previous move to Tulsa and the stripped identity from a time of purity and innocence.

I understood for the first time what Adam and Eve felt as they lost their existence in the forest. The beautiful trees never meant to last forever. Never meant to maintain themselves in any kind of eternal form. That idea is a false scheme or dream that I had gone through for many years as I tried desperately to re-write my future into some kind of happy tranquility. However, God didn’t kick me out of the forest and into a kind of desert doom. I chose ultimately to react to this path myself.

Now, I sit in a bookstore writing this narrative. My views of religion have changed dramatically from when I was twelve. I no longer call myself a Christian. The term I use is ethical monotheism, the same term a Jew might use to define their religion. Somehow, it comforts me to be on the outside of any organized religion. A building will never comfort me again, nor will the serious laws of science or gravity. In the midst of all my pessimism toward life’s situations, organized religion, and Christianity, I do not remain alone.

I found my spirit resonating as a child, and through years of resentment and contemplation, that soul, with a few scars, still remains holy. I don’t pray as much as I should, but sometimes I get excited reading a book and cannot stop writing a sentence or two to my friends or to myself on a blog. I feel the presence of God here in this bookstore. The trees have transformed to chairs. The birds are chirping human beings talking about Italian, nursing, the Chinese game Go, or random conversations on cellular phones. Communion is either Iced Coffee or a Coldbrewed Marble Mocha, and the religious music forms in my ears–as of now New Order and, later, George Harrison. I wear my Jesus sandals, believe Jesus was a great prophet but not God incarnate, and fill my soul with lines from the bookshelf. Though alone, I am surrounded by fellow believers of human beings. They may have their fundamentalist or liberal views on reality, while I exist somewhere in the middle praising my fundamentalist youth and the forests of the Romantic poets and writers during the 19th Century.

I am alive again. Once divorced. Now re-married. I am alive again with children to raise and enlightened by many thoughts. George Harrison’s song, “My Sweet Lord,” resonates in my ear as I return my thoughts to the Book of Job. I do not die. After the divorce, I inherited two step-children, and we created another child, Ethan–the one who connects both families together. We are not always happy, and I contribute to much of the sadness of our family with my depression, social phobia, panic disorder, generalized anxiety, and existential isolation. But, we press on like all families–fundamentalists or atheists. We make our lives something with what God has blessed us with in our middle class neighborhood as sunflowers, considered a weed, overtake the other flowers in our front lawn.

George Harrison’s guitar gently weeps, and I love my once fundamentalist and now suburban lifestyle no matter what suffering tries to limit the vibrations of the electricity forming multiple notes of beautiful music in my ears. And, I want to thank God for it all! The beginning! The middle! And, in the future, the end!