by Roger Lynn
One sunny Sunday morning in June, 1987, my life was changed by a shocking experience that shook me to the core. This story is about what led up to that experience, what it meant for my life at the time, and how it changed my life forever.
I’d had an ambivalent relationship with God. My folks were active Methodists, as were my grandparents. I got gold stars for my Sunday school attendance, but went through a period of doubt when I realized there was no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. The Divine went into the trash like old Christmas trees and Easter baskets. Then one day when I was about 12, as I was walking home on Hartford Street just east of Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, I heard a voice call my name, “Roger”. It was a kind clear voice but there was no one around. I didn’t know what it was. I thought it might have been God.
As I describe this experience, it sounds like some kind of psychological abnormality, but it was much more benign. In an essay on hallucinations, the psychiatrist, Erwin W. Straus, describes hallucinatory voices: “The schizophrenic voice derides, persecutes, commands. It allows reflection no freedom. The voices are everywhere; inescapably ‘they’ press in upon the patient like a poison gas which our own breathing forces us to inhale.”[1] This voice was not like that. The voice was kind. Being a faithful Sunday school student, I had been exposed to the idea of God speaking to a person and had learned about John Wesley and his “heart-warming experience.” Maybe this was God calling me.
Whatever it was, it started me wondering about this space, this mysterious realm within and beyond me, and I liked the wondering. But as I searched for an answer, I found the church language was too abstract. It did not connect with my life. When I was younger, my mother wanted me to learn to play the piano, but we could not afford one. To make up for the lack, the piano teacher gave me a cardboard key board to practice on. Like the cardboard key board, no
matter how I pushed on those words, they made no sounds in me and brought me no closer to uncovering the hidden voice or feeling the heart-warming experience.
I am a mechanic by nature and probably would have done well in engineering of one kind or another. My best friends went into physics, math, or engineering, but my father was a successful electrical engineer. Had I gone into engineering, in an effort to “help me”, I knew he would, have constantly pointed out what I was doing wrong and how I could improve myself. Going into the ministry, I had the illusion of leaving that critical voice behind and the hope that I would gain access to the kinder voice that had called my name.
When I started college as a pre-seminary student, I discovered Freud. He coined words and ideas to describe this inner space: the Oedipus Complex, the ego, superego, the unconscious, the libido made sense of my own interior, and Moses and Monotheism made more sense than the obscure language of the Bible and the church. In my sophomore year, I transferred to the University of Minnesota with a major in psychology, and minors in philosophy and math. At the U, I ran into the spiritual wasteland of Behaviorism in psychology and Positivism in philosophy. The psyche was hidden in a black box and what you could not measure did not exist. The only foray into any interior life was in Abnormal Psychology. At the time, my identity was in such disarray that I found myself reflected in most of the disorders.
By the end of my junior year, I was barely hanging on to a “C” average. Then I met Deanna, who would become my first wife. I fell deeply in love. I settled down, got good grades, and began to reexamine my relationship to a loving Divine Presence. If God is love as First John declares, I felt love. I was overflowing with love. My inner landscape was changing. In Freud’s term, I was experiencing my libido. Paul Tillich, in his book Morality and Beyond, writes this about the libido energy but differing with Freud:
“The difference is that essential libido (toward food or sex, for example) is concretely directed to a particular object and is satisfied in the union with it, while existentially distorted libido is directed to the pleasure which may be derived from the relation to any encountered object. This drives existential libido boundlessly from object to object.”[2]
One day I would run into this distinction, but not yet. I was in my “Garden of Eden” stage, my heart was warmed, but I heard no voice. In effect, Deanna had become my ground. In my senior year, I returned to the idea of the ministry. By spring quarter, I was married and was headed for Garrett Seminary. I had returned to my search for the hidden voice.
In many ways, life at Garrett Seminary was idyllic. Evanston was beautiful. We lived in the married couple’s apartments, rode our bicycles to the grocery store, and never paid more than $.39 a pound for hamburger. I enjoyed writing papers and managed to get most of them in on time with Deanna typing them. In one paper, the term “Holy Spirit” often came up. Deanna consistently misspelled it “Holy Spit”. When I asked, “What is this ‘Holy Spit’ business?” Without a pause, she said, “It’s what holds the Trinity together.” Though I did not include that insight in my paper, it made more sense to me than the theological gymnastics of St. Gregory of Naziansus who formulated the doctrine of the Trinity in the fourth century of the Common Era.
Our first child, Mary Karen, was born in Evanston. It was a wonderful place to begin our first family. There was a park across the street and there were other young families starting in the married couple’s apartments. It was known as the “Fertile Crescent”. At first, it was difficult for me, bringing up early issues when my brother was born, but I went into counseling. I remember a dream I had the night before my first session. I stood on the edge of a precipice and jumped into the void. It was true. I did jump into all the uncertainty of being a father and supporting a family.
It was not a planned pregnancy. Given a choice, I would have said, “Not yet. I’m not ready for that kind of responsibility,” but once that train pulled into the station, I jumped aboard. I loved being a father and Mary Karen was a delightful child. I can still picture her first laugh at the sight of a balloon popping up. I wanted to be a kind and affirming parent that my father was not able to be. Deanna turned all her considerable intelligence into being a mother, devouring Dr. Spock’s book on “Baby and Child Care” and teaching our young daughter to speak before her first birthday. There were hard times, sleepless nights and our relationship changed. We were no longer as carefree and I had to drive slower, but all-in-all, family life was a great ride.
The added responsibility meant I had to arrange for my first internship. I had two internships working mostly with youth and enjoyed it, but the search for the heartwarming experience took a back seat in that train. My orientation now had to be how to effectively deal with the external world of preaching, church administration, funerals, weddings, and so on. There was no time or instruction on how to listen for the hidden voice. The academic culture at Garrett also was not helpful. The dominant theology was Neo-orthodox with Karl Barth and Rudolph Bultman. To me, Barth’s stress on the “otherness” of God and Bultman’s demythologizing were much like Behaviorism in psychology and Positivism in philosophy. They did not awaken anything in me. Soren Kierkegaard’s existentialism with its disparagement of abstract philosophy and his emphasis on experience was intriguing. Also, Paul Tillich’s reference to God as the “ground of being and meaning” held some promise. I heard Tillich lecture at the University of Chicago School of Theology. I knew there was something there but could not quite get my mind around it. That most likely was the problem, trying to get my mind around it. My own experience was still foreign territory, like trying to play music on a cardboard key board.
During this time, I had a recuring pain in my abdomen. My body was trying to tell me something. Actually, it had been trying to tell me something my whole life, and I consistently ignored it. As a child I was hyper-active and dyslexic. In those days, these conditions were not diagnosed. Although I was intelligent, school was hard for me. I felt dumb as a door knob.
I was never taught to listen to my body. I learned at a young age to ignore, if not repress my feelings. They only got in the way: tears were for sissies, fear was not to be felt, anger got you into trouble. I remember one day when walking home from kindergarten, I came upon two first graders who had found a lady finger fire cracker they were afraid to light because it had a very short fuse. I said, “I’ll light it.” When it blew up in my fingers, one of them said, “See, we told you,” I quickly responded, “It didn’t hurt a bit.” By the time I got home, the pain had gone away. This denial of feelings began to change when I took a one-year course in Clinical Pastoral Education, studying for a second master’s degree. Max Maguire, the Supervisor, used a gestalt approach that focused on feelings rather than ideas. It took me three quarters to finally begin to identify my feelings.
In my fourth quarter, I was explaining what occurred in one of my hospital visits writing in profound detail what I was thinking. Max and the other three students confronted me for the umpteenth time with the question, “But how were you feeling?” If they had asked what color my socks were, I would know where to look, but to find my feelings, I had no clue. In frustration, I shouted in anger, “I don’t know!”
“So how do you feel right now?” Max asked.
Immediately, I responded, “I’m angry!”
“Good, it’s about time. That’s a start.”
Footnotes
1 Asthesiology and Hallucinations by Erwin W. Straus found in: Existence, A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, Rollo May, Ernest Angel, & Henri F. Ellenberger, Editors; New York, 1959, Basic Books Inc. page 167
2 Westminster John Knox Press; Louisville, Kentucky; 1965; pages 60, 61
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