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“Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh and say to him, ‘This is what the Lord says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me.”  Exodus 8:1 (New International Version)

I wrote the original essay about six years ago. I wrote it at a time when the chaos we’re seeing now was in its early stages. As I watched it all unfold, I gave thought to a sermon preached by Peter Marshall years before. It was about the Exodus of the “children of Israel” from Egypt. God’s representative, Moses, had gone to Pharaoh and spoke the now famous words from the eighth chapter of Exodus – “Let my people go so that they may worship me in the wilderness.” As the contest of wills between Pharaoh and Moses and God proceeded, I could see Pharaoh’s compromises recorded in Exodus 10 clearly – “Don’t go too far.” “The men can go, but the women and children must stay in Egypt.” “The people can all go, but their worldly goods and livestock must stay in Egypt.” 

Marshall saw the similarities to the compromises offered by Pharaoh to the compromises offered by modern society to Christians. I was living in Emporia, Kansas, thinking back to my graduate school days in Kansas City, when it hit me. Peter Marshall was right about what he saw back in his time. He was even more right about what I’m seeing in the early twenty-first century.

It’s now 2024 and I’m living in Kansas City, surveying the landscape of a society that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described as “on the brink.” Young boys and girls are being groomed to become drag queens. Some are even put on stage to bump and grind in seedy nightclubs to “entertain” perverted souls. Even worse, some of our young are being programmed to convince themselves that boys can become girls  and girls can become boys with a pronouncement. And, it hasn’t ended there. Greedy medical “practioners,” if they can be called that, are recommending and performing sex change operations on children who are unablle to understand what’s being done to them. It’s obscene!

 My original essay now follows for you, fellow Christian to consider 

A few weeks ago, I went over to Haag Pharmacy to pick up a prescription for my wife. As I walked toward the entrance, I found myself caught up in the sights and sounds of children playing and laughing in the adjacent playground of Emporia Christian School. If I could have, I’d have lingered a while longer. It just felt so good, for an all too fleeting moment, to be transported away from the insanity of modern life. 

When I got inside the pharmacy, I was re-transported back into the realities of adult life in America. That’s the world where about 40 million of us are taking prescribed anti-depressants and psychotropics. It’s a world dominated by Zoloft, Paxil, Prozac, Xanax, Ativan, Ritalin, or some newly concocted chill pill. There are millions more of us taking Demerol, Oxycodone, and Percocet for our pain. Too often, the reward for using these painkillers is addiction. I’ve heard that using them for only five days can turrn a corporate executive, an undertaker, a truck driver, or a college professor into a mumbing, toothless junkie. And, wonder of wonders, it’s all approved by the Food and Drug Administration. 

Now, mind you, I don’t fault  Amber and her crew. They’ve absolutely delightful people. They’re not the ones responsible for society’s ills. They’re only doing what the doctor ordered and the doctor is only trying to fix problems that he or she didn’t create.  But, I digress. I need to move on.  

I was greeted by a smiling face as soon as I got to the counter. “How are you, Phil? It’s good to see you.  How can I help you?” “I’m good. I’m here for Nancy’s regulars,” I responded.  

With my mind still trying to wrap itself around the joy those kids were experiencing in the playground next door, I paid for the prescriptions and made a bit of small talk before I left. “The kids next door are absolutely wonderful. They’re infectious, don’t you think?” The clerk smiled and nodded in agreement. I closed the conversation on a somber note. “The sad thing is, some of these happy kids are going to grow up and become United States Senators some day. I can’t figure it out. How does something like that happen? How does it all go off the rails?” 

Realizing it wouldn’t be fair for me to expect an answer to the question, I made my way to the exit.  

The questions have been nagging at me ever since. How? How? How? One day these kids are happy and content. Then, gradually, they get pumped full of Ritalin, Prozac, or painkillers and their heads are turned inside-out. The process repeats itself over time and they’re ruined. The only thing they’re good for in the end is the United States Senate.  

I’ve been giving this thought since that brief encounter, racking my brain for solutions to the problem. I’ve concluded the only thing that makes much sense to me is for those of us who are Christian to never send our kids to  public school at all. Let them learn about life on their own. They seem to do a far better job of learning how life is supposed to work without a lot of adult interference and instruction. 

“Why, Phil,” you say. “That’s a bit too radical; it’s insane. Our children need to get an education. After all, how are they ever going to succeed in this world without an education? 

That argument might have worked well on me a few years ago, but not these days. If  what the world considers success and God considers success could be put side by side into writing, one thing would become abundantly clear. God’s ideas about success are radically different than the “world’s.”  

It’s been that way for millennia.  

When I was in graduate school, I became acquainted with the work of Peter Marshall, a Presbyterian minister who emigrated from Scotland in the 1920’s and by the 1940’s had become Chaplain of the United States Senate. He died when he was in his forties. While his life was short, his legacy was rich and full. Whatever he was given in life, he used for the glory of God and the good of mankind. That was especially evident in the way he used worldly wealth. He died nearly penniless, with just a few dollars in his accounts to pass on to posterity.  Some people thought that this was a terrible thing for him to do to his family, but his wife, Catherine, thought otherwise. She once observed that she was quite proud of the example he’d set in life. She let the critics know that he had used every resource he had been given in life to the best possible end. 

I think of a man like Peter Marshall and ask myself what he might have to say about our children and the educational system we plunge them into these days. I believe I know the answer. In fact, I’m sure I know. 

Some time during the 1940’s, Peter Marshall preached a sermon that is now best known as “The Third Compromise.”  

What, you might ask, was or is “The Third Compromise?” It was Marshall’s commentary on the contest of wills between God and Pharaoh recorded in the book of Exodus. “The Third Compromise” can be found in chapter 10 of that book. 

Prior to chapter 10, Moses outlines God’s requirements for his people, under the broad umbrella of the now famous words, “Let my people go that they may worship me.” In response, Pharaoh offers a series of compromises –  (1) the people may go, but they must worship in the land of Egypt, (2) the people may go, but they cannot go too far, (3) the men can go, but the children must stay in Egypt, and (4) All can go, but their possessions cannot go with them. 

In the end, every compromise is rejected. The first is rejected when Moses tells Pharaoh that the children of Israel are to leave Egypt and go three days into the wilderness to worship God. Pharaoh responds by telling Moses the people can go, but not too far, which was another way of saying, “Don’t get too carried away with your religion business.” It was a very twenty-first century response, but it was also rejected.  

This brings me to “The Third Compromise.” Pharaoh’s offer and Moses’ and God’s response are outlined in the 10th chapter of Exodus, which follows 

“Then Moses and Aaron were brought back to Pharaoh. “Go, worship the Lord your God,” he  said. “But tell me who will be going.” Moses answered, “We will go with our young and our old, witth our sons and our daughters, and with our flocks and herds, because we are to celebrate a festival to the Lord.” Pharaoh said, “The Lord be with you—if I let you go, along with your women and children! Clearly you are bent on evil. No! Have only the men go and worship the Lord, since that’s what you have been asking for.” Then Moses and Aaron were driven out of Pharaoh’s presence.” (Exodus 10:8-10, New International Version) 

It is this “Third Compromise” that far too many Christians have been willing to embrace and they have done it to the detriment of the faith they profess in. 

In his sermon on the subject, Reverend Marshall puts the peril of the compromise succinctly: 

“This was perhaps the most subtle and the most successful of all the compromises, because even the most godly parents today desire worldly prosperity and position for their children. They want their children to stay in Egypt, they want their children to find success and approval in Egypt. One of the greatest problems facing the church today is the fact that so many children and young people are still in Egypt with the approval and the consent of their parents.” 

While some Christians opt for Christian schools or homeschooling, most send their children to public schools, which are supposedly neutral on the subject of religious faith, to learn the skills they’ll need in life to become “successful.” 

In this regard, Reverend Marshall’s words from the 1940’s are prescient and powerful:  “If you give to your children an account of the world from which God is left out, you will teach them to understand the world without reference to God.” 

I see 21st America and see the results of the “Third Compromise.” I see it in the ever increasing cohort of young people who want nothing to do with Christianity and even when they do, their belief systems are based on what the “world” believes it  should be, not God’s. The current moniker for this cohort is “Nones.” How’s that for a belief system? It might just as well be Bette Midler’s famous “Whatever!” 

Does this mean that the parents who have made this compromise don’t care about their children? No, of course not. As Reverend Marshall also observed, these parents give their children the best medical and dental care. They make sure their children’s posture is perfect and their grasp of social graces are outstanding. They pay fortunes for college tuition. But while “their bodies and their minds are carefully nurtured and trained while their souls are starved and neglected.” 

I think of young children today and conclude, sadly, that this is how our children become United States Senators or anything else we deem to be important in life. Far too many of them enter the fray without much of an internal rudder to guide them other than ambition and self-interest. They are thrown into a world where that ethic prevails. It’s every man for himself. It’s do whatever ambition and self-interest tell you to do, even if it means destroying your fellow travelers. 

Peter Marshall hasn’t been the only one who has seen the peril before the Christian world. About a year ago, I read Rod Dreher’s “The Benedict Option – A Strategy for Christians in a Post Christian Nation.” Dreher has observed what Peter Marshall observed more than a half a century before him. He has seen that “Christians often talk about “reaching the culture” without realizing that, having no distinct Christian culture of their own, they have been co-opted by the secular culture they wish to evangelize.” In other words, they have fallen prey to Pharaoh’s “Third Compromise.” 

Dreher sees all to well that “American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture, one in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears.”  

But how can we come to our senses? Dreher’s prescription is simple, right to the point:  

“If we are going to be for the world as Christ meant for us to be, we are going to have to spend more time away from the world, in deep prayer and substantial spiritual training—just as Jesus retreated to the desert to pray before ministering to the people. We cannot give the world what we do not have.”   

As it was in the time of Moses, I believe it’s time for Christians who truly want to live the Christian life to go into the wilderness, as it were, to worship God without the influence of the “world” to corrupt us. I don’t have a clear idea of what that life looks like. Like most people, I’ve been too caught up in the affairs of this world to see the objective clearly. But, I am convinced that it is time for us to tell the Pharaohs of our time, “Let my people go, that they may worship me.” 

Peter Marshall closed that famous sermon with a critical question. It was critical back in the 1940’s. It’s even more critical today.  

I’ll close with that question Peter Marshall and leave it with you, the reader, to consider: 

“What is the good of your son’s phi-beta-kappa key, or your girl’s successful career in music or art or journalism, if they don’t know God, if they are not saved, if they have not entered into a saving relationship with God through Christ, if they are spiritually illiterate or spiritually dead? That’s the question you will have to answer if your children are left in Egypt.” 

“We are approaching the brink; already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble: “But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.”…But we can do—everything!—even if we comfort and lie to ourselves that this is not so. It is not “they” who are guilty of everything, but we ourselves, only we!” 

• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – “Live Not by Lies” (1974) 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote the comments from the seminal essay I cited above not long before he was arrested by Soviet authorities, charged with treason, and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The arrest came on the heels of the publication of “The Gulag Archipeligo,” which became Solzhenitsyn’s  best known work.  

The theme Sozhenitsyn outlined in the book was quite simple. While the world has always had its fair share of evildoers pass though human history. Vladimir Lenin was the architect of an ideology that justified the gulags and the brute force, its supporting bureaucracies, and the terror that were to become the building blocks of the “Soviet Utopia.” Those building blocks paved the way for the evildoers to operate freely within the system Lenin had created. Subsequent Soviet leaders, from Stalin to Krushchev, Brezhnev, etc then recruited even more evildoers like Laverntiy Berea do whatever it would take to ensure that the Communist system succeeded.  

Solzhenitsyn learned the lesson about the Soviet Union’s security apparatus the hard way.  Berea, chief of the NKVD, meant business when he said “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Solzhenitsyn had become a target of the the NKVD when he wrote letters to friends highly critical of Stalin and when he wrote books like “Cancer Ward” and “The Red Wheel.” The books prompted a few assassination attempts, but his criticism of Stalin in the letters earned him an eight year sentence at a labor camp  for counterrevolutionary activity in 1945.   That time in the prison camp, in turn, became Solzehnitsyn’s inspiration for the publication of “The Gulag Archipeligo.” in 1974. 

Solzhenitsyn lived the life of an exile in Cavendish, Vermont until 1994, when the treason charges that had prompted the “conviction” were overturned by the U.S.S.R’s Prosecutor General. He was eventually allowed to return to Russia. He spent the rest of hs life there and died on August 3, 2008. He was 89 years old. 

Solzhenitsyn never went into exile willingly. He was thoroughly Russian and it showed in his extraordinary literary gifts. Had he lived during the times of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, or Chekhov, he would have been a valued member of this prestigious fraternity.  

During his exile he wrote three books – “Between Two Millstones,” “Sketches of Exile,” and “Exile in America.” In addition to the writing, he also made many compelling speeches, including his memorable 1976 speech to the graduating class of Harvard University, which he titled “A World Split Apart.”  

Like most Americans, I knew little about Solzhenitsyn prior to his Harvard address. I’d read “Cancer Ward” and “The Red Wheel,” and his essay “Live Not By Lies.” I admired him as a writer and began to think of him not only as a writer, but also as a prophet in the mold of Hosea, who was told by the Almighty to set “the trumpet to his mouth.”. That admiration grew exponentially after I read the transcript of his Harvard address. While I wasn’t in attendance at the event, I could visualize it, thanks to having lived in Cambridge,Massachusetts during my formative years. I’d strolled through the Harvard campus many times in those years. The sights and sounds of those days have stayed with me. I remember them fondly. 

I left Cambridge in 1961 to join the Air Force so that I could “see the world.”  By 1978, the year Solzhenitsyn made that famous address, I had just started attending graduate school in Kansas City.   

As I read the transcript I was riveted by what Solzhenitsyn had to say. The more I read, the more I saw that it took a prophet’s courage to utter them. A few samples from the speech follow. I think you’ll understand  what I’m trying to say once you read them: 

“But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that the vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems, which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive.” 

“However, it is a conception which develops out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick.” 

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.“ 

The world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems, which must be corrected. Strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still is criminality and there even is considerably more of it than in the pauper and lawless Soviet society.” 

“Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?” 

You may be asking what Solzehnitsyn said at Harvard has to do with twenty-first century America. I’ll say it plainly – everything. The things Solzhenitsyn wrote about and said during his life should stand as a prophetic warning to us. As he said in his 1974 essay, “we are on the brink.” A person would have to be wilfully blind not to see it. And, the problem is, much of America, including its leaders, has become wilfully blind. 

The obscene demonstrations on our elite college campuses, including Harvard, speak to this blindness. The rampant crime in America’s cities speaks to this blindness. The insidious “cancel culture” that has developed speaks to this blindness. The insanity of pronouns and gender dysphoria that is destroying far too many of our young people speaks to this blindness. 

Even here in Kansas City we’ve been treated to an example of wilful blindness. A week or so ago, Harrison Butker, who is the field goal kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, set off a national firestorm when he made the annual commencement address at Benedictine College, which is not too far from downtown Kansas City. What did he do to set of the firestorm? He spoke about marriage, family, children, career, and faith from a Catholic/Benedictine point of view and thousands of angry Progressives, “woke” individuals, media superstars, and a sprinkling of politicians took umbrage at what he’d said. While he never said that women couldn’t have fulfilling careers, he did extol the virtues of motherhood, womanhood, faith, and careers. As the rhetorical missiles lobbed across the airwaves it became apparent that he’d been villainized by claiming that family, faith, and children should be praised rather than seen as impediments to a rewarding career.  

It’s an all too familiar position today that becomes quite evident when one looks at the statistical data concerning abortion in America. According to the Guttmacher Institute, very few abortions in America are being performed to protect a mother’s health or because of a detected fetal abnormality. Women are choosing abortion for reasons like (1) Having a child would be an impediment to a lucrative, professionally rewarding career or (2) The woman considering the abortion wasn’t “ready” to have children. There were other reasons cited,but those two were the ones most often cited. Lest one think that aborting unborn children is rare in America, it must be said that there were 930,000 abortions performed in America in 2020. The total data for 2023 isn’t complete (two months worth of data is still missing), but when all the data is compiled it will almost certainly reveal that over a million abortions will have been performed. 

Some claim that abortion is rarely performed in America nowadays. Really. When one compares the number of abortions performed in 2022 (930,000) to the number of tonsillectomies (504,000), or the number of open heart surgeries (about 400,000), it’s clear that the number of abortions performed and the self-serving justifications given are astounding. In speaking about these things at Benedictine College, Harrison Butker hit a really raw nerve.  

I’m sure that Butker’s faith and philosophy of life are now considered the minority report and there are now thousands, if not millions, who are clamoring for him to be “cancelled” or for the Chiefs to terminate his contract.  

There’s a part of me that wants to just move on from the vitriol. After all,  Harrison Butker is an adult and he can handle all the hate being directed at him and folks like me, who admire Harison Butker, can lay low and just “go along to get along.” 

But, can we? Can we Christians just ignore what we see going wherever we turn?  

I’ve tried doing that, but it’s clear to me now that we’ve reached the  breaking point Aleksandr Solzhenitsin wrote about. We must speak out. We have no choice in the matter. If we don’t, we’ll be as guilty as those who are threatening, mocking, and vilifying Harrison Butker and others like him. 

This morning I read an essay penned by Rod Dreher, one of my favorite authors. I first read his book “The Benedict Option” a few years ago. In that book he described the life of Benedict of Nursia, the man who founded the Benedictine monastic order. Dreher recounted how Benedict’s father had sent him to Rome to study law. His arrival in Rome coincided with the collapse of the Empire. Benedict saw the decadence overwhelming the once great Empire and decided he did not want to be part of it. He left Rome and settled in Nursia, a small town of about 1,000 inhabitants, and started the now famous monastic order. It is still operating today and focuses on fellowship with Jesus,  prayer, and hospitality.  

Dreher was fascinated by what Benedict had accomplished and became convinced that the modern Christian church needed a new approach to the life of faith, hence the name “the Benedict Opton.” He described it this way: 

“If we are going to be for the world as Christ meant for us to be, we are going to have to spend more time away from the world, in deep prayer and substantial spiritual training.” 

Put succinctly, the Benedict Option is a way to interact as a Christian in a world that has become increasingly hostile to the Christian faith. We must share our love, hospitality, and service without compromising them. We cannot let the “world” determine” how we live our lives. We must be faithful to Jesus, not the world. 

In this morning’s essay, Dreher expressed something many of us Christians are feeling:  

“It’s not like I’m on the hunt for catastrophe porn, but more like I feel compelled to point out, Hey, look what’s happening! They’re really going to sink this ship! Let’s either storm the bridge or prepare the lifeboats!” 

It’s the same sentiment Solzhenitsyn expressed in his famous essay – “already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble:” 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rod Dreher, and Harrison Butker summoned up the courage to speak courageously to their respective cultures. We must honor them by setting the trumpet to our mouths! 

Conversion, Part Two

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

– John 1:14 (New International Version)

I have two essays in process right now, neither of which is completed. So, you’ll have to bear with me while I shamelessly buy time. The original piece about my conversion, part two, to Christianity, with a few edits added, now follows:

Not long after I arrived in Newfoundland I struck up a friendship with a guy named Larry Clyde Jones. He had been in the army and had left under what everyone sensed were mysterious circumstances. No one really knew, but everyone was curious. It wasn’t till months later I found out what the mysterious circumstances were. I’ll fill you in on those details in Part III.

Larry seemed to like having me around and we began to spend a lot of of our off duty time together. Most of our that time was spent in the Airman’s Club, where for the first time Larry laid out that I thought at first were outlandish plans. They came after he’d had a couple of drinks. He grinned, leaned over, and spoke slowly in his North Carolina drawl. “You know, Philip, I’m in real need of a bodyguard, I truly am.” I almost fell on the floor when he said it. “Why on earth do you need a bodyguard? Are the commies coming after you?” “Worse than that,” he responded. “I’ve been loan sharking and I’ve made some enemies around the barracks and the club. I need some protection.” I sat there like a cigar store indian, not knowing how to respond. After a minute or so of silence Larry made what turned out to be very pivota point of decision in my life. “What about you, Philip? I’d pay you.” “You’re not serious,” I responded. “Look at me. “I’m skinny. I’m not good in a fight. This is not for me.” The more I protested, the more he insisted. We went back and forth for about a half an hour and a few more drinks. By that that I felt a bit of a buzz and a surge of alcohol induced courage, which amounted to stupidity of the first order. I agreed to be his bodyguard, whatever that meant.

For the next four months or so I trailed along with Larry wherever he went. Internally, I was in absolute terror, fearing any potential encounter with a reluctant debtor. Thankfully, I masked the terror I felt inside, which I think made me believable. I also bought a straight razor and carried it with me wherever we went, just in case something were to happen. 

The loan sharking went swimmingly well. GI’s are almost always broke, looking for a few bucks to tide them over till payday and Larry was always happy to accommodate. It was five dollars for seven in return, seven for ten, 10 for fifteen, twenty for thirty, and so forth. 

Things just seemed to fall in place. Larry had plenty of money and he was paying me. What could be better? 

While in Newfoundland I also developed a pretty nasty drinking habit. It was on one of these alcohol induced interludes that I had my first adult encounter with grace. It was during Newfoundland’s very brief summer. A group of us had a few days leave from Ernest Harmon, so we decided to take the time in Corner Brook, which was a few hours north of the base. Most of the guys had girlfriends they visited there. I went just for the amusement. On our first night we found a spot  a few miles outside of town,  high above the water, unloaded the beer and whiskey, and set up a bonfire. The spirits were flowing freely for a couple of hours until we ran out. By this time most of us were too drunk to do the sensible thing, which would have been to stop. I don’t know who made the decision to get more and how Larry Clyde Jones and I got nominated to go to Corner Brook to get more and we agreed to go. That’s when the wheels came off the wagon.

Larry owned a little MG Midget. Larry adored it because, as he often said, “It’ll go like a bat out of hell.” We got ready to go and were interrupted by one of the girls with us whose name was Eloise. She’d made the decision to go with us because she was concerned for our safety and insisted she was going to pray for us as we made our to and from town. She was quite homely and didn’t drink at all.  She was, as I later found out, a “Salvation Army Girl.” But, as I also later found out, she did know how to pray and had the Almighty’s undivided attention.

“I wonder how fast this thing will go with three people in it?” Larry said, as we took off. I was sitting in the passenger seat and Eloise sat between Larry and me, which made us one very compact pile of humanity cramped into a very small place. I couldn’t see how fast Larry was going, but as I looked out the window I saw the water get more distant as we made our way along the treacherous dirt roads. Larry laughed and whooped it up as we careened around the sharp curves,  going faster and faster. Suddenly, on what was apparentlya very sharp sharp turn, Larry lost control of the car and we flew off the road. We started plummeting end over end down the cliff that overlooked the water. As we did I could see the car crumpling around me. I then felt a strange sense of peace. I don’t think it was a sense that every thing was going to be alright; it was a peaceful sense of resignation. We were going to die and that was it. I’m not sure how many times the tiny car turned end over end, but we finally landed on the shore about 200 feet below the cliff that we had launched from. My first thought was curious. I was sure I was dead. But I felt alive. “Well, ain’t this about a hoot,” I said to myself. “You’re dead. You’re alive. It’s all the same thing.” I then felt the warmth of blood running down my nose. It was then I realized that I was still alive. I looked to my left and saw Eloise. She was unhurt. I heard Larry moaning. “I’m all busted up. Oh, God I’m gonna’ die.” I found a hunting knife that Larry kept in the car and cut what was left of the convertible top so that we could extricate ourselves from the car I now feared was going to explode. I got Eloise out and found that she was not hurt at all. Not even a scratch! We then tried to move Larry. But it was impossible. The clutch had somehow come down on his right foot and jammed it into the floor. We couldn’t move him at all. Our only hope was to get help. With our fellow revelers still drunkat the bonfire any hope of having them even think of us was remote at best. Eloise and I decided that our best hope lay in climbing up the cliff to see if we could find help close to us. We left Larry knowing there was a chance that the car could explode, but we figured that there was nothing we could do for him without help. As we climbed the cliff I could hear Eloise praying, “Dear, dear Jesus, help us. Dear, dear Jesus help us. Dear, dear Jesus, help us.”

The first sight I remember when we got close to the top of the cliff was a small house. The lights were on. We scrambled to the top and ran across the road and pounded on the door. “We need help real bad,” I pleaded as an old man who looked somewhat like Fi answered the door. In about a half an hour the RCMP arrived. We took them across the road to show them were the car, and Larry were. I’m not sure how long it took to get Larry out of the car, but fortunately the Mounties did. Larry had suffered two broken legs, a broken foot, collarbone, pelvis, and two ribs. I had a bloody nose and Eloise was unhurt. The Mounties were amazed. The only theory they had was that having Eloise in the car with us had compacted Eloise and me to the point where we couldn’t get buffeted around as the car made its plunge. Their other theory was that “Someone was looking out for you tonight. You should be dead.”

In order to maintain my philosophical stance I claimed the option of chance. “It was just pure luck that things happened the way they did,” I later thought. “It was just pure chance and nothing more.” 

 I’ve either been too long winded or there’s more to the story than I believed. At any rate, I’m going to have to close this part out and leave Vietnam, William Shakespeare, and my encounter with Jesus for parts three and four.

Hopefully you’ll bear with me through this. Part three to follow

Conversion, Part Four

As with the previous post, this one will make much more sense if you read part one (if you haven’t read it already), and parts two and three.

The rest of my tour in Vietnam was quiet. I never did speak to Sergeant Vartenisian about the incident at the incinerator or tell him what I was thinking. I kept it all to myself. It’s something I now regret. Once I left Vietnam I never saw him again. I guess there are a lot of people like him, who pray for others and never see an answer to the prayers they make. They’re the people of faith who go about their lives quietly, believing that it’s enough for them to intercede, believing that somehow their prayer(s) will be answered.

Sergeant Vartenisian’s were, but it was going to take some time before they were fully realized.

My “deros” (rotation day) was coming up and I put in for anything near home – Hanscom Field, Otis AFB, anything in Massachusetts. When the orders came down about a month and a half before I was due to go home, I found, strangely that I had been assigned to Lockbourne AFB, which was just outside of Columbus, Ohio. It was a shock to my system and I tried to fight the assignment. But my fighting was in vain. I was going to Lockbourne and that was it. It turned out to be providential.

I got in bad with my unit right away, particularly my duty sergeant. I became uncooperative and that made me a marked man. After about eight months at Lockbourne I was assigned to a leadership school. It was the Air Force’s last ditch attempt to retrieve me before I destroyed myself.

I’ll never forget the day I arrived at the school. When I opened the door to the room that was to be mine for eight weeks I saw an eight ball sitting on the desk starting at me. That dreaded eight ball was the squadron’s way of saying, “Straighten up or ship out. This is your last chance.” I sat, somewhat amused, for a while until my assigned roommate came in. “Hey, I’m Vic Edwards.”

“Dillon…Phil Dillon.”

Vic was a round faced man, African-American. He had the proud look of a leader. I wondered if he had been assigned as my roommate to straighten me out.

“You’re the man who’s come to fix me? I asked

“Not me, Bubba. You and I are in the same boat.”

“I’m here because the Air Force is trying to purge a rebel from the flock. How about you? What’s your great sin?”

Vic laughed a bit. “I’m not exactly sure. I think it might be because I married a French woman.”

“So I’m the rebel and you’re the non-conformist. Does that about cover it?”

“That does a pretty good job of it.”

I doubled over laughing on my bunk, pulling the pillow over my head as I did. “Geeze, if this isn’t a real recipe for success.”

My cynical laughter was contagious. Vic fell back on his bunk and began to laugh along with me. “Well, Dillon, if you and I aren’t a marriage made in heaven. We are just one big roaring success waiting to spring ourselves on the U. S. Air Force.”

After about ten minutes our laughter subsided. The room became still as we privately contemplated our fates.

I don’t know why I asked the following question. Maybe it was desperation. I don’t know, but I did. “Do you pray much, Edwards?”

“No, once in a while, but that’s about it. How about you?”

“I can’t really say that I have. I’ve had a couple of strange religious experiences if you could call that praying, but other than that, no.”

Vic had been laying on his bunk until I mentioned the strange religious experiences. When he heard those words he sat up. “Strange? What kind of strange experiences, Dillon?”

I told him about the dreams I had had when I was young and about my experience in Vietnam. He listened intently. “That is strange,” he answered.

“Look, Vic, I don’t wanna’ change the subject but how are we gonna’ get through these eight weeks?”

Vic’s answer was almost in the form of a plea or a prayer. “It’ll take a miracle for sure.”

The word miracle struck a chord with me. I knew that it was going to keep me from getting drummed out of my unit. I was just too far gone. I was at the end of my rope.

My first step of faith was tentative and feeble, but I made it. “Well, then Vic, we’re just gonna’ have to pray our way through this thing. Don’t you think?” 

“I’m not sure I know how to,” Vic answered quizzically.

“I don’t either, but we’re desperate, man; we’ve got to do something or we’re cooked.”

“You’re right, we really don’t have much to lose. I’ll pray for you and you’ll pray for me and we’ll see what happens.”

As roll call for the first day at the leadership school began to ring out through the barracks I looked straight at Vic and said, “Let’s do it!”

For the next eight weeks Vic and I were faithful to our agreement. Where one of us had a weakness, the other prayed and supported in practical ways. When one of us was discouraged the other prayed for strength. And so it went. For my part I wasn’t sure exactly who I was praying to, but it did seem to help. Vic and I seemed to get stronger as the days passed. Vic excelled in drill and leadership. My strength was in classroom activity and public speaking. There was never a time that either of us felt jealous of the other. In fact, we took great pride in supporting one another. What had started as a possible disaster was turning into a life-changing event. 

The real epiphany in my life came when I was selected to as a finalist in a public speaking contest held by the school. Our subject was to be “the greatest leader who has ever lived.” When I first thought about it I thought of Hannibal, who I had considered to be a military genius in spite of his failures. I also gave thought to Alexander the Great, who had conquered the known world as a young man. But the more I thought about it I knew there had to be someone greater than these two men. I spoke to Vic about it and suggested, casually, that I consider Jesus as the greatest leader. “I don’t know anything about him, Vic, I mean not a thing,” I answered

Vic’s answer was right to the point. “Read the Bible. A lot of it is about him.”

Over the next week I read the New Testament gospels twice. I could hardly believe what I was reading. How could this one man, without an alternate plan, take a group of twelve men and change the world forever? How did he hold them together? How could he succeed without an army? The more I read the more fascinated I became. Hannibal and Alexander were great leaders, but as I read I saw that there was truly no one who had ever lived like Jesus. 

Over that same period I called the chaplain several times. “Was Jesus really the Son of God like he claimed to be? I asked over and over. The answer was always the same – Yes!

When the competition came I spoke about Jesus as the greatest leader who had ever lived. I’ve spoken publicly many times since that day, but none have ever compared to that speech. I won the award!

I came during that week to see that it was true and that the Jesus of the gospels was the same Jesus who had been crucified in my young dreams and the same Jesus who had spoken to me in Vietnam. And he was the same Jesus who had prompted Vic and me to join in a compact of prayer for one another for those eight weeks. I came to a place where I knew he was who he said he was. I came to a place where I would be willing to not only live, but also to die for him. It was all very private, real, and intensely personal.

At the end of the eight week school Vic and I won every award that was given at the graduation banquet. There were six in all. The miracle we had needed had come!

Not long after I graduated from the leadership school I began attending a Lincoln Baptist Church in Columbus. I listened for a few weeks and one Sunday, to the surprise of the preacher I came forward to profess faith in Jesus. Most of my friends assumed it was a spur of the moment thing, that this response to the altar call was nothing more than an emotional experience. But I knew better. It was a moment that was twenty five years in the making. In fact, as I look back at it I realize that all those moments in my life that led to that day are really a part of that moment. There are people I know who point to a date and time for their salvation, and I guess they’re right. But there was more to it for me. The dreams of my youth were a part of it. My experience as a young man rejecting faith was part of it. My experiences in Vietnam were part of it. And my experiences at Lockbourne were part of it. In temporal terms it was a long moment. In the scope of eternity it was linked to the beginning of time and to a cross where the man who had revealed himself to me in my youth reconciled my life.

Conversion – Part One

Nancy and I got back from Glorietta Sunday night. We had an absolutely wonderful time.

We each came away with several signifigant requests for proposals, including sample chapters, marketing plans for the proposal, etc. We’ll see where it all goes.

I’m planning to have my first proposal out by the end of the day tomorrow.

Blogging here has been light and will continue to be so for a while till I get all the proposals out.

Until then, I’m going to start re-publishing some of my first posts, beginning with my four part series detailing my conversion to Christianity. Part one follows:

“Within the Christian community there has been a great divide between those who understand salvation in essentially private or essentially public terms. In the privatized version, salvation is essentially a matter of my getting my soul into heaven, while the rest of reality we call history can, quite literally, go to hell. This is the stereotype (my emphasis added) of a certain kind of fundamentalist and revivalistic Protestantism. In this version of the Christian message the world is condemned, and the most urgent question, indeed the only question is, “Are you saved?” Christians outside the fundamentalist camp have been generally critical of this understanding of salvation. They have insisted that the gospel is of public significance, that it provides a context of meaning that illuminates human experience within actual history. Thus it has been thought that fundamentalism, with its focus upon privatized salvation, is indifferent to history, while liberal Christianity takes history seriously but shortchanges the quest for private, or personal, salvation. This way of understanding our differences is, I believe, no longer adequate.”

Richard John Neuhaus – The Naked Public Square (page 15)

No one I’ve read in the last ten years has expressed better than John Neuhaus the tension between these two Christian camps and the political world we live in today.

On one hand you have a group (liberal Christianity) that until the 1980’s had dominated the American social landscape. On the other you have a group (Neuhaus calls them fundamental or revivalistic) who, after a long absence, have re-entered the public debate. That has meant, in turn, that one Christian camp, which was almost unchallenged in the public arena for decades since the 1925 Scopes trial, had to compete with a rival to get its message out to the public, particularly those with political power.

The debate began in earnest in the 1980’s with the ascent of the Moral Majority and other conservative Christian organizations.

Now it must be explained that the rise of the religious right was not only a response to the politics of the time, but also to the theology.

For me the debate began back in the late seventies and early eighties when I was attending seminary. I was working toward a masters degree in theology, having decided to avoid the master of divinity program the seminary offered. I did it because, as I used to tell other students, I wanted to avoid becoming smarter than God. I’d read enough theology, particularly Thomas Altizer, to know that there are times and circumstances when one can profess to be wise and actually be a fool. We used to have raging debates about the theology of the times, particularly the “God is dead” theology that was in vogue. A sample of Altizer’s wisdom follows to give you a flavor of what I mean:

“Only when God is dead can Being begin in every Now. Eternal Recurrence is neither a cosmology nor a metaphysical idea: it is Nietzsche’s symbol of the deepest affirmation of existence, of Yes-saying. Accordingly, Eternal Recurrence is a symbolic portrait of the truly contemporary man, the man who dares to live in our time, in our history, in our existence.”

Seminarians used to love to run around quoting Altizer in those days. My question to them was always, “How would explain that to a cab driver or a stevedore or a baker or a butcher or a candlestick maker?” They couldn’t (or wouldn’t) of course, but it didn’t seem to matter to them. Did the “God is dead” theology, and other theologies of the time, build their faith? Read these words from Altizer, put yourself in seminary classroom, and imagine what they would do for you:

“Another and intimately related form of Christianity’s new estrangement was posed by the historical discovery of the eschatological “scandal” of New Testament faith. Modern scholarship unveiled a Jesus who is a “stranger and enigma to our time” (Schweitzer’s words) because his whole message and ministry were grounded in an expectation of the immediate coming of the end of the world. The Jesus whom we “know” is a deluded Jewish fanatic, his message is wholly eschatological, and hence Jesus and his message are totally irrelevant to our time and situation.”

If there are any cab drivers who happen to be Christians reading this post I’ll translate briefly for you. Your faith is useless and you’re on your own in this world. Comforting words, wouldn’t you say?

The divide between the Christian camps I mentioned earlier came into focus in these classes. The long and short of what I learned was that if I wanted to be engaged in the world I’d better act like God didn’t exist at all. So, if I’d come to seminary to learn and then go out into the world and contribute meaningfully to society I had to abandon the very faith that had brought me there. I could go and call it Christianity. I just couldn’t act like it really meant anything.

But I was, as Altizer had said, a man who would “dare to live in our time.” I was a fundamentalist who, I believe, had his feet on the ground.

I hadn’t always been that way. I won’t bore you with the details right now, especially after you’ve had to muddle your way through a couple of snippets of Altizer. Perhaps in some later post I’ll fill you in. I’ll give you just enough to let you know what experiences guided my decisions in life.

It’s safe, I believe, to say that my background truly did inform my pilgrimage. My father had died when I, my brother, and sister, were very young. He died of tuberculosis which had been helped along by alcoholism and the stereotypical Irish gift of melancholy. My mother went into a deep depression and was subsequently hospitalized for years. This left us as wards of the state. We were sent to a preventorium in Mattapan, a suburb of Boston to ensure we were taken care of and to also ensure that we didn’t contract the tuberculosis that had killed my father.

While I can’t say we were treated badly there, I can say that I came to see that kindness does not always translate into caring. The kind of caring I experienced in Mattapan was one that taught me to always be grateful to my benefactors. The kindness seemed to me to have no inner life at all. It had all the outward trappings of kindness, the food, the medicine, etc. But it didn’t have any of the inward signs of caring. I never remember once having anyone ask me how I felt about wanting to go home with my mother. I never heard anyone ask me what I wanted to do.

This, for me, was lesson number one. I was state property.

Lesson number two came later. My mother was released from the hospital after about eight years of therapy, shock treatment, and God knows what else. At that time my brother was sent to a trade school, my sister to some relatives in Maynard (another suburb of Boston), and I got to go home to live with my mother in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston. One of my mother’s first tasks was to get me some religion. She started sending me to Christ Church, which still holds the distinction of being the oldest church in the city (it was established in 1759). I have very little in the way of significant memories of my first few years there. As I grew and became more thoughtful, though, things changed. In the two or three years after my mother and I moved to Cambridge my brother and sister also came back home. We were a family once again after years of separation. They were among the happiest years of my life. While my sister and I didn’t get along especially well, I still loved having her at home. But my greatest joy was being around my brother. We spent our non school time playing stickball. He was four years older than me and used the age advantage he had to the fullest. I don’t remember how many sixteen hit shutouts he pitched against me in those days, but there were a lot. He took great delight in allowing me to load the bases and then turn to his patented “pimple curve” and strike me out to end every threat. As the ball would pass my stick he’d howl with delight, “Yerrrrr ouuuuuttttt.”

I’d have a momentary fit of anger, but I really didn’t mind. Just being around him was enough for me.

It was around this time that I began to develop my own religious thinking. We became acolytes at Christ Church, read from the Book of Common Prayer, took instruction, and observed the mysterious liturgy of the Episcopal Church. I developed a real interest in matters of faith during those days. I attended classes religiously. I even started having dreams about mysterious things. One recurring dream was of me sitting at our apartment window and seeing a man being crucified on the privacy fence that surrounded our complex. After five or six episodes I asked the rector of the church what the dream meant. “I don’t know,” he responded.

“Could it have been God talking to me?”

“Maybe.”

“What would He be saying?”

“Well, I’m not sure He was talking to you so I can’t really answer the question.”

There was really a more burning question for me, a question that had haunted me since I was a little boy. “Does God know when you’re going to die?”

“Why do you want to know that?”

“I just do.”

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid that’s something He doesn’t know. It’s not like He’s got a clock and says, ‘well it’s 6:00 PM, I guess I’d better go and get Phil Dillon.” It just doesn’t work that way. You wouldn’t want it that way.”

“I would.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know He’s not just out there. I want to know that He’s here too.”

“I wish I could help you but I can’t.”

“Was that Jesus in my dreams?”

“Well Jesus went to sit at the right hand of God.”

“Do you mean He’s not here?”

“Well, He’s here because you’re here.”

“Why can’t He be here and there at the same time?”

I got no answer, only the silence that told me I had asked one too many questions.

The second lesson I learned in my youth was that I, as many theologians say, was on my own.

As I look back at it now I realize that I was having a dialogue with the rector about transcendence and immanence. I wanted both, but I got no answer then. It was to take years until I did.

While I felt on my own after my philosophical discussion with the rector of our church I didn’t feel totally abandoned. I still had my family; I still had my stickball in the summer and my beloved Boston Celtics in the winter. I still attended church, but something was missing. I recall often being caught up in a sense of wonder in mystery on those Sunday mornings. There were times when I just wanted to float away, hoping to find the the man who hung crucified on the privacy fence of my recurring dream. I wanted to find him and ask him who had done this done him. I wanted to find him and ask why they’d done it. But more than anything I wanted to ask why no one would help him. Praying the traditional “collects” and other “prayers and thanksgivings” seemed to heighten the sense of mystery in me. A few prayers, in particular, have stayed with me through the years. One was a prayer we often recited for our “national life:”

Prayers for National Life18.

For our Country”Almighty God, who hast given us this good land for ourheritage: We humbly beseech thee that we may always proveourselves a people mindful of thy favor and glad to do thy will.Bless our land with honorable industry, sound learning, andpure manners. Save us from violence, discord, and confusion;from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way. Defendour liberties, and fashion into one united people the multitudesbrought hither out of many kindreds and tongues. Endue with the spirit of wisdom those to whom in thy Name we entrustthe authority of government, that there may be justice andpeace at home, and that, through obedience to thy law, we may show forth thy praise among the nations of the earth.In the time of prosperity, fill our hearts with thankfulness,and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in thee to fail;all which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

The other was a prayer we prayed on Palm Sunday:

Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday

The Proper Liturgy for this day is on page 270.

“Almighty and everliving God, who, of thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may both follow theexample of his patience, and also be make partakers of hisresurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

These prayers, as beautiful and rhythmic as they were, only added to the growing sense of alienation I was experiencing. God was out there, somewhere, and I wanted to find Him. Was He just a part of some recurring dream? Was He so transcendent that I would probably never find him? Was He even there at all or was all that I was going through nothing more than ritual?

My weekdays were filled with school, stickball (in season), hanging around with my brother and other kids in the neighborhood. In time I became the stickball champion of Chatham Street. None of the kids in my age group could beat me. For that I had my brother to thank. Those frustrating episodes of swinging wildly at his “pimple curve” had prepared me for better things. I can’t say that my childhood was unhappy. When I’ve spoken to people over the years, particularly liberal friends, they have a tendency to feel sorry for me. I’ve never felt that way. In fact in 1995 I expressed my feelings about my background this way:

The Romantic’s Ghetto

Some say their roots are in the land

In the strength and dignity of furrowed country rows

Mine are in the blaze of neon

Giving light and breath to the tenements lining ghetto streets.

Some say their faith was honed on cathedral glass

And sharpened by regal priestly robes

Mine was cut on jagged ghetto glass

And purified by the clatter of subway steel.

Some say they have an eye for distant landscapes

Or the refined beauty of a mountain stream.

Mine is tuned to a ragged ghetto face

Or the cloistered ghetto masses forgotten by the rush of time.

Where’s the dignity of life to be found?

In the land? In a stream?

For some it is for sure…..Where is it then for me?

It’s the romance of the Ghetto that will always fill my soul.

© 1995 Phil Dillon

Our family was poor. My mother only had a third grade education followed by a nervous breakdown, and years of hospitalization to support us. In practical terms it meant we had to live as recipients of the welfare state. One of my mother’s failings was her inability to maintain any kind of economic balance. She would shop, see something she liked, and buy it, as she often said, “On the cuff.” That was her slang for credit. The credit would be extended and the bills would mount up. In time there were a long line of creditors coming by looking for their money. Our way of dealing with the problem was to stay on the move. In one three year period we must have moved nine or ten times. In the times I’ve revisited Cambridge over the years I’ve been a great amusement to my wife. We’ve strolled and passed apartment buildings or tenements and I’ve often said as we’ve passed, “I lived there for a couple of months” or “I remember that place too.”

My first sense of anger at my station in life came when my mother would send me to city hall to get our welfare check every month. One visit is still very vividly planted in my memory. It wasn’t the visit that hurt. I’d made enough trips to city hall to swallow my pride and accept the goodness of the state. On this occasion it was a whispered conversation that cut to the quick. While looking for our check he was asked by another counselor, “Who’s this?”

“That’s one of the Dillon kids. This poor kid doesn’t have a chance. His father died a drunk and his mother’s a dolt. He just doesn’t have chance in life.”

His conversation was meant to be out of earshot, but I heard it and it hurt. When he came back to me with the check he saw that I was crying. “What’s wrong?” he asked

I didn’t have the courage to say how I felt. “Nothing,” I responded meekly.

I left, vowing that some day I would be my own man and that I would never again have to be dependent on the goodness of the state for my welfare or dignity.

This incident, along with my growing sense of alienation from God, brought me to my first major adult decision in my life. I made it when I was fifteen. I was at a friend’s apartment watching television on a Sunday night. I don’t recall who was conducting the interview, but the interviewee was J Paul Getty, who was at that time the world’s richest man. The interview was being conducted at his English estate called Sutton Place. I didn’t hear much of what Getty was saying, but I did notice all the trappings of wealth that surrounded him. Something inside of me just snapped. “How can this be?” I thought. “This man has more than he’ll ever need and I have to beg the state of Massachusetts for the little our family gets.” The internal anger hit a crescendo. “There can’t possibly be a God! There is no God! There never was, there isn’t one now, there never will be!”

As I look back on it now, the decision didn’t make sense. But it didn’t have to. Anger and alienation were to be my “guiding principles” for the next ten years.

When I got old enough I decided to leave Massachusetts. I joined the Air Force in 1961, did my boot camp at Lackland AFB, an uneventful tour in California, and some time on temporary duty in Washington D.C., and then got an assignment to Ernest Harmon AFB, Newfoundland. The assignment was, actually, quite providential. My mother was born in Newfoundland, in a little fishing village called McIvers Cove. This gave me the opportunity to meet relatives I would never have been able to if it hadn’t been for the Air Force assignment. During my time in Newfoundland I spent three leaves in McIvers, all of them wonderful. My aunts, uncles, cousins and other assorted relatives were all very kind, gentle people. I grew to love them. One uncle, in particular, captured my heart. His name was Fiander Louis Park. Fi (pronounced fye), as he liked to be called, was a tall man, almost toothless. If you’ve ever read Richard Brautigan’s “Confederate General from Big Sur” you’ll get a small glimpse of what Fi was like. The one tooth in his head seemed to float from place to place. One morning at breakfast it would appear to be in the upper right part of his mouth. The next morning it seemed to be on the bottom left. And, no dear reader, it was not my imagination. When I visited McIvers Fi was my official tour guide. He would glide down McIver’s dirt road to my Aunt Mabel’s to get breakfast each morning and then take me from place to place. Some days we’d just go up to his cabin. On others we’d go out in a dory together. If would row (he insisted on it) and I would sit and view the breathtaking cliffs of McIver’s and the other inlets in the area. On one excursion we saw a couple of whales. Fi whispered to me, “Look my son. Look I think they might’s be a couple of blues. Oh my son, have you ever seen the likes?

“No Fi, I’ve never.”

They’s beautiful, ‘eh?”

“They are.”

“Oh my son, my son.”

It was on these journeys that I would occasionally recall the mysteries of Christ Church and the man being crucified on the fence from years before, but I would try to dismiss them as soon as the thoughts came. I had decided that I would enjoy these moments for what they were. Life, as I’d come to believe, had very few of them. One had to enjoy them, endure the rest of life, then die, rot, and be forgotten. That was the sum total of life as I saw it back then.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2005

Conversion, Part THREE

As with the previous post, this one will make much more sense if you read part one (if you haven’t read it already) and part two.

After the accident near Corner Brook I decided to maintain a low profile. My worldview and my ego were battered and needed a rest. I did maintain my love of the stout, though, and it was that love that was to really get me in trouble.

Larry recovered from his injuries in a few months and we got right back to business, five for seven, seven for ten and so forth. It was working quite well until late January, when I happened by chance to pick up a copy of Look Magazine’s January 26, 1995 issue. I got back to the barracks and began reading, first from the cover. There beneath the cover photo of Julie Andrews was a tantalizing headline – “Four special reports on “Conspiracy USA.” I passed by a couple of the articles and got to page 28. There to my amazement was a photograph of Larry hovering over a desk, with a menacing look on his face. To the left of the photo was the title of the piece – “A Plot That Failed.” I continued reading and the more I did the more my adrenaline went wild. From this point, I’ll splice quotes from the article with my recollection of what was going on with me in Newfoundland.

There was much more to Larry than I could ever have imagined. A few years before I met him in Newfoundland, Larry had been in the Army, stationed in Germany in 1961. While he was there he became part of a right wing group called “CUSA,” which was short for “Conservatism USA.” Larry was their “security chief.”

I was absolutely stunned and it kept getting worse. Larry and his cohorts were funding their schemes and platforms using some of the same tactics he had gotten me involved in – loan sharking. From there, they graduated to “selling three day passes,” and so forth. Their eventual aim was to play a key role in “electing a Conservative president in 1969.” To further that aim, Larry’s cohorts got out of the Army and moved to Dallas. sometime in 1962. Larry “remained in Munich,” still tied to the organization. Larrie Schmidt, the organization’s founding father, spent a great deal of time trying to link up with “Young Americans for Freedom, eventually becoming the organization’s southwestern executive secretary.”

Things did not go well for Schmidt. In fact, the article put in succinctly, with just one word – “fizzle!” What impact did that have on Larry. Again, the article put it succinctly – “Jones vanished.”

As soon as I was done reading the article I went to Larry and confronted him with it. His response was immediate. He got a bunch of money from his foot locker and handed it to me. “Go over to the Base Exchange and buy every copy Look that’s available and hurry. Every last one. Do you hear me?” About twenty minutes later I came back with the magazines and sat down to complete the conversation I’d begun. “Are you in trouble? Tell me. Am I in trouble?” He laughed and reassured me that neither one of us was in trouble. He said that he had left CUSA and the Army when things fizzled, saying he never really wanted to get involved in politics. “It was about money. That’s all it was about for me.”

There were other questions I wanted to task him, questions like “How were you able to leave the Army and then join the Air Force? He never would answer them.

At this point I knew that I had to move on from Larry. I’d gotten myself in way over my head. Alcohol had done some amazing things. It lowered my inhibitions. It turned a normal human body into a poor imitation of a flopping fish. And it caused a normally sensible person to let down his guard. 

That was not my only problem. About a month or so after the accident, while Larry was recuperating, I struck up a friendship with a guy from my unit who I’ll just refer to by his first name, Steve. Steve had been assigned to Ernest Harmon about a year after me, which meant that he was going to be there, I assumed, a year after I was gone. I met him at the airman’s club one night and we struck up a conversation over a couple of beers. One thing led to another over the next couple of weeks until Steve decided to “open up.” It was on one of our almost nightly tours of duty at the airman’s club he confided in me that he wanted to get his wife up to Newfoundland but didn’t have enough money for a down payment on a trailer house he had looked at and decided would be good for him and his wife. I didn’t pay much attention at first, but after three or four drinks I let my guard down. “How much money do you need? I asked. He looked pleadingly as he answered, “About two thousand.”

“That’s some serious money and I don’t have that kind of cash. Have you tried to get a loan?”

He slumped down in his chair. “Yeah, I tried, but they told me I would need a co-signer.”

“Well,” I slurred, “Why dontcha’ just go get one. It couldn’t be that hard.”

Steve grinned back. “How about you? You’d do that for a friend, wouldn’t you?”

“I can’t man.”

“Come on, man, you know I’m good for it. I’d never leave you high and dry.”

“I really can’t.”

“Please, Phil, please. I’m really desperate to see the old woman.”

If I’d been sober that night my life would have been so different. But I wasn’t. I foolishly agreed to co-sign a loan and a couple of weeks later Steve had the cash he needed.

After he got the cash Steve seemed to be less of a friend than he had before. He didn’t come by the airman’s club and any time I saw him while we were on duty he found a way to avoid me. I did corner him once and asked if his wife had gotten to Newfoundland. “Oh yeah,” he assured me. “Things couldn’t be better.”

Something didn’t seem right. Have you ever had that internal railroad crossing go off inside you?” That’s what was happening to me. Any time I’d get around Steve after co-signing the loan that signal would go off. “Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. Train coming. Don’t cross the tracks.”

I found out shortly after these brief encounters that I was in the middle of the tracks and a train was bearing down on me.

I got to my duty station one night and went to look for Steve to let him know I had some misgivings about having co-signed the loan. When I couldn’t find him I checked with one of the duty section’s NCOs. Where’s Steve?” I asked

“He got an emergency reassignment stateside.”

“You can’t be serious. What about his wife?”

“He ain’t married.”

“Yeah he is. He got me to co-sign a loan so that he could get her up here.”

“Well, if you ain’t the stupidest airman at Ernest Harmon. You’ve been conned.”

“I’m tellin’ you sarge, he’s married. He got the money to get her up here.”

“If you really believe that you’re even stupider than the stupidest airman at Ernest Harmon.”

It wasn’t long till the train hit me broadside. I got a letter, then a call from the finance company. They wanted their money. I told them to get it from Steve, but they told me that they were going to get it from me. I pleaded poverty. “I don’t have two thousand dollars.” That didn’t work either. The relationship with the finance company spiraled downward. They decided the loan was in default and they wanted all their money, immediately. Worse yet, they threatened to get the Air Force involved if I didn’t pay in full. 

Now two thousand dollars may not seem like much these days, but back in 1964 it was a lot. I didn’t have the money. My mother didn’t have the money. No one I knew had the money, other than Larry, and I just knew I couldn’t ask him. In desperation I checked my options within the military. There was one. I had to take what was called a “short discharge” and re-enlist so I could get the re – enlistment bonus, which I hadn’t planned on doing. But I was so desperate that I was willing to do anything. I signed over another four years of my life and got the two thousand dollars I needed.

Toward the end of my eighteen month tour someone showed me a picture he had found in a magazine of a Montagnard tribesman. It looked to me like the pictures I had seen in geography classes when I was in school or like something out of National Geographic. “Where’s this guy live?” I asked out of curiosity. 

“Vietnam.”

“You mean Indo-China?”

“No, Vietnam.”

“We’ve got advisors over there, don’t we.”

“More than advisors. They’re lookin’ for volunteers.”

I didn’t know then what possessed me to do it, but as soon as I was finished with that conversation I went over to the orderly room and volunteered to go to Vietnam. Within a week I had shipping orders to report to the 1964th Communications Squadron at Tan son Nhut AFB, Vietnam.

A couple of months later found me on a Continental Airlines flight from Travis AFB to Saigon. I’ll never forget our approach into the airport. The flight crew played the 1944 tune “I’ll Be Seeing You”, then wished us well. As I looked out the window I thought it was ironic that someone like me would be serenaded with words like:

I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places

That this heart of mine embraces all day through

In that small café, the park across the way

The children’s carousel, the chestnut trees, the wishing well

I’ll be seeing you in every lovely summer’s day

In everything that’s light and gay

I’ll always think of you that way

I’ll find you in the mornin’ sunAnd when the night is new

I’ll be looking at the moon

But I’ll be seeing you

I had few familiar places, it seemed, to go back home to. There was very little that my heart embraced. No chestnut trees. No wishing wells. All that fueled me was anger and alienation.

My first on-ground recollection at Tan son Nhut was the smell. There was something ominous that just hung in the air. It reminded me of the odor of embalming fluid that lingers in the air of funeral homes. 

My tour wasn’t especially dangerous, compared to what the Marines and Army were going through. About two or three times a month there would be a brief mortar attack. They’d usually last about thirty minutes or so and every thing would get back to normal.

It didn’t take me long to settle in. There was an on base beer hall adjacent to my barracks and I spent most of my off duty time there. Once I found it my life consisted of work, rotten chow, and about four hours a day of drinking.

Some of the other troops picked up on my surly attitude and tried to befriend me. The especially vulnerable of them, the Christians I met, got it full bore. They would usually start with the obligatory, “How you doin?”

“Alright, I guess, but I’d really prefer it if you’d leave me alone.”

“Why. I’m just askin’ because I care.”

“Sure.”

“People should care about each other. I mean, God cares.”

“Let’s not go there, alright.”

“What’s wrong with you, guy, don’t you believe in God?”

“No!”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Trust me, it’s true.”

“I don’t understand. I mean, look at all the beauty in this world. Where do you think it came from?”

“About the same place as all these mangled bodies we see every day.”

“I don’t understand how you can’t believe in God.”

“Well I don’t understand how you can, so we’re even. Now leave me alone.”

The conversations with Christians would almost all end that way. There was one exception, Paul Vartenisian. Paul was an NCO assigned to my duty section. He took an interest in me about six months into my tour. He seemed like a nice man to me and it seemed he really cared about me. The casual friendship went well until he came by the barracks one day. The conversation started innocently enough, then it got religious. “Phil,” he said. You’ve got to know God loves you. You really do.”

“Come on Sarge. Leave me alone.”

“He cares, Phil. He cares.”

“Sure.”

“You’ve got to know He loves you. He died on the cross for you.”

Those words – “died on the cross” – hit home, although I wouldn’t admit it. They brought me back to my childhood and the man who was being crucified on the fence outside my apartment window. “Just leave me alone. I want nothing to do with this.”

“I can’t, Phil, I can’t. Your life is worth everything to Him.”

“Get the hell outta’ here and leave me alone.”

Fred turned to go. “I’ll go, Phil, but I won’t leave you alone. I’ll be praying for you.”

“You just go right ahead for all the good it’ll do.” I said. “Your prayers mean nothing to me.”

In the six months or so I’d been in Vietnam I’d gotten used to sleeping with helicopters constantly flying over our barracks or the sound of bombs exploding in the distance. But, after the conversation with Sergeant Vartenisian things changed. I began to toss and turn throughout the night, replaying the conversation with him over and over in my head. It really bothered me but I couldn’t make sense of it. I would lay awake at night and wonder, “What are you so worried about. He isn’t praying to anyone or anything. Just go to sleep.” But, I couldn’t. The next time I saw Fred I took him aside and told him that while I respected his rank, I would kill him if he didn’t stop what he was doing. He never flinched. “Don’t you understand, Phil, God is trying to talk to you.” He said no more.

A week after that conversation I was assigned to take care of burning our section’s classified trash. It was very unpleasant duty. I took the five or six bags we had, grabbed an M-16, and went out to the incinerator, which was about a couple of hundred feet from our building. It was a very private spot on the top of a hill covered with tropical growth. I unlocked the gate, went in, and started to work. A couple of minutes into my ordeal I heard something rustling down the hill from me. I picked up the weapon and looked into the trees. Near the bottom of the hill I saw what appeared to be an old man. He was squatting down, defecating. “Something” seemed to possess me. A thought struck me. “Why don’t you shoot him? He’s just an old man. His life is probably miserable anyway. You’ll just be putting him out of his misery. Go ahead man. Do it!”

I raised the weapon and aimed down the hill. I was about ready to squeeze on the trigger when I heard these words, “The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.” I stopped and wiped my face, which by now was sweating profusely. I raised the weapon again. And once more I heard the words, “The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.” I knew the second time I heard them where they came from. These words that pleaded with me to stay my hand came from William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. They were Portia’s words to Shylock, pleading against exacting a pound of flesh, pleading for mercy:

“The quality of mercy is not strain’d,It droppeth as the gentle rain from heavenUpon the place beneath: it is twice blest;It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomesThe throned monarch better than his crown;His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,The attribute to awe and majesty,Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;But mercy is above this sceptred sway;It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,It is an attribute to God himself;And earthly power doth then show likest God’sWhen mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,Though justice be thy plea, consider this,That, in the course of justice, none of usShould see salvation: we do pray for mercy;And that same prayer doth teach us all to renderThe deeds of mercy.”

I dropped the weapon and fell on my face, sobbing. “I don’t even know if You’re real”, I cried. “But if you are please show me. Please, please, show me.”

I look back at that day now in wonder. There was nothing else in my frame of reference that would have prevented me from killing that old Vietnamese man that day than the words I heard. I was soon to learn that they did not come by chance, but that they had been spoken to me by the man in my dreams who was being crucified on the fence outside my window years before. 

That incident, which could have been a tragedy, became the starting place in a journey of reconciliation I had walked away from in my youth.