Book Excerpt

I'm trying to write a memoir of a three year period of my life. After a pretty good start, I've slowed down a lot. Anyway, here's an excerpt.

"Turning Away

When Jonah ran away from God, he was swallowed by a sea-beast and regurgitated onto a beach. When I ran away from God, nothing remotely exciting happened. It just kinda…stopped.


When I got back to Richmond the summer after college, I had already decided to apply to Divinity School. At that point, I still considered myself a theist, with strong attachments to Judeo-Christian thought. But there had been a pretty big shift in my thinking during my senior year of college. That yearI had studied Ghandi and MLK and Luther, and I saw the power of organized religion to marshall the public into pursuing social and political change. I had convinced myself to pursue ministry by focusing on the power of organized religion to be a force for good in society.

Earlham School of Religion is the Quaker seminary attached to Earlham College. Like Unitarians, Quakers don’t have an official “creed,” though both groups certainly have unofficial ones. Quakers tend to be politically and theologically “liberal,” with an emphasis on freedom of thought and belief, though they can be quite conservative on social-sexual issues. This liberalism makes Quakerism probably the most liberal of the Christian denominations. Some Quakers I met over the years even bristled at being called a Christian at all!

ESR attracted a fair number of UU students, both because of its liberalism and because there were no other UU seminaries in the area. The governing body (such as it is) for UUS, called the UUA, does not require aspiring pastors to attend UU seminaries.

My plan was to take two classes at ESR in both the spring and fall semesters and to spend one month of the year (January) at Meadville-Lombard seminary in Chicago, doing four intensive classes. I could have simply taken courses at ESR, but I thought it would help my job prospects to have a degree from Meadville, one of the two official UU seminaries, since I was already an outsider. During the spring and fall, I would have also been required to complete an internship with a local congregation. After three years of this, and an extensive internship, the degree was to be granted by Meadville. I didn’t really realize it at the time, but that’s a lot of work for a Master’s degree! Most mainline denominations have similar requirements for their leaders, which is comforting. Many nondenominational churches do not have such requirements…which is not comforting.

Though I had done some research on UU for class, my hands-on experience was quite limited. I knew the young pastor of one of the closer UU churches from classes I’d taken at ESR as an undergrad. I got in touch with him, and found myself driving east on I-70 one Sunday morning to Eldorado (pronounced el dorade-o), Ohio.

I quickly discovered that the congregation of the Universalist Church of Eldorado was not your typical UU church. The modern UU church is the result of a merger of two different denominations in the 1960s. These two groups have very different ancestries. Unitarians started Harvard University, and have long been constituted by wealthy, intellectual, and powerful people. Universalism was much more of a populist movement, and it had more of a bibilical and spiritual flare to it. The church at Eldorado had originally been Universalist, and it retained much of that character…probably because most of the parishioners pre-dated the merger. It was a small congregation, with most of the folks in their 70s at least, and many of them were WWII veterans and/or their wives. The only family with children that I was aware of consisted of a 30 something guy named Tim who claimed to be some kind of warlock. In most UU churches, Tim would be the norm, but here, most of the people probably considered themselves to be Christian. Many modern UU churches are exercises in the limits of politically correct egg-shell walking, but this one still celebrated Christmas with the gusto of small town America everywhere.

Probably because they were so desperate for new blood, the folks there welcomed me with open (but wrinkley) arms. Every week, the sermon involved a “talkback” session, where the congregation could respond to what they heard.

In March of 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. I was on Spring Break, where I had kissed a girl who was not my girlfriend. The former was the worse of the two decisions. Like many students at Earlham, I opposed the invasion, believing that George Bush was using the excuse of Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (which I thought was likely) to justify a War whose purpose was much, much larger…to establish a precedent of American aggresion and power that would strike fear into the hearts of our enemies, allowing American will to dominate foreign policy in the post Cold War era. Not to mention securing oil reserves and unleashing a democratic dominoe effect in the middle east. Hell…maybe I’m giving myself too much credit in the rosy haze of hindsight. Maybe I just thought war was bad and Bush was an asshole.

In a shocking development, George Bush did not listen to my objections, and we invaded anyway.

The War accelerated a process that had been occuring slowly in me for some time. Academically, it probably started with reading Marx, and continued with Feminist Philosophy….I was starting to see the world in terms of power, money, and the lack of those things. My a-historical, self-obsessessed existentialism balked at the idea that my identity and experience had as much to do with power, privelage, and history as personality and spirituality. I felt like Tony Soprano, when his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi, asks him how he felt about himself after several years of therapy. “What can I say? I’m a fat fuckin crook from New Jersey.”

I started learning about other global issues. The 10 year anniversery of the Rawandan Genocide brought that story back into the spotlight for another 15 minutes. In case you don’t know, that’s when Hutu Rwandans killed somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis in the span of about 100 days, mostly with machetes, hacking of their feet. That incident focused my attention on Africa, and the more I learned, the more horrified I became.

I remember getting the Grapes of Wrath on tape, and learning about the devestation of the Depression…and the salvific power of organized resistance, of government, when government works for the people.

I remember watching the great televsion show the West Wing, where noble, brilliant, and hard working men and women sacrificed themselves to make the country and the world a better place using the tools of democracy and government.

Mostly, though, I consumed news voraciously. Living in Richmond, I was able to get a fantastic public radio station broadcast from Miami of Ohio university in Oxford, Ohio, WMUB. They had all the great NPR talk shows…Diane Rheam, Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, and, of course, the news (Morning Edition and All Things Considered), not to mention Mama Jazz. At the end of my shift with Bill and Scott, I just had time to watch Charlie Rose, and I was totally enthralled by these very powerful people talking nonchalantly about changing the world. When I got home from work, I’d turn on Comedy Central to watch the Daily Show, just in its John Stewart infancy then.

I worked third, then second shift, and the news became my closest friend in Richmond. The was totally intoxicated by being able to finally understand the world I lived in, how it worked, who controled what and why. The intoxication was intensified by the sense of manifest global destiny that the Bush administration exuded. The world seemed poised on the brink of some great change, some new world order, and though I despised Bush, my sympathy for global problems made me admire his engagement with the world. Say what you will…he was not setting back to let things happen. And then, in a perfect storm of excitement, the 2004 election was kicking into gear, and for the first time, I was able to follow it from the primary through to the end. I was immersed in it, soaked by my news junkie habit, and drawn so inexorably to the world of power…a world I had never before seen or understood.

My newfound passion for foreign policy (I actually subscribed to Foreign Policy magazine) and politics had a hard time co-existing with my plan to enter the ministry. For one thing, I began to see the church, and my church in particular, as powerless to deal with the pressing ethical problems facing the world…namely, war, inequality, poverty, disease, and environmental degradation. I was holding onto the idea that organized religion had played a major role in social change throughout history (Civil Rights, for instance). I had been telling myself that I could organize my parishioners to pursue social change. But the more I learned of power and problems, the less realistic that goal seemed. For starters, there just aren’t that many Uus…maybe 100,000 worldwide. And though they are disproportionately rich and powerful, they are too few and too far out of the mainstream to be a real political force. I had reached the conclusion that the big problems facing the world could only be addressed effectively by governments. Only governments had the power and the money to build roads and hospitals and disarm militias and, in general, provide the massive investments in health and infrastructure that poor countries needed.

I also realized that the United States is, by far, the richest country in the world. The United States government is the most powerful concentrated force in human history. The lure of that power on me, the idea that I could be a real player in the most powerful country in history at one of the most crucial moments of history (or so it seemed to me), was too seductive. The Uus seemed as hopelessly naïve as the radical liberals I’d gone to college with…blithely hurling complaints against U.S. power when they should have been working hard to control it…of course, for the greater good. For poverty and equality and justice, for protecting the meek, for stopping war and genocide, for healing the climate, for creating a peaceful and sustainable world….power like ours, money like ours, seemed to me to be too wondrous to leave to the lawyers and businessmen who ran the government.

I also had major doubts about my fitness for professional ministry. I had mistakenly inferred from my general interest in religion, philosophy, and finding the meaning of life that I should pursue professional religious leadership as a career. My error was to misidentify the role of a pastor. I wanted to be a truth-teller…I wanted crowds to gather and be amazed at the profundity that spilled from my mouth. But, I didn’t think about the fact that truth I wanted to tell was frightening, sad, and depressing. I began to realize that people didn’t go to church to hear unalloyed truth…they go to church for inspiration and hope and beauty! Churchgoers will abide a certain portion of ethical upbraiding, but only when it’s tempered by joy and hope and general reverence.

By the time that I was ready to start divinity school, my worldview had become very dark. I had lost all hope that the concept of God could possibly make rational sense, and my news obsession had exposed me to suffering and cruelty on a monumental scale. One particular night at work, I watched a documentary on child soldiers in Liberia. How Charles Taylor had recruited young boys, 10-15 years old, to fight for him, and how they roamed the streets of the capital, controlling it like some kind of Lord of the Flies nightmare. It was so, so, so sad and terrible.

With my faith in God hanging on by a fraying thread, and my faith in humanity almost completely gone, I just could not see how I could stand up in front of the congregation every Sunday, making corny jokes about the weather and telling everybody how wonderful they are and how wonderful God is for making such a wonderful place. The only thing I wanted to tell them was to get off their rich, liberal, lilly-white asses and help make this world a better place before everybody dies! The truth I had to tell was not inspiring…it was bitter, and hard, and dirty. And when it came to God and Ultimate meaning, I realized that my basic belief was that everybody should be utterly, paralyzingly terrified at the realities of human existence, which I believed to be…death, and meaninglessness. Did I really want to make a career out of trying to convince people that their attitudes of hope and reverence and love-of-life were bullshit, and that they really should be terrified and depressed? Well…no, I guess not. So, should I just focus all my sermons and work on organizing people for political action? Well…if that’s my primary interest, why bother being a pastor? Why not just go into politics or activism?

A pastor is not primarily a truth teller….that’s the prophet’s job. A pastor’s first job is to love and nurture his flock. For that, it seemed to me that I lacked the hopeful attitude, the optimistic worldview, or the capacity for unconditional love that real nurturing would require. At the very, very least, a good pastor needs to be able to really love the parishioners…maybe if he loved them, he could at least put on a show of optimism and reverence, simply to nurture the people. And while I loved individual people a great deal, and loved humanity in general a great deal, I lacked the ability to love all individuals unequivically and unconditionally.

Long story short, I started investigating ways to pursue a career in public life. What I really wanted was power…power to stop guys like Charles Taylor from enslaving child soldiers…power to stop the hutus from killing the tutsis…power to buy bed nets for Africans to stop the spread of malaria…power to build roads and hospitals and universities…to develop economies and to stop genocides…to reduce suffering and improve justice and freedom…power to keep us from killing ourselves.

I didn’t realize at the time that I didn’t have what it takes to attain that kind of power…if it even exists at all. Neither did I realize (at least not fully) that my desire to save the world belied my stated pessimism and actually represented a deep reverence for something ultimate…namely, humanity.

I dropped out of Divinity School and took the LSAT so I could apply to a joint MPA/JD program at IU Bloomington. I also applied to schools all over the country…Harvard (didn’t get in), Tufts (didn’t get in), U. Chicago (got in), American U (got in), DePaul (got in), Syracuse (better than Harvard and DID get in), and Pittsburgh (got in). I eventually settled on the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IU…20 minutes away from where I went to high school.

God did not send a whale to take me back to Him. "