Currents of Faith: Open and Unfolding Reflections

I learned about sex from my mother, older brother, high school friends, and the barnyard. I recall vividly my mother’s words when I was eleven living on the cattle ranch. A group of us boys and girls were going to play among the willow trees along a nearby creek. Mom said, “keep your pants zipped up!” These words came several years before puberty. This was my first class in sex education.

I am  passionate about groups! I have some of my most fulfilling moments in groups. I love to facilitate groups. I think that groups are a setting where persons can have memorable experiences. I have fun in groups. I feel vibrant, free and alive. I gain new insights in groups. I consider groups a gold mine of opportunity to learn about living in community. Heightened feelings toward others can emerge in groups. I believe that people can have experiences in a group which are simply impossible alone.

I never in my wildest dreams imagined myself a writer. This dream appeared late and unexpected. It could only have come as a result of a combination of other experiences, prominent among them were days in my counseling office, evenings teaching adults in the church, and hours studying process theology.

Teaching has been a lively adventure in which I have experienced my highest and lowest moments. I have felt frustration, agony, anger, despair, and excitement, delight, satisfaction, hope and peace. Gratefully, most feelings were high. This adventure seems ironic given that the earlier parts of me were scaredy cat, coward and saluting soldier. Thankfully, other parts grew within me over the years. I have learned in my own being the meaning of process and especially of creative transformation

I counseled for forty-two years, beginning in 1957, when I was appointed a half-time instructor in the MSU Student Counseling Center. During my career, I counseled in the university, church and community, the latter in Wenatchee for thirty years. I knew a few things before I met process theology.

I have decided to take pity on my readers and use a different medium to discuss the important area of judgment: a power point presentation. But first, a personal introduction   Judgment is clearly a part of my religious tradition. I had to come to terms with it, even though the idea is not attractive to me. Believing in a fully gracious God meant that I had trouble with a judging God. In my professional life, my clients had serious troubles but for a different reason. They wondered whether those hurtful, abusive and violent people who deeply offended them would ever have any consequences. They could not accept that these persons who caused them serious injury and pain would simply get away with it and go “scot-free.” They wanted judgment! I agreed with their wanting consequences, but could not agree with God as judging. Both personally and professionally, I needed to find answers.

Death was very much with me as a boy and youth. Already overwhelmed by the shock of my father’s death, it felt as though dying was occurring all around me. My father died in 1942, my maternal grandfather and my great uncle Louis Robert, my name sake, died in 1943, the president of our high school fraternity drove off the edge of the Snake River Canyon in 1946 and my good friend Don fell to his death in that same canyon in 1949. Perhaps such deaths are not unusual for anyone growing up, especially knowing that my father was aged fifty when I was born, however, since they followed my own family crisis and were surrounded by the daily report of casualties in World War II and the utter tragedy of the holocaust, it seemed death was everywhere. I could not avoid it but neither could I explain it. No one talked about death.

I used to think that I was a miserable failure at praying. After many years I now believe that I pray in a way which fits my theology. When I entered the church at age sixteen, I learned first about corporate prayer, those words spoken by the minister and the total congregation. The two prayers I heard most frequently were the pastoral prayer and the Lord’s Prayer. It would be much later when I would learn more about and engage in personal prayer. I must say that I have had quite a journey with prayer.

The two branches of the Brizee family in Twin Falls were divided. The family of Leland, my father’s youngest brother, and his wife Elizabeth were one branch, my mother’s family the other. If the division were present before my father’s death, I did not know, but the chasm was accentuated following his death. My lack of understanding arises from my young age at his death.

I have always had trouble with the word salvation and an even greater problem with the question: “Are you saved?” I was repulsed by them, feeling that they just did not fit in my vocabulary. My entry into the church at age sixteen marked the beginning of my struggle with salvation. I loved the church and eagerly participated. I did not like salvation.

During the Lenten season I decided to offer an evening class on the topic, “A Deeper Exploration of God.” I announced that the content of the class would come from the questions which people brought. Following are several of those questions:

“Why do so many bad things keep happening on earth under God’s watch?

My theology guides me to seek experience to understand events. I began with searching the books between the bookends of Jesus’ life, the actual history of what Jesus said and did. I now turn to my search for the experiences of the church expressed in the bookends of Christmas and Easter. I move from what Jesus said to what was said about Jesus, from proclaimer to proclaimed.