Appendix Four
A
Personal Odyssey
This is an
account based on one aspect of my life. The theme employed encompasses those events that are religious or spiritual in nature.
David
Center
My
earliest recollection of religion was during the time when my father
was overseas in the U.S. Army, and my mother and I were living with
her parents in Nashville, Tennessee. My grandparents, my mother and I
attended a local Baptist church that was within walking distance of
my grandparents' home. I recall standing on the bench beside my
mother so that I could see over the heads of those seated in front of
us. What I most remember from that church experience was hymn
singing. My maternal grandfather (Papa Spann), according to his
eulogy*, was an active supporter of the local negro (black) church
and helped raise funds to support the church. Probably not unrelated
to this support was his practice of reverse integrating the city
buses when he rode them. Most trips were by city bus, and whenever I
went with him on a bus trip we always sat in the back with the black
passengers.
I also
have early recollections of being admonished to avoid swearing and
using the "Lord's name in vain," at the risk of being struck
by lightning. I don't recall specifically who did this admonishing
but the most likely sources were my paternal grandmother and aunt, who
both lived in the same general area. I should for the sake of
accuracy point out that none of my paternal relatives are actually
biologically related to me. My father was abandoned as a very young
child and was reared by the Smith family, whose members I had a
familial relationship with all of my life. After my father's return,
we lived on campus, in married student housing, at Vanderbilt
University. I am told that my father did a double undergraduate major
in English and chemistry and then went on to do a master's degree in
English, all of which was done in 39 months.
As my
father was completing school, we moved into a house that was owned by
the Smiths, and my father taught high school English for one year.
During this time I recall running in an empty field not far from the
house and taking a fall. I remember "taking the Lord's name in
vain" in the course of this event. With some anxiety I awaited
the promised lightening strike, which of course never came. After
several minutes without retribution and being an experimentalist even
at that young age, I repeatedly challenged the heavens to do their
best. Nothing. I walked out of that field a confirmed doubter in the
"wrath of God."
Following
my completion of the second grade, my father took a position teaching
English at Meridian Junior College, and we moved to Mississippi. My
father, in my recollection up to this point, had not attended church,
nor had my mother since leaving her parents' home. Once we settled in
Meridian, my mother took up religion again, and with me in tow she
began attending a nearby Baptist church. My father did not attend nor
did my only sibling at the time, who was too young. During my
attendance, I "joined" the church and was baptized.
In the
summer, I would ride either the train or bus from Meridian to
Nashville and spend a few weeks with my paternal grandmother and
grandfather. I saw little of the latter since he worked as a night
watchman and slept in the daytime. Mama Smith belonged to the Church
of the Nazarene, and she frequently took me with her on Sunday. Papa
Smith never attended church as far as I can recall. The most vivid
recollection I have about this church was the singing, which was
accompanied by a lot of movement and activity.
Mama
Smith often told me that movies were the work of the devil but had
apparently struck a compromise with him. She gave me admission fare
to the nearby local movie theater on Saturdays so that I could go and
watch the serial and double feature (usually westerns). She also
purchased a TV to give me an additional reason to come and visit her,
since we did not have a TV at home, and the only station in the state
of Mississippi at that time was located some distance from us in the
capitol of Jackson. We would not have a TV until after we moved to
Madison, TN.
After
a few years at Meridian Junior College, my father decided that there
was no future in teaching English. We moved back to Nashville and
lived for a few months with Mama and Papa Smith, until my father
acquired a house in Madison, Tennessee. My father enrolled in a
graduate program at Vanderbilt in audio-speech pathology and took a
full-time, night job as a chemist with Avco Manufacturing
Corporation.
After
getting settled in Madison, my mother found a local church she liked
and began trying to drag me along with her. I balked. First, I was
now old enough and big enough that I could successfully assert myself
with her. In particular, I recall an incident where she was trying to
get me to put on some dress slacks and a white shirt to wear to
church, and I said I would only go if I could wear my jeans. I knew
that this was entirely unacceptable to her. An extended argument
ensued about proper attire to wear to church. My position was that if
God cared what I wore to church I didn't have any use for him. She
refused to let me wear jeans and I did not attend church with her
while we lived in Madison.
After
my father completed his graduate program, he accepted a position as
head of the Fairhaven School for retarded children in Atlanta and we
moved to Decatur, Georgia. My mother went back on her "crusade"
and wanted to "turn a new leaf" now that my father was no
longer occupied all the time with school and work. She wanted the
entire family to attend a local Baptist church. My father relented
and agreed that we would all go and continue going until the first
time they showed up at the house soliciting money. I went since my
father had agreed that we would all attend. It was only one week
before a representative of the church's building fund committee
showed up at the door. Thereafter, only my mother and siblings
attended. Sometime after we moved to Decatur I became acquainted with
the word atheist and decided it fit with my outlook. Thereafter, I
described myself as an atheist.
Just
after I began my senior year in high school, I was out with a group
of friends one Sunday, driving around the metro Atlanta area. One of
the guys in the car kept saying, "We're going to have a wreck.
Take me home." There was nothing about how we were driving that
would cause him any alarm, and he was hardly the type who got alarmed
about much anyway. He definitely had never in our experience been
known to voice premonitions. Of course, we all scoffed at his
declaration and ignored him. He continued to request to be taken
home. Eventually, we did drop him off and a couple of others as well.
Finally, there was just the driver and I left in the car, and we
headed for my house. It had begun to rain and had gotten dark. We
came around a curve and entered a long straight stretch of highway
that was close to the turnoff for my house. A car was coming toward
us and another car was in the process of passing it. The car that was
passing spun out and ran the other car off the road. The car began
spinning round and round and drifting from one side of the road to
the other. It finally went off the road on our side and then came
back on the road just in time to hit us head-on while it was
broadside in the road, forming a letter T with the two vehicles.
I went
partially through the windshield and back into the car. When
everything came to a stop, I sat there briefly and then asked the
driver how he was. He had hit the steering wheel with his face and
made a total mess of his mouth. He managed to get out of the car and
come around and help me get the door open on the passenger side so I
could get out. We were just standing there in the rain trying take in
what had happened when the guy that had been run off the road
appeared. He looked at me and said something to the effect that I was
bleeding to death. He grabbed me by the arm and rushed me to his car
and we took off down the highway. I had felt wetness on my face but
thought it was water from the rain. As we drove down the highway, I
became aware of a gritty feeling in my eyes and realized it was
probably glass from the windshield. I recall trying to keep my eyes
very still so as not to do any more damage than had already been
done.
We
soon arrived at the emergency room in a university hospital where I
went into shock. While I was lying on the table violently shaking, I
overheard two physicians talking. They were basically saying that I
had lost a lot of blood and needed a transfusion of whole blood and
that they didn't have enough of the right type. I later learned that
a student from the theology school on campus who had my somewhat rare
(5%) blood type responded to a call and came in to donate some
additional blood. I remember seriously praying for the first time in
my life while lying on that table. There is some truth to the old
saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. I was looking for help
from any quarter that might be available. In this prayer I proposed a
deal. Let me live and I would acquiesce to serving in the military.
This was in the days of military conscription, and the draft rubbed my
libertarian sensibilities the wrong way, but it was about all I could
think of to put on the table, so to speak.
I
spent several hours in surgery having glass picked out of my face and
initial repair work done that resulted in about 350 stitches in my
face. I spent nearly a week in the hospital with my face completely
covered by bandages, including my eyes. When I asked about my eyesight I kept getting evasive answers. It was a great relief when the
bandages were removed and I found that I still had my eyesight, though
I was missing an eyelid and couldn't close that eye. Needless to say,
my face was a mess and once my injuries had healed I began a series
of plastic surgery procedures to reconfigure my face.
About
a year after the accident, I was sitting looking at the contrast
provided by two photos. One was my senior picture for the school
annual that had been taken a couple of weeks prior to the accident
and the other was a "before" picture taken in the plastic
surgeon's office before he began the operations on my face.
Spontaneously, a strong wave of emotion swept through me. I had the
distinct feeling that the person pictured from before the accident no
longer existed. At first, I interpreted the feelings that I was
experiencing as sadness, but this gave way to something akin of a
sense of an exuberant Aha! I realized that a transformation was
taking place. The "self" in the school picture was free of
all personal history that had defined that selfhood. At the time this
was simply an intuitive sense, but today I would say that what I
realized was the fictive nature of the self. Our sense of who we are,
our ego, is an act of creative self-expression. Unfortunately, we
tend to view this creation as "writ in stone" and surrender
ourselves to the dictates of this fiction as if we are its puppets.
This realization set me free of the past and what had been
constructed from it. This sense of freedom was liberating and marked
the beginning of a redefinition of myself and one that had a degree
of fluidity inherent in it. This was what today I would call a noetic
(see Definitions) experience.
One
result of this noetic experience was a question that began to creep
into my thoughts. That question was simply, if "ego" or
"self" is a fiction, created from the way we pick from
among our memories of our experiences and then spin them into a
narrative, who is making these choices and creating the
interpretation of them? This led me to an interest in psychology and
philosophy and especially religious philosophies from India, China
and Japan. In the course of searching out such books in local
bookstores I ran across a biography titled There is a River.
This was a biography by Thomas Sugrue of the psychic Edgar Cayce. In
this biography there was a section based on Cayce readings about
reincarnation and the eternal nature of the soul or consciousness
that cyclically inhabits our physical bodies. This resonated
strongly with me and seemed to be pointing toward an answer to my
question. Also, about this time I had a friend who kept trying to get
me to read the Christian Bible. Given that I had begun a trip "down
the rabbit hole," I agreed to take a look and let him know what
I thought.
About
this time, I was in the process of moving to Knoxville, Tennessee to
live with my family and take my father up on his offer to put me
through college. Prior to this I had been attending night school
taking what today would be called "developmental courses"
to compensate for some of the many deficits I had from high school.
Before I could make the arrangements to move to Knoxville, I was
called up for a draft physical where I was told to expect induction
into the Army within 90 days. I was determined to go to college and
looked for a way to get around the potential draft call.
I was
employed in a Georgia DOT lab on the Georgia Tech campus and one day
at lunch time walked over to the Naval ROTC and Naval Reserve
building on campus. I was informed that if I joined the USNR I
could get a deferment from active duty until I completed college and
would have a two-year active duty obligation, which was no longer
than I would have to spend in the U.S. Army, if I were drafted. I
decided to join the USNR. The USNR application form had a box in
which one was asked to write in their religion. I entered "None"
and was told this was unacceptable. I said this was the truth and
that I wasn't going to lie just to satisfy the Navy. The recruiter
and I were at loggerheads until I mentioned that my mother was a
Baptist. He said, "Fine put that in the blank." Thus, I met
the requirement by writing, "My mother is a Baptist."
That
summer I went to Great Lakes Naval Training Center for "boot
camp" and then returned to Atlanta, settled my affairs and moved
to Knoxville in August. While waiting to hear about my application
for admission to the University of Tennessee and for school to start,
I went to the Knoxville Library to look for some reading material.
There I ran across a book by Frank Barron about his research on
creativity. It was in his book that I first encountered a discussion
of religious agnosticism. This discussion was in the context of his
finding that the psychological profiles of "true believers"
and atheists were almost identical. Barron pointed out that at root
both were making an assertion for which they could offer no empirical
proof. On the other hand, agnostics simply take the position that
they don't know if such an entity as God exists or not and are
content to wait for some evidence that bears on the question. I
decided that this was closer to how I saw my own position than
atheism, and I began describing myself as an agnostic.
After
a year or so at UT, I recalled my promise to my friend and decided to
take a look at the Bible. The first thing that I decided was that the
Old Testament was not Christian but Jewish. Further, the New
Testament superseded the Old Testament, in any event. That bit of
logic dispensed with a lot of material. Next, I asked myself what was
important in the New Testament. The answer for me was only those
portions that purported to convey directly the teachings of Jesus
upon which Christianity was supposed to have been built. I had now
narrowed the task down to the four gospels. I looked those over and
decided on Matthew for two reasons. First, at the time there was some
opinion that it was the oldest. Second, it seemed to offer a fairly
coherent account. Thus, I put my emphasis on Matthew and then wrote a
didactic play titled, A Dialogue with Jesus (see Appendix 10).
During
the period that I was reading Matthew and writing on this play, I was
also giving a lot of thought to the morality of the Vietnam war that
was hotly in progress. I had just missed getting embroiled in this
conflict, which may have been another intuitive event. When I was
looking at alternatives to being drafted, I had almost enlisted in
the U.S. Army's warrant officer program to be trained as a helicopter
pilot. At the last minute, I backed out, determined to find a way to
go on to college, which I did through the USNR program. After
completing the play, I sent a copy to my friend and told him that
this was what I took from the Bible. He took the play to his Baptist
minister who after reading it told him that it could only have been
written by an atheist.
During
my junior year at UT, Shirley and I decided to get married. We wanted
to plan our own ceremony and did not want it to be religious in
nature. On the other hand, we didn't want to have a civil ceremony
over which we would have little control. My now lifelong friend and
philosophy instructor at UT suggested that we get married in his
church, which was the Unitarian Church on Kingston Pike in Knoxville.
He spoke with his minister, who agreed to perform the ceremony and to
let us design it. Thus, we had a small private "church"
wedding.
During
my time at UT, I had read a lot of the Edgar Cayce material and had
become quite interested in it and the implications it held about
spiritual matters. I learned that there was an organization called
the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) in Virginia
Beach, Virginia, that was dedicated to preserving and distributing
the materials delivered through Cayce. I wrote to the A.R.E. and said
that I anticipated being in the Virginia Beach area in the near
future and wanted to know if their archive of materials was open to
the public. Why I felt I would soon be in the area I couldn't say. I
just felt that I would and strongly enough to contact them about
possibly getting access to their archives.
After
graduating from UT, Shirley and I moved to Decatur, GA and lived with
a friend and his wife for a short period until Shirley could find a
job. I was waiting on orders that would begin my active duty in the
USN. Writing the Dialogue had if nothing else helped me clarify my
thinking about the Vietnam war, which was simply that there was no
justification for it either ethically or legally. While waiting on my
orders, I spent a lot of time struggling with my commitment to serve
in the USN. In a way, I felt bound to my commitment both by the
prayer mentioned earlier and by the fact that I had voluntarily
joined the USNR, albeit in the face of what qualified as coercion.
But, I had made something of a pact with the Navy. They would keep me
from being drafted, allow me to attend college now and in return I
would owe them no more of my time than being drafted would have
taken.
After
struggling with this dilemma for a month or so, what appeared to be a
workable solution came to me. I drafted a letter to the Commandant of
the Sixth Naval District to which my USNR unit belonged. In that
letter, I said that I had resolved that ethically I could not allow
someone else to determine when I would or would not engage in an act
of violence. Thus, I planned to honor my commitment to serve in the
USN but reserved to myself the right to decide whether or not to
engage in aggressive behavior. In short, I would not blindly follow
an order to commit violence. Further, I would accept no pay from the
Navy while on active duty and thereby I viewed my service as wholly
voluntary and in no way subordinate to their intentions, because I was
not accepting pay to serve.
I
received a reply that offered me the opportunity to apply for a
conscientious objectors discharge. I wrote them back and rejected the
offer on the grounds that I was not a C.O., because I could conceive
of circumstances in which I might engage in aggressive behavior, but
only I could make that determination. Shortly thereafter I received
orders to report to the naval base in Charleston, South Carolina for
processing.
The
first thing that happened in Charleston was an attempt to transfer me
from the USN to the Marine Corp. I fought this transfer largely
through the office of Senator Al Gore, Sr. of Tennessee. After that
effort was foiled, I went through a number of "pay days"
and refused to accept the checks. This apparently created some
disruption of the financial operations because the disbursing office
became very insistent that I had to clear the checks out of their
accounts. Eventually, I took the checks, put them in an envelope with
a letter and sent them to Senator Gore. In that letter, I told him
basically what was taking place and that the checks represented money
that belonged to the taxpaying citizens of the U.S. Further, since he
was a representative of those citizens, I suggested that he should
distribute the money in any way that he saw fit.
Once I
accepted the checks, I received orders to report to the USS Franklin
D. Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier in dry dock in Portsmouth, VA.
Interestingly, Portsmouth is not very many miles from Virginia Beach
where the A.R.E. is located, and this assignment put me right where
earlier I had told the A.R.E. I expected to be, i.e., in the Virginia
Beach area. Upon arriving on board, I was asked to report to a
conference room where I met with several officers. They told me that
they had been informed by the Department of the Navy that I did not
have to accept my paychecks and that if I had any further issues
that I should talk with them before getting Senator Gore's office
involved again. They then assigned me to work in the chaplains' office on
board the ship.
I was
soon designated the office manager for the chaplains, of which there
were two. One was a Protestant minister and the other a Catholic
priest. This office consisted of the two chaplains and four enlisted
personnel. The office performed or coordinated all religious services
on board, ran the ship's library, maintained the crew's lounge and
handled all personnel matters of a personal nature such as deaths in
the family and similar emergencies. The Protestant minister was only
on board a few months before being transferred, but during that time
he recommended me for Annapolis, which recommendation I declined and
asked that it be removed from my personnel file. I became friends
with the Catholic priest and spent a good bit of time off the ship at
his apartment. The replacement for the Protestant minister was a
Southern Baptist and the youngest captain in the history of the USN
Chaplains Corp. I let him read my play, Dialogue with Jesus,
after he'd been on board a little while. After reading it, he
declared that he was the only chaplain in the U.S. Navy whose office
was run by an atheist.
In my
role as Chaplain's Yeoman, I learned to setup and assist with
Catholic mass. I also was involved in working with the Jewish
personnel, the Mormon personnel and the Black Muslim personnel on
board. I assisted them in scheduling their services and finding
locations for their services when necessary. I also helped with
obtaining any supplies that were needed. In fact, we maintained a
locker of supplies specifically provided by the Navy for Jewish
religious observances and services. In the course of carrying out
these duties, I became familiar with the diversity of religious
practices on board the ship.
After
being separated from the U.S. Navy at the end of my two years, I
returned to Decatur, GA. During the initial months back in Decatur, I
did not do much of anything but relax. We lived in an apartment next
to an old cemetery. One day I sat quietly, for an extended period of
time, just gazing out the window at the cemetery, which because of
all of the trees and landscaping was pleasant to the eye. I suppose
one might say I was in a meditative or contemplative state. Suddenly,
I found myself in what I can only describe as a profound state of
awareness as to the unity of Consciousness. It was as if, to borrow a
concept from the TV program Star Trek, I had a Vulcan mind
meld with a universal state of consciousness. This is the second
experience in my life that I would now describe as noetic in nature.
About
a year or so later, I was walking in the yard of a small apartment
complex where we lived and that was owned by my brother-in-law. It
was a cold winter day and no one was outside so it was quiet and I
was very much alone. As I walked about immersed in the solitude, I
was suddenly seized by an intuitive realization. What I came to know
in that moment was that reality as we know it is a social construct.
Just as several years earlier I had realized that the ego or self is
a fictional narrative that we spin for ourselves, so too is social
reality. In short, these were parallel intuitions, but one was on a
personal level and the other was on a societal level. This I would
classify as my third noetic experience. While the previous two
experiences had eluded any attempt to capture them with language, I
made a passable effort to do so with this third experience through a
poem. The poem is titled Outlaw (see Appendix 5).
The
cumulative effect of the three noetic experiences described above was
that I achieved a private, intuitive and direct understanding that
there is a spiritual dimension to life that is superordinate to
materialism. This understanding encompassed a phenomenological
(see Definitions) understanding of both personal and social reality.
I
subsequently did a good bit of reading looking for material that I
found compatible with my understanding. Two sources that I read
during this time that resonated with me were the writings of the
American mystic Franklin Merrell-Wolff and the Seth channeling by
Jane Roberts. During this same period, a friend told me about a woman
he'd met through his brother, who did psychic readings. The friend, a
university professor, was pretty impressed with this woman's
abilities. He offered to see if the psychic could do a reading on me
without my being present since she was a considerable distance away.
She agreed and I too found her impressive, for among other things she
told me some personal things that no one other than myself was aware
of and would have been extraordinarily unlikely guesses. Between the
earlier premonition about the auto accident, my own intuitive sense
that I would be located close to Virginia Beach and this woman's
readings, I was convinced that there were information flows taking
place in the universe that could not be accounted for by current
scientific theories about what was possible.
My
next experience with religion was to become a minister in the
Universal Life Church, which was entered with the idea of using
institutional religion as a vehicle for tax purposes. While this did
not work out as a "tax dodge" for reasons I won't go into
here, it did require that a "church" be formed and services
conducted. Thus, I prepared a set of founding principles for a
religion that I called Trinitarianism, not realizing at the time that
there was already a religion using the name Trinitarian that had been
around for 800 years or so. The principles for my version of
Trinitarianism can be found in the Appendices (see Appendix 11). The
Trinitarian congregation was small and met monthly in my home's large
family room, in which I performed one marriage.
For a
number of years following this time, I was too involved with my
family and career to be actively involved in spiritual matters other
than a little reading here and there when the opportunity presented
itself. Upon retiring from my university position, I began to devote
more time to thinking about spiritual matters. One effect of this was
to, for the first time in my life, voluntarily associate myself with
a church. My wife and I joined a small lay-led Unitarian,
Universalist Fellowship. This was probably influenced in part by
having been married in such a church and in part because I didn't
really consider it a religion, i.e., no theology and no dogma. After
serving in several administrative capacities in this church, it
became clear to me that this was not a spiritual community but merely
a social organization, and a quite contentious one at that. Further,
the funding practices of the UUA appeared designed to exploit small
congregations to the benefit of large congregations. Finally, I was
not entirely comfortable with the idea of being a member of an
organization that called itself a religion. Thus, we left this church
and are not now affiliated with any religious organization. However,
my interest in spiritual matters remains and I continue to pursue
that interest in whatever suitable ways that present themselves,
including opportunities through religious organizations.
Note:
The above is a personal narrative constructed from events in my life.
I could choose different events or make alternative interpretations
of them and create a different narrative. In large part, we define
who we are and this personal narrative is a self-definition of at
least one thread that weaves through the recollection and
interpretation of events in my life. I cannot say that it is a true
narrative in some absolute sense, but it is meaningful to me.