Part #3: Significant Influences--Writers Francis Schaeffer and Jack Kerouac's Life Stances

Writers who ‘fathered’ me, giving my young adult self various versions of deep time eyes:

1. Thomas Merton, Liberal Catholic Monk, Meditator, and Social Moralist

2. Friends for 300 Years by Howard Brinton

3. Henry David Thoreau, Transcendentalist who Wrote “Civil Disobedience”

4. ERB, Edgar Rice Burroughs, SF Author of simplistic, but enjoyable stories of Barsoom and other galactic adventures

5. Aldous Huxley, Brilliant Author and Thinker of Brave New World, Island, and Point Counter Point

6. C.S. Lewis, Ex-atheist Liberal Christian Thinker and Fiction Writer

7. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Christian Leader who Opposed Hitler, The Cost of Discipleship
.....

And there were other writers, whose legacy has been only partially good, because they communicated bad and fallacious views, ideas, and harmful actions. They were bad models for young impressionable Dan:

21. Francis and Edith Shaeffer, famous couple who founded L’Abri. He, at first a missionary to the Swiss beginning in the late 1940’s, later became a Christian philosophical apologist and she wrote a famous biographical, inspirational book about their famous Christian community and intellectual center in Switzerland.

In my young adult years, I avidly read most of Schaeffer’s critiques of secular and atheistic life stances and apologetical defenses of mere Christianity. I was deeply impressed with his insights, artistic interests, and caring views.

His emphasis that every Christian needs to have a total commitment to agape love, the way of Jesus, he presented in his short book The Mark of the Christian.

Schaeffer had a deep understanding of key atheist views, their weak philosophical bases, and their destructive implications for humankind. His writings strongly influenced me and millions of other Christians coming of age in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Two of his best books are
The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason.

What I didn’t know back then, because Schaeffer hid this, is that he wasn’t a ‘mere’ Christian (in the sense of C.S. Lewis) like he presented himself, but a hardline Calvinist!

I still find that hard to understand or square with his more liberal artistic and moral views. It turns out, that he was a member of and missionary for an extremely fundamentalistic Calvinistic denomination that had split from a larger conservative one.

This all only came to light later in the early 1980’s when I discovered other facts about him that, also, were so contrary to his public image and his reasoning in his books. For example, another horror, I still find inexplicable is that he strongly supported nuclear weapons. Doing so, of course, is grossly contrary to the moral outlook of his book, The Mark of a Christian.

Schaeffer's wife, Edith Schaeffer, wrote L'Abri,a famous biographical story of their outreach community of L’Abri in Switzerland. She greatly inspired and motivated and misled me!

In her riveting, deeply spiritual biography, Edit emphasizes many instances of supernatural answers to prayer. Based upon her book, my dedication to prayer became much stronger, and my belief in miracles increased (though I still had strong doubts about all of that because there were no cases of proven miracles and no evidential cases of prayer actually changing any events).

Years later, when I read the tell-all autobiography by their son, Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God and other accounts of their famous story of L'Abri, I discovered, that while she may have been sincere in her beliefs, her claims seem to be shown to be false. In fact, it turns out that her husband Francis was given to severe depression, that he verbally and physically harmed her, and that there were other disheartening facts about their story that were contrary to her idealistic presentation in her biography.

So much for the good and bad influence of these two authors on my life in the past.

That was the Christian influence, a mixture of very good and very bad.
--

22. Jack Kerouac, infamous Beat novelist and poet who influenced 2 generations of young poeple. He wrote life-changing autobiographical novels including On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Big Sur.

Though I had wonderful experiences “going on the road,” being influenced to study Buddhism, getting a backpack, hitch-hiking like him repeatedly across sections of the U.S. (and later across Europe and Palestine-Israel),
overall Kerouac was a bad influence.

Fortunately, I adopted some of his life stance views and actions, filtered through the lens of my Baptist Christian faith, so I didn’t succumb to any of his vices and immoral actions.

It still astounds me that I read books such as The Dharma Bums, and centered myself only on his exciting nature hikes, work as a U.S. Forest Service fire lookout, and evocations and descriptions of his love for God (which I mistakenly interpreted as similar to my own devotion to God, though his God was considerably different from the one I believed in).

I skipped over his often positive comments about sexual promiscuity, heavy drinking, drugs, irresponsibility, etc. Those down-sides to his life stance, I very strongly opposed but managed to admire him as one of my heroes. This later changed at the University of Nebraska, when an older grad student warned me of the dangers of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and other Beats, explaining how their gross personal lives contradicted their commitment to God, love, and altruism.

Tragically, there was a bad instance of this older students' negative analysis demonstrated when one of Kerouac's and Ginsberg's close friends got a young student pregnant and then skipped town, just after the Beats were emphasizing to be loving to everyone. Too often, their "love" was selfish lust.

I’m amazed that I could become so enamored of Kerouac such a figure and writer whose life stance was so contrary to my own. Basically, I think it was his creativity and his adventure-some actions that hooked me.

Always, I was somewhat of a wild spirit, even as a fundamentalist Baptist kid. My sister used to tell me later how she thought I really was going to live in the forest in a cave when I grew up like I told her when we were kids;-).

My natural inclination was further spurred in opposite direction of my mom who so strongly sought to discipline and direct me into a very ordered, controlled, secure, unadventurous life. And, also, one mustn’t forget, that in my late teens, like most young men, I was feeling rebellious and probably had lots of male hormone coursing through me.

And, I was disconcerted, and disheartened that my dad let my mom control, inhibit, and cow him, and put him down, and disparage him. I really hated that and didn’t want to be like that, under a controlling woman’s grip.

So, enter Kerouac, via another obsessive reader student in our high school philosophy class. This intellectual often read books such as Kerouac’s in particular, The Dharma Bums, even during lectures from our great teacher, Tom Keene!

But that brilliant student wasn’t a good role model either. He suddenly disappeared from class one week and didn’t return. It turned out that he had taken off to travel west, hitch-hiking and riding the rails like Kerouac.

I followed in their steps, hitch-hiking back and forth across parts of the U.S., then across Europe, Palestine-Israel, etc.

Without Kerouac’s influence, I would have still adventured a little, but would have stayed in college (instead of taking 7 years to graduate), would have gotten my teaching degree at 22, instead of at 32!

Then I would have been prepared for adult-married-fathering life in my early 20’s instead of being a late bloomer, in my early 30’s. My wife and I would have been far more financially secure. I would have probably figured out a way to buy a great real estate deal offered to me--the Speer place without lying to the old owner shortly before he died.

On the other hand, would I have missioned at the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, hitch-hiked across the U.S. and Europe, lived in Palestine-Israel on a kibbutz, lived in Haight-Ashbury, etc.?

Long live reading:-)

In the Light of Truth, Justice, Equality, and Altruism,

Dan Wilcox

Of Moose and Men

Of Moose and Men: Redux

Like moose drool down from his jaw
Liquid drip of much after thought,
The human chews his abstract cud.

Drooling brought-back cussedness

This brainy mammal with his huge
Mental jaw ruminates and masticates
Difficult philosophical concepts.

He chews and chews and chaws
Minding repeatedly, and pondering
Into his daily life for good or ill

Drooling, brought-back cussedness

The meta-conundrums, the ones
He can't stomach, that ethical gristle
Imponderable quandaries.

Like the massive moose of yonder glen,
Man stands as king and all get out
In this damned lake he calls civilization;

Drooling brought-back cussedness

Then walking admidst verbal tall trees, he
Rummages through this forest of ideas,
Philosophical redwoods towering above.

And he peers up searching the heights, but
Stands sludged mired in his soggy morass,
The moral muddle of his shallow bog.

Drooling brought-back cussedness

What festering future, or fertile destiny
Awaits this drooling race of primate
Caught in the quagmire, a hypocrite?


Any St. Bernard dog, as Thoreau said,
Has more basic moral sense than
Most men who swallow gross wrong whole,

Drooling and drooling and drooling...


--Daniel E. Wilcox

First pub.
Dark Energy,
by Diminuendo Press

In Defense of Cherry Picking the Bible

A guest article by Valerie Tarico, a fine writer and thinker:

The KEY point:
"Our ancestors were flawed and human, as we are today. And they lacked many of the advantages we have from our privileged vantage in the 21st Century. They were constrained by their own time and place and individual failings, but even so, they took their received traditions and wrestled with them, offering a new understanding of what was right and real, drawing on the past but facing the future.

And in doing so, they offered us genuinely timeless and transcendent metrics by which we might do the same.

When we cherry pick their words in accordance with their highest and most enduring ideals, we honor and further their quest."

Start of Article:
"People accuse each other of cherry picking sacred texts, as if the term was an insult. But for those seeking to honor the spiritual quest of our ancestors, including the Bible writers, that is precisely the right approach.

No parent with a backyard cherry tree would pick every piece of fruit on the tree and feed it to her children. No matter how excellent a tree, some of the fruit is wormy. Some of it is bird pecked and moldy. Some wasn’t pollinated properly and has been hard and shriveled from the beginning. A loving parent culls through, discarding the bad fruit and feeding her children the cherries that are juicy and nourishing.

But when it comes to handed down ideas about religion—about what is real and what is good and how we should then live—many people don’t apply the same prudent care. They take the Bible or related traditions and pass them on without sifting or sorting.

Bad cherries in the bowl will give a child a stomach ache at worst, but bad religious ideas can leave a person needlessly guilt ridden for life or unable to enjoy sex, or deeply fearful of death, or full of judgment and alienation toward outsiders, or even suffering what some call religious trauma syndrome.

Handing down un-culled religious beliefs from one generation to the next not only passes on psychologically harmful ideas, it is tearing apart our world. Today some of the worst ideas plaguing society are ideas that claim support from the pages of the Torah or Christian Bible or Quran, for example the idea that children are born bad and must be beaten, or that female sexuality is dirty and dangerous, or that homosexuality is abominable, or that religious outsiders lack morals, or that war can be holy, or that the Earth is ours to consume as we please and that God will simply replace it.

These ideas reflect the mentality of our ancestors, but there is every reason to think that they would be far less common today were it not for the fact that they are endorsed in the pages of books now called Holy by hundreds of millions of believers.

To understand how humanity ended up in this dilemma and how we might get past it, we need to understand something fundamental about the Abrahamic religions.

People of the Book

When the Prophet Mohammed embraced Jews and Christians as fellow “People of the Book,” he wasn’t simply acknowledging the shared roots of all three religions in the ancient Hebrew narrative of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He was also correctly observing that these two religious traditions were centered around written texts akin to the one he was in the process of creating.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam emerged during the time when writing was coming into its own as humanity’s most powerful cultural technology, one that wouldn’t be rivaled until the 20th Century. To a degree unlike any prior religion (or any religion that is likely to emerge in the future), the Abrahamic religions are structured around a specific communication technology—the written word.

It is no coincidence that some of the world’s largest religions spread across continents not only in the minds of individual believers but in bundles of papyrus, parchment, scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, and finally mass produced books.

In Christianity, the advent of the printing press, which brought the written word to the masses, directly fueled the Protestant Reformation. Over time, across vast swaths of Christendom the authority of the papacy and Catholic hierarchy were replaced by the authority of the Bible, the Reformation’s “sola scriptura.” (The irony, of course, is that it was the Catholic hierarchy itself that had assembled the collection of texts and declared them, on papal authority, to be God’s best and most complete revelation to humankind. But I digress.)

This focus on the written word is both the greatest strength and greatest flaw of the Abrahamic religions. It has allowed Christianity and Islam to become more powerful than any religion in history. Today over 3.7 billion people identify with one or the other of these traditions. But it has also allowed both traditions to become stagnant and cruel, profoundly corrupted by a phenomenon that might best be described as “book worship” or “bibliolatry.”

Book as Golden Calf

Today many Christians assert that the Bible is the literally perfect Word of God, timeless and complete—exempt from addition, deletion, or revision. Many Muslims make the same claim for the Quran, according it such high status that either defacing a copy of the book or denying its divine provenance is a crime worthy of death. In other words, they attribute to the Bible and Quran the qualities of divinity, and they treat offenses against the book as if they were offenses against a god.

They behave toward the Bible and Quran precisely like their ancestors did toward the wood and stone carvings that represented the divine for pre-literate people.

In an age of widespread literacy, what better golden calf than a ‘golden’ book?

Bibliolatry Violates Both Book and Writer

Ironically, the idea that our sacred texts are perfect and complete, in final form, is diametrically opposed to the stance of the men who wrote those texts. Each of these men took the tradition and teachings he received, processed them, and then offered what he believed to be a better, deeper understanding of reality and goodness. Had this not been the case, the authors would have been copyists, not writers.

Ironically, too, writers of both the Bible and Quran understood the dangers of idolatry, and within the constraints of their own cultural blinders did what they could to warn against it. They recognized that pre-literate people had sought to convey their understanding of the divine through works of art: sculptures, paintings, friezes, and more. They recognized that these objects became idols, treated as if the icons themselves were as holy as the truths they sought to convey. And they recognized that idol worship bound people to harmful ideas and practices, and to inadequate conceptions of divinity.

They felt so strongly about this that they encouraged the destruction of religious symbols and icons. In the intervening centuries, both Christianity and Islam have been plagued with bouts of iconoclasm, purges like the one that currently drives members of the Taliban and ISIS to destroy the last vestiges of ancient pre-Muslim culture and religion, as they are able.

The authors of the Bible and Quran had no way to foresee that their words would eventually cause the greatest developmental arrest in the history of humankind. In their Iron Age context, the advent and spread of writing was an innovation on par with the arrival of computing. It allowed so much more depth, nuance and complexity that earlier symbolic systems that the possibilities must have seemed infinite.

It must have been impossible to imagine that inked texts would ultimately fail to keep up with the growth of human knowledge, and that they would eventually be replace by mass printing, then living documents (like wikis) and other media. It must have been impossible to grasp the limits of the written word–that texts, however sacred, can only, ever, convey a finite set of spiritual understandings, static and frozen in time, small and bound by human psychology, utterly inadequate to encompass the power behind the DNA code or the laws of physics.

The High Price of High Fidelity: Static Books, Static Knowledge, Static Priorities

The spread of writing allowed previously unimaginable advances, but like any new technology it created a new set of problems. Before the advent of the sacred text, religious beliefs and practices were handed down via oral tradition and were represented by symbols, icons and rituals. Religion was necessarily more heterogeneous, more place based, and more grounded in practice, or “praxis,” rather than belief. It was also more free to evolve as culture and moral consciousness themselves evolved in response to changing environmental conditions, population densities, and technologies.

By contrast with oral tradition, a book allows an extraordinary degree of fidelity in transmitting a set of ideas across time and space and between strangers with many degrees of separation. That is the strength, but also the weakness of the written word. This fidelity means that any printed text is frozen in time, a snapshot of a single mind embedded in a specific cultural and historical context.

And since the knowledge or insight imbedded in the text is static, when people or institutions bind themselves to a text, asserting that it is final and complete–the definitive authority on whatever matter it addresses–they become stagnant too. An institution or person that declares allegiance to an immutable text becomes developmentally arrested, unable to do what the author himself did, which was to take his received tradition and iterate on it, offering new ideas and insights about the subject at hand.

The Fruit of the Spirit

My friend Eckhart inherited two old cherry trees when he bought his current home. The trees were past their prime and the cherries are prone to be buggy. But with selective pruning and care he has gotten a bounty of sweet, wholesome fruit for his family.

Eckhart’s story isn’t surprising to anyone who understands agriculture. But why do we so often fail to apply simple lessons from other parts of life to our spiritual endeavor?

Rather than being used as an epithet, perhaps cherry picker should be a compliment, an acknowledgment of discernment, wisdom, judgment, and responsibility. In actual fact, all religious believers (and nonbelievers) cherry pick their sacred texts or cultural traditions, even fundamentalists, even those who deny doing so. A book like the Bible or Quran contains passages that contradict each other, or that demand a level of perfection (or cruelty) that is simply unattainable for most believers.

Whether we are Christian or Muslim or post-Abrahamic freethinkers or practitioners of some other spiritual tradition, the question isn’t whether we cherry pick, it is whether we do so wisely and well, based on some higher principle that tells us which passages are spiritually nourishing and which should be discarded.

Humanity’s shared moral core provides guidance in this regard. Religion scholar Huston Smith says that the world’s great wisdom traditions converge on three values that he calls veracity, humility, and charity, each of which both constrains and enhances the others. Veracity means truth telling and truth seeking, including honest self-appraisal. Humility means recognizing that each of us is just one among many and that the yearnings and insights of others matter. Charity, in the King James sense, is not merely generosity but love, the kind that seeks to value the pleasure and pain of others on par with our own.

The Golden Rule, which can be thought of as a shorthand for these values appears in some form in virtually every religious or secular moral philosophy, and likely is encoded into our genes in ways that scientists are just beginning to understand. As Christian author Rachel Held Evans has said eloquently, in Christianity, this ethic is woven into what Jesus calls the greatest of the commandment, to love God and to love your neighbor, the latter being the tangible manifestation of the former. This, he says, sum up all the writings of the Law and Prophets. In the book of Matthew, he warns against false prophets, saying, “You will know them by their fruit.”

The Apostle Paul lists the fruit of the spirit as love, joy, peace, longsuffering, goodness, meekness, temperance and faith. “Against such, there is no law,” he adds, recognizing that these virtues are respected not only within but also outside the nascent Christian community.

These are the measures that let us know what fruit is worth keeping, and what is not. Cherry picking a sacred text doesn’t leave a person without a moral core, lost in a world where anything goes, as some fundamentalists fear. Rather, it anchors that moral core to something clearer, deeper, and more durable than the bindings of a golden book.

Our ancestors were flawed and human, as we are today. And they lacked many of the advantages we have from our privileged vantage in the 21st Century. They were constrained by their own time and place and individual failings, but even so, they took their received traditions and wrestled with them, offering a new understanding of what was right and real, drawing on the past but facing the future. And in doing so, they offered us genuinely timeless and transcendent metrics by which we might do the same.

When we cherry pick their words in accordance with their highest and most enduring ideals, we honor and further their quest. We also show our selves worthy of the privilege we have been given to live at this point in history. What stories might have been told, and what insights might have been attained by an Isaiah or Jesus or Paul or Mohammed who had the advantage of living in the 21st Century?"
--

"Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org. Her articles about religion, reproductive health, and the role of women in society have been featured at sites including AlterNet, Salon, the Huffington Post, Grist, and Jezebel. Subscribe at ValerieTarico.com."

On some points, Valerie Tarico and I have different views of the world, but we come together on the importance of balance, reason, respect, courtesy, empathy, compassion, and all the other great values which define humanity at its best.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox