Huey Talk
A few days ago while running errands around town, a Huey, or perhaps several, buzzed the east side of Milwaukee. We have a reserve Army base located here, so I imagine they were just running operations in the sky, or perhaps some other innocent training mission.
But I was below, looking up, having pulled my Focus over, stuck my head out into the cold spring air, and looked straight up, and not quite surprised, but a little disturbed, I began to feel tears streaming down my face. This isn’t the first time the whack-whack-whack of the rotor blades of a Huey has done this to me. In fact it comes close to classical conditioning…put me in the air space of a moving Huey, and I usually start to leak all over the place. I keep trying to get over it, and I say I am over it, and I can go long periods of staying over it, but somehow, like those one or two-step snakes in Vietnam, I get bitten with immediate reactions.
Hueys resupplied our firebase in Vietnam every day, and always, a few guys were stepping onto the Huey to ship out, and a few were stepping off, as new timers for a 365 day tour of duty in Vietnam. Of course the Huey also supplied us with hot food (roast beef, peas, roast beef, peas, roast beef, peas, roast beef, peas, roast beef, peas, and roast beef and peas.) When the Hueys landed on our little patch of US Territory in the foothills of Vietnam, it was always a good feeling. The wind would kick up fearsome, but for all of us (I’ve lost track of everybody) I wondered if it was some kind of hope that flew in every day with supplies, food, new troops and old-timers. I’ve even flown in on a Huey to this firebase and flew out, so I have a sense, even though it is a distant one, of what it’s like to sit in on, with an M-14 sitting between our legs. I’ve flown in larger helicopters (Chinooks) for special operations, and smaller ones, little mosquitoes, for super fast travel, but it’s Hueys I came to expect every day, and even if the sun didn’t shine (6 months due to the monsoons) I still knew a Huey knew where we were, and wouldn’t forget us.
I came home in bad shape, not physically, but my head was a bit screwed up, and couldn’t quite get over the accusation that I was a monster of the Nixon Administration. I wore a combat jacket for a few months, but with time, I began to find civilian clothes must more comfortable, and created much less buzz with the civilians who I spoke to whether it was ordering fried eggs, or asking a professor about John Milton’s “Areopagitica.” I put away the few medals and “salad bar” items worn on my Army dress coat, and today, I couldn’t even begin to think of where they might be. The few pictures I took are fading away downstairs somewhere in a slide box, and the few paper photos, well, I have no idea where there are now. One photo captured an image of me shirtless with a flak jacket and helmet, M14, outside a bunker. I believe that was taken on Hill 477, probably before the Hill was overrun by North Vietnamese Regulars in June of 1970. I still wonder sometimes why a NVA bullet didn’t spray my brains out that long night so many years ago. I don’t obsess about it, didn’t dream about it, but when those darn Hueys pass over, it all comes back.
Years ago, I thought I wanted to go back to Vietnam, find the hillsides where I lived for 13 months, but I sense it would have been a lonely trip, and no one to really visit with. I read about Tim O’Brien of The Things They Carried doing that in a New York Times Magazine article, but I wasn’t sure about the whole trip. My wonderful wife urged me not to go. Good advice at the time, and I haven’t felt the urge to go, but oddly, and maybe this is the reason for the tears, I did share a wonderful meal with friends last night in Milwaukee’s only Vietnamese restaurant. Maybe the atmosphere, the Hueys, our war in Iraq and Afghanistan, all of it came buzzing by this morning. And the evening, a delightful little theater production of “Ears on a Beatle,” a light look at two FBI agents following the likes of John Lennon. I was doing just fine on the front row until the sound director included a Huey helicopter hovering over the The Dakota. I couldn’t help but close my eyes, tune out the sounds, and take a few yoga breaths. Why have so many Hueys buzzed my brain in such a short time? I’m checking the local air traffic the next time I go outside.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Thursday, April 12, 2007
God Talk
God Talk
Okay, so sooner or later, somebody’s going to ask, I believe in God, right? Well, that sort of depends, as my students like to say, for just about every question that I ask them. As a kid, I couldn’t help but at least say, “of course!!” as I was growing up in a Methodist parsonage, and praying over meals at home, and at church, and I suppose everyplace else where I thought it might help the situation. Nobody actually every asked the question, as everybody assumed everybody in Kansas was a believer. So swept up in the excitement of my father’s sermons, and baptisms and what I heard about funerals, that I decided while still in high school, that I would follow in the great footsteps, for my grandfather, too, was a Methodist minister.
So at the early and tender age of 18, even before I arrived at a church college to begin a pre-ministerial life, I started hitting the books required for securing a “license to preach.” This is it, I thought. Learn how to stand up before the believers and prove to them the joy of this life and the next, that is, if they believed. At the time, I didn’t believe I was in any trouble, with the Lord, or with any board that questioned my sermon topics that I used throughout my freshman year at a Methodist church college, as I was just a sub for the regular ministers who were not available to their flock.
I still have frightening memories of one college professor jumping up onto his lectern table scarring the b’Jesus out of us with rants and rages of a living, breathing Isaiah, or perhaps it was Jeremiah. I still attended the pre-ministerial student meetings, but remember that it was the late 1960’s, and despite the fact that I was living in Kansas, the rest of the world was revolting from so many different social/cultural/political problems that somehow, some of it must have trickled its way into that tiny town of Winfield, Kansas. English and journalism were beginning to replace the Bible classes, and even though I recall that I did poorly in nearly all of my classes, I found the work of the modern poets even more fascinating than the mysterious texts of the Old and New Testaments. By the end of my college years I was thinking more about the Peace Corps than seminary, and when that fizzled, I took a defeatist attitude and decided to volunteer for the U.S. Army knowing that there could be no way that I could be stationed in Vietnam for a tour of duty.
Little did I know that a Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, was also protesting the war in his country, and it wouldn’t be until decades later that I even knew he was there. Slowly I was losing interest in seminary, in even becoming a lay minister. Without knowing it, I had just drifted away from something that was fundamental and essential to who I was going to be, but now I was in a different kind of seminary, learning how to interpret “literary” texts, and I was even trusted with my first congregation of freshman though no faith in the word was required, but their words had many fragments, comma splices and run-on sentences along with even more frightening “agreement” errors. But I was beginning to get the hang of it, and besides, the flock left at the end of a season, and then a whole new congregation would sit in the pews next semester.
I admit writing the text, and talking about the text, and reading student texts were more appealing and invigorating than what I had planned on as a life of a minister, but the lure of graduate school and more classes and more new friendships with text writers was quite appealing. I had forgotten about God.
That is until a Jewish classmate invited me and my wife to his house in Detroit to enjoy a lunch in his “sukkah.” I vaguely recalled my father talking about this Jewish tradition, but now I am not sure I heard anything Jewish in my father’s church. It really didn’t matter for the hummus was delicious, and have been eating it for sustenance ever since, though at the time, I didn’t realize what was being kindled in my heart and mind.
Years and years later, decades perhaps, my wife asked if I would join her in attending a Jewish worship service on a Friday night on the east side of Milwaukee. We were just beginning to get started with our different academic assignments, yet my wife found herself yearning for something more than just having friends over, or trips to the zoo on Sundays. So without knowing what might happen, and with actually some excitement and curiosity, I decided to take up her offer. That evening, without knowing it, I had taken the first step in becoming a Jew. Between the rabbi and the cantor, the new “congregants” and the great cake and tea as part of the “oneg,” I had stepped into a world of the “Old Testament,” and realized how much I had missed, or probably misinterpreted, back then, in the olden days of college envisioning a life of a New Testament Methodist minister. Well that certainly changed.
Over the months and years of my wife’s own journey into Judaism, I, too, started to enroll and listen to my new Jewish teachers tell me about such things as Isaac’s sacrifice each fall season (where was I when I heard that as a kid?), or matzo ball soup (I can even make my own now), or who were the 6 million of a dictator’s wrath? Or maybe why Ruth in the Book of Ruth was not just a Moabite, but a distant cousin? Walking around in Jerusalem years later, I thought I had come home. Then came the new Jewish name. My father would have probably flinched, or twitched, on hearing that, but I never want to assume what he might have done. But his widow, my mother, was there for the conversion ceremony, and somehow she got through it. Soon I began further studies, and even tried learning enough Hebrew to take the next step, as an adult bar mitzvah boy. That didn’t seem to satiate my need for learning, so it was off to a summer camp rabbinic aide school, and by that time, I seriously wondered if a full time English professor could squeeze in a part time study toward a Jewish Studies program. When that seemed too much to do in one lifetime, I did take a step toward wanting to help others on the path toward Judaism, and in time, began teaching an Introduction to Judaism course to potential converts.
But at my university, where I was still able to manage holding down a full time job, I began to take on a new assignment of a course that reflected even a broader sweep of religion and literature, a general education course called simply, World of Ideas.
I began to read the Upanishads, and wondered about cool places like nirvana and what would it really be like to experience samsara. Then the Buddha came into my life.
Then the Dalai Lama. And finally, all the way from Vietnam, Thich Nhat Hanh, who taught me not how to hold my breath, but to simply acknowledge it. And much more.
But Lao-Tze also dropped into my life through this course, and so did Confucius.
And in time, so did Muhammad. And on the day I read Surah 37 in the Koran (in English, not Arabic) I couldn’t help but sense how this journey was a complete circle of coming and going, for there was not Isaac, but Ishmael, and off we went from ancient Israel to southern Saudi Arabia to rebuild the Kaa’ba.
So where is God in all of this? Actually I thought I found a hint when teaching Socrates, or introducing Socrates to my students. At one point, the “text” points to Anaxagoras, a “pre-Socratic” philosopher who got into much much trouble for interpreting gods as simply a metaphor for human desires, wishes and fears. Labeled an “atheist,” he too was run out of Athens because of his unpopular “views.” Yet it’s Anaxagoras who has my current interest. Why didn’t his views gel with the Athenians? Why was the personification of gods and goddesses more acceptable to even the smartest guys? Even Socrates paid homage to the Greek gods, for he was probably as pious as anyone.
And another mystery keeps me looking. Wasn’t it the Zoroastrians of Persia who introduced the Cosmic Battle of Good and Evil to the exiled Jews in Babylonia?
Where is God? Well, God just might be a text. I’ll keep thinking about it.
Okay, so sooner or later, somebody’s going to ask, I believe in God, right? Well, that sort of depends, as my students like to say, for just about every question that I ask them. As a kid, I couldn’t help but at least say, “of course!!” as I was growing up in a Methodist parsonage, and praying over meals at home, and at church, and I suppose everyplace else where I thought it might help the situation. Nobody actually every asked the question, as everybody assumed everybody in Kansas was a believer. So swept up in the excitement of my father’s sermons, and baptisms and what I heard about funerals, that I decided while still in high school, that I would follow in the great footsteps, for my grandfather, too, was a Methodist minister.
So at the early and tender age of 18, even before I arrived at a church college to begin a pre-ministerial life, I started hitting the books required for securing a “license to preach.” This is it, I thought. Learn how to stand up before the believers and prove to them the joy of this life and the next, that is, if they believed. At the time, I didn’t believe I was in any trouble, with the Lord, or with any board that questioned my sermon topics that I used throughout my freshman year at a Methodist church college, as I was just a sub for the regular ministers who were not available to their flock.
I still have frightening memories of one college professor jumping up onto his lectern table scarring the b’Jesus out of us with rants and rages of a living, breathing Isaiah, or perhaps it was Jeremiah. I still attended the pre-ministerial student meetings, but remember that it was the late 1960’s, and despite the fact that I was living in Kansas, the rest of the world was revolting from so many different social/cultural/political problems that somehow, some of it must have trickled its way into that tiny town of Winfield, Kansas. English and journalism were beginning to replace the Bible classes, and even though I recall that I did poorly in nearly all of my classes, I found the work of the modern poets even more fascinating than the mysterious texts of the Old and New Testaments. By the end of my college years I was thinking more about the Peace Corps than seminary, and when that fizzled, I took a defeatist attitude and decided to volunteer for the U.S. Army knowing that there could be no way that I could be stationed in Vietnam for a tour of duty.
Little did I know that a Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, was also protesting the war in his country, and it wouldn’t be until decades later that I even knew he was there. Slowly I was losing interest in seminary, in even becoming a lay minister. Without knowing it, I had just drifted away from something that was fundamental and essential to who I was going to be, but now I was in a different kind of seminary, learning how to interpret “literary” texts, and I was even trusted with my first congregation of freshman though no faith in the word was required, but their words had many fragments, comma splices and run-on sentences along with even more frightening “agreement” errors. But I was beginning to get the hang of it, and besides, the flock left at the end of a season, and then a whole new congregation would sit in the pews next semester.
I admit writing the text, and talking about the text, and reading student texts were more appealing and invigorating than what I had planned on as a life of a minister, but the lure of graduate school and more classes and more new friendships with text writers was quite appealing. I had forgotten about God.
That is until a Jewish classmate invited me and my wife to his house in Detroit to enjoy a lunch in his “sukkah.” I vaguely recalled my father talking about this Jewish tradition, but now I am not sure I heard anything Jewish in my father’s church. It really didn’t matter for the hummus was delicious, and have been eating it for sustenance ever since, though at the time, I didn’t realize what was being kindled in my heart and mind.
Years and years later, decades perhaps, my wife asked if I would join her in attending a Jewish worship service on a Friday night on the east side of Milwaukee. We were just beginning to get started with our different academic assignments, yet my wife found herself yearning for something more than just having friends over, or trips to the zoo on Sundays. So without knowing what might happen, and with actually some excitement and curiosity, I decided to take up her offer. That evening, without knowing it, I had taken the first step in becoming a Jew. Between the rabbi and the cantor, the new “congregants” and the great cake and tea as part of the “oneg,” I had stepped into a world of the “Old Testament,” and realized how much I had missed, or probably misinterpreted, back then, in the olden days of college envisioning a life of a New Testament Methodist minister. Well that certainly changed.
Over the months and years of my wife’s own journey into Judaism, I, too, started to enroll and listen to my new Jewish teachers tell me about such things as Isaac’s sacrifice each fall season (where was I when I heard that as a kid?), or matzo ball soup (I can even make my own now), or who were the 6 million of a dictator’s wrath? Or maybe why Ruth in the Book of Ruth was not just a Moabite, but a distant cousin? Walking around in Jerusalem years later, I thought I had come home. Then came the new Jewish name. My father would have probably flinched, or twitched, on hearing that, but I never want to assume what he might have done. But his widow, my mother, was there for the conversion ceremony, and somehow she got through it. Soon I began further studies, and even tried learning enough Hebrew to take the next step, as an adult bar mitzvah boy. That didn’t seem to satiate my need for learning, so it was off to a summer camp rabbinic aide school, and by that time, I seriously wondered if a full time English professor could squeeze in a part time study toward a Jewish Studies program. When that seemed too much to do in one lifetime, I did take a step toward wanting to help others on the path toward Judaism, and in time, began teaching an Introduction to Judaism course to potential converts.
But at my university, where I was still able to manage holding down a full time job, I began to take on a new assignment of a course that reflected even a broader sweep of religion and literature, a general education course called simply, World of Ideas.
I began to read the Upanishads, and wondered about cool places like nirvana and what would it really be like to experience samsara. Then the Buddha came into my life.
Then the Dalai Lama. And finally, all the way from Vietnam, Thich Nhat Hanh, who taught me not how to hold my breath, but to simply acknowledge it. And much more.
But Lao-Tze also dropped into my life through this course, and so did Confucius.
And in time, so did Muhammad. And on the day I read Surah 37 in the Koran (in English, not Arabic) I couldn’t help but sense how this journey was a complete circle of coming and going, for there was not Isaac, but Ishmael, and off we went from ancient Israel to southern Saudi Arabia to rebuild the Kaa’ba.
So where is God in all of this? Actually I thought I found a hint when teaching Socrates, or introducing Socrates to my students. At one point, the “text” points to Anaxagoras, a “pre-Socratic” philosopher who got into much much trouble for interpreting gods as simply a metaphor for human desires, wishes and fears. Labeled an “atheist,” he too was run out of Athens because of his unpopular “views.” Yet it’s Anaxagoras who has my current interest. Why didn’t his views gel with the Athenians? Why was the personification of gods and goddesses more acceptable to even the smartest guys? Even Socrates paid homage to the Greek gods, for he was probably as pious as anyone.
And another mystery keeps me looking. Wasn’t it the Zoroastrians of Persia who introduced the Cosmic Battle of Good and Evil to the exiled Jews in Babylonia?
Where is God? Well, God just might be a text. I’ll keep thinking about it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)