Previous post, Part 4: Head, Heart, and Suffering
The decades since my conversion have brought mostly blessings to my life, as I married Sharon Doeden, who contrasts sharply with her head-in-the-clouds husband by keeping both feet planted on terra firma. She grew up a farm girl near Worthington, MN, and I was a “townie” an hour’s drive away in Marshall. Having now lived in the big city (Minneapolis area) nearly forty years, I’ve noticed of her that you cannot take the farm out of the girl. She was bred for home-cooking, plain-talking honesty, and practical living. None of this has changed. She indulges my philosophical and theological musings with a quizzical smile and a measure of patience before requesting a change of subject. We’ve raised two kids who are following the Lord with their lives and teaching their children to love God and neighbor. We have faced sorrow, losing relatives and friends in various ways, mainly to old age. I’m still reeling from the felling of all my grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles. The extended family that brought me up and served as permanent institutions in my life – such as Aunt Donna, who taught me to appreciate the Lac Que Parle Dam and state park and mission church where my parents were married in 1955, near Montevideo, MN – were, in fact, not permanent. Only their memories remain. I cannot believe they abandoned me for the afterlife, just as I will do someday to my kids and their families. The generations turn over. Only one thing is permanent, and that is the Creator who made and released and rescued and held, in love-to-the-death, the creatures who are his. “We are the sheep of his pasture,” so says the scripture.
Holy Land
In 2023, I had an opportunity to visit the homeland of this Creator to whom I belong. Six Harvard graduate students were to explore the Holy Land, but their chaplain was unavailable, so I got the call. Would I serve as their mentor on a tour bus for twelve days?
Brannon from Harvard Business School is twice my size and strength, a good giant of a man, while I resemble an archetype choir boy, more girly than burly. He played college football. I sang tenor. So it was with some relief and assurance that I was paired with Brannon as his “buddy” as we waded into the rippling, surging sea of men at the Western Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, our bodies pressed and jostled inside a massive scrum. We managed to stand and then stumble forward in a serpentine line to await our turn at the wall. The din of male voices was deafening. Jews in full regalia of robes and long dark suits and white shirts, yarmulke (skull caps), round fur hats, torah scrolls, and phylacteries prayed with bobbing heads or danced in whirling circles of raucous celebration. I held my yarmulke (required to enter the plaza area) in place with my left hand atop my skull while clutching Brannon’s shirttail.
Finally reaching the wall, I leaned my head forward against the ancient brick. I couldn’t turn off the open faucets flowing liquid through my eyes. I had scribbled three prayer requests on a small square of hotel stationery, which I folded and shoved into a crevice, just as pilgrims had been doing for millennia. A minute of prayer commenced, and then we were done. Demand for contact with the wall in the lines behind us was fierce. Not even my Herculean buddy could stem the tide of bodies bearing down on us. Parting the sea like a defensive end cutting through linemen on a football field, Brannon led me back to safety.
God was there. The Wailing Wall became the wailing of my heart. I reflected afterward on how I’d grown up with a vague notion of the divine, which could easily have turned into my private religion where I would dictate who God would be, if he would be anything at all. Playing it the opposite way, where I would submit to God and approach him on his terms rather than mine, was unthinkable. No, I would get mine. Even if I had to cut corners and treat people as objects, as means to ends, I would get mine. I would get my happiness and my education and my money and my ladies and the respect I deserved. I would be admired and very proud, and I would show the world the uniqueness of me.
I still remember those grandiose visions from age seventeen and feeling, at the time, very special. I was sufficient. Or so I thought. Relinquishing such distorted dreams at the feet of Jesus, kneeling before the cross, encountering the disfigurement which was inflicted on his person for our benefit – all was an admission of deficiency. I couldn’t run my own life. Nor was I made to do so. Nor did I ever expect that following Jesus would expand and develop me into my intended self. I thought maybe as a Christian I’d be diminished and then dependent in some sickly way. One must grow up and take responsibility for oneself. But then I heard the call. I remembered God. At some point, I recognized not only a need for God within, but also a deep moral bankruptcy that required both forgiveness and cleansing – a regeneration. I would be what the scripture calls a “new creation.” One of my golfing buddies said it well to me recently: “Rick, you gotta let go and let God.”
So, that is my pilgrimage, which began on the wind-blown prairies of southwestern Minnesota and continued to the big city and to college campuses around the country.
