I was rummaging through some stacks of stuff in the garage today sorting through items that needed to be recycled, discarded, and saved. I found an old, dust-covered briefcase that I used as a student, locked tight with long-forgotten combinations on the clasps. After trying various three-digit combinations that might have meant something to me back then, I gave up and grabbed the biggest screwdriver I could find and pried the locks loose. Among some dried up pens, an old notebook, and some tissues, I found a purple Pee-Chee with two dozen or so papers—obviously important since they were set aside from the reams of notes I have in an old metal filing cabinet at the rear of the garage. In back of the handwritten notes on epistemology and the dot matrix printout of reference materials I grabbed from the library, I found a single page on which I had written some lines in red ink. It’s dated June 1995 which makes it just a touch over 20 years old almost to the day.
In June 1995 I was scouting graduate schools with the goal of studying philosophy. I had grown up a Christian fundamentalist who generally had the world figured out by the time I was a teen and had my eyes firmly set on full time ministry. I took a required intro to philosophy class during my senior year at an ultra-conservative Baptist college by a professor who was not so conservative (and not so Baptist it turns out). I would never be the same. For the first time in my college experience, I had found myself with questions. Real questions, not the kind you’re taught to ask knowing you already have the answer. And there was something else. For the first time in my life, a small seed of doubt had been planted. I found myself with the terrifying consideration that some items in my worldview may not have been as iron-clad and irresistibly true as I had been led to believe they were. That seed flowered and by the end of the summer I had, for the first time, started reading to try to discover the truth rather than to reaffirm it.
Three years later, my worldview was in shambles and I knew I needed more training. Graduate school seemed like the best option and I headed to southern California to check out the program at Biola University. I stayed at a friends house not knowing who I was or where I was headed. I was alone and contemplative, one foot in the warm, comfortable old world and one out in the frigid unknown. Thoughts flooded into my head in that quiet room on that hot summer June evening and I jotted down these words.
At the top of the page, I simply wrote,
“Philosophy”
Look inside, outside, through pages of endless thought
endless mind in weary, dreary droll.
A slight glimpse a shadow vague—a stick, a nail
a jury-rigged edifice growing on the knoll.
Take, steal, beg, borrow desperately humbled
to light (or dark) not quite my own.
But shoulders are strong and tall enough
to bring heaven closer, nearer (not alone).
Secluded so it seems. A bubble impenetrable or only slightly visible.
A flame to few.
Half moon—silly half as many see it. Intelligence and genius reign
for those outside the pew.
Taste it. Good? You know it now. Ghosts haunt my mansion.
You live in an exorcised house.
Empty though it is, free, loose, explode! What’s beyond? Look!
The heres and nows.
Hand in hand we stand? Confusion with glasses on. Look closer.
More, heavier pages.
It squiggles and squirms. Can you catch it?
Not for all the stacks filled with sages.
