Author: Roger Lynn

Those three quarters of Clinical Pastoral Education in Rochester, Minnesota, at the Mayo Clinic hospitals with its Gestalt philosophy started the journey into my feelings.  Later, I studied yoga at the Meditation Center in Minneapolis and learned to meditate.  I began to get out of my head and started exploring what was going on in my body. This led to attending a ten-day course at the Himalayan Institute (in Desplaines, Illinois).

On the train coming back from the Institute, I started meditating on my energy centers.  The Swami at the institute talked about the chakras or energy centers at length.  He said the lower chakras are negative. We should focus instead on the upper chakras.  This made no sense to me.  So, on the return trip, sitting in a comfortable seat, feeling the rhythm of the rails, I began to meditate on the first chakra at the base of my spine between the anus and the genitals.  Soon an image came to mind: a large millipede like snake coiled in a circle with sharp claws instead of feet.  Here was my first chakra that was supposed to be the center of basic safety, security, and ground, hissing and snarling at me! 

The journey into my inner space reached a new milestone: the exploration of my fear of nonbeing, my basic angst.  Tillich describes this feeling in his description of Augustine’s and Luther’s attacks of consciousness: “They create an incredible Angst (dread), a feeling of being enclosed in a narrow place from which there is no escape. (Angst, he [Luther] rightly pointed out, is derived from angustiae, narrows.”[1] 

The beginning of the feeling was in the early moments of my life.  I have no conscious memory of this, but there are clues. My mother was given a strong anesthetic and was unconscious while birthing me.  The doctor reported that I had a hard time coming through the birth canal.  I was a “blue baby”. When I was very young, I was terrified every time I took a tight-fitting shirt off over my head, feeling that I would suffocate.

Mother was young when I was born, 21, recently married.  It was an unexpected pregnancy.  When the doctor told her she was pregnant, she cried saying, “We can’t afford to have a baby.”  The kindly doctor assured her it would all work out, but an instance of my father’s anger is etched into my memory.  When he was repairing the screen door in my grandparent’s house where we were staying, I wanted to go in the house.  He told me to be quiet and wait till he was done.  I started to cry, and he said in anger, “Stop your crying and don’t go running to your mother like you always do.”

Mother had trouble breast feeding me.  A colicky baby, I cried a lot.  The doctor said I was malnourished, so Mother stopped breast feeding and put me on the bottle.  When my brother, Richard, was born, I was six. I felt jealous when I would see her nursing him.

Another clue to the source of my angst was a dream I had as an adult in the morning on

the brink of waking. This poem came at the end of the dream:

Lying at the bottom of a well not remembering the fall,
Sitting on the edge, the edge of life, the edge of reality. 
I had no pain, only the coldness seeping in as my life slipped away. 
The black walls closed above me
Leaving a small opening in the blackness of the night sky that did not hear my cry.

            I have seen death in many forms in my life.  As a pastor, I have sat at the bedside of dying parishioners.  One time on my way out to Camp Koinonia for a junior high weekend retreat, we came upon an over-turned station wagon that had missed the curve.  There was luggage, toys, bedding, and bodies strewn in its wake. As I walked amidst the wreckage, it was like watching a movie. Then, I came across a life-size doll with a hole punched in its forehead.  As I looked closer, I saw it was not a doll.  The sight of that dead baby punched through the surface right into my gut. I was no longer watching. I was in it as I went on to comfort the mother who was lying injured several feet away crying for her baby.  A few days later, I spent time at the hospital trying to help her understand what had happened.

I had encountered death earlier when I was a life guard for four summers and was a Water Safety Instructor, and maybe because of that, I have a strong fear of drowning.  One hot summer day, a boy dove off the fifteen-foot diving tower and hit another boy who had dived off before him. He hit the other boy, who was coming up, in the head.  We dove into the twenty-to-thirty-foot-deep waters searching for him, but the boy who was hit never made it to the surface.  After two dives into that cold, dark water, I had to quit.  I had severe bursitis in my right shoulder, but the real reason was the angst.  I often played underwater tag under that dock with neighborhood kids, but diving deeper into the murky water at the bottom of the lake and the thought of finding the drowned boy, brought immobilizing terror.  Later, the boy’s body was dragged up forty feet from the dock by a grappling hook.

I carry the feeling, not the idea, the feeling of non-being deep in my gut.  It has been awakened time and again in my dreams, when I was a life guard, in my ministry.  In Money Creek, fresh out of seminary, I had twelve funerals in my first year.   One time in my last parish, a young man living in our home tried to kill me (a story I will tell later), and the angst would come when trying to go to sleep at night. At the bottom of each exhale, I would feel the fear.  It was a force driving me, keeping me awake. I was running from the coiled snake, looking for a way to safety.  The origin of the fear is pre-verbal, primeval, and powerful, tying a knot in my gut.

I am getting ahead of myself here. Let me go back to my first ministerial appointment out of Garrett seminary. I had enjoyed working with youth in my seminary internships, so I asked for an urban appointment working with youth.  The Minnesota Annual Conference said God had other plans. They sent me to a three-church rural appointment in southeastern Minnesota called, “Money Creek”.                          

My basic operational style is to start innovative programs that do well, but I get overwhelmed as I run out of energy. The underlying despair catches up with me: always trying to be the good boy, knowing underneath it all that I’m not good enough. Among other things, I started a youth group, took the youth for a weekend retreat in Chicago, became a leader in Conference youth work, helped put a new entryway in one of the churches, convinced the churches to do an every-member canvas, started the Root River Canoe Trail Association which included a canoe race that I canoed in, wrote and printed a monthly newsletter and the weekly bulletin, all without a secretary and no inner source of renewing energy. 

On a positive note, Susan, our second child was born while we were living in Money Creek. It was dramatic. I had ordered a Nichols and Stone rocking chair for Deanna and the new baby. It didn’t come until Dee was in the hospital, so I brought it to her there. It was a big hit with the nurses. The birth itself was mind shattering. I was not in the delivery room for Mary Karen’s birth, but was there watching Susan’s. The blood, the pain, the impossible stretching were excruciating. By the time Susan finally arrived, I was barely there. Then she was there. This beautiful new person.  It shook me at a very deep level.  Driving home that night, I did not even notice that I drove under a tornado. I heard about it in the news the next morning.  The storm had destroyed buildings on both sides of the highway including a brick school house as I drove under it.  Susan was born on Soren Kierkegaard’s birthday, May 5; we named her Susan Kelly. She had blond curly hair, a bright smile, and an artful inquisitive view of the world.

I eventually ran out of steam. I woke up one morning, stretched, fainted, fell, hit my head on the wall, and ended up in the hospital with a brain concussion. A month or two later I was in the hospital again with chest pains caused by an inflammation of the pleural membrane in my chest the result of running through the woods all night in a coon hunt with some high school students. With pains running down my right arm and shortness of breath, I was sure I was having a heart attack.

Then before being buried in the foot-deep paper work on my desk and the spinning plates I was keeping aloft could start to fall, we were rescued.  As I wrote of previously, I received a scholarship for a year’s study in Clinical Pastoral Education at the Mayo Clinic hospitals in Rochester for a Master’s degree in Sacred Theology from the Presbyterian Seminary at Dubuque University.

We had a good time in Rochester.  We moved into a Rochester sub-division with other new families in a rented bungalow.  Our two daughters made new friends, and I played soft ball with the neighborhood kids. Mary Karen started kindergarten at age 4. It was a pleasant interlude.

Then I received the plum appointment of Minister of Education at a downtown cathedral church.  Deanna liked the upscale culture of the church, but felt intimidated, because she did not have a degree. I was successful at first becoming popular with the youth and young adults.  I revived the “University of Life” Sunday evening program for high school youth, started small support groups for youth, danced the Hora to the Doors, Light My Fire, began a young adult program, held a number of weekend retreats at the church’s retreat center, and led a summer camp for grade school and high school youth.  We lived at the retreat center all summer.  I took the high school youth on a weekend retreat to the Ecumenical Institute in Chicago where they studied and discussed essays by Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and Bultmann and how this all led to “praxis”, work for social justice. I worked with a family education program based on the work of Rudolph Driekurs. It seemed that the strands of my life were coming together, but it was not to be.  Things would eventually unravel.

I worked closely with a group of very talented high school students.  We were on a planning retreat when news came of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.  We were all deeply affected by MLK’s death and expressed our grief by working out what we called a “Soul Statement”.  This became a guiding energy.  Here is the “Soul” essay as it was printed on the cover of the Sunday bulletin, May 5, 1968:

SOUL (A Working Paper)

Soul is that which we are striving to attain.  Being Soulful we satisfy our deepest needs.  Being unsoulful we are accepted no less but are yet unfulfilled as persons

A part of Soul is awareness of your surroundings.  An openness to all that is around you: your self, other people and the world in general.  This includes a sense of direction, i.e., knowing what it’s all about and where you fit in.

Another part of soul is care for persons.  This is more than the general “I like people” feeling.  It is a specific concern for individuals and groups of them.

Soul also includes the ability to express all emotions with honesty and openness.

Suffering is another part of Soul.  You do not need to look for suffering, but when it comes to you, you confront and deal with it. To be soulful is to have hope. This does not mean eternal optimism but rather a joy in our suffering and in our unSoulfulness.

Separately these qualities are not Soul. They might be good, but they are not Soul. Soul is attained by possessing all of these at once.

Actually, Soul is a rewording of our traditional faith into contemporary and meaningful terms.  Soul can be seen and understood in and through the crucifixion of Jesus.

This was an expression of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, which was most clearly found in the French existentialists like Sartre and Camu. The image that comes to mind is Sisyphus rolling the rock back up the mountain singing the blues. Its strength is the courage to face the inevitable suffering.  Any meaning must be supplied by the sufferer. There is no spiritual ground, nothing beyond the existential material existence.  The stars stare back at us with indifference.  My fire was lit and it burned me out. There was no renewing source of energy.  My heart cooled, the coiled snake grew and I did not find the kind voice that had called my name.

            In the fall of 1968, I had a political awakening, the topic of the next chapter.

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[1] Ibid. page 77

by Roger Lynn

One sunny Sunday morning in June, 1987, my life was changed by a shocking experience that shook me to the core. This story is about what led up to that experience, what it meant for my life at the time, and how it changed my life forever.

I’d had an ambivalent relationship with God. My folks were active Methodists, as were my grandparents. I got gold stars for my Sunday school attendance, but went through a period of doubt when I realized there was no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. The Divine went into the trash like old Christmas trees and Easter baskets. Then one day when I was about 12, as I was walking home on Hartford Street just east of Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, I heard a voice call my name, “Roger”. It was a kind clear voice but there was no one around. I didn’t know what it was. I thought it might have been God.

As I describe this experience, it sounds like some kind of psychological abnormality, but it was much more benign. In an essay on hallucinations, the psychiatrist, Erwin W. Straus, describes hallucinatory voices: “The schizophrenic voice derides, persecutes, commands. It allows reflection no freedom. The voices are everywhere; inescapably ‘they’ press in upon the patient like a poison gas which our own breathing forces us to inhale.”^[1] This voice was not like that. The voice was kind. Being a faithful Sunday school student, I had been exposed to the idea of God speaking to a person and had learned about John Wesley and his “heart-warming experience.” Maybe this was God calling me.

Whatever it was, it started me wondering about this space, this mysterious realm within and beyond me, and I liked the wondering. But as I searched for an answer, I found the church language was too abstract. It did not connect with my life. When I was younger, my mother wanted me to learn to play the piano, but we could not afford one. To make up for the lack, the piano teacher gave me a cardboard key board to practice on. Like the cardboard key board, no
matter how I pushed on those words, they made no sounds in me and brought me no closer to uncovering the hidden voice or feeling the heart-warming experience.

I am a mechanic by nature and probably would have done well in engineering of one kind or another. My best friends went into physics, math, or engineering, but my father was a successful electrical engineer. Had I gone into engineering, in an effort to “help me”, I knew he would, have constantly pointed out what I was doing wrong and how I could improve myself. Going into the ministry, I had the illusion of leaving that critical voice behind and the hope that I would gain access to the kinder voice that had called my name.

When I started college as a pre-seminary student, I discovered Freud. He coined words and ideas to describe this inner space: the Oedipus Complex, the ego, superego, the unconscious, the libido made sense of my own interior, and Moses and Monotheism made more sense than the obscure language of the Bible and the church. In my sophomore year, I transferred to the University of Minnesota with a major in psychology, and minors in philosophy and math. At the U, I ran into the spiritual wasteland of Behaviorism in psychology and Positivism in philosophy. The psyche was hidden in a black box and what you could not measure did not exist. The only foray into any interior life was in Abnormal Psychology. At the time, my identity was in such disarray that I found myself reflected in most of the disorders.

By the end of my junior year, I was barely hanging on to a “C” average. Then I met Deanna, who would become my first wife. I fell deeply in love. I settled down, got good grades, and began to reexamine my relationship to a loving Divine Presence. If God is love as First John declares, I felt love. I was overflowing with love. My inner landscape was changing. In Freud’s term, I was experiencing my libido. Paul Tillich, in his book Morality and Beyond, writes this about the libido energy but differing with Freud:

“The difference is that essential libido (toward food or sex, for example) is concretely directed to a particular object and is satisfied in the union with it, while existentially distorted libido is directed to the pleasure which may be derived from the relation to any encountered object. This drives existential libido boundlessly from object to object.”[2]

One day I would run into this distinction, but not yet. I was in my “Garden of Eden” stage, my heart was warmed, but I heard no voice. In effect, Deanna had become my ground. In my senior year, I returned to the idea of the ministry. By spring quarter, I was married and was headed for Garrett Seminary. I had returned to my search for the hidden voice.

In many ways, life at Garrett Seminary was idyllic. Evanston was beautiful. We lived in the married couple’s apartments, rode our bicycles to the grocery store, and never paid more than $.39 a pound for hamburger. I enjoyed writing papers and managed to get most of them in on time with Deanna typing them. In one paper, the term “Holy Spirit” often came up. Deanna consistently misspelled it “Holy Spit”. When I asked, “What is this ‘Holy Spit’ business?” Without a pause, she said, “It’s what holds the Trinity together.” Though I did not include that insight in my paper, it made more sense to me than the theological gymnastics of St. Gregory of Naziansus who formulated the doctrine of the Trinity in the fourth century of the Common Era.

Our first child, Mary Karen, was born in Evanston. It was a wonderful place to begin our first family. There was a park across the street and there were other young families starting in the married couple’s apartments. It was known as the “Fertile Crescent”. At first, it was difficult for me, bringing up early issues when my brother was born, but I went into counseling. I remember a dream I had the night before my first session. I stood on the edge of a precipice and jumped into the void. It was true. I did jump into all the uncertainty of being a father and supporting a family.

It was not a planned pregnancy. Given a choice, I would have said, “Not yet. I’m not ready for that kind of responsibility,” but once that train pulled into the station, I jumped aboard. I loved being a father and Mary Karen was a delightful child. I can still picture her first laugh at the sight of a balloon popping up. I wanted to be a kind and affirming parent that my father was not able to be. Deanna turned all her considerable intelligence into being a mother, devouring Dr. Spock’s book on “Baby and Child Care” and teaching our young daughter to speak before her first birthday. There were hard times, sleepless nights and our relationship changed. We were no longer as carefree and I had to drive slower, but all-in-all, family life was a great ride.

The added responsibility meant I had to arrange for my first internship. I had two internships working mostly with youth and enjoyed it, but the search for the heartwarming experience took a back seat in that train. My orientation now had to be how to effectively deal with the external world of preaching, church administration, funerals, weddings, and so on. There was no time or instruction on how to listen for the hidden voice. The academic culture at Garrett also was not helpful. The dominant theology was Neo-orthodox with Karl Barth and Rudolph Bultman. To me, Barth’s stress on the “otherness” of God and Bultman’s demythologizing were much like Behaviorism in psychology and Positivism in philosophy. They did not awaken anything in me. Soren Kierkegaard’s existentialism with its disparagement of abstract philosophy and his emphasis on experience was intriguing. Also, Paul Tillich’s reference to God as the “ground of being and meaning” held some promise. I heard Tillich lecture at the University of Chicago School of Theology. I knew there was something there but could not quite get my mind around it. That most likely was the problem, trying to get my mind around it. My own experience was still foreign territory, like trying to play music on a cardboard key board.

During this time, I had a recuring pain in my abdomen. My body was trying to tell me something. Actually, it had been trying to tell me something my whole life, and I consistently ignored it. As a child I was hyper-active and dyslexic. In those days, these conditions were not diagnosed. Although I was intelligent, school was hard for me. I felt dumb as a door knob.

I was never taught to listen to my body. I learned at a young age to ignore, if not repress my feelings. They only got in the way: tears were for sissies, fear was not to be felt, anger got you into trouble. I remember one day when walking home from kindergarten, I came upon two first graders who had found a lady finger fire cracker they were afraid to light because it had a very short fuse. I said, “I’ll light it.” When it blew up in my fingers, one of them said, “See, we told you,” I quickly responded, “It didn’t hurt a bit.” By the time I got home, the pain had gone away. This denial of feelings began to change when I took a one-year course in Clinical Pastoral Education, studying for a second master’s degree. Max Maguire, the Supervisor, used a gestalt approach that focused on feelings rather than ideas. It took me three quarters to finally begin to identify my feelings.

In my fourth quarter, I was explaining what occurred in one of my hospital visits writing in profound detail what I was thinking. Max and the other three students confronted me for the umpteenth time with the question, “But how were you feeling?” If they had asked what color my socks were, I would know where to look, but to find my feelings, I had no clue. In frustration, I shouted in anger, “I don’t know!”

“So how do you feel right now?” Max asked.

Immediately, I responded, “I’m angry!”

“Good, it’s about time. That’s a start.”

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Footnotes

1 Asthesiology and Hallucinations by Erwin W. Straus found in: Existence, A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, Rollo May, Ernest Angel, & Henri F. Ellenberger, Editors; New York, 1959, Basic Books Inc. page 167

2 Westminster John Knox Press; Louisville, Kentucky; 1965; pages 60, 61

The first installment of the Hidden Voice stories will be six chapters of my story about searching for the hidden voice. It is this story that started my interest in beginning the web site. Basically, the journey begins on the surface of my life where I, along with most men of my age, had shut down my feelings, I devoted all my energy to “making it” in this world: learning to use language effectively, dressing appropriately, gaining an education, getting and maintaining a job, acquiring and spending money, and starting a family. These are all important, but they come at a price. This story is about the price I paid, the struggles I had, and what I learned in the process, and what happened when I stopped struggling and learned to listen.

It is my hope that this will begin a conversation, a sharing of stories about how we have explored this inner space, or what Paul Tillich calls our “Essential Being”. I look forward to your responses to my stories and hearing and sharing your stories on this web site. No one person or one group of people own a franchise on the truth. When we all share our stories and listen to the sharing, we come closer to each other and to the truth that undergirds all of our lives.