The Obsessions of My LIfe: Third Essay

In my weakened condition after my knee injury, I began attending communicant classes at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church ("MPPC") to transfer my church membership to that congregation. I had grown up in the womb of liberal New England Congregationalism, where membership in the local church was an expression of good citizenship, much like joining the Boy Scouts or mowing lawns in the summer. But I soon discovered that membership at MPPC or, as one of my co-mathematical geeks called it 'MP squared', carried with it a different understanding. They expected you to be able to declare, in no uncertain terms, that Christ was your Savior, that you intended to live a life in accordance with the Scriptures, and that you would seek out the fellowship of the Church whenever you could.

For some strange reason I, who was still 16, decided to take them seriously. Until the end of high school I was just trying to figure out what church and faith was all about, but when I went away to college in Fall 1970, I fell in with a group of like-minded Evangelically-oriented young people who were smart, outgoing, and motivated in faith. And then I began to take faith super-seriously. A footnote on Brown University--One of the treasures of the Brown Christian Fellowship ("BCF") in those early years (we just started it in 1970) was its interracial character. It was not a "white-dominated" group. I still remember very vividly LeRoy Thomas, Terry Walker, Lindsey Robinson, Deborah Gore, Brenda Byrd--African Americans who taught me more about faith, grace, considerateness and style than probably any comparable group of people throughout my life.

Then, in the Spring of 1971, I decided that I needed to develop a focus on learning the Bible. It really came from a very simple motivation. If God, indeed, spoke to us in the Bible, and if God's word was the most precious word in the world, what more important thing was there in life than to spend all my time mastering it? I waited for the end of Spring semester 1971 with the eagerness of someone waiting liberation from prison. Then, in summer 1971, I began to study the Bible with such passion and sole-focus that my parents began to worry about me. I would come home from my summer work job and then retire to my room, coming out only to get an evening snack or to work out. I would take a "pocket Bible" to work, stealing away each hour from my desk to try to memorize at least one verse so that I could come back and have some "redemptive" time while I was doing my (mindless) job.

My obsession knew no bounds. I kept up with BCF friends by letters (we still wrote them in those days) throughout the summer. In order to show my new-found commitment to mastery of the Scriptures, I would construct my letters as if they were a Pauline Epistle. They were stilted above measure, and my fellow BCF'ers in the Fall told me they cracked up when they received them, so earnest and inappropriately worded were they. But they accepted me.

I recall a conversation with LeRoy Thomas in April of 1971, just a month before we split up for the summer. I had mentioned to my fellow BCF'ers that I was going to "know" the Bible by the time I returned in the Fall. To people like Norm and LeRoy, who had had years of instruction in the Bible (I never learned it in my liberal Congregational church), they smiled. I recall one day LeRoy looking at me with his large, black, plaintive, searching eyes and saying, "So, Bill, you are going to know the Bible?" And then he burst out laughing. Their point, of course, is that learning the Bible was a lifelong task. My ambition was akin to trying to eat all the food one would need for a lifetime in one summer in order to try to get "hyper-nourished." LeRoy and Norm just knowingly winked at each other. "Yeah," they seemed to say, "this arrogant Presbyterian thinks he is going to know the Bible." It became sort of a joke that people told at my expense.

Of course, this fired my desire all the more, and by the time I returned in Fall 1971, I really was a different person. I remember talking first to Terry Walker, a member of an Exclusive Plymouth Brethren Church in Brooklyn. We got around to talking about the Bible, and as we talked further, I saw a look of amazement cross his face. He went back to LeRoy and Norm and said, "You know, Bill does know the Bible now."

But it didn't stop there. I now became very focused on Scripture memorization, and began to master vast sections of the Pauline Epistles, Psalms and other passages. This sole focus on Scripture for several years eventuated in a kind of milestone for me--when I took the ordination exams for future Presbyterian ministers, I managed to get the highest score ever recorded on the Bible content exam--and I finished the two-hour exam in 45 minutes.

My shot-putting obsession lasted one year; my Bible mastery obsession lasted about four years. Ironically, once I finished theological seminary and entered a doctoral program in early Christianity, I lost some of my fire for Bible mastery. I suppose it was because I knew the New Testament well enough so that I really didn't want just to focus on minutia of other scholars' work. I became weary with reading 300-page doctoral dissertations, the goal of which was to illumine the "background" for three or four NT verses. I began to think to myself that there must be something better than this!

My Current Obsession(s)

I lost the idea of obsession for about 25 years, from about 1977-2002, almost the same years I was married (1977-2001). Oh, I think I had bouts of it during the mid-1980s, when I was running for political office or trying to recapture my work on the Psalms, but I lost obsessiveness. And with my lost obsessiveness, I lost my direction in life. This is not to say that I didn't compile a stellar resume. Indeed, as I look at it now (you can read it here), I have had the unique experience of working intimately with many of the Oregon's leading institutions (Reed College; the Oregonian; Westminster Church Portland; Stoel Rives; Willamette University College of Law). But in all of those work situations, I was either "taking orders" from someone else or responsible to walk to the beat of someone else in doing my work. It was not intolerable; indeed, I would not be able to write these pages without the experiences I have had.

But, the overriding feeling I have as I think of those years is that I was rootless, in a sort of intellectual and spiritual wilderness. And the reason I had (and have) these feelings about those days is because I didn't have an obsession. Indeed, maybe I couldn't have had many obsessions, since they seem to run counter to healthy family life at times. So, I swallowed hard, tried to do the work that was before me, in family or employment, and continued my life. I think I entered into a rather deep and bleak depression, the contours of which are just becoming clear to me. Indeed, I believe I was depressed for about 18 years, from 1986-2004.

Things Change

I was depressed until I learned how to develop an outlet for a new obsession. What happened was that three things came together early in 2004 for me. The first was my decision finally not to listen to other people who had been telling me for years, or assuming without telling me, that the way to success and meaning in life was through specialization in a field. It was incredibly difficult for me ultimately to reject this advice because I so much respect so many people who told me to specialize over the years. But what I began to discover, with the second thing, was that I could both be a polymath as well as a certain kind of specialist which really is unusual in our day. That is, I could embrace my inner polymath by writing on the Bible one day, Shakespeare another, autobiography a third, territorial Kansas history a fourth, roots of words, book and film reviews, etc. Then I could write law essays galore on subjects on which I was interested (oh, I had a mini-obsessional focus for 3 1/2 months in Fall 1999, when I researched and wrote the first book on the history of the Oregon Death Penalty, for which I even won an award).

The specialist would come out because as I wrote essays or even books, I would have such a different "take" on a subject, through a combination of relentless tracking down of the facts and telling an engaging story, that even the specialists would someday be grateful. But the third thing that I learned was a technology which would make this all possible. Before I began to post my essays on this site, I would write long and detailed expositions of text, reviews of books, etc. in my private notebooks. I call them "BillsNotebooks" on this site (check the bottom right of the Site Map page), even though I haven't "posted" anything from these 14 single-spaced notebooks of ruminations for about a 20-year period (about 1982-2003). I sometimes became so frustrated that I had no "outlet" for all these thoughts, some of which are worthy of being published, that I wondered if I should just burn all my notebooks or give orders to bury them with me when I was interred.

But through the offices of Prof. Jenny Orr of Willamette University's computer science department, I meet a bona-fide geek in Geoff Kruse, who taught me the technology I use each day today in constructing this "page." By May 2004 I was substantially "on my way" to this new life.

As you see, this site, a reflection of my new life, really is an expression of obsessiveness. Each day I arise as if my mind is "besieged," and I begin to feel that I need to write about certain things. Being 55 has allowed me many years to ruminate on classic texts and other human issues, as well as given me the confidence to be able to express my thoughts clearly, and so I gladly listen to the voices within that gently direct me to write about various things. Today it is these three essays and one on the Scriptures. Tomorrow it may be on Kansas Territorial History and Cicero. Who knows? Occasionally, especially now that it is Thanksgiving today, I spend time with family (my kids came up and down to visit me this weekend) and friends. I have more friends than you might think that I, an obsessional guy, deserve. But I am clearly now in a new focus, and I haven't had a happier time in my life. I have been fortunate enough to have had this focus for about 3 1/2 years now. I have no idea how long it will continue, but light dawns for me each day, and I feel that I ought to tell the world about it. My goal, purpose, etc. in life is to clarify some of the bewildering realities of history and life. My goal is also to exposit classic texts, to bring out the meaning often packed into few words by patiently teasing out signficance of the texts for today. My goal, by writing thousands of these essays, is to reorient the way we look at knowledge. But, for all of these "goals," my happiness emerges from being able to rise each day and have the privilege of thinking, researching, writing and speaking to individuals and groups.

I wouldn't have been able to do this if I didn't believe deeply in obsessions. Indeed, my life is a tribute to the value of obsession.

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