“The world and everyone in it is passing strange, except for me and thee—and even thou art a little strange.” That was my grandfather, a teacher and historian, harking back to his Yorkshire roots. With a twinkle in his eye, he applied it to the late 1960s in which I—passing strange—was a teenager whom he and my grandmother were raising.
“May you live in interesting times,” is supposedly an ancient Asian curse intended to rock the complacent to their beige core. By that measure, we are living right now in interesting times. People of my vintage have been here before. I’ve never regretted coming up in the 60s. Sheltered though I was within the cocoon of the Adventist community centered on Pacific Union College, I was attuned to the world outside—its music, its culture, its violent changes, and its politics. The events on the six o’clock news were horrific, but they were such commonplace that it was difficult to measure one against the other. Assassinations, airplane hijackings, the frequent bombings by groups like the Weathermen and the Baader-Meinhoff gang were the foreground to the constant thrum of the Vietnam War.
After a while, it all became the exhalations of a giant wounded beast, whose labored breathing could keep you awake at night. In the apocalyptic cast to our days, it wasn’t hard to imagine the world ending. Whether we would survive to see it through—to see the cloud the size of a man’s hand, to see Jesus riding triumphant—that was another question altogether.
I wonder now if my high school friends and I became inured to the chaos in the larger culture or if we were so insulated that the waves of that tempestuous sea only lapped at our feet. Or were we less attuned to the world than we thought we were, accepting that this was the way the world was when run by adults?
Behind the teenage angst about self-identity and social standing, there were the religious pressures to conform. We knew the guideposts by heart: “This is the way, walk ye in it,” or “Higher than the highest human thought is God’s ideal for His people.” And the hammer: “Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.”
Our attempts to interpret the moods of the Father oscillated between two poles. The first was God’s unyielding standard of moral conduct (“narrow is the way”) and the second was Jesus’ crucifixion, proof of God’s infinite love for us, though it was we who continued to drive the nails into Jesus’ hands. I pictured this as a double helix twisted by forces at both ends, an image designed to wind me up like a rubber band and launch me into walking in Jesus’ footsteps—but without sin.
In some classes we read long passages from Ellen G. White’s Messages to Young People, handy spiritual advice from our stern and frowning prophet-mother. There were other books, of course, like The Desire of Ages and Steps to Christ, books that portrayed the daily life of Jesus in such detail that it gave new meaning to the argument-clincher, “I was shown.”
In the early phase of my newly awakened spiritual life, I drew strength from these books. I still have a Living Bible with quotations from them about Jesus, written
out in a tiny script on pages I laboriously pasted into the back of the Bible. I vividly recall hitchhiking from Pacific Union College out through Sonoma to Jenner-by-the-Sea while carrying a small paper-bound Thoughts from the Mount of Blessings. One driver, a young man not much older than I, was blissfully stoned to the point that his response on catching sight of the title was “Far out, man!” I left it with him when he dropped me off.
For me, caught up as I was in the late 60s on the fringes of the Jesus Movement, what mattered was to carry a witness to the world. The phrase that powered me was another one of Ellen G. White’s aphorisms: “Everything depends on the right action of the will.” By this time, righteousness by faith was the track I was on, and while her phrase had a faint whiff of works-righteousness about it, its moral agency and the freedom it took to carry it out was attractive.
It turned out this reliance on the strength of the will had a long history in Western philosophy. Beginning with Aristotle’s virtue ethics in which a good character is developed through assiduous practice, and continuing through the Stoics and the Epicureans, all the way to Kant, this form of moral fortitude was captured in another of Ellen G. White’s maxims: “Be as true to duty as the needle to the pole.” Whenever I was faced with some moral breakpoint, however small, my grandmother would quote it to me. It was my responsibility to work it out for myself in the light of this North Star of duty.
The historian of ideas, Sir Isaiah Berlin, once wrote an essay on Tolstoy that has become a touchstone for me. Entitled “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” it provides a kind of assay or test of one’s general direction and method in life. Quoting a fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus which says: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” Berlin observes that a vast chasm exists between the foxes who pursue many various and unrelated ends, and the hedgehogs whose lives are governed by one central compelling vision.
The former group lead lives that are centrifugal, “scattered and diffuse,” with no organizing moral or aesthetic principles. The latter group tends to be centripetal, focused around unifying moral or psychological precepts. Without too rigidly insisting on the classifications, Berlin put Dante with the hedgehogs, Shakespeare with the foxes. Plato, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche are in varying degrees hedgehogs; Aristotle, Erasmus, Goethe, Balzac, and Joyce were foxes.
Berlin’s thesis is that Tolstoy was a fox who thought he should be a hedgehog. The essay discusses the resulting conflict in his work which becomes clearer through his view of history.
When I first read this essay, I immediately knew myself to be a fox. I have disparate and sometimes conflicting interests; I tend to throw a wide net and eventually choose the one fish; I become restless and anxious when I feel herded down a single chute instead of released into the wider forest. But at the same time, as a Christian, I hear Jesus talk of the pearl of great price for which the merchant sold everything in order to possess it. I remember Soren Kierkegaard whose intensity about discipleship is summarized in his saying, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” And Ellen G. White echoes in my head: “Everything depends on the right action of the will.”
My interest in this is not just aesthetic, relating to how I go about writing essays or crafting poems. It is also autobiographical, social, and spiritual. For example, to what extent did my upbringing determine me as an Adventist? How much of my early life was the result of my own decisions? If I had been raised by my father, I might have been rather more secular, certainly not an Adventist, and maybe not a Christian.
As it was, I was raised by my grandparents, both of whom were converts in their youth to Adventism and who taught within the Adventist educational system their whole lives. You could trace the fact I was raised by them back through many branching decisions which were made without them fully understanding the consequences. Were those decisions wholly human or was the Holy Spirit nudging the ball at certain points?
Now here I am, seventy-two years of age, a lifelong Adventist who considers himself to be on the boundary between the church and the world, Christianity and world faiths, a minimalist on the 28 Fundamentals and a maximalist on Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount. I have remarked to many classes and students that I was raised a Christian and an Adventist and, at a certain point, I became, by choice, a member of both communities.
I ask myself, is there an overarching pattern to history which can be discerned through Scripture and prophecy, that regards Adventism as the hinge of history? I am convinced of the first part, not so of the latter phrase. Is there a pattern to my life revealing the leading of the Spirit? I hope so. I see fragments and glimpses of it now and then. As much as I am a fox without a single focus, I believe I shall one day know as I am known. Until then I shall try to make my way, under the influence of the Spirit, through these very interesting, postnormal, times.
Barry Casey is the author of Wandering, Not Lost, a collection of essays on faith, doubt, and mystery, published by Wipf and Stock (2019). His recent work has appeared in Brevity, Faculty Focus, Detroit Lit Mag, Fauxmoir, Humans of the World, Lighthouse Weekly, Mountain Views, Patheos, Pensive Journal, Rockvale Review, Spectrum Magazine, The Dewdrop, The Purpled Nail, and The Ulu Review. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion from Claremont Graduate University. He writes from Burtonsville, Maryland. Email him at: darmokjilad@gmail.com