Bedrock Beliefs

I used to carry my own coffee mug to Starbucks. I got a dime discount. More importantly, I prefer to drink coffee from porcelain or stoneware than from paper (or–horribly–from Styrofoam). Nevertheless, long ago I quit taking my own mug. A Starbucks “tall” container holds more coffee than my mug. I don’t drink a lot of coffee. I am not one of the coffee-drinking elite, so I can save about two-thirds of a “tall” for the next day, and often the last third for a third day. Using their container is more economical, at least for the way I drink coffee. The other reason for turning to their “cups” is that I like to read the quotations printed on them. Most are inane, but occasionally I run across one that is quite good. Recently I read the judgment of Rick Ridgeway, World Class Mountain and Rock-climber, explorer. He said: “Most of our bedrock beliefs are established by the time we are young adults–the ones we use to make our choices, and therefore direct our lives.” For more than forty years I have made it a point to review my “bedrock beliefs.” I know what I believe, and why, but I had never considered when those beliefs were established. So, I went back to those early years to see what of my “bedrock beliefs” were established by the time I was a young adult. I list them pretty well in the order they developed. • Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life.” • Church is the place. • I am a social misfit. • The status quo is somewhere off-center, not to be accepted uncritically. • Carol is my “one.” • Reading is my best way of socializing. • Nature restores me. • Life is bittersweet. I appreciate Ridgeway for helping me see myself more clearly. These are, in fact, the beliefs that direct my life. • My understanding of Jesus is, far too much, culturally conditioned. Knowing him is beyond my grasp, but knowing that I am known by him, knowing that I can–and do–trust him keeps me moving the right direction, and gives his assuring presence and strength to keep moving on ahead and on up. • For near about forty years I have been engaged in a lover’s quarrel with the church. Good ones are not easy to find. Many of them stink. I find that, inside the church building, anger often visits me and is slow to leave. Nevertheless, the church is my home. There my soul is restored. God always meets me there. In this world where all the lights seem to be going out, the church is the only place any hint and hope of The Light of the World can be found. • In social situations, such as parties, dinners, Sunday School classes, and conventions, I wish I were more comfortable, and that I was accepted as a living, active member of the group, but I always remain an outsider, even if I am the honored guest or featured speaker. It was long years before I came to accept my differentness and stopped trying to round off the corners of my square peg and fit into the social circle. Three factors seem responsible for my otherness. When tested by the Myers-Briggs Personality Profile, I was classified as an INFP, a category that comprises somewhere from 1-8% of the population–most sources speak of 1%. I have a life-long condition called dysthymia, which affects only 3-6% of us–again, most authorities speak of 3%. On top of these two personality features that separate me from the vast majority of society, I was moved through the second and third grades in one school year, making me always the youngest in my class, thus a year behind my peers in social and psychological development. Thus, one of my bedrock beliefs is that I am not and will not come to be an insider in the larger society. • As early as I can remember, the status quo, in all realms of life, seemed amiss in my eyes and mind. This was a vague, indefinable perception that the years have brought into clearer and more definite focus. • By the time I reached middle-age, I realized there were only two things I’d never had a single doubt about: that I married the right woman, and that, through Homer White, God had called me to teach (this call came long after early adulthood). I was only sixteen when I realized that Carol was my “one.” That was well over a half-century ago. • Books have accepted and affirmed me just as I am, beginning back when just as I am was a lonely little boy. Through books I have been everywhere, learned something about almost everything, and befriended some the wisest and most interesting, first-rate, quality people who have ever lived. Often I am reading ten or more books at the same time, and on at least a half-dozen subjects. Whether like Poe I have “sought to borrow from my books surcease of sorrow,” or to visit with a friend, or to satisfy my curiosities, books have always been there. • The out-of-doors, fresh air, God’s good creation is like a restoring tonic. Always. Immediately my spirit is lifted, whether by a wisp of grass coming through a crack in the concrete, a lizard at attention, the prairies, the desert, a swamp or the clouds of the sky. A refuge. • Finally, before I left childhood, the bedrock conviction had come to me that life is bittersweet, a never-ceasing dialectical conflict in which the sweetness of life runs, always, ahead of the bitterness. Some of us taste much more of one than the other, but life is always both. ___________________ All of this from a French-pressed cup of Starbucks Italian Roast. I never realized that, although my eighteen-year-old self would not recognize its septuagenarian fruit, my bedrock beliefs were in place by the time I was eighteen. What about you? What foundations did you lay in those tender years? Do you know? It might be worth exploring.