Beginning and End

I am alive today because the United States was not at war in 1955-1957. In college, I had spent four years in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. Soon after graduation in January 1955, I spent four months at Fort Benning, Georgia in the Basic Infantry Officer School and went immediately from that into the strenuous six-weeks course at the U.S. Army Ranger School. I was on active duty as an infantry officer from April 1955 until April 1957. If I have ever had to lead a group of soldiers into combat, I and at least some of the men would have been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner because I would not have known what I was doing. I would not have understood what was going on. Nor would I have known how to go about doing the things I had spent almost five years learning to do. How do I know I would not have survived, and would have been responsibility for the death of others? Why did I not understand my part in war? I would have been leading blindly, because the entire pattern of my life, at least until I was forty-years-old, was that I never understood what was going on in life around me or life within me. No one had ever explained anything in terms of the big picture. Not even in terms of the larger picture. On the other hand, I may be misrepresenting parents and teachers. I do know that if the big picture, the meaning and relationships of things were ever presented to me, it was not in a way that caught my attention or held my interest. I was a fairly immature human for the first half of my life. Somehow I made good grades and established a reputation among teachers and peers as a very intelligent person, but although I could see and identify the trees, I was only vaguely that there was such a thing as a forest. I earned a place on a college livestock judging team that won the International Livestock Judging Contest in Chicago in 1954. I earned a commission in the U.S. Army, and in the Army Ranger School was one of the two-thirds of my class members that successfully completed the course, but I was clueless about what any of it was about. I wandered through the years lost and confused. I don’t know all the reasons behind my failure to understand, but I know that much, perhaps even most, of it can be because all my education (two master’s degrees and a doctorate) can be likened to the 1950s classic television police show, Dragnet. Each week the episode would find Sgt. Joe Friday and his partner questioning a talkative witness who took the long way around telling what they had seen. Sgt. Friday, an abrupt man of few words and limited patience, always interrupted, with his flat, uninflected voice, saying, “All we want is the facts, ma’am.” That is the way I remember schools. I was taught to learn the facts, and was good at it. I was told the facts, and I was told what to do, but no one ever talked about the “why” of things, except the authoritarian, “Because I said so.” I grew up in church, faithfully attended Sunday School, and memorized hundreds of Bible verses. I received three advanced degrees from a theological seminary. Yet, when in 1974 I was hired to teach not only philosophy, but also introductory Bible courses, I realized I didn’t know the Bible as a whole, didn’t know how it all fit together. I found myself wanting to understand in order to teach effectively. There were seven of us teaching Bible in the university. The others emphasized teaching the students all the biblical facts they could stuff in their somewhat resistant heads. Because by then I recognized the failure in my own education, I knew I had to teach the big picture, help them see how it all fit together, and what it was ultimately about. It took me a few years to get it together, but in the process I learned a new way to go about understanding. Now I could come to understand almost anything that can be understood. (I also understood that there are many things that cannot be known or understood.) To understand anything, three things must be learned: the beginning, the end, and the major steps involved in getting from one to the other. The end should be the beginning of our search for understanding. We need to learn what the goal is, the purpose, the point, what the use of it is. Now we understand the “why” of our learning all else. Next, we should attempt to find out what is behind it all, where it began, what motivates or drives our subject, where this person is coming from. If we know that the poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, was opposed to and offended by the Calvinist theology of his day, then we are able to understand his satirical poem, “The Deacon’s Masterpiece,” which, on the surface seems to be the story of a “wonderful one-hoss shay,” but rather is a fable about the demise of Calvinism. When we know that our stoneware dishes came from clay dug from a hillside pit, we are position to understand the nature of our pottery, including its hint of earthiness. Once we know what the goal is, why something is of significance, and we know its origin, we are prepared to discover the few overarching steps or stages that lead from beginning to end. At this point, we have a framework on which to hang all the facts we might need to know. We understand the facts as parts of a whole. Now we not only know the facts, we can comprehend their meaning. The purpose–the point, the goal, the reason why--of these paragraphs is to explain what is involved in understanding anything. The starting point–the motivation, where I am coming from, the driving force for this writing–was my decades-long experience of confusion, lostness, and lack of understanding. This essay moved from where I have come from to a brief statement of the ultimate purpose of the writing. It got from one to the other by describing the development of a three-step method of understanding.