BIO SKETCHES “I thirst!” John 19:28 When Jesus said, "I thirst," he was offered and accepted sour wine on a hyssop stalk. (Note Exodus 12:22, Psalm 51:7.) When I was a student at the University of Chicago during the Vietnam War, I went with several other students to Rockefeller Chapel for the Maundy Thursday service. That enormous Collegiate Gothic edifice, which seats about 1,700, is full of carvings and symbols that seem to embrace all of Christian history. The dean of the Chapel invited us to sit in the capacious chancel. Otherwise the place was empty. It was an extraordinarily intimate liturgy in such a holy setting. The companionship with my fellow students that night somehow intimated the supper Jesus shared with his friends. They had been with Jesus as he often challenged authority. On my mind were reports of students around the country who burned their draft cards to protest what I thought was the iniquity of my government's war. I was grateful for my deferment as a theological student but troubled by a guilt that others would be maimed or die in my place. In the context of the wickedness agonizingly visible in the daily news, the dean's homily that night somehow spoke to the commitment required of those who would follow Jesus. He reminded us of the oppression and injustice of that time that the earthly Jesus confronted, and of the Kingdom of God He came to establish. I knew the sacred story, what lay ahead for Jesus. When I was offered the bread and wine, the Body and Blood, I trembled. I thirsted for righteousness, but could I eat and drink this Sacrifice? How genuine was my thirst for righteousness? Unto death? Sometime later, at a Sunday service, following the sermon, there was a deliberate pause, which several students and I had requested. From our pews, we walked forward from the nave. We solemnly placed our draft cards on the altar. The service resumed. I did not know the press was present. A few days later, our names appeared in the paper. The FBI came to the University to question me. I explained. Soon an official letter arrived from my draft board. My deferment was revoked. Many years have passed. The Eucharist remains for me a sublimely terrifying, and yet at the same time, sublimely assuring Mystery. What does "thirst" mean for us now? What might the sour wine on the cleansing hyssop be telling us these days? Vern Barnet What happened after I was classified I-A, ready for induction, is a bit complicated and depends on what happened earlier in my life. In brief, immediately after high school, years before Vietnam was any public concern, I enlisted in the Naval Reserve. I loved it. After active duty for training, I went weekly for additional training. I began being disturbed by the training films which viciously portrayed ordinary Russians as enemies of the US and other propaganda. It glorified war. I decided I could not serve in a dishonest enterprise. I discussed this with my minister (who had been a Naval officer) who wrote supporting my own long letter explaining why I did not feel I could in good conscience be part of the Navy if it continued the kind of morale training I was receiving. After 2 years, 11 months, and 14 days from my enlistment, I received an honorable discharge with the notation that I was not recommended for reenlistment without prior approval of the chief of Naval personnel. Years later, after the FBI and the letter from the Selective Service, I went to my "draft" board in Omaha to appeal, though I had no hope of success and was agonizing about leaving school. When I appeared before my draft board, the members were upset with me and said they wanted to stand by the I-A classification they had sent me, which was readiness for military duty. They found me unworthy to continue my education and gave me quite a lecture. However, a letter to my draft board had just arrived from the Navy as part of the review process. Because I was "not recommended for reenlistment without prior approval of the chief of Naval personnel," they decided to classify me IV-F, "not qualified for military service on physical, mental, or moral grounds." I think they thought of me as a conscientious objector, although I never claimed that, either with them or in my letter to the Navy. I later learned my classification of IV-F was frequently used to mask the number of conscientious objectors (I-O and I-A-O) because the government did not want the public to know how many young men felt all war, or this war, was morally wrong, as such information would have further fueled to protests against the war. Young men fleeing to Canada publicized was bad enough. How to deal with the war was a complex ethical problem, and how to think about those backing the war and those in various ways and for various reasons objecting to it, was a consuming preoccupation in that era. I struggled with the decision my draft board was forced to make in my case, and that would be another story. For the Lenten meditation, I wanted to focus on the thirst for righteousness which I think His words on the cross could possibly remind us of, whether the Evangelist meant that or not, and on the complex terrifying and redeeming meaning of the Mass as I experience it ever since that Maundy Thursday service which has become, over the years, a richer and deeper paradigm of the cosmos for me. |
Teilhard! He changed my life. Utterly. After my childhood extreme fundamentalism and my high school militant atheist reaction, in my search for truth (which religion could not satisfy), I turned to science. One June Sunday in 1960 in the attic with my chemistry set (my mother said it would be better to blow up the attic than the whole house), I had the radio on and heard a sermon (I thought it was a talk) about Teilhard and The Phenomenon of Man which, as you note, had been published the previous year. This talk instilled in me the idea that science and religion could be compatible. I was amazed to learn at the end of the talk that the speaker was a minister, a Unitarian minister. A few months later I became a Unitarian. I got the book, too, and read it with profound effect. That is not the end of the story for me with Teilhard, but is the beginning of the rest of my life |
plagiarism 231213 My first experience with plagiarism is the best. As a High School senior I compilededited a city-wide booklet, Creative Writing, printed by the South High School print department, about 100 pages. The Omaha World-Herald ran a story about it with my picture. A few of my own pieces were included in the booklet. Two or three years later I was on the editorial board of Grain of Sand, the English Department's undergraduate rather handsome quarterly. Each year high school students were invited to submit poems and short stories for a prize and publication in Grain of Sand. The chairman referred a sonnet to me for comment. It was a very slightly altered version of a sonnet of mine in Creative Writing. I had fun writing the student who made the plagiarist submission, beginning with how his poem surely is worthy of a prize, but criticizing the change the student had made to the poem and suggesting he find he work had been already published under my name. Still, I could not but feel more flattered than violated. My 500-page doctoral paper presents a different problem. I was a laggard in completing it. My fellow students had finished theirs on time (and theirs were much shorter). I begged the faculty for a month's extension. They gave me one week. I cried for help. Several wives ran dictation machines and typed what I dictated to help me meet the deadline. And I asked one student I especially trusted to write about four pages on a particular area for me using an outline and citations I wanted. I turned in the paper a few minutes before the deadline, but I did not have a chance to read what he had done for me before I submitted the paper. I don't feel bad about it at all since I doubt that the examining faculty likely did not have a chance to wade through the whole dissertation before my oral exam anyhow, and I don't think there were any questions or challenges on what my friend wrote for me. I am pretty sure that one reason I passed is that about 40 pages of the dissertation -- original research -- had been published by the denomination's ministers' association's scholarly quarterly. I had written that part for a class at the seminary, and intended it to be part of m dissertation. (My professor submitted it to the publication without my knowing it, if my memory is correct.) My paper was the longest dissertation in the then-145 year history of the school, and I don't know if that has ever been surpassed. Of course, since the paper was about Shunya, the Void or Emptiness, I like to say I wrote 500 pages about Nothing. As a teacher myself, I liked to give individual oral exams or in-class writing assignments, and otherwise papers required personal reflections which would have made using someone else's stuff difficult to copy, especially after I got to know the students. I am sure I had one or two or three cases of plagiarism, but I can't recall any consequences as severe as expulsion or complete course failure with undergraduates (think I may have failed a paper and had a come-to-Jesus talk with the student), and I never encountered this problem with grad students, as what I taught in seminary were subjects that lent themselves to creativity, or I found ways to make them so, as giving assignments to teams for class presentation. These were sometimes hilarious. As my book of sonnets shows, I rather like showing off sources and connections, and I don't understand why someone would not want others to know about the research he had done. I don't know what to think about the accusation that MLKing plagiarized his doctoral work, though preachers stealing others' material for sermons is a tradition, but not in the academy. |