GOD FOR AN OLD MAN
Thomas M. Dicken
GOD FOR AN OLD MAN
Copyright © 2015 Thomas M. Dicken. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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For my two Anchors in life
My wife Nancy
and
My son John
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Over the years, I have been able to work through my thoughts about some important topics in academic journals. I am grateful to all those journals for enabling my work to go ahead. Inevitably, the result of those years is implicit in this book.
In some places, that earlier work is very explicit in these pages. My concluding chapter originally appeared in 2015 as “God for an Old Man” in Process Studies. My chapter “Dying: An Interim Report” first appeared in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. I had been told in May, 2006 that I had lymphoma, and perhaps had a year to live. I needed to write about that. I wrote my essay in August, 2006. I’m glad I did and I’m glad my article appeared in Soundings and is also in this book.
I have been working through my ideas for over fifty years. My article “The Homeless God” in the Journal of Religion was a breakthrough for me, allowing me to break with the last constraints of a traditional view of God as omnipresent and strike out on my own, finding my own way. The four chapters in the “Adult Thoughts” portion of the book have developed from ideas first explored in that article. My chapter on John Updike’s Seek My Face develops insights first explored in part of my article “God and Pigment: John Updike on the Conservation of Meaning” in Religion and Literature in 2004.
Paragraphs and pages from other articles also appear, scattered throughout these pages, though none of those is reprinted here in such detail. The articles were influential and suggestive as I wrote this book. In particular my thoughts about art and literature emerged in various articles. All of my relevant journal articles are listed in the Bibliography section of this book.
All biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version.
Introduction
When I was one year old, in 1937, the Ohio River flooded major sections of Louisville. Disease seemed to spread in the many disruptions caused by that flood. I contracted diphtheria. Inoculations for diphtheria were available back then, but my family tended to avoid medical care, influenced both by poverty and a belief that God would take care of us.
Several times during my childhood, my mother would tell me how close I had come to dying. Dr. Craddock, the physician who had delivered me at childbirth in our home a year earlier, was finally called. He came to our house and told my mother that my life was in the balance. It could go either way.
When my mother told me this story, she said that she had gone out for a walk around the block, praying as she went. She told God she could not stand it any more. God should either let me die or heal me. When she returned to our small house, Dr. Craddock told her my fever had broken. He thought that I would survive. My mother explained to me that God had spared me in response to her prayer. That meant that God had a purpose for me.
That was an impressive story to be told as a child. I listened to my mother carefully, but kept my own questions to myself. Why had I had to go through all that if my life was part of God’s purpose? How did prayer work? What did the story tell me about my mother? About God? I filed the story away, but that account provoked my first thoughts about God.
I have thought about God throughout my life, reading philosophical and theological works about God, but also reading novels and memoirs that had suggestions about God. I have been involved with churches, both Pentecostal and liberal Protestant churches. I have also had long periods of not being involved with any church. I never lost interest in God, however. I have published a number of articles in academic journals, developing my thoughts and opening myself to the responses of others.
In recent years, I have become preoccupied with my own life story and how thoughts about God have interacted with events in my life. I have never before written in any responsible way about my life and my ongoing interaction with the thought of God. I attempt to do that here.
Since I think that human life does, in fact, have various definable stages, I have tried to understand how my ideas of God were influenced at several stages of life. The God I find interesting in my eighth decade of exploring, thinking, and experiencing is different from the God I found interesting in my tenth year. I have pondered the ideas of the great Erik Erikson, who saw human life as being defined by eight stages. He saw old age as a time for wisdom, learned over the years, teaching children by example that life is well worth living. In this brief book, I have four major sections: Young Impressions, Adult Thoughts, Side Views (art and literature), and God for an Old Man, in which I discuss what God means and does not mean for me as I wind down that eighth decade. If my “Young Impressions” might be described as looking in a rear view mirror, my collection “Side Views” reflects my glances in side view mirrors, describing two of the major influences on my life: art and literature.
I have been influenced over the years by process thought, a vision of reality articulated originally by Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne in the twentieth century and developed in detail by many philosophers, theologians, and other thinkers since then. In my own academic writing, I have made a small contribution to this effort.
I have made my own critiques of some aspects of this school of thought. Both the influence of this vision on my views and my occasional differences with this vision will surface in this book. They are also spelled out in more precise language in academic articles I have published over the years, particularly articles in the journal Process Studies.
I also want to say something about existentialism, the school of thought that influenced philosophical and theological thought, as well as art, literature, and memoir, in the post-World War II era. I was deeply influenced by many of those thinkers. Other schools of thought have become dominant over the years, but I continue to judge ideas from many thoughtful writers in terms of their existential impact. Today, we are perhaps more inclined to talk about the “personal” meaning or impact of an idea, rather than the “existential” meaning. This book contains much reflection about God. Some people talk about a “personal God.” As our thoughts about God become more abstract, reaching out to eons of time, abstract cosmic purposes, and extraordinary distances, the personal God begins to fade. I don’t believe we can talk about a personal God without talking about ourselves in a personal way. Those of us in the academic world tend to be shy about being too personal. In this book, I have written in a more personal way than I ever have. I have been influenced by process thought and existential thought. Most importantly, I have been shaped in my thought by my own life.
Part I
1 DISRUPTION
We lived in a shotgun house, with rooms leading directly to one another, with no hallways: living room, bedroom, kitchen, bath. An ell had been built in back, adding a second bedroom. My favorite place