The previous post dealt with the importance of Religion and began to unfold the place of Human Relationships, particularly Friendships, as sources of meaning in my life. To move forward from there, another place where I have found deep and cherished meaning in my life has been, and continues to be, the experience of love, for many people in many different forms and expressions. It crosses over to my closest friends; to my late first wife; and so vibrantly to my wife of now 39 years; to my children; to my late parents; to other relatives; and to my only sibling, my sister, for whom I must pause at this point.

The sad reason for this important “sidestep” away from the topic narrative is that I just returned from my sister’s funeral, which was held in a suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she lived and went to church. She had lived an unusually healthy life, so her unexpected death from the second of two severe strokes was jarring and brought the presence of a heavy grief I had not known since the loss of my two daughters just two years ago! My presence at her funeral in Broken Arrow, OK, and her burial in Fort Smith, AR— directly above the grave of our Dad and next to him, our Mom—would never have been possible without the generous offer of my son, Chris, to drive us, over two days, the 900+ miles required to get there! Now—both for my own need to reminisce and also to honor the request of her son and our dear cousins—I offer these memories—some distant, with apologies for those that may not be perfectly accurate, and some that are vividly present in my  mind and my heart, drawing both the blessings of comfort and the tears of grief.

Since I was seven years older than my sister, who had been healthy for most of her life, it never occurred to me that I would outlive her. As we were growing up in Fort Smith, in the same house with our parents, our relationship was, understandably, a bit distant. Since most of her friends happened to be a little younger than her, while most of my friends were a bit older than I was, the seven years between us grew even longer. When I left for college at 17, she was just ten years old, and my home visits over the years of my college and graduate education were brief and far between. She, of course, made a life for herself, graduated from High School, continued her education/training in clerical work at a local Junior College and was soon hired in just such a position. When she met the right man in her life, I was honored to perform their private marriage ceremony. Her marriage took her to a number of locations out of the state of Arkansas, and her marriage was blessed with the birth of her son, Monte. On the dark side, her marriage was a troubled one that ended in separation and, eventually, divorce, although in later years she established a friendly and helpful relationship with her ex-husband, who has suffered from a series of difficult physical issues. On the bright side, she eventually settled in Tulsa, where her work training and experience as a clerical administrative assistant enabled her to be employed in two or three corporate businesses. The last positions, which she held for many years, were with the construction and repair division of Tulsa’s county of public schools. It was during this time that she and I reconnected. It’s been so many years since we started this very important routine, that I’ve lost track, but except when, as often as possible, she was spending the weekend with her son and his family, and we would switch to Monday, we have had an hour and a half conversation every other Sunday evening. Our only “in person” contacts were the result of several visits over the years by our dear cousins, Gay and Jan. They lived in Ft. Smith but would bring Betty with them whenever they came. And my son, Chris, and I made several trips to Ft. Smith over the years and spent our time visiting with Betty, our cousins, and their families.  We were extremely grateful for those visits but, still, for my relationship with my sister, our bi-weekly conversations were the only “constant” that kept us in touch. They ranged widely, from issues at work, to her weekends with her son, his wife, and their eight children—mostly incredibly happy and fun, some occasionally troubled; her concerns about a lack of close friends; worries about whether she had enough resources ever to retire; her precious cat—its age and symptoms of troubling physical problems; and, usually, brief conversations about my wife and I and what was going on in our lives. She always wanted my help, my advice about her problems—she gave far more credence and weight to what “Big Brother” had to say than I owned or deserved, whether she followed it or not. These conversations, no matter the topic, became such a bond for us that I will ever remember and be incredibly grateful for this irreplaceable connection with Betty, my beloved “Sis!” I will miss her for the rest of my days.

To continue now with some important instances of love that have given immeasurable meaning to my life, historically I must speak of my love for my parents. I think I understood even when I was too young express it, the relationship that bonded me to my Mom and Dad. It was a love returned, a love even without name, that was expressed in so many positive ways and was even present—which I understand now but probably did not then—in the corrections, the punishments (which, by the way, were rarely physical) when I had done something that violated the simple rules of the household or that I knew to be wrong for religious or experiential reasons. I must say that I remember no time at all when I ever doubted I was loved and that I returned that love as best I could understand it. By the time I had entered high school age and when I left for college, the love I had received and the love I then understood and was able to consciously express to my parents, and my sister, as well as other close relatives, had become a part of my life and the foundation on which I was able to build a love for others!

As noted in earlier blogs, love can be a broad term, from its strongest and most intense experience—e.g parents, spouse—to what characterizes my relationship with my closest friends—i.e. true and strong but a small step back from its most intense encounter. From there, my feeling, my care, my strong relationship with other friends begins to soften the boundaries between love and affection, warmth, fondness, etc. Since the second blog post on this topic dealt extensively with friendships as an important source of meaning in my life, I will not pursue it further in this context. But by any definition or the stretching of its boundaries, love has had a boundless and significant place among the elements, the experiences, that have been and that are a significant source of meaning in my life!

Turning now to the important place of my forty-five year career in the world of teaching and learning as a source of meaning for me, I must begin by referencing my experience of a sense of “call” while I was still in high school. It is important to note that in an extremely fundamentalist Baptist Church in which I was raised, to be “called” meant only one thing: a call to preach! So I started to college as one of a number of “preacher boys,” as we were known. But two things extremely important to my life happened during my college years.

One of them was taking a philosophy course. Truly, I don’t remember much about the content of the course. Its significance for me was that the professor who taught it forced me—for the first time in my life—to think for myself, and never to take something as true simply on the basis of authority. My task was to investigate the source of the authority, to see whether there was any reason simply to accept something as true just because someone or some institution said so. I had never been asked or considered it my task to do so and being forced by comment after comment on my papers and exams to think for myself was a huge turning point in my life.

I learned, for the first time in another course, about Martin Luther. There was, of course, much to discover about his role in the Reformation, but I also found out about his use of the term “vocation,” which was new to me, to refer to people’s work life. What “blew me away” was discovering that the word came from a Latin word, vocare, which meant “to call,” and that Luther used the word to talk about anyone’s career. It literally opened doors and windows into my understanding of my “call”—that it could be to anything, not just to preach! And that allowed me, eventually, to see clearly that my gifts were more suited to teaching than to preaching, which clarified the path I would take when I graduated from college and started to seminary. My intention was to complete the basic degree and, if I qualified, move directly into a doctoral program, majoring in philosophy, so that if the opportunity arrived, I would be eligible to apply for an open position. I did serve as pastor of two churches while I was in seminary, but the year after I finished my doctoral work, I learned from Page Lee—who had become a close friend while working on our doctorates and had been granted leave from Mars Hill College to do so—that a newly created position had been opened for someone qualified to teach philosophy, for which he asked me to apply. And the rest, as they say, is history. For twenty years I was able to fulfill what I believed was my “calling,” engaging students in courses in philosophy and a number of interdisciplinary general education courses. Although I later became VP for Academic and Student Affairs at MHC and in a post-retirement career, served as Chief Academic Officer at another institution, I tried always to remember that, among my various duties, my calling was to be supportive of those—whether faculty or staff—who were directly involved in teaching students. And that remained in my life a true source of meaning.

There were also two avocations that I enjoyed during my academic career that also, in their own way, gave meaning to my life. One of them was acting in theatrical productions. I had gotten a taste of acting in high school and learned that “putting on greasepaint” allowed me to briefly step out of my low self- esteem and lack of self-confidence and be anyone I wanted to be. I majored in Speech and Theatre in college and performed roles in several productions, including Brutus in Julius Caesar. While acting went on hiatus throughout my seminary years, the most important “rebirth” of my interest in theatrical roles occurred during my career at Mars Hill. Upon arrival there during the summer of 1968, we moved into a duplex apartment which just happened to be across the street from the family of a man—commonly known as “Tah”—who became my dear friend of now over 56 years and who was the chair of Department of Theatre Arts. He quickly learned that I had majored in Speech and Theatre and began to badger me to take age-appropriate roles in student productions. After putting him off for a couple of years—which allowed me to stay a couple of weeks ahead of my students—I agreed to start participating in the cast of several productions. But the event that made acting an avocation for me was Tah’s becoming the Founding Creative Director of the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre in 1975, which has been producing summer theatrical productions for now approaching fifty years! I was cast as El Gallo, the lead role in The Fantastiks, and was privileged to speak the very first words and sing the very first song, “Try to Remember,” in SART’s very first production. This was the beginning of my having lead roles in over 35 productions, most of them in SART but some in a variety of other venues, primarily in and around Asheville but some as far away as Hershey, PA. Among my most favorite roles were as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, King Arthur in Camelot, Nat in I’m Not Rappaport, Morrie in Tuesdays with Morrie, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and Niels Bohr in Copenhagen.

But one might ask how this had a place in providing meaning in my life, and the answer is primarily in one word: creativity. I learned this from a variety of amazingly skilled directors, the two I would speak of first being my friend, Tah, who directed a number of the productions in which I had the lead role, and Bill Martin, who resided in NYC where he directed over 200 Off-Broadway productions and was nominated for Best Director of the Tony nominated musical, The Lieutenant. Bill directed both SART productions of Fiddler on the Roof (1981, 1999). I must also note the talents of director and playwright, C. Robert Jones, who directed several productions in which I had a role, and was also the playwright of three of the productions in which I had a lead role. From these talented directors I learned not only the importance of learning one’s lines, but also, at least for me, building those lines importantly not on simply memorizing them, but on where I was on stage and why I was there, when and why I moved on stage, why and to whom I was speaking, and the importance of those lines to the dialogue that was happening on stage. But the most crucial thing I learned was that my task was not simply to create the character I was playing, it was to become the character—so that I was not “watching myself” act, I was to “lose myself” in the skin and the soul of my character! As I have aged and become less mobile, these opportunities lessened and have now become simply memories. However, I still managed for several years to engage in “Readers’ Theatre” at the local Community Theatre. As the name implies, there is no set, costumes, or stage movement involved.  Actors simply stand behind a metal lectern and read their lines from a script. That said, with none of the accouterments of a staged play, the necessity for creativity in portraying a character rises significantly. It is, perhaps, a less engaging production than a fully staged play, but it has its place for interested audiences and calls for imagination and inventiveness on the part of those portraying the characters. Perhaps it is now understandable why becoming such a variety of over 40 characters in a period of over four decades brought an important sense of meaning to my life.

Doing recorded voice-overs also became an avocational career arising, interestingly, from theatre. The woman playing my character, Tevye’s, wife, Tzeitel, in SART’s first production of Fiddler on the Roof in 1981, was Debra Hull, one of the most talented actresses I ever worked with (and who died, tragically of cancer far too young). Her full-time job was with ProComm Studios which produced voiceovers and occasional TV commercials. Her work colleagues came to see her in a performance of Fiddler, and soon after sent a message to me asking if I would consider auditioning for recording voiceovers, which I did, and soon after began receiving invitations to do recordings. When I first started, I was in a fairly large room with a microphone, a script, and looking through a large glass window into the recording room where the technician managed a large, complex tape recorder, and where corrections and editing were done by cut and splice.  Well into my years of voice-overs, and when I occasionally do them now, I stand in a very small soundproof “stall” with a microphone, and all recordings are done on computerized devices and monitored by a skilled sound expert. So what does this have to do with meaning in my life? Please remember the word “creative.” Listen to any radio or TV program and be aware of the number of voices you hear on commercial breaks and the wide differences in volume, pace, voice control, pitch, etc. As in “becoming” the character in a theatrical production, the producer of voice-overs must be capable of a variety of deliveries in order to be asked to do them. For me, anyway, here is where the link to acting happens. I tried not to just change my voice delivery, I tried to “be” the voice that was asked for in this particular recording. And that’s where this became not just a job that provided extra income, but another source of meaning in my life.

Having “gone on” too long, as I’m apt to do, I will regrettably stop here and save the last two “items of meaning” for the final—and truly briefer—post in this series on meaning in my life.