A Mind In The Making

A Mind in the Making David Alexander January 2009

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A Mind in the Making A round of goodbye dinners, then a trip to Taoyuan Airport, and the year was over. After takeoff and a meal, Dwayne opened a book about trekking in the Himalayas and settled back for a long read. An hour later he came to an explanation of the Tibetan Buddhist mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum, “The Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus.” Om invokes All that is otherwise inexpressible; Mani expresses the pure and indestructible essence of existence beyond all phenomena; and Padme locates this essence in the world of phenomena that unfolds to reveal the Mani at the heart of daily life. As Dwayne reflected on his recent year in Taiwan he came to see his own story in this mantra. “Strange,” he thought, “I went to Taiwan as an Evangelical Christian, and I don’t think I’ve changed, but here I find a Buddhist phrase that seems to sum up my journey of faith.” At 25, Dwayne saw that his Taiwan sojourn had begun when he was in high school. He grew up in Grand Rapids where his parents, who held MBA degrees from Michigan State, worked in the office furniture industry. While Dwayne was a babe-in-arms his parents joined Fountain Street Church, a liberal congregation offering freedom to doubt as well as to believe; a place to “grow one’s soul, not just to save it.” Though this church was not confining, its freedoms didn’t sit well when Dwayne was 16. Attending some Christian meetings with classmates who came from less open backgrounds and watching them respond, he came to desire their confidence and rigid sureness. One Saturday evening he responded to a call to be saved. The next afternoon he told his parents that he wanted to drop out of Fountain Street and begin worshipping at The Firehouse, an independent congregation that met in a former fire station. Three people led this church. Pastor Pete, his wife Gina and Pastor Mark (who led the music) The members of the church were almost all between the ages of 15 and 24. Dwayne’s parents gave a “yes and no” answer. If he would continue to attend Fountain Street on Sunday mornings then he was free to be part of any other church at other times. His father, Rick, said, “I’m sure that they believe the Bible at The Firehouse, so they’ll agree that children are to obey their parents, especially in the areas of religious practice.” His mother, Susan offered to have Pete and Gina over for a meal so they we could all talk this thing through. Dwayne declined, and found ways to be involved at The Firehouse while complying with his parents’ demand that he attend Fountain Street on Sunday mornings. But not for long. The Firehouse was written up in a magazine about cutting edge ministries and Pete got invitations to speak at conferences out of town. The events often lasted from Friday through Sunday noon. He missed morning worship but was back in time for “Jammin’ with Jesus” on Sunday evenings. Then he went to lead spiritual life week at a Bible college in Tennessee. While he was gone Gina and Mark took care of the church themselves. After one particularly difficult evening (a teenager they counseled had committed suicide) they found solace in each other’s prayers and each others’ arms. When Pete returned he was excited by an invitation to become the college chaplain,

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(doubly pleased because he’d never finished college himself). Gina said, “Go ahead.” She and Mark were headed for Seattle. Within two weeks The Firehouse had fallen apart. Dwayne and his friends wondered what to do. They wanted the musical excitement, religious fervor and spiritual certainty they’d come to love. One guy suggested that they should try The Return, another contemporary church across town. It turned out to be just what they were looking for. Weekly “prayer at the flagpole” meetings at school and church life at The Return made Dwayne into the spiritually confident type of person who attracted other young people to faith in God. He was an avid Bible reader, using an edition specially edited to help adolescents grow nearer to God. And one Saturday evening at The Return he took a pledge of “sexual abstinence until marriage.” When it was time to apply to college he discovered that that Rick and Susan wanted him to go to Michigan State. Dwayne countered with a call to full-time Christian service after Bible college in Missouri. They had a round-table discussion with the pastor from The Return, a pastor from Fountain Street, and the family. Dwayne felt safe expressing his call to ministry and Bible college in front of a pastor he trusted. Rick and Susan were comfortable with the pastor who had known Dwayne since 6th grade. The discussion went well. The pastors, though from opposite sides of the Protestant theological spectrum, found lots of common ground. A deal emerged. Rick and Susan promised to contribute an amount equal to whatever they would have to pay for Michigan State, and Dwayne agreed to attend Calvin College in Grand Rapids. The pastor from The Return was pleased. Though he was theologically much more conservative than the atmosphere of Calvin, he recognized quality. He also knew that Dwayne would continue to be part of the life of his church. Dwayne was persuaded that ministry could be helped by education in psychology or sociology. He also could access Calvin’s wealth of religion and Bible courses. During his freshman year he grew in breadth and depth, but long-range finances began to concern him. His parents’ limited contribution meant taking on debt to attend Calvin. He concluded that living on campus was costing him “big time” down the line. He moved home, got a bus pass and forfeited his driver’s license to get Rick and Susan to add what they paid for car insurance to what they contributed towards his education. The Return went the way of The Firehouse, but for a different reason. The pastor invested the building fund in something promoted by a cousin. The investment went south. Disgraced, the pastor left and the congregation disintegrated. Dwayne was church shopping again. He was still in contact with Christian friends from high school. Some were working at entry-level jobs, others studying at Community College and a few had moved out of state. It surprised him that two girls who had taken the abstinence pledge with him were already single mothers.

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Because he lived at home, he continued attending Fountain Street on Sunday mornings. He listened politely at his parents’ church and learned solid skills in faith articulation and critical thinking at Calvin, but he wanted something stirring, like what he had found at the contemporary churches, for his soul. Wary of independents, he turned to a “brand name” and found an established and lively Baptist church. He was happy, and the people there were glad to have him. He spent four years with these loving, confident people. The years after graduation were due to college debt. He wanted the adventure of short-term overseas missionary service but didn’t feel he could ask others to pay his college loans so that he could get a thrill. His Calvin BA in social psychology and some connections at Fountain Street got him hired as a social work assistant with an agency funded by The United Way. He continued riding the bus. His social life was mostly church-related. He stayed with his parents’ and paid room and board. Social work gave him insight into things that cause people to need help with problems. He learned ruses used to explain away bad behavior and perversity. He met good people who had fallen on hard times and a share of Kent County’s sociopaths and conmen. After a while, he was assigned to teach a course on personal financial management to people seeking assistance with their electric bills. Practicing what he preached, he was out of debt in less than two years. The Baptist church had a house for missionaries on furlough. Jerry and Mary Dinkle, who worked in Taiwan, stayed there with their kids for a few months just as Dwayne came out of debt. He decided to go to Taiwan and participate in the things they talked about and showed on their promotional DVD. But though he was a good Christian and social work assistant, he was not a fund-raiser. Then he learned of a Taiwanese foundation that enlisted young Americans to teach English at middle schools in a region where an earthquake had struck in 1999. Dwayne signed up and was on his way by the first of June. Orientation in Taipei started on June 22nd, but Dwayne went early to spend time helping Jerry and Mary. In his excitement he forgot to tell them he was coming. Arriving at their house in Taichung he met a chilly welcome. He blamed himself, spent a single night in their guest room, and moved to a youth hostel. He met a young Taiwanese man, Tom, who taught him Chinese on a language exchange basis. Dwayne told Tom about Jerry and Mary’s work with orphans, disabled children, and teenagers at risk. The DVD was handy. Tom recognized some locations and took Dwayne to visit them. But the folks at the orphanage had never heard of the Dinkles. When they saw pictures of Jerry and Mary, though, their eyes lit up. “Oh, them, they came here once. They had us take a lot of pictures, said a blessing in poor Mandarin, and then drove away.” Dwayne noticed that in most of the shots, no matter where they were taken, Jerry and Mary were wearing the same clothes. It appeared that all the visits and all of the photography had been done on a single day.

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Were these people frauds? They had spoken so movingly of their work and need for support. He e-mailed his pastor and got an immediate response. Some members of the church had doubted the Dinkles. Suspicion of fraud played a role in an early departure from the mission house. The deacons concluded, though, that all that had taken from the church was three months of free rent and some goodwill, so these Baptists, true to their nature, had forgiven. But they also decided to be more cautious in the future, supporting only their own members or missionaries from recognized organizations On June 22nd Dwayne moved to Taipei. Unlike some who had just gotten off planes, he wasn’t jet lagged. The smattering of Mandarin he’d learned from Tom impressed the organizers, so when assignments were made he was sent to Long Feng, a remote small town. Housing was in the former rectory of a nearby Catholic church, where years earlier several foreign priests had lived. St. Bosco’s Catholic Church had also once hosted a large kindergarten managed by German nuns, but as the population changed and the nuns had retired things were less active. Father Mark, an American Maryknoll priest, now served the Catholics of Long-feng and those of 7 other churches. He lived in Nantou City. The former rectory, convent and kindergarten had been turned into a hostel for high school boys from even more remote places. A caretaker, Mr. Chang, lived in a little house out back. A laywoman, Mrs. Wu, opened the church every morning to pray with whoever showed up (generally women in their 60’s). Mass was celebrated every Sunday at 2:30PM. After a Summer English program Dwayne began teaching 9th grade English. As he slowly acquired more Chinese he added to the English some of his students learned to use. Interaction with native English speakers was limited to Father Mark. Dwayne began to attend Mass, not because he could understand Mark’s American accented Mandarin, but because the atmosphere of being in a church felt good. He recognized the Lord’s Prayer and the Nicene Creed based on the rhythms with which they were recited. After Mass on Sunday, Mark often remained to chat. He didn’t try to make Dwayne a Catholic, and therefore succeeded in making a friend. Dwayne had noticed that Mrs. Wu’s group of women alternated their styles of prayer and telling of beads from day to day. He asked, and Mark explained that the group included both Catholics and nominal or faithful Buddhists. They alternated between the Rosary and Buddhist sutras. Mark told him “The faithfulness of Catholics and the quality of their fellowship brought the Buddhist women into the group.” The women themselves or their children had been students in the nuns’ kindergarten. “In this town there’s no other group of people who demonstrate the love of Christ as well as this bunch. I don’t care what they pray. I look at how they love one another.” In November a girl arrived in the church compound. Mei-ling, Mr. Chang’s niece, was there because she had “bad friends and bad habits” in Taichung. Her parents felt that under the watchful care of her uncle and living at a church she might get turned around. Mrs. Wu was rebuffed when she attempted to be motherly, so she paid attention to Mr. Chang, advising him on care of adolescent girls (She had raised four of her own.). Meiling went only to school. The boys in the hostel were told to keep their distance.

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Winter break came. At a 3-day gathering of foundation-sponsored teachers, Dwayne ran into Jerry Dinkle, who came to talk about teaching small children. Jerry recognized the young man whom he had treated so shabbily in July and found time for a private talk. The story was that Jerry and Mary, enthusiastic Christians and graduates of a Bible College, had raised support to become church-planting missionaries. But they had a terrible time learning Chinese. Eventually most of their time and energy was put into teaching English. They were good at it and began to make quite a bit of money. After three years they privately dropped the pretense of planting a church. But the necessity of going back on furlough drove them to desperate measures. Too proud to admit failure, they lied. When they were caught in Grand Rapids they immediately returned to Taiwan. “When you showed up at our door,” Jerry said, “we were overwhelmed by guilt.” Good financial records helped. Jerry showed Dwayne a letter they had sent to their supporters the previous August. They admitted what they had done, gave the date they had dropped out of evangelizing, and detailed all of the money they had collected since then. Now they lived frugally, taught a lot, and were paying back the donations month by month. They planed to return to Illinois when schools in Taiwan let out for summer. Jerry said, “We don’t deserve it, but I ask that you pray for us so that we never fall into deceiving people again.” Dwayne could have spent the rest of winter vacation in Bali or Bangkok, but being a cheapskate, he only went as far as Taiwan’s east coast. He stayed in youth hostels and ate at noodle stands. He returned to Long-feng before the big holiday to find the dorm empty and locked. At the caretaker’s house he discovered that he didn’t know the word for what he wanted. He pointed to the old rectory while miming putting a key into a lock and opening a door. Mr. Chang figured things out readily enough, and Mei-ling chuckled. Late that evening Mr. Chang went out to help a family in a far village whose house had burned down. Father Mark had phoned and asked him to do it because he, himself, was sitting with a man who was dying in a charity ward. Dwayne was at the hostel, catching up on his Bible reading, when Mei-ling came to the door. She had a DVD in her hand. In high school English she suggested that they watch it together. They sat on the couch. Mei-ling had chosen a romantic comedy that made Dwayne yearn for someone to hold close. No sooner had the thought entered his mind than Mei-ling, seemingly also moved, was close, REALLY close. As she embraced him and sighed deeply his mind quickly flashed through several things. The restriction on her being around the “hostel boys” was dismissed as because he was not a boy. As she nibbled on his ear he reasoned that this was not a threat because he’d seen Christian friends in Grand Rapids getting even closer. As he began returning her kisses he thought about his abstinence pledge, and told himself “this isn’t sex.” It wasn’t. But soon it was, and a couple of hours later when he fell asleep it had been sex, a LOT of sex.

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The next morning he woke late and alone. He reflected on the previous evening with Mei-ling and on what he had learned from the people who had led him in his teenage pledge. “They were right. Sex is a wonderful gift from God, intended for pleasure. I sure liked it!” But he was disappointed in his failure to keep his promise. While getting things together to go for breakfast he noticed that his folding money, three NT$1,000 bills that had been in his wallet, were gone. Having enough change for breakfast, he figured that he had put the cash elsewhere. Going out the door, hoping for and dreading the possibility of running into Meiling, he saw Father Mark and Mr. Chang. Dwayne stood back. Then Mrs. Wu arrived and began a private conversation with the caretaker. Mark told Dwayne that that when Mr. Chang got home that morning (he had spent the night at the chapel in the village where the fire had been) he had not found Mei-ling. The woman at the local bus stop told him that Mei-ling had left on the first bus, paying for the ticket with a thousand dollar bill. Mark said that Mei-ling had originally been sent to Long-feng because she had begun “turning tricks” at a KTV in Taichung when she was 15. Her parents’ attempt to save her had failed. She had likely disappeared into the sex trade underground of Taichung. Mrs. Wu would be a good help to Mr. Chang because one of her four daughters had done the same thing about 15 years earlier. Dwayne was crestfallen. The night of sex had not been about his desirability or his manliness, it was a setup for being robbed. “If I were a Catholic,” he told Father Mark, “I’d ask to see you in the confessional.” On a nearby bench the story came out: the pledge, the sex, the money, and the shame. Dwayne was careful to say, “I know that I don’t have to tell you this, it’s between God and me. God forgives, not you.” Mark agreed, saying it was the Catholic belief, too. He asked, though, if Dwayne wanted to do some penance. “It’s not necessary for being forgiven, but I’ve found it good for the soul” Dwayne asked what that might entail. “Given that you’re a Bible-reading Protestant, I suppose you’ve read through the whole thing several times.” “No,” Dwayne admitted, “I’m not at all familiar with loads of the Old Testament.” “Well then,” Mark countered, “I’m assigning you to start from the 10 commandments in Exodus 20 and read all the way through to the end of Esther in the next 45 days. For each book, give me a written summary of no more than 350 words. I’ll expect several pages each Sunday when I see you at Mass.” Dwayne had been set up to trudge through some pretty boring stuff. It was hard slogging through descriptions of the Tabernacle in Exodus, laws in Leviticus, and numbers in Numbers. Stories of conquest in the history books were a bit more exciting, and Ruth was inspiring. But the stuff about kings in Kings was repetitive and in the Chronicles the names began to flow together. By the time he finished Ezra and Nehemiah, he held the Levites in low regard. It began to seem to him that if indeed there had been a chosen people who went to a promised land, lost it and went into exile from which some returned, their laws, religion and history had been hijacked by the group who

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wrote it down and controlled the nation economically, politically and religiously. He began to doubt what he read in the Bible. That didn’t stop his believing, but it did liberate him to read things beyond his self-imposed limitations. He recalled professors at Calvin who had encouraged wide reading, professors whom he’d ignored because he only wanted to read “holy stuff.” As his final months in Taiwan spun themselves out, he began picking up whatever came to hand, reading what interested him, and leaving aside that which didn’t. That’s why he held a book on Himalayan trekking as he flew. Dwayne pondered what might be Padme, the phenomena that had obscured reality, and Mani, the pure and indestructible essence of reality, for him. About an hour before landing, he thought he may have figured it out. His Padme was all that certainty, and his Mani was the freedom to doubt.