BEGINNINGS

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The persons who make the biggest impression on us aren't always those we spend the most time with. That was how it was for me with my paternal grandfather. He visited us rarely when I was a child — perhaps once or twice a year — but I remember those visits vividly. He had an imposing, authoritative presence. Wherever he was, he filled the space, emanating an unmistakable virile force and mental strength, as well as a dignity, that I instinctively recognized as a child and responded to with awe. That impression predated my discovering any of the details of who he was and what he did. Later, I learned that my grandfather was an eminent Christian theologian and teacher, as well as the author of famous commentaries on the Bible, including Paul's Letter to the Romans.

When I was old enough to understand, my father told me my grandfather was always on the road, lecturing and preaching on the Bible. He worked for the famous Moody Bible Institute, which was founded in 1886 and which he joined in 1895, when Moody invited him to become the assistant superintendent, under R. A. Torrey. My grandfather would give a lecture in Chicago on Monday night, take the train to Detroit and give a lecture on Tuesday night, then take the train to Toronto and give a lecture there on Wednesday night, finally winding up back in Chicago toward the end of the week. His name was William R. Newell. His lectures were attended by thousands of people who regularly formed enraptured audiences. Nonetheless, I know that it was less what he preached and believed that made an impression on me as a child, since I had little contact with him in this capacity, than it was the fact that he was a man who clearly was passionately and completely filled with a sense of dedication and mission. That life could be filled with that level of passion and commitment formed an unconscious though deep imprint on my impressionable mind.

My father, Philip Newell, after whom I am named, also held his father in awe. He once told me his first memory of hearing my grandfather lecture in Detroit, and seeing a sign on a public streetcar saying, "Tonight: William R. Newell, 'Fourteen Ways to Hell!"' Apparently, however, the powerful nature of his father's teaching did not dissuade my father as a young man from pursuing a different kind of life. Perhaps he just needed to get away and decide things for himself. Besides, since William Newell the preacher was always on the road, as a child my father had not been particularly close to his own father.

In the summers, William Newell would park his wife and three boys, including my father, at the Gull Lake Bible Conference near Kalamazoo, Michigan, while he fulfilled his theological and lecturing duties. The conference was sponsored by the West Michigan branch of the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, and was financed by the famously rich McCormick family, the inventors of the reaper, that large farm machine for harvesting crops. After the summer conference, my grandfather would ship his entire family down to Florida for the winter while he continued lecturing.

All three boys went to boarding school, my father in Essex Falls, New Jersey. He then attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In his senior year in college, he worked at a local clothing store in Ann Arbor called Wild and Company, and originated the slogan "Be a Wild Man,' a slogan of which he was very proud. After college, he went to work for the Pelton and Crane Company in Detroit. Still well known today, the company manufactures the bright light that shines in your mouth, but amazingly enough not in your eyes, when you sit in the dentist's chair. My father did very well for himself, and became managing director of this nationwide company. Along the way, he met, fell in love with, and married my mother, Frances Furst, a high school biology teacher whose father had built a house on Gull Lake, Kalamazoo, that later became our summer home. My father settled down with his new wife in an upscale suburb of Detroit and they had three children: my older sister Martha, me, and my brother, Rick, in that order.

I was born in 1927 in Detroit, Michigan, and weighed in at a hefty 10 pounds, 11 ounces. What I remember of my earliest years of life was comfortable and uneventful. Looking back, I can see that our family was pretty much given over to money and proper behavior. We lived in a beautiful home and sported a Packard car, a luxury item in those days. On Sundays, my father would drop off his three children at the local Episcopal Church, and go home to work on the garden. Occasionally we also said family prayers. I have memories from early childhood of being close to my mother, who was very gentle, and I remember being regaled with stories by my father, who was fun loving, playful, and very much present to his wife, whom he adored, and to his children.

All that started to change, and our family comfort to break apart, when I was six years old. That is when my mother, who today would be diagnosed as having bipolar disorder, had her first nervous breakdown. Bit by bit, our life began to unravel. My strongest memory of the early days of my mother's illness was of coming home from school, and having her greet me by asking me to brush her hair, as she sat listlessly on her bed or on a couch. That was just one example of the awful reversal of roles that can happen when a parent can no longer take care of a child, and asks the child instead to take care of her.

My mother increasingly withdrew. Not understanding what was happening to her, I felt helpless, hurt, and confused. I also remember feeling some shame around my mother, as her illness progressed and our lives were increasingly constrained by her erratic behavior — sometimes deeply passive and listless, at other times agitated and very angry. I certainly didn't understand what was happening, and only knew that my mother was not there for me, and that her alternating patterns of depression and violence were relentlessly undermining the tranquility, order, and sense of meaning in my world. However I interpreted what was going on, I knew one thing for certain: I no longer had a mother.

My mother never recovered. Deeply devoted to her, my father was stricken with grief and loneliness, and tried for the first few years to handle the situation by keeping her at home and having in-house help. But that didn't work. My mother was too ill, my father couldn't find adequate help, and there were no effective medications at the time for my mother's illness. By the time I was nine, my mother disappeared from my life completely. She was sent first to a private hospital for two or three years, and then transferred to the Kalamazoo State Hospital for the "insane." All told, she spent seventeen years in an institution. Many years later, when her symptoms abated somewhat, my mother was able to live with my father again, but that was after I was grown and living my own independent life.

My father used to take us several times a year to visit my mother at the sanatorium. I was very uncomfortable with those visits, and resisted them. I was just a child, and could hardly recognize the woman who was my mother, sitting withdrawn in a rocking chair and sucking on her hair. I also distinctly remember the creaking sound of her rocking chair, and those of other patients, and the heavy smell of Lysol. I felt alone in a big world that was frightening, ugly, and that I did not understand. It was only years later that I recognized that the feelings of aloneness, emptiness, and chaos of my childhood years were also fertile ground for a search for meaning that would eventually greatly enrich my life beyond what I might otherwise have experienced.

Life continued under the lengthening shadow of the family's ongoing disintegration. My father did his best to continue his business while leaving the running of the household to either relatives or in-house help. In the summers, he would take us out to our Gull Lake summer home, built by my mother's grandfather Andrew. My father had always been a rather dashing and charismatic person who loved singing and reciting poetry, and I remember how he would sing a particularly poignant song in memory of my mother and the loss of our comfortable life. The song was called "Among My Souvenirs." Its words told how he felt about the loss of his wife, and gave a sense of the giant hole in his world:

There's nothing left for me of days that used to be;
I live in memory among my souvenirs.
Some letters tied with blue, a photograph or two;
I see a rose from you among my souvenirs.
A few more tokens rest within my treasure chest,
And though they do their best to give me consolation,
I count them all apart and as the teardrops start,
I find a broken heart among my souvenirs.

My father entrusted the care of his children during those summers in Gull Lake to my mother's two sisters, while he returned to our empty home and to his business. I never felt very comfortable with my aunts, whom I overheard tell my father that I was "strange." I loved Gull Lake, however, with its beautiful scenery and calm waters, and it was during those long summers that my first childlike efforts at redefining myself and creating a world I could accept began.

The games we choose to play and the way we entertain ourselves as children can tell a great deal about our inner state and aspirations. Gull Lake was full of turtles, and as a child I loved hanging out with them. I used to go down to the lake early in the morning or at dusk, sit on the dock, and watch the turtles come ashore to lay their eggs. They would scratch a big hole, dump their eggs in the hole in the sand, and without looking back head for the water. When the eggs hatched and the little turtles started developing, they would imitate their parents by climbing onto logs to catch the afternoon sun. When startled, they would shove themselves off the logs and swim toward the bottom.

I developed a way to catch turtles without using tools, nets, or buckets. I practiced first on the baby ones who were less experienced, and then graduated to the bigger ones. I was nearsighted, and I learned to swim with my old-style steel-rimmed glasses. When I saw the black, triangular head of a turtle I would swim underwater within ten feet of it. I would slowly and quietly submerge myself completely and swim on my side as fast as I could along the bottom. If I judged things correctly, and if I was lucky, I would come up behind the turtle and grab it between the front and back legs with both hands in the middle of its carapace, and then I would come up for air.

Eventually, I became good enough that I could catch the big, more experienced turtles as well as the little ones. I caught the same turtle year after year. I know this because the turtle had a hole in its shell with a chain, probably from a trap. The first time I caught it, I took it behind the shed and removed the chain with a pair of pliers. I told the story to my aunts and the next year I caught the same turtle again. My aunts told me "She wants to make it easy for you, because she is grateful." I was grateful to the turtle myself, feeling we had somehow become friends.

I became so good at catching turtles that members of my family, and then the community at large, called me the Turtle King of South Willow Beach, a name I wore with pride.

I spent most of my time in the summer not with family — my mother was no longer there, my father was absent, I never felt at home with my aunts, and while I was close to my siblings, my brother and sister often had other interests — but with turtles: underwater, in my shell, in another world. I wasn't consciously aware of it at the time, but I was doing the best I could to replace my everyday world, which no longer worked, and in which I felt extremely lonely, with a protected underwater world. That world was full of fascinating water bottoms, fishes, and currents, and I shared it with my true friends. I was escaping, and while escaping, beginning my search to find a world that could make sense to me.

The longer my mother was ill, the more difficult life became. My father was increasingly absent, spending long hours at work, and I began even as a pre-adolescent to raise myself. Things were further complicated by the fact that my father was never able to sit down with his children, talk with them, and comfort them around the loss of their mother, and his wife. We all had to figure it out for ourselves. I don't remember ever talking with my father about how the loss of my mother affected me, either during childhood, adolescence, or later as an adult.

There were other changes in my father during those years that further influenced my growing sense of alienation, and my need to figure out things for myself and find a meaning for my life that could help me through. As time went by, my father left homecare increasingly to hired help and absorbed himself for ever longer hours in his work. At the same time, his religious life, which he had taken casually at best during my earliest years, became an increasingly central concern to him. While he never spoke to me about it, I imagine that it was a sense of despair, of shattered life, and perhaps of guilt that motivated him to turn from the worldly and materialistic form of the life he had built, with only a casual nod to religion, to a life very concerned with his own "salvation" and that of his children.

Unfortunately, while my father must have seen himself as turning in middle age to the Christianity of his father, the way he did this, and the influence it had on me, was far from loving. He became a hard and rigid taskmaster, demanding that his children, like him, become born-again Christians. Whatever that meant to him, for me it was all tied up with rules and regulations: attendance at church two times on Sunday and at least one other time during the week, regular Bible readings and prayers, and the constant overseeing and sternness that my father must have associated with making sure his children did not slip into irredeemably sinful lives.

Gone was the playful, engaged father who knew instinctively how to connect with his children and who would tell them stories of Christopher Robin and Sam McGee. In its place was a man whose own guilt made him require a subjugation and belief from his children that must have paralleled his own deep inner sense that his misfortunes were all his fault in God's eyes. My father became a dogmatic, born-again Christian and in the process left love and warmth toward his next of kin out of the picture. Before my father's conversion, I felt he was for me, on my side. After his conversion, it seemed he had turned against me.

I have a vivid memory from the age of twelve, during a summer on Gull Lake, of my father bringing back to the house a colleague from the Gull Lake Bible conference. The man smelled of cheap after-shave lotion and sweat, and he and my father together forced me down onto my knees while my father demanded that I take Jesus "as my personal savior." Although over the years I learned to view myself and life in deeply religious terms, this experience had nothing of that religious flavor to it. It was all about coercion, rigidity, and subjugation, none of which have anything to do with what the historical Christ represents. Of course, I wasn't thinking in those terms then, but I certainly felt the alienation, control, and lack of love in my father's behavior. I refused his demand.

My father's conversion, and the way he expressed it, lost me my father, replacing him with a harsh disciplinarian. While my father must have felt he had returned to the religion of his own father, there was a vast difference between the two in the way their religious sense manifested. My grandfather emanated authority, but didn't ask for it. You wanted to hear him and listen to him and be with him simply because of who he was. My father, instead, demanded authority and obedience, but by virtue of this demand, failed to be convincing. His interior seemed empty.

True spirituality and religious commitment are about adherence to a transcendent order of things, an order that manifests itself through our own transformation into an increasingly loving person who then supports the well-being, growth, and transformation of others. Our own transformation, because it is so deep, is also always, in a certain sense, homegrown. It grows out of experience, often out of the sufferings and challenges of life, and out of the way life demands that we become bigger and better than we are. The study of religious texts and listening to religious sermons can provide deeply important stimuli along the way. But there is no text and no doctrine that can replace or substitute for the inner commitment to self and others that grows out of a profound self-questioning, and that forces us to confront the purpose of our life and of our relationship to others. When such self-questioning is deep, it leads to heightened compassion and care, and to an attempt to change the world for the better. But if we turn to a religious doctrine out of fear, anxiety, and guilt, as I believe on some level my father must have done, religious commitment becomes something imposed and doctrinaire. Instead of growing, we shrink as human beings.