Them: “What are you so angry about? What are you rebelling against?”‘

Us: “Whadda ya got?”

So it went and so it was. There was a lot of anger in the air in The Day, although few of us really had an idea of why. We just knew something was wrong and we were angry about it.

In Behind Blue Eyes: The Life of Pete Townshend, Geoffrey Guiliano writes, “In ‘My Generation’ Townshend first released the anger and frustration he would never outgrow.

I think Guiliano is right about Townshend and about many of us who grew up in the Sixties. We were and are angry; we’ve never outgrown it. A lot of us have, maybe even most of us, seduced by the comforts of capitalism and having made an unholy tryst with an ugly culture and mentality. But not all of us, even though we may have tried to do so.

I’m still angry.

“What are you so angry about?”

Well, I’m angry about Patricia and Anna Moore’s little sister.

I don’t really know how old I was. I was old enough to remember the fire clearly and have vivid images in my mind’s eye, but I wasn’t old enough to know what was going on. I’ll guess that it was 1959, give or take a year.

One of my sisters woke me up in what seemed to my boyish clock to be the middle of the night. All she said was something to the effect that the Moore’s house was on fire.

The Moore family lived almost directly behind us, just across a one-lane dirt alley that separated the two sides of my supersized block in Terre Haute, Indiana. I don’t remember how many children they had: they didn’t have any boys my age so I didn’t pay much attention to them. Patricia and Anna, though, went to school with my sisters and were kinda friends. I knew them and thought they were cool.

When I got to the fire the two-story, wooden house was totally engulfed in flames. I remember the brightness and the heat given off, and a few mothers in the neighborhood who were holding their small children in their arms. It was probably winter but not very cold. Plus the fire was very hot.

I remember seeing Anna and maybe Patricia crying. I remember feeling bad for them: I sure didn’t want to think about my own house burning to the ground.

We didn’t stay long. We’d seen a lot of fires here and there in the neighborhood and the novelty of one so close to home wore off quickly.

I learned the next day that Patricia and Anna Moore’s little sister died in the fire. I don’t think I ever knew her name. A little while later I learned that it had taken the fire department forty-five minutes to respond to the first call. The fire station was one street over and one street down. Two blocks. Forty-five minutes.

A little girl died because the fire department didn’t come when they were first called. They waited.

Did I mention that this was around 1959?

Did I mention that the Moore family was black?

My town was racist back then; it may still be so. But that was one of the first things I remember that contributed to the anger and frustration I’ve pretty much always felt. The THFD took their time because they didn’t feel any sense of urgency to respond to a house fire two blocks away but across U.S. 41, the dividing line between blacks and whites in our town. I lived in a ghetto. I didn’t know it but I did.

It still makes me angry now, almost fifty years later. I recognize that the death of a nameless black girl has become a symbol of sorts for me, and that my anger is not just about her death. It’s about all the mind-numbing horror that has been dumped on people for years and years by people who ought to have known better. People who grew up when the U.S. was more Christian than now.

And I’m still angry because it’s still happening. The groups have changed, perhaps, but the inhumanity and hatred continue. Maybe we call them “illegal aliens” now and think of them as illegal but treat them as though they’re aliens. Non-human. Not capable of love or deep feelings or saving faith or devotion to Christ or any other thing that makes us human but not them.

The churches in my town were silent about the whole thing. Nobody thought it was usual. And what really gets to me even now, what almost brings me to tears as I write this and think about it, is that the black people in my neighborhood weren’t surprised either. They had come to expect it. It had been going on for years and years and years.

And I hated it and I still hate it and I’ll rage against it until the day I die. Or, I hope I die before I stop hating what happened. I’m angry.

“What are you so angry about? What are you rebelling against?”

“Whadda ya got?”

“Tom White Bear said his mother and dad told him not to believe all that stuff. But he said his grandmother whispered it was true anyway, so he believes it.”

He looks at me pleadingly. He really does want to know things sometimes. Being facetious is not being a very good father. “Sure,” I say, reversing myself, “I believe in ghosts too.”

Now John and Sylvia look at me peculiarly. I see I’m not going to get out of this one easily and brace myself for a long explanation.

“It’s completely natural,” I say, “to think of Europeans who believed in ghosts or Indians who believed in ghosts as ignorant. The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive, so that if a person today talks about ghosts or spirits he is considered ignorant or maybe nutty. It’s just all but completely impossible to imagine a world where ghosts can actually exist.”

John nods affirmatively and I continue.

“My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn’t that superior. IQs aren’t that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.”

“What?”

“Oh, the laws of physics and of logic — the number system — the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.

“They seem real to me,” John says.

“I don’t get it,” says Chris.

So I go on. “For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.”

“Of course.”

“So when did this law start? Has it always existed?”

John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at.

“What I’m driving at,” I say, “is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed.”

“Sure.”

“Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone’s mind because there wasn’t anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere…this law of gravity still existed?”

Now John seems not so sure.

“If that law of gravity existed,” I say, “I honestly don’t know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that that law of gravity didn’t have. Or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. And yet it is still `common sense’ to believe that it existed.”

John says, “I guess I’d have to think about it.”

“Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.

“And what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.”

. . .

John shakes his head and pours me another drink. He puts his hand over his mouth and in a mock aside says to Sylvia, “You know, most of the time he seems like such a normal guy.”

I counter, “That’s the first normal thing I’ve said in weeks. The rest of the time I’m feigning twentieth-century lunacy just like you are. So as not to draw attention to myself.

“But I’ll repeat it for you,” I say. “We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world. That, John, is ridiculous.

“The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it’s just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either.”

They are just looking at me so I continue: “Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.”

John looks too much in thought to speak. But Sylvia is excited. “Where do you get all these ideas?” she asks.

I am about to answer them but then do not. I have a feeling of having already pushed it to the limit, maybe beyond, and it is time to drop it.

After a while John says, “It’ll be good to see the mountains again.”

“Yes, it will,” I agree. “one last drink to that!”

Early in the motorcycle journey from Minnesota to Montana, the speaker (for the book is written in first-person limited) takes time to explain his understanding of understanding. He says,

“But right now I just want to use a dichotomy and explain it later. I want to divide human understanding into two kinds - classical understanding and romantic understanding. . . .

“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. . . .

“The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. . . .

“The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws - which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior . . .”

The narration goes on but I want to interrupt for a moment. When I read “romantic” and “classic” I think “Praxis” and “Theology.” And by “Praxis” I mean the living out of the Christian life, not something divorced from reason or knowledge but instead something growing out of it and also informing it. I could call it Peripateo, the word for “walk” but Praxis, “practice,” is perhaps more familiar and thus preferable.

I am not saying that experience or Praxis should determine doctrine or Theology. I am saying that Praxis should illuminate Theology. And illuminate it by both demonstrating the truth of the doctrine and deepening or even modifying our understanding of knowledge and doctrine.

Then narrator says, “Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classical.” My application is this: “Although Praxis is romantic (as defined here), Theology is purely classical (as defined here).”

He adds,

“The classic style [Theology] is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control.”

And then he adds this important observation:

“Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one more or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about.”

If this doesn’t describe most of the division in evangelical Christianity, I don’t know what does. It is not only in the “world” that reason is elevated and affect marginalized: it is certainly true any many segments of evangelicalism, too.

Having been spiritually raised in a Bible Church environment, I have looked disdainfully in the past at those who seemed to draw their knowledge of God almost exclusively from their experiences. And their experiences, it seemed to me, tended to dictate their doctrine and beliefs.

I no longer look at such people with disdain but I still think the generalization is largely true. Such people are the romantics of Christendom, enthralled by the beauty and grandeur of Christianity but negligent or ignorant of the structure and foundation necessary to support it.

But the knife cuts another way, too. My own experience has been largely, if not exclusively, in classical or Theological understanding. It has been cerebral and reasonable, clinical and sterile. Feelings, emotions, experience have been relegated to a lower status, as though they were creations of a lessor god.

The merging of these two ways of understanding lie down the path of Christian maturity. I have only begun trying figure out how to think about these things and how to live them out. I’ll talk later about what constitutes excellence or genuine maturity, but for now I’ll only say that it requires both of these modes in proper relationship to one another.

Important and significant as this has been for me, it is not what caused the seismic paradigm shift for me. That lies elsewhere, but much needs to be explained before I can get there.