Learning on Life’s Way: Remembering and Reflecting by a Teller of Tall Tales

By Paul R. Sponheim

Born into a pack of religiously divided siblings with a devout mother and an agnostic father, Sponheim finds the triad of faith/unfaith/many faiths central in telling the tall tale of God. Through his half-century of teaching and writing, the doctrine of creation becomes decisive for Sponheim, featuring a God who has a "very big operation going in this world." Drawing on such diverse mentors as Soren Kierkegaard, Alfred North Whitehead, and feminist authors, he offers a deeply relational conception of the "tallness," the height, humankind seeks. In his own family he sees God's operation in such diverse worlds as music, science, and athletics. Personally, he has witnessed the saving work of the Creator in such worldly affairs as inner city social change programs, a domestic abuse project, and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Without compromising a present-time "ethic of risk," he closes with an eschatological exploration, asking "What future would do, if it were true?" And "Is it true?"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Aug 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532650253

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Learning on Life’s Way

Remembering and Reflecting by a Teller of Tall Tales

Paul R. Sponheim

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Learning on Life’s Way

Remembering and Reflecting by a Teller of Tall Tales

Copyright © 2018 Paul R. Sponheim. 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.

Wipf & Stock

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-5023-9

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-5024-6

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-5025-3

Manufactured in the U.S.A. January 8, 2019

Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Into the Rapids

Chapter 2: The Channel Chosen

Chapter 3: Carried by the Current

A: Settling in Somehow: To Tell of the Creator’s Big Operation

B: Finding a Focus: To Write of God’s Tallness for the Creatures

Chapter 4: Heading for Harbor

A: Facing a Shrinking World

B: Given an Expanding World

C: Questioning and Questing Together

D: Learning on Life’s Way

Chapter 5: Portaging to a New Place

A: What Would Do, If It Were True?

B: Is It True?

Bibliography

To my grandchildren—Aidan, Caleb, Emmett,

Joey, Katrina, Rikke, Tom, Trygg—and their companion

generation—in penitence and hope

Preface

Boat Launching

As I begin this book, I confess I’m not sure how the library cataloguers will know on which shelf to place it. This is my story. I am aiming to write about things I have learned/am learning along the way of my life. In doing that I seek also to say something about how that learning itself takes place. So far so good, you say, It sounds like a memoir to me. Well, I suppose it is that. I’ll order my chapters chronologically, following my story through the circumstances and happenings that come together in my life. But I’ve got other fish to fry as well. I’ve been a member of some Christian community ever since I was baptized as a baby in 1930. More than that, I consider myself a teller of a tall tale. I am that, for I am a person whose nearly nine decades have been spent pondering Christian faith claims. I’ve spent most of my years pouring over and puzzling over those claims as a student or professor in church-supported institutions of higher learning. I’ll write of that pondering, so perhaps this book is a religious essay of sorts, presented in a far more personal form than other things I have written. Looking to make an assessment after all these years, I consider what lies ahead of you here a tall enough tale at any time. It is surely that in this time of disenchantment with many of the behaviors and beliefs we associate with churches, synagogues and mosques. I believe religious claims can refer to realities beyond and before the claiming. More specifically, I want to claim the Christian story is true. But the climb to that claim is steep.

For whom do I write this mixed bag, then? Well, family and close friends might pick up a memoir by yours truly. Perhaps some college and seminary professors, knowing a little of my resumé, might turn these pages hoping to learn something by comparing their classroom experience to mine. Yet I aim for a wider audience. I think every person who finds an abiding challenge in life’s choices may relate with interest to an author who owns up to finding faith—his faith—a tall tale, but keeps on talking all the same. Thus, in chapters 1 and 2 I focus mainly on familial matters, noting converging influences and reflecting on transformative events. Chapter 3, a long chapter covering my four decades of full-time teaching, continues to attend to my personal development, but emphasizes the emerging theological orientation norming my tall tale telling in spoken or written word. Chapter 4 opens with reflections on the experience of entering official retirement, but moves decisively to a consideration of the contemporary experience of radical religious difference. The final chapter attempts an imaginative theological proposal regarding the final future awaiting us all. Unsurprisingly, I gradually move to employ more explicitly theological terminology and a greater sprinkling of footnotes. A grandchild’s reading focus may differ from that of a pastoral or professional colleague. To all/any of you, I say, Welcome aboard! We’ll see how it works out, won’t we?

I write of learning on life’s way. You may know that Søren Kierkegaard, the prolific Danish genius, wrote a book named Stages on Life’s Way. My book is not a commentary on Kierkegaard’s, though it is quite certain that he planted one of the seeds that struggle to flower here.¹ I’m also conscious of the fact that the earliest followers of Jesus of Nazareth spoke of their journey as the Way. Can we, can I, join their journey? The way is not always easy. Indeed, some African American women have been moved to write of making a way out of no way.² I have in mind as well specifically the American story. Frontier America was a nation of immigrants, moving westward until Pacific shores were reached. Actually, that kind of sweeping language about things American vastly oversimplifies matters. African Americans would not speak of their America-bound ancestors as immigrants. The slave trade brought millions of human beings to this land, but not by their own choice. Native Americans were also on the move as on a Trail of Tears, through forced removal from lands that were rightly theirs.³ The nation of immigrants story does report on the White frontier and that story has dominated our history books.⁴ It is helpful for Caucasian residents of the Phillips neighborhood in Minneapolis to realize that their new neighbors from Somalia face many of the same challenges their Swedish ancestors did a century and a half ago. But it matters much that we probe to ask what it was that brought and still brings highly diverse newcomers to this land.

Still more broadly, I stress the notion of movement in my title because I think the nature of reality, as we know it from the physicists, is a becoming, a coming to be. I’ve liked to say in class, The Rock of Gibraltar exists from moment to moment. There will be more ahead on that, as I chronicle the contribution to this story made by Alfred North Whitehead, the great Cambridge mathematician and cosmologist. To sum up, Christians look ahead more than up, and other human beings as well give their deeds to the future. Thus, I’ve spoken of us creatures as horizontal people. I’ve appropriated the metaphor of flowing water to convey this sense of motion in my life. If the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus was right that all things flow, then diverse elements that make up a constantly coursing river might represent comparable aspects of a life.

Learning happens on the lean. Travel can be our teacher. That’s been important in my personal story, as my wife and I with our children made a point of making many trips to other parts of the United States. Sabbaticals and personal commitments at times brought us across the Atlantic and to Pacific islands to learn of the tastes and traditions of far-off places. If we put down our cameras for a while and live the experience of the moment in a strange land, we will learn. That learning will bear on what we claim as our tall tale and on it’s telling.

So, what posture, what tonality in reception, do I ask of you, my reader(s)? For the story of my life and the tall tale I tell I invite you to blend suspicion and humility. The two can come together somehow in a measured willingness to have a look at this writing, to consider how it might contribute to your well-being. That’s how I have tried to travel on life’s way. To err is indeed human. I regret that my memory is less well stocked than I would like and my judgment is certainly open to question. I surely have some things wrong in my seeing and saying. As you engage my writing, you do well to be suspicious of my execution, not to mention my motive. Moreover, the tall tale told here makes extravagant claims on the hearer’s life and the survival of your sanity may require suspicion at many points. Yet readers themselves have not escaped the finitude that they will find painfully evident in me as an author. To learn on life’s way, not least from the pages of a book, it helps immensely to recognize that one always has something to learn. One stretches that a little in supposing that any author has something to teach. But we won’t know until we try, will we? So, let’s go forward in a spirit of trust, preserving some suspicion while humbly recognizing our neediness as fallible human beings.

1. I wrote the introduction to the Schocken edition of this Kierkegaard text back in

1967

.

2. Coleman, Making a Way.

3. On the slave trade see Walker, Mothership Connections. On the Native American Trail of Tears, Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee remains a useful classic study.

4. A much-cited accounting is Mead’s The Lively Experiment. For a more balanced view see Coleman, That the Blood Stay Pure.

Acknowledgments

As I launch this frail craft, I wish I could name in appreciation many extended family members—uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, cousins and many others as the family stretches out. That goes as well for help received from many people—my official teachers and students, faculty and staff colleagues—at my schools in Thief River Falls, Minneapolis, Moorhead, St. Paul and Chicago. I am grateful as well for my hosts in Copenhagen, Claremont, Cambridge and Collegeville. I am indebted to the people and pastors of the churches where I’ve been a member, particularly at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Roseville since 1969. Four friends and three family members have been especially helpful with this manuscript: Kirsten Mebust, Gary Olson, Joey, Tom and Valerie Sponheim, Curtis Thompson and Scott Tunseth. In waters rough and smooth my wife Nell has lovingly made this journey with me, steadfastly saying, You should write this memoir and seek its publication.

Many thanks to my endorsers, as well, for reviewing the book, and taking the time to write their endorsement.

At the press I thank Matt Wimer, my project manager, RaeAnne Harris, Kyle Lundburg, Ben Dieter and Nathan Rhoads, my copy editor. Finally, I want gratefully to acknowledge that on life’s way I have been

disturbed and challenged,

sustained and corrected, and

invited and inspired

by a veritable multitude. Thanks be to God!

1

Into the Rapids

A Degree of Difference (1930–48)

At the outset i’ll acknowledge that I don’t have many very datable memories of my earliest years. I have one visual memory of my maternal grandfather, John Weeks, before his death when I was eight years old. I certainly remember the Armistice Day blizzard of 1940 and gathering around the family radio to get the reports of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. About the same time, I remember competing in the high jump as a fourth grader. Earlier than that, I do have some vivid memories, such as one of my brother Don chasing me around the house with a knife in his hands. (Mother got things straightened out between us.) It’s hard to put dates on these memories or on those of mother’s Bible stories or of the croquet games in the back yard. Thank goodness, I do remember my high school teachers. But I would get a low score on the elementary school teachers, though I certainly remember that dark cloakroom where we hung our coats. I’ll have to hope that the fragments I do have can fit together in the clearer structure of my double-digit years.

Differing Parental Love, Agreeing to Disagree, Sibling Homogeneity, Money Problems

I know that some psychologists emphasize how important the first few years of life are with respect to the experience of affection.¹ As far back as I can raise a glimmer of memory, I knew my mother loved me. Her love truly seemed unconditional. She was for me, more specifically, the exemplification of a Christian life, as I understood that calling from my Sunday school classes. She’s still that for me today, even if the marker Christian life carries some changes now. Then there was in the category a quite prominent place for self-denial, but even so I remember being glad that she could brag about being a very good speller. Not a high school graduate, she was happy to have been a certified teacher in a rural school (Radium, Minnesota) before marriage. She received inadequate medical care throughout her life and so the mother I remember was very stooped and could not bend one arm. She would smile and say, I’ll stand tall in heaven. She was sure about that and it gave her strength and hope in the midst of a life filled with suffering aplenty. Her wedding picture shows a tall and beautiful young woman.

I early learned that dad seemed to be in charge of most everything and that he had high expectations for his children. Later my brother Don and I came up with the theory that as a failed Homestead Act farmer on untillable land near Grygla, Minnesota, he saw himself—and/or believed he was seen—as the black sheep of his family. His offspring were his chance to prove his siblings wrong. He was not prone to sweet sayings, and drilled his kids hard on their golfing swings as they hit cotton balls against the garage wall. If you didn’t enjoy criticism, you probably didn’t want to be his partner in the family Rook games. Still, softening this grim image, there were those Saturday night after-bath-time drives down to the local ice cream store. In many ways mother and dad were polar opposites in personality, but somehow they made a marriage together, if not one featuring equality.

What about my siblings? Family therapists speak of how no two siblings are born into the same family. As the parents change year by year, the family takes new shape quietly or dramatically. All the same, I perceived a lot of continuity and consistency in the family as represented by my disagreeing parents. Further, the six of us Sponheim kids—Harlon, Irwin and Marion (the older trio), Carol, Don and I (the younger)—looked like each other and we certainly knew nothing of difference in terms of racial identity or sexual orientation. Moreover, Thief River Falls, Minnesota, the geographical and cultural context for the texts of our early lives, was characterized by a strong homogeneity. As far as I knew, exactly one Jewish family resided in town. The prevailing foreigner for our family was Roman Catholicism. Later, from the elevated perch of college years, we would joke about a mixed marriage being one that joined a Norwegian Lutheran and a Swedish one. We didn’t have a whole lot of contact with the wider, pre-Internet world. There was very little travel because that takes money. We didn’t have a lot of visitors either. Dad’s sister Marie and her husband, Carl, would come over from North Dakota. They were wealthy farmers and one sensed dad’s tension through the times of their coming. Mom’s younger sister, Helen, would come up from Wadena with her husband, Roy. Helen was highly placed in the women’s organization for the Lutheran church and there was some sense of comparison and perhaps even competition in the air during their visits. That was surely clear out in the back yard where Don and I would compete in touch football and punting skills against the Storvick pair, Olin and David. They were older than we were and, well, better at about everything we tried. Later Olin turned up at Concordia College as a classics professor, after my time there. He was known as the gentle giant who moved much more