Is God Dead Yet?

By Dale A. Johnson

Dale A. Johnson is an ordained priest of the Syriac Orthodox Church. He is an internationally recognized linguist, humanitarian, lecturer on the language of Jesus and texts related to Aramaic and Syriac studies. He is the winner of the North Carolina State Role Model Leadership Award (2006) which includes other notable winners such as Maya Angelou, Gov. James Hunt, and founders of Habitat for Humanity.
He has lived in the Middle East, Caribbean, and Asia for many years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781300735779

Book preview

Is God Dead Yet?

Is God Dead Yet?

I hope so!

An autobiography

By Dale A. Johnson

Copyright © 2013  by Dale A. Johnson

All rights  reserved.

This book, or no parts thereof, may be reproduced

in any  form  without  express written  permission

Library of congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dale A. Johnson

Is God Dead Yet?

I hope so!

autobiography

ISBN 978-1-300-73577-9

Manufactured in the United States of America

First e- edition

February  2013

[e-mail]

Dedicated to:

Brad Munn, for his support and friendship

the Braun family for their love and help

Joanne Lamont, Bernie and Stacie Swain

for being extraordinary volunteers

Burk Childers for his appetite for spiritual conversation

and all others who

have believed in me

Introduction: Is God Dead Yet?

This book will disturb and upset you if you are one of the following kinds of Christians. If you are an evangelical Christian you will be upset because I do not accept the bible as the inerrant word of God. It is more than a rulebook to be slavishly followed. It is so much more. It is literature and imaginative fiction mixed with real history. If you are Roman Catholic you will be upset because I believe in a God of unlimited Grace and unconditional love. I am against the use of sacraments to punish people and withhold the love of God even if this is possible. If you are a mainline Christian of the protestant kind you will be upset because you have forgotten to preach the gospel and have substituted social ministry for transformational power of God's love to change human lives. If you are a purpose driven protestant of the Rick Warren kind then you will be outraged by this book because you cannot make up your religion. God breaks through our addictions, our polite mortgage based life; he breaks through the shadows of the towering shopping malls that lure us to the false hope of happiness, and shines his light on every creepy thing we have ever done and every skeleton without backbone, and reveals our fake, unhappy, deadbeat existence.

If you meet God on the road...kill him! This of course is a variation on a Buddhist proverb. What this really means is that the idea of the sacred we hold onto and use to define ourselves is an illusion and construct of our self righteousness and self centerers. The sooner it dies the better. Unfortunately these various ideas of God are institutionalized in our various denominations. If you attend a Joel Osteen church in Texas you would think the Jesus carries an American passport, loves football, and would love nothing more than to be your psychologist. This is not the God I know and at some level on consciousness this is not the God that authentically transformed people know. It is just that there are few other options for a Christian who lives in the land of Touchdown Jesus. If you are an Irish Catholic who attend church in Boston you live in fear of excommunication for holding an idea that abortion is sometimes the most compassionate decision and action. Pat Kennedy, congressman from Rhode Island was recently denied the Eucharist. You punish people with sacraments that are supposed to represent the love of God? Wow, this is some church that will punish a politician for not believing the infallible teachings of the church. Boy, what a tough and powerful God. I guess that would keep me in line. How is this supposed to appeal to the person who is broken by bad decisions, the injustice of poverty, and the oppression of the powerful of society? Tell this person to come to the altar and receive the sacraments of life....only be careful because you might be given a test on the teachings of the church and if you do not pass then we will withhold these most precious gifts from you. Just forget that these gifts are freely given to ALL and have already been paid for by the blood of Jesus. I would rather see the sacraments in the hands of the poor, the neglected, and destitute than on the clean altar cloths of the church.

Is god dead yet, the god of vengeance whom the Psalmist asks to smash the heads of his enemies babies against the rocks, the god who can be blackmailed with prayers for prosperity, the god who will entertain you on Sundays with rock bands and movie screens? Is this god dead yet and replaced with the God who  is beyond anthropomorphic description and control, the God who loves unconditionally but treats us with all seriousness and never gives up on us? Is this God alive and well? I hope so!

I write this autobiography for no other reason than to pass on a central wisdom. My life is none of my business. It has taken many years to learn this truth but I believe we are all destined to confront this truth. My life in and of itself is not important but in connection with larger historical  forces and a universal consciousness that pokes its head into the business of living a wisdom beyond, a wisdom deeper, and higher begins to emerge.

So what is my business if it isn't my life? It is hospitality...service to others. There is no other way to find our life than to lose it in service to others. It seems counter-intuitive at first but the fact is we cannot see our own face unless we look in a mirror. The faces of those we serve mirror back to us our true self.

Life as Metaphor: 1950-1968

I grew up on a dairy farm in the State of Washington, north of Seattle in the beautiful Skagit Valley. It was a green swath of land that flowed from the Cascade mountains to the Puget Sound stamped with hundreds of dairy farms. It was the perfect place to learn the great lessons of life.

The Skagit Valley is not a valley at all. It is a flood plain formed by glacial action 15 million years ago. On the west is a deep canyon of  salt water bays and inlets called the Puget  Sound. To the east the Cascade Mountains loom over the Skagit plain framed by the ever white snows of Mt. Baker. Snaking its way through the Skagit plain is a river, the last vestige of an ice age  that melted and left behind  muddy soils and gravel to form a thick layer of farm land as rich as the Nile delta.

Indigenous tribes of hunter gather groups lived feasting upon the shellfish and abundant sea-life. Ancient forests of cedar trees formed a boundary to the plain at the foothills of the Cascades. The proximity of the mountain to the sea allowed the natives to easily migrate from the seashore to the berry rich high meadows where hundreds of streams spilled out into the delta plain. Creating an ever shifting pattern of canals When Scandinavian settlers of the 19th century flooded the Skagit delta they built dikes and dug out sloughs to control the landscape. It was a losing battle at first unlike the success they had at pushing out the shy and retreating native Skagit tribes. Eventually dams and better engineering slowed the shifting delta. Fences and farms created a stable web of boundaries that the new people could call their own.

My father was a newcomer to the valley. He was born into a Finnish family of fisher-folk in 1910 on the edge of the Columbia River on Stringtown road in Chinook, Washington. His mother died three years later leaving behind a husband who did not have much time or use for his nine children. My father was raised by his older sister and brothers. When his older brother came home from college with a new bride, my father hid out in the barn for three days. Eventually he reconciled with the new changes in his life. Like his brothers he attended Washington State University only to be faced with an abbreviated college career with the collapse to his local bank and the loss of his entire savings in 1929. With no way to pay for college he and his brother took a job as herdsmen for a large dairy farm on the edge of the Columbia River where explorers Lewis and Clark had once camped but left because of the noise of the ducks at night. For the next 20 years, he and his brother managed Chicona farms. One of my father's jobs was to take prize cattle to various dairy shows on the West Coast. He showed cows at the Cow Palace in San Francisco at its opening in 1941, at the fair grounds in Denver, and many other places. It was this core experience with cattle that grow out of a personal and national crisis that shaped the life of my father.

The owner of Chicona farms gave my father and uncle several dairy cows each as a reward for 20 years of service and as a final goodbye to the farm. The farm land was donated to Washington State University.  The rest of the cattle were sold and my father began a search for a new life. In those 20 years he had gotten married to my mother who worked for the local utility company and they headed north to the Skagit Valley in search of a farm and a new life. At first my father worked for another farmer, George Dynes, until they were able to save enough money to buy their own farm.

I arrived at 1720 Britt Slough Road in a white 1950 Ford in the lap of my mother in the spring of 1953. My mother and father were joyous after going through the rigorous process to adopt me from the Lutheran Family Welfare Agency in Seattle. They first saw me December 1951 on the front page of the Seattle Times newspaper in a state of distress. My picture was on the front page and I had tears rolling down my eyes pointing to the caption below that was making an appeal to the readers to contribute to the county Christmas fund. This was the stimulus for my mother to begin an adoption process. She had already given birth to two children.  The first child was born in 1948 and something was seriously wrong. He was eventually diagnosed with Down's Syndrome, given a death sentence, and my mother and father were encouraged to send him to a State institution for the mentally infirm in Buckley, Washington.  The next child was born in 1950 and died of asphyxiation from the birth cord being wrapped around her next.  She lived only a few hours. Adoption was my mother's hope for a normal family. I am not so sure this is what she got.

Nevertheless, I began my life on a dairy farm.

As an adopted child, I,  like other adopted children had a sense of being chosen. I loved the stories of Moses, Oedipus, King Arthur, and all the other men of legend and lore who were raised by other families. They too were chosen and because they were chosen they were special and destined to extraordinary lives. I knew that an extraordinary life involved suffering. The greatness of Moses was forged in the fire of self discovery. Raised to be a great leader he eventually discovers his birth family and this leads to a fall from grace and exile. Only in the bright glare of the burning bush does he hear the voice that leads him, although reluctantly, to the high mountain of leadership and responsibility. Oedipus was doomed to kill his father and marry his mother, a prophesy against which he fought all his life. It was this very fight and resistance that created the conditions that led to the fulfillment of the prophesy. King Arthur was raised by a shepherd and in the tranquility of farm country only to return to draw the sword from the stone and reveal to others that the true king had returned. These lessons formed a myriad of questions in my young mind. This was the beginning of my search to seek my life purpose and destiny with both fear and curiosity. The search would be shaped and reformed many times over the course of my life always tempered by the warnings and wonders of these stories.

My mother was a nervous mother. Her bible was Dr. Spock's Baby Book. Everything she needed to know was in that book. I was not held much because that was the principle of Dr. Spock's theory of child raising. Even to this day I do not like to be touched.

My brother Dennis joined us after six months. He was in the same orphanage that I had been in. He had suffered the effects of nutritional deprivation and had been diagnosed with Rickets. This   is a serious disease due to lack of vitamin C. It affects the bones and nervous system. I believe that my brother's lack of success in school and life is due to this early preventable disease. He died at age 55 crippled and alone.

My brother Allen was diagnosed with Down's Syndrome a severe and debilitating genetic condition that produces mental retardation and a number of other physical symptoms. Allen was 15 months older and the biological child of my mother.  She had a daughter before Allen who died a few hours after child birth. It was a sorrow my mother carried with her all her life.

Allen went to a State School at age five. My parents has little choice as this was the strong recommendation of doctors. At the time schools had no capacity to educate these special students. Allen came home on the holidays and these were times of great joy and reunion. At some level there was a feeling of abandonment in all of us children. Allen would cry uncontrollably every time he would get in the car to go back to Rainier School in Buckley where he lived in Perceval Hall warehoused with 80 other children with various genetic and birth injuries.

Allen never met a person who didn't deserve a hug. He was the most loving human being I have ever met and he taught me tolerance and love as no other person.

At the age of six years, I began to help my father every evening with the milking of about 30 cows. I brushed the cows when they came into the flat barn because my father believed this to be a good practice for both the health and comfort of the cow. I learned the full name of every cow because all our cows were registered Guernsey’s. These are the brown and white cows sometimes called golden Guernsey’s. Our milk was sold to a dairy cooperative called Darigold, a company made up of farmers from the valley. Guernseys were highly valued because of their milk made golden by the natural golden color in the milk. This produced yellow cheese unlike other breeds such as the Holstein, Jersey, Ayrshire, or Brown Swiss. In later years, local Guernsey farmers sold their milk, including ours, to a pizza factory specifically for the golden cheese color.

Registered Guernseys were cows who were registered with a national office by the distinctive markings each animal was born with. Also, the animal had to have a purebred dam and sire who was also registered. As a calf grew into a heifer (one year of age) and a heifer was bred (about 18 months of age) and became a cow and began to produce milk (about 2.5 years of age), data was collected for each individual animal. A milk tester would come to our farm every month and weigh the milk each animal produced over a 24 hour period. He would then test the milk for butterfat, with special tiny scientific capsules dropped in a test tube of milk, calculate the percentage and further test for solids in the milk such as protein with the help of a centrifuge. He would do all this in our milk house where each cow's milk was delivered in a 10 gallon can. The data would be sent to Washington State University and we would get a report on the annual production of each animal. An annual average was determined for each herd based on 305 days of milking, the average length on time a cow lactates. This was all part of a system called the Dairy Herd Improvement Association.

Each year we would attend a banquet in a local high school gym and a catalogue of data would be given to each farmer along with awards for herds with the highest milk and butterfat production. This information would be broken down into individual breeds. It was thrilling to see our herd near the top in production every year for Guernsey herds.

Also there would be a lecture given by a dairy expert about emerging issues in the dairy industry. But one year we had Dr. Bradbury speak. He was our local veterinarian. I had seen him many times come to our farm and treat our cows for milk fever, infections, difficult birth, and also to administer the required vaccinations. I also knew him to be the most intelligent man I knew. He was a real scientist always working on some new procedure or medication. He believed he had discovered a cure for mastitis, a debilitating infection in the mammary glands of cows and other mammals. He showed us a series of slides on whales and milk production. I was fascinated by the pictures of newly born whale calves suckling off their mothers. My views of the world expanded. I had thought that only cows produced milk. Now I understood it was a feature of all mammals.

This broader and expanding view made me curious about life in general. I watched calves be born, our bull selectively breed some of our cows. I learned of the connection between dams and daughters and genetic manipulation. You see, the purpose of our farm was to produce superior dairy cattle, cattle that would produce more milk and butterfat every year. To do this each daughter had to be better than her mother. We could measure this by comparing the milk production of the dam to the daughter. Therefore we had to use bulls that were proven to throw daughters who produced more milk and butterfat than their dams. Guernsey bulls from around the nation were selected from high producing dams. After the bull produced ten daughters, their records would be compared to their dams to see if they were superior to their dams. If the bull produced daughters that produced more milk and butterfat than their dams then we would say the bull is proven. A great bull would produce daughters that would produce more than a thousand pounds of milk a year more than their dams and one hundred pounds of butterfat. It was my father's dream to produce a proven bull who could contribute to the success of the breed.

My father produced two bulls over his lifetime that was selected for national use in the breed. These bulls went to live on a bull farm where semen was collected from them every week. Their semen was stored in liquid nitrogen tanks and shipped to various areas of the country and world where cows would be artificially inseminated. Our one bull Dairyboy was a 1000/100 plus bull in the dam daughter comparison system.

Our best cow was named Denny-Dale Buster's Beautiful. Denny-Dale was the name of our farm. Buster was the name of the sire and Beautiful was the name of this excellent animal. Her name started with the letter b because her dam's name started with the same letter. It was a simple system. By learning the name of all the animals I was able to determine the relationships of each animal to the others. We have cows whose names started with B, others with  H, others with J and many more letters. My first calf I owned was named Jill. She produced five daughters, Jingle, Jangle, Jackie, Jazzabell, and Julie. Four of those daughters produced 100,000 pounds of milk in their lifetimes and she was declared a Gold Star Dam by the National Guernsey Association.

Beautiful was my father's pride and joy. One of her son's was Dairyboy.  Pictures of them adorned our house. These were my early lessons in genetics.

Artificially insemination was a new technology that arrived in the Skagit Valley about the time I did. The dairy cattle industry was being revolutionized by the discovery of effective ways to preserve bull semen. One bull could produce daughters in thousands of animals and hundreds of herds. This put the genetic revolution on the fast track. Diary cattle from 1950 to 1970 almost doubled production in milk. The downside of the revolution is that it shortened the lives of cattle. Cattle nutrition improved and soon there was a surplus of milk. The government stepped in and farmers were paid to kill their cows.

I saw the power of human beings to change and manipulate the external world while simultaneously not being able to change their inner selves. What was the purpose of life I wondered?  Was it merely to milk cows and produce animals with shorter life spans? During the late 50s and early 60s crop planes sprayed nearby fields with deadly pesticides. I learned about DDT and its dangers from a book a book by Rachel Carson called the Silent Spring. Clouds of pesticide drifted onto our pastures. Cattle ate the grass and for two years we saw 33 calves born with all the signs of genetic damage from pesticides.  I watched calves born with their skin