10. The Mimeograph Machine

The intellectual radicalization of my graduate school years, which I described in the previous installment, was enormously complicated by the simultaneous three-year struggle with my religion, the personal faith with which I had grown up and seen develop in college. The two “sides” were related, of course; each would continue, over time, to inform and change the other. The period was the same—from late ’67 to late ’70. Through it all, I considered myself a committed Christian, though I was aware from that first year at the University that the nature of my Christian outlook was undergoing a profound and life-changing shift.

It was in the milieu of my university courses that I was confronted, full-force, with the reality of the Vietnam War and my own growing angst at how unjust and unnecessary it was. At first it created merely confusion for me, so I decided to undertake a reading program of my own, apart from my classes, in whatever spare time I could make. I would read as widely as I could, I decided, about war, and I would read from those whom I took to be informed Christians writing about what was going on in the world.

I bought books, more than I should have. What I couldn’t afford to buy, I sought from the university’s libraries. Mostly Christian books—radical Christian books. As it turned out, three writers ended up catching my attention in a big way, and toward the end of that first year of graduate school, by about the end of ‘67, my own Christian—i.e., political/theological—reading was underway. During that spring and summer of ’68, seldom an afternoon would go by that I did not gather up three of four of my books and cross the street to Hess Park where I would prop myself up at a big tree and read and think. I was almost overwhelmed by the war and its horror by then—that went back even to my editorial writing and Democratic National Convention days in Decatur and Chicago. I watched the news carefully and read the New York Times as often as I could buy it. I was deeply moved in ’67 by the enormous anger-producing antiwar march on Washington DC.

I was needing help, though, with how to think about war, period. It was not a subject that I had ever really been introduced to; and now it was affecting me to the point where it was all I could do to keep focused on my graduate studies, where I was hearing about it, too. I learned at one level to keep the two intellectual areas separate in my mind; at another level, though, everything was starting to meld together.

By the end of 1968, three writers were working on me mightily. The first was probably the most famous American pacifist of the twentieth century. Little known actually, he was a Protestant preacher, a clergyman, then in his 80s. He had been a conscientious objector in both World Wars I and II, and now was advocating not just conscientious objection to the war in Vietnam, but all-out opposition to it; and he was doing so on the basis of a unique and powerful Christian outlook—an intensely appealing outlook to me. His name was A. J. Muste, and the book I stumbled onto—Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice had referred to him in one issue and I went looking—the book I stumbled onto was a thick black tome titled, simply, The Essays of A. J. Muste.

I ordered the book and found myself utterly transformed by what I read. His essays were profoundly Christian, drawing on ways I had never read before about the words, the life, and even the death of Jesus Christ. Muste was original, as far as I could tell. He was not doctrinaire, not angry, not legalistic, though he was startlingly biblical. By that time I had read a number of books about Christian pacifism, but none has really convinced me, none had moved me; in fact, some had repelled me. But when I read all of Muste’s essays, I couldn’t believe their effect on me. I had underlined sections on virtually every page with a heavy black pen. I read the entire book again, but this time I underlined in red, sometimes the same words as before, sometimes not. I would come back a few weeks later, sitting under the same tree in the park, and read the book a third, and later a fourth time, each time using different colors of ink. I became, as I have remained all my life, an unrepentant pacifist.

The second book that took me that year from the summer into the fall was a hardback from the library written by the well-known Catholic and antiwar radical, Daniel Berrigan. It turned out to be another book that I could not get enough of, and when the paperback version of it came out in late 1968 I bought and marked it up as thoroughly and as often as I had my book of Muste essays. While Berrigan was regularly in the news media as a result of his audacious and dramatic anti-war activities, he had also written a number of thoughtful activist-theology books. I read the ones I could get hold of, but the book that captured and changed me was They Call Us Dead Men: Reflections on Life and Conscience.

For me, the pull of the book was that it was about the relationship between lifestyle—not dramatic actions but lifestyle—and the communication of radical faith in society. Berrigan wrote about the urgency of a life of voluntary poverty modeled after Christ. “It remains true,” Berrigan wrote then, “that material well-being is always an ambiguous blessing for the Church. . .The affluent are generally inclined to resist social change with all the force at their command. No personal need presses on them to bring about change; and so long as their lives are stable and comfortable, conditions in society, even when most deplorable, remain for them largely an abstraction. If their hearts remain closed before the sufferings of others, they often see the lot of most men only as a personal threat to their well-being.” (18)

Of the renewal of the church, Berrigan wrote that “an understanding of the world under its sign of poverty is so important a question that to renew the sense of poverty within the church is almost equivalent to a renewal of its whole fabric of life.” (20) His words and ideas brought to the forefront of my consciousness notions that had only lurked until then in the back of my awareness.

Berrigan’s passionate book about renewal of the Church’s voice in the world. I read it and reread it, as I had Muste’s essays. Here was a Christian view of economics and lifestyle—of Christian communication as “lifestyle”—that, in my mind, dovetailed amazingly with the economics, politics and even the Marxist theory that I was exploring in my classes and seminars. Here was a radical challenge that was transforming my sense of Christian faith itself. My own faith was being radicalized, and I found myself being challenged to be a wholly different kind of Christian that I had been before—not so much a better one, but certainly a different one. Faith was not so much about other worldly things as it was about living in this world. It was not as much about what one believed as it was about how one lived. The shift for me was life-changing in about every conceivable way.

While I did not overtly realize it then or even for many years that followed, eventually I understood that it was Berrigan’s emphasis on a Christian lifestyle of poverty, undertaken, as he said, in solidarity with poverty-ridden peoples around the world, that imprinted a life-long pattern within me. Throughout my adult life, to the great dismay, even anger, of my wife and others around me, I refused to purchase property or a house of any kind of my own, even when we clearly could have done so, was because of the imprint of the Berrigan book upon me. As I write this I realize that only a year ago, at age 65, did I finally buy a small property, with a small house and a couple of other other buildings, in North Carolina.

While I can now make those clear connections in retrospect, in retrospect also I am trying hard not to second-guess myself for those far-back impulses and decisions. I did—honestly I thought at the time—determine to try to live out the “voluntary poverty” argued so passionately for by Berrigan. I did determine, as much as possible, to try to live without possessions, owning nothing that, in my mind, would send “wrong messages” or that would unduly align me with place or social class that I did not want to be associated with. Through many of those years, though, I remained unduly oblivious to the subtle effects of such a decision on my wife and son and others who would come into my life.

The third book that shaped life for me from my late 20s on—the book that, in many ways, pulled a lot of pieces together for me—was by the great Catholic scholar and mystic Thomas Merton. The book that came into my hands was titled, Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice. Like both of the other books, this one too was a collection of his essays. I found this book in the university bookstore shortly after it appeared in 1968. Like the others, I read and re-read, marking it up multiple times, even wearing out one copy and buying another.

The thrust and power of the book is summed up in the heading of his first section of essays: “Toward a Theology of Resistance.” That word “resistance” was the key that made this book so different in many ways from the other two. As I reread sections of this book now, four decades later, they still ring with the emotional and radical resonance that they summoned up for me back then. This is the book that kicked my life off in a direction that would motivate me for all the decades to follow—it still motivates my fundamental outlook as well as the passions that I am still driven by.

The book was not just about the need for a full-fledged opposition to the war in Vietnam. Nor was it just about a lifestyle of identification with the oppressed of the world. It was those things, but it was primarily about an all-out resistance to the forces of institutional evil which were embodied, during that era at least, in the policies of the American government in the world, policies which, remarkably, still seem to motivate the core American ideology. The theme of Merton’s book, which once I kept taped on the top of my little study desk, is struck on the opening page of the opening chapter about his “theology of resistance”—with these words:

“The population of the affluent world is nourished on a steady diet of brutal mythology and hallucination, kept at a constant pitch of high tension by a life that is intrinsically violent in that it forces a large part of the population to submit to an existence which is humanly intolerable. Hence murder, mugging, rape, crime, corruption. But it must be remembered that the crime that breaks out of the ghetto is only the fruit of a greater and more pervasive violence: the injustice which forces people to live in the ghetto in the first place. The problem of violence, then, is not the problem of a few rioters and rebels, but the problem of a whole social structure that it outwardly ordered and respectable, but inwardly ridden by psychopathic obsessions and delusions.” (3)

Then, quoting Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris a couple of paragraphs later, Merton says that “the problem of violence together must be traced to its root: not the small-time murderers but the massively organized bands of murderers whose operations are global.” (4) So his book, Merton says, “is concerned with the dignity and rights of man against the encroachments and brutality of massive power structures which threaten either to enslave him or destroy him, which exploiting him in their conflicts with one another.”

While times, dates, and global conflicts have shifted, Merton’s words still ring remarkable provocative and prophetic to me. I don’t know that I ever deliberately decided that I would take Merton’s words as the north star of my own outlook, my worldview—but as the words sank in over several readings and much meditation, and as they came to fit so easily with what I was studying in my graduate seminars, I certainly did do that. Over the next several years, I would continue to pick up this book to read his “Blessed Are the Meek” essay, his brilliant pieces on non-violent resistence (published ironically, about the time of Martin Luther King’s murder), on “Peace and Protest,” “An Enemy of the State,” “Religion and Race in the United States,” and his extraordinary essay, “The Hot Summer of Sixty-Seven.”

The theological world of my adulthood was largely created through my captivating digesting of Merton’s concluding theological essays: “Violence and the Death of God,” since J. J. Althizer’s book on the death of God came out in those years;” “Honest to God,” Merton’s deeply important meditation on the John A. T. Robinson’s book by that title, which also appeared about that time; “The Unbelief of Believers,” and “Apologies to an Unbeliever,” as well as his work on “Godless Christianity,” based on the then recently published writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

What all of this meant, at a fairly basic level, was that just as I was being radicalized, both politically and economically, by my university studies, I was being just as radicalized, if not more so, by the other, less formal, studies under my tree in Hess Park. I was not actually losing my faith—or at least I adamantly did not think I was—but I was sure losing my religious innocence.

As an undergraduate at Lincoln Christian College, with a proud church heritage of what can be described as Enlightenment conservatism, I had been taught that it was alright to think for oneself, that there was no higher-up religious authorities to which one had to answer, and that I was free to use my own intellect to understand the Bible and my role in the congregational environment of which I was a part. I assumed and later treasured the independence of religious thought that such a position held out to me within the church I had grown up in. Now, I was using it—and doing so with a measure of confidence.

But there was another dimension of life that I put into operation then, one that would have significant long-range consequences for my future. Under the influence of the “resistance” writings of Merton I was also determined that I had no choice but to try—as a Christian in a particular, if rather small, national community of “Christian Church” Christians—to try to speak out as loudly and as forcefully within that “community” as I could. But, to do that I would have to make my voice heard among my own church’s informal, but easily identifiable, leaders.

With that goal, on a Saturday morning in the Spring of ’69 I went to an office machines store in Champaign where for $90 I purchased a used (but “in good shape”) mimeograph machine. It was way before computers and even a couple of years before public access to xerox machines. In fact, good high-grade mimeographs were the machines of choice for “running off” large numbers of copies of printed material. One typed on a stencil, with each typed key punching the shape of the letter through the famous blue stencil sheets. Since I am writing this to include my students who have no idea what I am talking about, the typed stencil was rolled onto the big round drum of the mimeograph machine. My machine was old so the back side of the drum was actually open, the place where thick ink was poured into it and then rubbed around the inside of the drum with a brush. It was messy—really messy—but it let me make a hundred of so mimeo copies with each stencil.

With my prized mimeograph machine, I gathered a hundred or so addresses of people throughout my church denomination, influential ministers, editors, Christian college presidents and professors, people whose names I knew and who I wanted to try to influence with my emerging Christian outlook and ideas. I was, after all, a fairly well trained and experienced editorial writer, so I knew how to craft a three page essay—an “editorial”—and make it really stick to the wall, so to speak. I would write about the controversial topics of the day: about the war and the need for vigorous protests against it, about Americanism and the evils of misguided patriotism; and about religious subjects, too, about dying churches and horrid preaching, and the failures of Christian lifestyle. The list of the pieces I wrote grew to be quite long, all copied on my mimeograph machine, folded, carefully addressed by hand and mailed.

While a few people responded with some glee about what I had written, the majority did not. Actually, I was deliberately sending the pieces to people that I knew would not see things as I did, to put it mildly. Overall, the reaction over the next couple of months to what I called my “open letters” was angry and stern. Some of the harshest of the responses went to my dad, then the Academic Dean at Lincoln Christian College, my undergraduate school. Dad was clearly embarrassed by what I was doing, though he never tried to discourage my “open letter” writing. I did, however, make a significant number of intense enemies with my letters, something that would haunt me in a big way over time. I should have expected it, of course, yet I was still naïve enough to think that it might be otherwise.

It was also during this time that I started to hunt for a teaching post with my soon-to-be-minted Ph.D. degree. My degree would be in communication—and, despite my quantum shift of mind and heart theologically I still held an intense hope that I would be able to find a good Christian college or seminary that would value my education and love to have me on its faculty. I prepared a good, solid resume and send out more than 50 copies of it, seeking that special religious environment that would want me to work on preaching and ministerial issues. I was ready.

Never mind that my resumes went out amidst the spate of critical “open letters,” or that during that last year my hair had grown long and I was actively involved in the antiwar movement—I was still a Christian at heart and I still wanted to connect my growing expertise in communication to the Church’s failures of communication, in both its life and in the pulpit. None of that drive in me had vanished or even weakened as a result of the changes that had gradually turned me into a very different person.

My resumes, with cover letters intact, went into the mail in late October of ’69. By mid-spring of ’70, I had not only not been turned down anywhere—I had not received a single reply or response from anywhere I had applied. There was just silence. I placed a couple of phone calls to older friends around the country who had reacted positively to my “open letters.” Only then, at their good-natured if candid prodding, did I realize that there would be nothing anywhere for me in that Christian “world.” I was, as one of them memorably put it to me over the phone, “radioactive.” Better move on to something else, he advised.

It was a bitter blow, actually, one that I should have seen coming but didn’t. Instinctively, I began quickly to think job, just get a job, just find a teaching job someplace. It is not , I reluctantly told myself, going to be anything like what you want or think you have prepared for—but you have to find work. I scoured the Gregory Hall bulletin boards, which was loaded with teaching job notices for the following year. The winter had been long and very cold, with a lot of snow. I found a California notice on the board and jotted down the information. I redid my resume package and letter, added a couple of letters that my profs had graciously and hurridly written, and fired it off to Cal State Northridge. By April I was invited to fly cross country for the first time in my life for an interview, and by May was answer came. I had the job, and, as it turned out, it was a good one.

Strangely, I also had a deep anger burning within me that would last for years and years. It was an anger with the Church and everything about it, with my church, with any Church. What I had gone through intellectually, emotionally, and even spiritually, I thought, the whole Church needed to go through. The world had changed, and the Church had to change with it—or else fall more out of step with everyone than it was. I actually resented my new job, as good as it was, but it was a resentment that I would have to figure out a way to live with—something that I knew, even then, would not be easy. The power of that anger was already kicking in.