My earliest years were gratuitous, a free enjoyment whose wisdom was unearned. This is true of all men, but many of us learn suffering very soon, and so even the given becomes a matter of problems and of seeking. Beyond my tenth year I was more often solemn, and humor become more an action of creation. I turned from mostly pleasure to listening.

As a small boy I like to use the ways of increasing enjoyment and humor in others I recited poems and rhymes, sang and told stories. I made a puppet theatre in the cellar and put on shows for the neighbors and their children and all my relatives. Then I was a ventriloquist and a dancer, and until I was thirteen I always performed comedy with my dummy at school. I loved to draw and paint, and everyone took pleasure in what I made, so that I even won the "art award" when I left eighth grade to go to high school.

Religion took on a certain humor for me as I came to adolescence. I was an acolyte in the Lutheran church, and nearly every Sunday I served in the altar. Once every month the church took communion, and I would prepare the altar. I filled the little glasses in the trays with wine and set out the pressed discs of unleavened bread.

I would have to get up very early to serve on those communion Sundays. From the time I was about eight or nine my parents ceased to go to church except on the important holidays. holidays. And so I would get up on those Sundays alone, about 6 a.m., and leave for church without breakfast. I would get very hungry while I poured the wine into glasses and packed the wafers into the paten. The wine was contained in a special glass bottle. It had a rubber bulb on top that injected a bit of wine into a glass through a little spout as you pressed it.

I had tasted a little wine at home a few times in my life when my parents had company they would sometimes give me a tiny bit of port. And once or twice I had a small glass of beer with pizza at a neighbor's house. But I had never felt drunkenness, and wine seemed harmless to me. Before it is consecrated on the altar, the bread and wine of communion is not really holy or untouchable, so I felt only a little reluctant to sample it in the pastor's study.

One such morning, when I was thirteen or fourteen, while feeling particularly hungry and weak, I pressed a little sweet port into my mouth, then one for the tray, then one for me. I ate a few communion wafers, and then a little more wine. I had tried this just a little once or twice before and felt no peculiar effects. And it did help my hunger. So, on this particular day, I was very liberal with myself.

I hadn't quite finished filling the trays, when I began to feel very dizzy, and yet very happy, so that I was laughing quite a lot when the other acolyte, the pastor and the choir began to arrive to prepare for the service. I knew that I was drunk. There was no doubt about that. But I didn't feel particularly guilty. I felt only that I should try very hard to look as normal as possible!

It couldn't have happened on a day more filled with unusual circumstances. The pastor was a little late, so, as soon as he arrived, everything had to be done very quickly. I was a little too dizzy for fast movements, but somehow I had to finish the wine trays instantly and lay out the altar. Then there was a sudden prayer, and we were hustled into the church.

Prior to the actual communion, the acolytes sat in the choir pews in the chancel. I was enjoying myself. I felt very heady and relaxed, but a little concerned that people, especially the pastor, would observe something peculiar about me. I looked at faces a lot, and grinned every now and then at a friend in the choir or the congregation.

During communion the acolytes had to do a lot of ceremonious moving around in the altar, giving and taking wafers and wine trays to and from the pastor. I seemed to sway a lot, and my body felt very nervous as we began. Then I dropped a few wafers and, in obedience to the rule, I hungrily picked them up to eat. But the rhythm of the movements in the ceremony became a kind of repetitive dance, so that my anxiety disappeared in circles again and again.

I watched the communicants very closely. And soon their movements became absurd to me. Sometimes there would be one too many, and all the kneeling communicants would be crunched up. And there was something ridiculous about the way each of them would stick out his tongue for a wafer. So that very often I would find some bit of business to do on the altar, to turn away and bury my laughter in the wall!

Then the communion was over, and we returned to the pews in the chancel for a hymn. At that point the pastor, who was about twenty feet away from me at the head of the pew, remembered that he was supposed to perform a baptism at the close of the service. He told one of the choir to signal me. Whispers went down the line, and soon I was being elbowed. The person next to me was trying to whisper something about a baptism, but I had no idea what that had to do with me. I had never served at a baptism.

I began to get a little nervous, and I wasn't sure whether my drunkenness was preventing me from getting the message. Finally, someone leaned over and whispered very loudly, "Fill the baptismal basin.

The baptismal basin was down in front of the congregation, outside the chancel and just below the lectern where the pastor read the Bible lessons. I really didn't know how to go about it ceremoniously and unnoticed, but I figured I had better get out of the chancel and get some water somewhere.

I got up and swayed out of the chancel into a doorway on the other side of the altar. As I went out I looked back at the pastor for any last minute signal about what the hell I should do! But he was nodding in his hymnal with the choir.

I had no idea how long I had before the baptism was supposed to take place. Perhaps only the length of a hymn! So I ran frantically around the pastor's study looking for a water bottle. I opened up the doors to a closet where we kept our gowns and the altar paraphernalia. I jumped back. There was a man standing in the closet, peeking out between the gowns! He was obviously hiding in the closet! He pressed his index finger to his lips and made a sign for me to be quiet. So I closed the doors on him again and ran around some more, but I could hardly keep from falling on the floor and laughing my guts out.

I learned later that the man in the closet was an FBI agent who was supposed to be watching for someone who had been stealing money from the weekly offering plates. Anyway, I let him be, since I was rushed. All I could find was an old milk bottle under the pastor's wash basin. It was coated inside with some kind of ashy substance. It looked as though somebody had been growing plants in it.

I had no time to look for any other kind of bottle, so I ran water through it several times and shook it to loosen the sludge. The best I could do was wash away some of the surface dirt, but the stain itself remained all around the inside of the bottle. I filled it with cold water and ran toward the exit to the church nave.

As I opened the door and stepped into the church in front of the congregation every eye seemed to follow me. I tried to carry the bottle ceremoniously on my right side away from the congregation, but everyone seemed to see it anyway, and lots of them began to smile at me and whisper to one another. It all began to seem friendly enough to me, so I walked as calmly as possible, smiling solemnly. As I walked it began to occur to me that the ice cold water was going to be a little rough on the baby's head. And I began to laugh inside again at how ridiculous it all was, the man in the closet, the dirty bottle, the cold water, so that I stepped into the front of my robe and nearly fell over on the floor.

Now it seemed everyone was aware of me. I was standing by the baptismal basin. The pastor was standing above me at his lectern. And the whole church was silent. I lifted the top off the basin and put it on the floor. And then, with grace and ceremony, I turned the milk bottle upside down.

The bottle went glub-glup, glub-glub, and the sound seemed to ring around the church! I could hear people snorting everywhere. And when I looked up at the pastor he was pressing his lips and trying not to laugh. The more I poured the louder it got, and I was trying so hard to keep steady and not to laugh that tears were running out of my eyes.

Finally, I figured there was enough water in the bowl, and I swifted out of the room, back to the pastor's study. I remember laughing myself silly in the pastor's sink before I cruised back, solemn and easy, to my seat in the choir.

I suppose it was around this time that I became a true adolescent. I should mark it just about the year I entered high school, when I was nearly fourteen. Then the rights of sex and personal power, identity and privacy became very crucial needs. Up to that time I was protected in the state of games. Until then I asserted myself in dependence, but now in independence.

At first I was not overt at all. My first three years in high school were gray years many ways. I didn't feel the freedom of sexual and personal play that I assumed as a little boy. I became more serious, more reserved, somewhat puzzled, and, outside of school, I tended to spend a lot of time in solitude.

I became an amateur radio operator. There was a fascination for me in the subtle energy, circuitry and physical mysteries of communication. I was often awake late into the night, or I would get up before sunrise in order to take advantage of the energy waves that made long-distance radio communication possible during those hours."

About the middle of my junior year in high school I learned that there was a very fundamental power in communication. I read in the school newspaper that the American Legion was sponsoring an oratorical contest, and all junior and senior year students were eligible. I felt certain that I could speak persuasively, and I began to write a speech.

I don't know how it occurred to me, but I decided to before the civil rights movement or its viewpoint had any write an oratory on prejudice. This was back in 1956, force or voice at all. The speech was called "Patterns of Prejudice." I took exerpts from various documents and books in the library, and I put together a speech that had a very pure and righteous tone. It had very little humor, but there was a basic feeling throughout of the obviousness of our mutual existence. I mimicked many attitudes in the speech, and they seemed to me to be obviously that--attitudes, possible but not necessary ways of considering another being about whom we were conscious of a difference, be it color, or religion, nationality, manner, or whatever.

I think some of the force behind that speech came from my childhood experiences of conflict in my family. And my father was from Mississippi. I don't recall any peculiar expressions of race prejudice in him, but he had taken me to the South a couple of times as a boy and I became aware of race hatred there. Shortly before we made our first visit a negro man had been hanged in a barn nearby.

There was also the tone of religion in the speech. Prejudice was an attitude I had perceived in the very people I met in my church. I saw it everywhere in the community. `I I assumed, somewhat naively, that nearly everyone was a religious person in some way, and so I considered that nearly everyone could recognize at once that prejudice was not a viable expression, purely on the basis of the religious beliefs they already professed.

I delivered the speech to a few people in a small classroom and was accepted as a finalist, along with three or four others. '"hen, a week later, we were brought to the school auditorium, which was filled with perhaps a thousand people or more. I had never confronted a mass of humanity before. But I was certain of a peculiar expanded power that moved in me.

I gave my speech while standing alone on the stage. Somehow or other I seemed to be producing a very strange effect on everyone. Silence came over the entire audience. Even the "hoods," the gangs that took the front rows and slouched or mimicked whatever appeared on the stage, began to sit up. Each one became very quiet and attentive, as if each alone were experiencing some fundamental truth that was always hidden but which he could not deny if it stood out before him. I felt as if I were speaking a truth that all of us accepted whole, and upon which we would operate, except that we never decide together that each of us already holds it true

I won the oratorical contest that day. And I went on from there to a finalist session that was supposed to decide the winner for the county, who would then go on to compete for the state award, and, I suppose, then for the whole country. But I didn't win at the next level. As soon as stood to speak before the huge numbers of that strange crowd I felt a different aura, a wholly different mind. The person who won that day gave what appeared to me a cute, meaningless speech about George Washington and the flag.'

Many came to shake my hand after the speeches, and their expressions implied that I had stepped on some toes. They felt there was an actual "establishment" of prejudice, and that even the American Legion itself could not accept what appeared to be a very radical expression of brotherhood, mutual love and untroubled enjoyment of humanity."

I was only a young boy, and the whole matter was surrounded by purely adolescent perceptions, but there was something real that I encountered in the world that day. It began a new career in me that grew and became constant over time. From then I was concentrated in myself. I began to listen to a subtle force. I began to doubt. I was profoundly aware of a resistance, a madness in humanity that would require acknowledge its own truth. "

Perhaps that was the beginning of maturity in me. Of course it was the same problem of conflict and separation that I recognized even as a little child. And I was handling it in the same way, by enforcing a presence and an intelligence that was, for me, already obvious, whole and free. It was the "bright" again, but I brought it to bear on a problem that is not merely personal, a temporary family conflict, but a schism that is rooted in our minds, in every moment of our lives, in the world itself. I saw that human beings were not living as real and true. I saw that truth great intelligence and masterful communication before it would and reality were not actually being lived, and that the world of my future was not a field of consciousness. and love, but a field of ignorance, conflict and search.

After that I became a public man for a year. I acted in school plays, spoke in school politics. My paternal grandfather died in my senior year, and I created a ceremony to be performed at his funeral. I was to recite it along with my cousins and other members of the De Molay, a junior branch of the Masons, of which my Grandfather was a high-ranking member.

We performed this ceremony in the funeral home, before my grandfather's casket. It was a very emotional and honorable ceremony, and everyone present was deeply moved. But I felt almost unmoved. There was no particular sorrow in me or sense of loss. I was mostly aware of the living who were present. There was something I understood that needed to be understood and. lived, and I wanted to communicate it with an overwhelming force.

It was after this ceremony that the pastor of my church urged me to go on to college and eventually become a Lutheran minister. This seemed like an obvious and right course to me, and I agreed. I became a liturgist or reader in the church. And I was accepted by Columbia College to enter as a freshman in the coming year.

I moved into this obvious future with a great feeling of clarity and power. But I ceased to do anything to create it. My interest in high school studies fell off completely, so that one teacher remarked that he wished I had "never won that contest." It was true that the experience had changed me. But it was not so much the winning as the losing. I was aware of something radically wrong in life. As far was concerned, I had already dropped out.

I had taken a large number of credits in technical courses that dealt with the physics and practical use of electricity and electronics. The examinations I to take at the end of my senior year were the finals for courses that extended for two and even three years. But I ceased to study altogether. None of that work, or any of the work in my other courses seemed to have any importance. In fact, it seemed like nonsense to me.

I made only the most superficial study for my exams. I thought that I could probably pass mart' of them. Some of them I was almost certain I could not pass. Yet, I felt that it didn't matter, and I knew that I would somehow go on to what ever work I had to do.

I had always been an excellent student in the past, and I have never, before or since, cheated on examinations. But when I went to my final technical examinations almost totally unprepared, I decided I would simply copy another student's work. I sat behind and across the aisle from a student I knew would do well on the tests. and I copied every one of his calculations and answers. Here and there, where I was as I able to notice a slight error, I corrected the answers.

As a result, I came to graduation with one of the highest scores in the technical exams. It didn't matter to me, although I was happy to know that I would be able to go on to college unobstructed.

The next phase of my life is the real beginning of listening for me. At the end of my high school years I was radically apart from any kind of superficial idealism or any need to achieve ordinary human excellence. I was profoundly serious and also profoundly undisciplined. I aligned myself exclusively with my own internal perception. Where there was desire, I indulged it. Where there was interest, I followed it. I was totally renegade in my holding to life, for I felt on the brink of knowledge, of reality, of brilliant discovery. Of course, no one who lives disarmed in this way is free of delusions or suffering, and I was about to begin a long period of most awesome and painful suffering. But I was alarmingly free to follow the thread of my own consciousness.

The period of the "bright" was past. I no longer possessed the gratuitous joy and clarity of my boyhood. I had seen the world and ceased to be innocent. I had enjoyed my own lack of innocence, my own pleasures, and I had acknowledged my power over others. I avoided no "sin" at all, and yet I was concentrated in the image and presence of Christ, as if, when I would know it utterly, it would freely convert me and purify all of my estrangement. Thus, I did not fear my sinfulness any more than I feared to eat the wafers and the wine in secret.

I became self-indulgent, and I began a pattern of self-exploitation that was to persist for many years. I began to gain excess weight, to indulge myself sexually, and to assert myself beyond anyone's power to limit me.

But within me I was fully conscious of this play of Scorpio. I did not adopt it as a way of life but as a way of knowing life. I was driven to experience the heart of our dilemma. Again, this intention in me is not something I can recognize now after years of reflection. It was an actual, conscious decision I made at that time. Later, as you will see in the next chapter, this intention became even more explicit I no longer took the position of the "bright," the force of consciousness, surrounded by the conflicts of others. I had found conflict in the very world. I felt it rising in myself. sand I rushed to become it, in order to know the way that no longer required it for anyone.

The Knee of Listening - Table of Contents