"Dancing with the Wind: Cycles, Cyclones & Hitchhiking," Stan Yoder, lay preacher
Scooter picture projected
I love riding my motor scooter! When I ride, it’s like the bike and I become a single thing. I find myself melding with the machine and the road. If I just THINK about changing from the center track to either the right or left track, I’m there. I don’t have to make much of a conscious effort to steer one way or another; we just go. I’m connected to my surroundings. I can smell damp earth or french fries or fireplace smoke or SUV exhaust. I can hear the roar of air rushing by and feel the wind resisting my progress. But one of my most favorite things is riding in a gusty Texas crosswind. Really! When a gust hits me and my machine, we both get blown over a bit. But without much effort, and with wild joy, my machine and I lean into the gust to stay on course, then lean back up when the gust falls away. I can’t see the changes coming. The force is invisible and powerful. It’s not predictable. Sometimes it’s even a bit scary. But it’s exhilarating. It’s like dancing. Dancing with the wind on my motor scooter.
Wind is a useful metaphor for life. Wind knocks you down or holds you up, cools you off or fans your fire. Sometimes it blows out your candle entirely. There are ill winds, fresh winds and winds of change. You head into the wind, are free as the wind, gone with the wind, find the answers blowin’ in the wind and see what the wind blew in. You can fight the wind or dance with it.
I choose dancing.
But I haven’t always been able to dance with the wind. I used to be deathly afraid of wind. FIGHTING the wind seemed a much more reasonable response than dancing with it.
Tornado picture projected
When I was seven the family moved from northern Indiana to Mountain Home, Arkansas, so my father could become a Mennonite preacher. Daddy didn’t have a seminary degree. In fact, he had only a few hours of college credit. But he decided he was being called to the ministry. So he left his factory job to serve the Lord. In the Arkansas Ozarks. Maybe it was a good thing. Because we moved to Arkansas, we missed the deadly Palm Sunday Tornado Outbreak in Indiana by almost exactly one year. A friend sent us a book with stunning black and white pictures and stories of the intensely violent power of the tornadoes. There were pictures of the awful destruction including the massive double-funnel tornado that hit Dunlap, a neighboring town I remembered, pictures of houses leveled, cars in trees, and wheat straws that had been driven deep into telephone poles. That last idea impressed and terrified me. How could anything be so strong that it could force a feeble wheat straw through wood?
Wow! Scary! You’d better fight the wind. Wind could kill you.
And dying was a seriously unhappy thought for my eight-year-old mind. Because I was worried that if I died at the wrong time, meaning before I’d asked Jesus to forgive me for my latest sin — like hitting my sister or stealing cookies or thinking bad thoughts or whatever — I’d burn in hell forever. I remember asking my mother when I was just five years old, “Mommy, if you have three sins can you get into heaven?” She replied, “No, God doesn’t allow sin in heaven.” Concerned, I went back to playing with my blocks. “Mommy,” I tried again, “what if you only have two sins?” “No,” she said, “God doesn’t want any sin in heaven.” I couldn’t let it alone. “But what if you only have one sin? If you only have one sin, won’t God let you into heaven?” “No, dear,” she said. “God hates sin. There will be no sin at all allowed in heaven. Not even one.” What a suddenly cold wind THAT was, blowing across my blocks. I knew it was not bloody likely that I could be perfect. Certainly not for long enough for me to be sure that if Jesus came back again it would be at precisely the right lucky moment for me to get into heaven. I had about as much chance of hitting the proper eternal target as a ... spit ball in a cyclone. So ... fear blew into my life as a constant companion that hung over me like a storm cloud.
Not only was I afraid of eternal punishment, I was afraid of my father. He knew how to use a belt. This hurts me more than it hurts you, he’d say. But he faithfully administered the rod anyway for all my greater offenses, like running and shouting with the other kids after church. Spare the rod, spoil the child, he’d say. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, he’d say. He didn’t seem to be overly fond of god-is-love Sunday School talk. He’d say it sometimes, but we knew he really meant god is vengeance. God is rigid. God rejoices in the defeat of his enemies and pours fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorra and turns Lot’s wife into salt for looking back and has bears eat kids who make fun of bald-headed prophets. You are god’s enemy if you do NOT... what I say, I mean, what he says.
I did my best to have faith, I really did. When things didn’t make sense, I was just supposed to have faith. When my father made religious pronouncements based on his dubious interpretations of the bible, I was not permitted to pursue argument. Just have faith, I was told. So I tried. I was baptized at age seven, at my own insistence. But I kept falling away, time after time. Then when I would hear the radio say, “Tornado watch for Baxter county,” I would quick, become a christian again, just in case. So I would persevere as a christian — until I despaired and gave up again. Until the next high-wind warning blew me sheepishly back into the fold, as it were. For a bit. On again, off again.
When I left home after high school, I was in an on-again, now-I-AM-a-christian jag. I went to Hesston, a Mennonite junior college in Kansas, determined to to be a faithful witness to those Mennonite reprobates I’d heard about that didn’t believe quite as righteously as I did. But it didn’t take me long to run into ideas more reasonable than the ones I’d been taught. Take just one, for instance: the idea that the WORDS said in a prayer don’t mean a thing if the desires of one’s heart are at odds with the words. Uh-oh. Just knowing and saying the right thing didn’t count anymore? That ... actually made sense. I began to examine and challenge other beliefs I’d been taught. One by one, old beliefs, after further review, got blown away.
It was at Hesston College that I finally found courage enough to stand up to this great and terrible and all-powerful god of my childhood whom I was supposed to love with all my heart, soul and strength — even with the knowledge he could kill me and send me to hell on a technical gotcha. One despairing evening while studying in my room I officially and categorically rejected everything about god and religion I’d ever been taught. Tabula rasa. Clean slate. No beliefs whatsoever.
The terror that act produced in me could have provoked a global war. So I immediately retreated from that abyss and chose a few things I could believe.
I decided:
#1: I believe in myself. My experience taught me to suspect all else and thoroughly examine myself. Regularly.
#2: I believe in belief itself. Most knowledge, I reasoned, is actually only belief. Believing one’s senses. Believing what one is earnestly told is true. Therefore, if someone believes something, that something remains true for them until and unless they figure out it actually isn’t true.
And #3: I believe in love as the highest good. Defined as active caring.
These three points of belief laid the foundation for further growth, and the rejection of the thousand other points of childhood belief stirred up in me a violent storm of pain and dread. What if god really were like the one with which I’d grown up? I began the process of trying to contact and communicate somehow with that god or any god—a process that would last for years. But first I had to fight the strong prevailing wind of unquestioning orthodoxy from my parents ... and students at a Mennonite college.
I decided blasphemously that not only did I not love god, I actually hated god. In my second year of college, I stood in the rain in the middle of a Kansas thunderstorm and dared him to get it over with, to kill me now, to strike me with lightning or a tornado. Despite the fearful suspicion that my insolence would get me blown away, ..................... nothing happened.
Kite picture projected
From that moment the fear of wind and fear of storms and fear of death began to weaken their choke-hold on my gut. Over the years I gradually lost my dread of dying, and came to realize that most of the other fears in my life stemmed from that one most basic fear: fear of death. As I shed off my old skins of fear, I also shed false faith, my beliefs based on fear. My molting process revealed a calmer, stronger, more independent, less fearful person still searching for those answers blowin’ in the wind — those answers to life, the universe and everything.
The winds of spiritual evolution blew me through a period of militant agnosticism, when I perversely enjoyed pretending to be lost and confused about things religious and then using logic to annihilate the arguments of anyone who dared to tell me they KNEW PRECISELY what I should do or believe. Eastern-influenced mysticism intrigued me for a number of years ... until the guru I’d been following retired. New Age thought was a lot less intolerable than had been my fundamentalist upbringing, so when I found myself directing music at a new age church, I assimilated a bit of its philosophy. You know, I’m-good-enough, I’m-smart-enough, and by golly, I’m-actually-already-rich. Didn’t get rich, though.
Sometimes I wonder if there might actually be something larger than is obvious or presents evidence for itself. As a Unitarian Universalist, I rub shoulders with others who do believe that. But for me, the current operational label for my philosophical stance is Agnostic Atheist. I’m not arrogant enough to say there can’t be a god. I just have no reason to believe there is anything like my childhood god who exists or has ever existed outside the minds of True Believers. Perhaps there are other gods not like that—better gods. I have found no reason to believe there are. But if so, the ball’s in their court if they care to reveal themselves. In addition to Pathways, I recently acquired a second church membership, this one online. I am now an official member, just for signing up, of the ............ Universal Church Triumphant of the Apathetic Agnostic. Is there a god? We don’t know and it doesn’t matter.
My helmet does not have a radio in it, so my beloved NPR remains a “car thing.” Without the distraction of a radio, while I’m riding my cycle I have time to think. I wonder about the sports standings, or am I going to be late to work again and what will they do to me if I am, or if that car doesn’t notice I’m here, how will I escape without being hit. Sometimes I wonder about more cosmic issues. Why am I here? How do I fit into the universe? At the most basic, sub-subatomic particle level, is everything fundamentally alike and connected? Might we all become able to tune into each other at that primal energy level? What is that primal energy? Is it self-aware? Is the apparent separation of people and things really just an illusion?
Thinking, questioning has become an intentional way of life for me. A fundamentalist friend told me that my problem, on which he and his pastor agreed, is that I think too much. Alright! Thinking and questioning, it seems, blows up too much dust in the temple.
I started out with the temple my parents built for me — a fortress in which a wonderful/terrible god, a loving but spiteful, predictable but whimsical, good but evil god was all powerful and took a legalistic personal interest in my every thought. In this temple I was nothing but an insignificant creation compelled to praise and serve this hero-but-monster on pain of eternal torment if I screwed up, compelled to try to attain perfection despite the slim chance of eternal reward.
Fear built that temple. The winds of reason blew it apart.
There was no great cyclone that totally demolished the structure and drove wheat straws into the rubble. The winds of time and thought took it down, one shingle at a time. For over 30 years the breezes and gales of life removed the unworthy materials of that inherited temple until nothing stood but a skeleton. Integrity and courage then required me to finish the job and fell that skeleton, starting over on a new foundation. A foundation of reason rather than whimsy. A base of loving coexistence with humanity and the planet. A joyful realization that I make the world a different place by my choices and actions, and that my legacy derives not from an inherited temple I attempt to rebuild in the minds of my kids, but from the quality of my daily choices and actions.
For a long time I believed that when a random wind blew something into my life, it had to have cosmic meaning. There is no such thing as coincidence, I’d repeat to myself. Because I’d heard that in the New Age church. It’s comforting to believe that winds are not random, that there are grand purposes affecting every event, that a powerful and benevolent entity will pull strings specifically to make my life easier. But as I’ve learned to look more rationally at fate, I realize that, rather than “there is no such thing as coincidence,” instead, IT’S ALL COINCIDENCE. Life’s winds indeed ARE random. Things just happen. We love to assign meaning to circumstance because it makes us feel better, more in control. It’s always possible to believe after the fact that, in this best of all possible worlds, of course it HAD to happen that way. It’s much harder to predict the supposedly inevitable BEFORE the fact — because so much in life is erratic. Like the wind. The important thing for me is that I make the best of whichever way the wind blows. That I tack into the wind, if necessary, to reach the shore. That I take joy in understanding that it IS all coincidence and that I get the opportunity to create the best outcome from each coincidence. That fighting is not inevitable; I can choose to dance with the winds of circumstance instead of fighting them.
I don’t like it when winds sometimes blow up my tablecloth and dump my picnic lunch —do you? But I find ways to make it through 'til dinner. We all do.
Hitchhiker picture projected (or stay on kite pic)
After two years at Hesston College, I took an eight-week hitchhiking trip. I wanted to see New England. I wanted to experience whatever came and just roll with the punches. I wanted to find god. So I went. I explored. I followed the wind. I searched for evidence to support my childhood god or any god. It occurred to me as I stood sometimes for hours on a freeway or a back road that I was, at one and the same time, both free as the wind and totally dependent on the kindness of strangers. It didn’t do any good to get frustrated when the rides were not easily found. Fighting the traffic winds didn’t help; I had to have patience, to relax and dance in my mind even when I felt like fighting. I could choose which way I wanted to go, but I had to wait to arrive until someone helped me get there. I could accept or refuse a ride, but the ride had to be offered first. My task was to decide. To decide where I wanted to go, to decide which rides to accept, to decide to adjust my plans based on circumstances and to decide when I was tired of the whole game and quit playing. So as I stood with my thumb out and the wind from passing cars blowing my hair, I thought about how hitchhiking was also a wonderful metaphor for life. Free as the wind, uncertain as rain, full of decisions with consequences, requiring help from others (who often were repaying help from earlier others,) and an opportunity to meet wonderful people and experience new places and help others along the way. I also found my trip to be completely free of any convincing evidence for my childhood god. Or any other god.
Winds are gonna blow. The trick is to find ways to dance with the winds. At our house, all our electrical power comes from wind. That’s a way to dance with the wind. When I sing, the air from my lungs supports my sound. That’s dancing with the wind. When I ride my cycle, I adjust for the gust. That’s dancing with the wind. When the storms of life arrive, I face them, hold onto the tablecloth and sing while my hair blows. That’s dancing with the wind.
With apologies to the style of the late Johnnie Cochrane, I propose a maxim: Maybe sometimes it’s Right to Fight, but you Must adJust for the Gust.
On the cycle, in the storm, while hitchhiking, in life, we can fight the wind or dance with it.
I choose dancing.