The Tough College Years
Before getting started with the following chapter, I need to write a disclaimer. The title here is The Tough College Years. But by no means were they as tough as my fellow American colleagues were experiencing, who were fighting and dying by the tune of 5,000 a year in Vietnam. My friend Ronnie Santoro [1] was one of them. He joined the US Marines after high school and didn’t make it through a year in combat. Real war is not like a video game where you just “start over.”
Neither were those supposedly tough college years as tough as those that the poor Vietnamese civilians faced during that same period, or many other poor, undernourished oppressed populations faced elsewhere around the world. But they were tough for me as I looked death in the eyes in the form of suicide. It was during those years that my world view became atheistic and existential. One of the logical conclusions from that belief system was, why live? But before we get further into that question, we’ll start the chapter as I had originally written it. Here we go.
Moving to Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio in September of 1967 was the beginning of a new life. I was thrown into a society in which I was a “nobody.” No one knew I was president of my senior class. No one knew I was on the Central Jersey Group III State Champion football team. No one knew my girlfriend was secretary of the student body and a cheerleader. No one knew my best friend was president of the student body. No one knew what or who I was. An identity crisis was in full gear.
It was some time in that first year, that my former girlfriend came and told me she had another boyfriend. I was destroyed. Here I had been trying to keep all the church rules against premarital sex and the thing that I loved the most, my girlfriend, “God” took from me and gave to another. I fell into a deep depression. I was mad at “God.” I stopped believing in Him and threw away my "religious" faith and threw myself into atheism, evolution and political anarchy. I had been taking a geology course that first year that fed me evolution and “billions of years.” I swallowed it all in as a rational justification for our existence without the need of a “God.” I began attacking the faith of Christian girls I would date. I tried to convert others to my new-found beliefs proving through science that the Bible was wrong.
It was during my sophomore year that my close call with death came. My required geology course in my freshman year had given me justification for my rejection of God. I was, as Richard Dawkins explained, an intellectually satisfied atheist. Darwinian evolution and millions of years had given me an alternative to the Biblical creation story.
In my psychology course we were studying, among others, Freud with his psychoanalysis, and Skinner with his psychological behaviorism, which was sort of the equivalent to psychological dialectic materialism. In Comparative Religion the head of the Religion department showed he was more emotionally excited about the “truths” of Buddhism than in the words of Jesus Christ. In my course on Modern European Novels, we were reading Kafka, Sartre and Camus with their atheistic existential meaningless-life world view.
With all the negative input I was having, it was no wonder, one bleak winter afternoon that I decided to drive my car off the bridge between Marietta, Ohio and Parkersburg, West Virginia and into the Ohio River. Like George Bailey in the film It’s a Wonderful Life,[2] I had gotten to end of myself and just wanted to end it all. But as the car began its course across the ice-covered bridge, at the moment when I was to jerk the wheel to the right and break through the protective fence into the water, I saw, in my mind’s eye, the face of my dear Aunt Ida.
It had been just a few months earlier when Ida had taken me in her arms and asked me, “What’s the matter, Dennis?” I couldn’t answer, as I couldn’t open up to her and share what was going on inside me. I had been a quiet and shy person throughout my life. In fact, I was plagued with timidity. But Ida took it all in stride, and tenderly sang I Love You a Bushel and a Peck and a Hug around the Neck.[3] As she rocked me in her arms, to that old familiar song she had used to sing to put me to sleep when I was just a wee little tot, I felt loved.
Because of the love my Aunt Ida had manifested to me, at that moment on the bridge, I knew I couldn’t kill myself. Even though my atheism and my existentialism seemed to cry “Just Do It,” I couldn’t. Somebody loved me. Ida loved me, and because Ida loved me, that meant love existed. I had felt it in Ida’s arms. If love existed, life wasn’t meaningless. Life was worth living. I just needed to keep on searching for the answers.
If life doesn’t seem worth living for you at the moment, maybe Nick Vujicic’s inspirational YouTube video will encourage you. Whatever you do, don’t give up![4]
I need to reiterate here that my parents were loving people. My mother often received into our home the individual woman neighbors who would confide in her their problems. My father was a happy, helpful person who was always making conversation with strangers in the supermarket or doing some shopping for one of the neighbors. But coming from a Polish family, we weren’t a very affectionate family. My parents didn’t give me hugs, or my grandparents. However, Ida did, as well as my Godmother Aunt Dolores.
In the 1980s, psychologist Dr. Virginia Satir shared with the 4,000 delegates of the American Orthopsychiatric Association the results of tests concerning the affects of hugging.[5] Research had shown that as the amount of hugs a person received increased, so their psychological health and happiness also increased.
The study concluded that 4 hugs a day were needed for survival, while 8 hugs were required for psychological, mental and emotional maintenance. For growth and happiness, 12 hugs a day were necessary. I think the “Free Hug” movement evolved from the above research. In Portugal we have a national association called “Abraços,” or “Hugs,”[6] based on the same idea with the goal of helping people infected by the AIDS virus.
Parents, please hug your children. I recently read a regret list where one of the regrets was “I wish I had hugged my wife, my children, my friends and my loved ones more often. I wish I had shown more physical affection for my loved ones.” I think we could all be more loving and do more to show our love through hugs and other forms of physical affection.
Three and a half years ago, as I was about to go to sleep, at around 12 midnight, I received a telephone call. It was one of those calls you don’t want anyone to receive. My twenty-seven year old son had gone missing. He hadn’t showed up for work. His friends found his clothing on the beach not far from their rented bungalow. He was a good worker, conscientious, a good son and I was proud of him. Yet, I couldn’t remember when was the last time I had told him, “Martin, I love you,” or “Martin, I’m proud of you.” I couldn’t remember the last time I had hugged him and showed him in a tangible way that I loved him.
Of course, the Lord is always a very present help in time of trouble. I was surprised how He helped me get through the perhaps most difficult event of my life, my son’s death. I prayed. I read the Bible. I spent time praising. But His most present help came in the form of the hugs I received, the physical affection that I received, the love I received sometimes from total strangers.
After I arrived in the Bermudas, where my son had been working, I made my way to the place where he had been employed. While asking directions, I told the young heavy-set black Bermudian cashier that I was the father of the young man who had recently drowned. Without hesitating she said, “Do you mind if I come around from the cashier counter and give you a hug?” And so it happened various times in the days that followed. The physical affection I received in the form of hugs from people I did not even know, the love that I received, was the single most identifiable factor to me being able to overcome the utter sadness and lost I felt. Friends, please hug your loved ones. They need it and you need it. We all need it and we will be better persons for showing affection to others.
Now let’s get back to the story.
It was a few months after my aborted suicide attempt, while smoking hashish with a close friend, when I had my "God" experience. I want to make it clear here I am not advocating taking drugs to find God, but God used that experience on my path to Him. I recently asked a friend of mine if he had a similar experience while doing drugs. His answer was, yes, he did. But he had also had some very bad experiences - bad, demonic trips. It was the bad trips that assured him the Devil was real and caused him to search more desperately for God.
Here’s what happened to me. In a vision, I saw a small ball of light in the upper corner of the room. I was talking to my close friend Chris Smith at the moment. He was using some kind of encounter psychology to help me to open up. Finally, I reached out and touched his arm and said, “Yes, Chris, I need help!” At that very moment, with my confession of desperate need, the ball of light descended from the corner of the room and embraced me. Instantly, I was enveloped in an energy-field of unexplainable love. It was like a spiritual orgasm, a spiritual epiphany. My whole being had been transformed in an instance. It was kind of like what was visualized in the movie Cocoon[7] when the main male actor has “alien sex” with the beautiful female alien.
My first thought was "Is this what Jesus is all about?" From that moment on I knew love was the power and the force of the universe. On that day, I went home and apologized to my parents for the way I had acted as a rebellious teen, even having fought with my father twice during my teen years. All I wanted to do was to love others. But now I had to consolidate my experience and find out where this power of love came from.
I started searching through different religious philosophies for truth. Buddhism was one of the first to catch my interest. I studied the eight-fold path of Siddhartha. I read Herman Hesse´s books which contained Buddhist philosophy. I became an organic vegetarian. I also dabbled in Judaism as I had a Jewish girlfriend for a time. I read heavily on transcendental meditation and used as my spiritual guides, the books Be Here Now by Ram Dass, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, and Erich Fromm´s The Art of Loving, among others. I steered clear of Christian Evangelicals and Christianity and Catholicism which I assumed to be false because of the hypocritical actions of their followers and my previous experiences in childhood.
However, the question of war and my involvement in it, as I was due to be drafted after my four-year college deferment ended, led me to start reading heavily on the subject of conscientious objection to war and draft resistance. In my reading, I came across Leo Tolstoy’s Letter to a Non-Commissioned Officer,[8] and The Kingdom of God is Within You.[9] As Tolstoy mentions the teaching of Christ from the Sermon on the Mount in these writings, I started to read and study Jesus´ own words found in chapters 5-7 of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament.
In June of 1971, I graduated from Marietta College with a Bachelors of Arts degree in History and was on the Dean’s List with a straight B average. But by the month of October I had been denied conscientious objector status by the military, and after refusing to take the various pre-entrance examinations, I had been ordered to appear for induction into the US military or face the consequences. My mother, God bless her soul, telephoned me at the end of October telling me the FBI had been around to arrest me as I had not appeared for induction on the date specified.
I was working as a low-salaried teacher of special needs children in Marietta, Ohio at the time. However, when I put down the phone from speaking to my mom, I dropped to my knees and with tears falling from my eyes called out with all my heart to "God," if He indeed existed, to save me. I was not asking Him to save my soul, but to save me from the problem of having to go into the military, to save me from having to kill and/or be killed in Vietnam. But after having prayed, I rose from my knees and spit on the floor and said, "There’s no God, so why am I praying?"
But I was soon to find out that God does answer prayer when we call upon Him with all our heart, even if our mind sometimes gets in the way.
To go to the previous chapter click HERE
To go to the next chapter click HERE
To go to the index of the chapter for the book click HERE
All Bible verses are from the King James Bible, although I have changed some of the old English. Any similarity to any modern version is only by coincidence. Bible verses other than the King James have been foot-noted properly.
Copyright @ Dennis M. Edwards (photos used from Google images for educational purposes only) The full text can be found on archive.org at the following link: Full text of "Where is America in Bible Prophecy?"
Notes:
[1] http://www.virtualwall.org/ds/SantoroRP01a.htm# (accessed 03/2016
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life (accessed 03/2016)
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw2phldcmCQ (accessed 03/2016)
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJvEoLPLIg8 (accessed 03/2016)
[5] http://eqi.org/ht.htm (accessed 03/2016)
[6] http://www.abraco.org.pt/ (accessed 03/2016)
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoon_(film) (accessed 03/2016)
[9] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4602 (accessed 03/2016)
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