Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment (Introduction and Chapter 1)

Editor’s note: Over the next twenty-two weeks, Current is grateful to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment. We are grateful for P&R Publishing for its permission to serialize the book. You can read a chapter here every Thursday.

Introduction

A book of mine that P&R published in 2021, Lament for a Father, proved useful to many readers. Some were estranged from their still-living parents and wanted to make amends. Some with deceased dads wanted to understand, maybe forgive, maybe pray for God’s forgiveness.

This book, Pivot Points, is a sequel to Lament. It may be useful for people going through or remembering tumultuous changes in their lives. My latest change came in 2021: twenty-nine years after I started editing World, the enterprise took a sharp turn and I needed to resign. Suddenly, my email and media feeds were full of sweet notes from former students and interns, readers of my columns and books, and others. I saw the moral of It’s a Wonderful Life: one life touches so many others.

My favorite tweet was both negative and positive. A student I taught during my twenty-five years at the University of Texas at Austin wrote, “Olasky was one of my UT profs. He was an a––hole [who required] deeply reported work that made clear, concise arguments. My work was better because he was a man of unshakeable principles.”

I’d like to think that last sentence is true, but if so, it’s through God’s grace and some hard experience. Often that pain-in-the-rear characterization was true. I had to learn that students, readers, listeners, and reporters did not belong to me. God just shared them for a few minutes.

My “unshakeable principles,” though, have gone through lots of shakings, and my overall sense is this: Don’t worry about pivots. Don’t get stuck in one place, looking only one way, out of fear. Don’t be afraid to move around, learning from people you otherwise would not meet and exposing yourself to ideas you otherwise might never encounter.

This is a memoir, not an autobiography. It’s mainly about work experiences. To avoid invading privacy, it includes little about family and marriage. It also skips by helping to start a church and a school, because both of those activities went pretty smoothly, and I’m focusing in this book on the jagged. It reports some defeats, which are prime times for learning and growth.

Looking back, I don’t have a lot of complaints, thanks to God’s mercy, because I’ve certainly done dumb things. Almost all of my nineteen employers in fifty-seven years of working have been fair. (That’s one every three years, with many short-term jobs overlapping my long careers at UT and World.) Three times it was important to leave when leaders headed in directions that seemed wrong. My experience in dealing with success and failure in a variety of Christian and non-Christian organizations may be helpful to you.

Overall, I’ve learned to take some chances, humanly speaking, in the knowledge that God is the Lord of mercy, not a gotcha god. Some Sunday school classes treat the Bible as a series of exemplary lives, but it’s more a saga of God relentlessly pursuing his children, rescuing us despite our unfaithfulness. The Bible’s record of dysfunctional families teaches us to lament but also repent. We often fail, but a joyful part of Christianity is the knowledge that God out of his infinite mercy forgives us because of the perfect work of Christ on the cross.

One fundamentalist method of training babies goes like this: Lay a baby on a blanket. Put a bauble just off the blanket, out of his reach. Watch as he squirms and twists to reach it. Then, when he does, spank his hand. The idea is to teach the baby to stay within a square of protection, under the authority of a parent or supervisor. But that approach communicates to a child that God hovers over us with instant punishment whenever our reach exceeds our grasp.

That approach also goes counter to my own venturing. When I was young, my ideological blanket was Marxism. In middle age, my occupational blanket was tenure at a big university. As a greybeard, my leadership blanket was in an organization I had nurtured for decades. Each time God had me leave the blanket and in the process learn more about him and the world he created.

In our gig economy, the ability and willingness to pivot at times are essential—but freedom from fear requires either a colossal ego or a colossal God. To follow our ego leads us to grab what is not ours. That’s the road to temporary dominance and long-term destruction. To follow God is the path of thanksgiving and contentment, with an emphasis on giving rather than taking.

In this book, as in Lament for a Father, I’ve taken the unusual step of writing about the past in the present tense. That’s because my own failures and successes seem to seventy-three-year-old me not like history but like a movie (or a comic strip) playing out right before my eyes. You may benefit from thinking hard about how your current actions and patterns may look to you decades from now. This book shows what I now know, but it also shows how you can think about yourself as your present passes by faster than you realize.

Act One: TURBULENCE (1963–1975)

Chapter 1: Today I Am a Man

On June 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy flies out of Andrews Air Force base, heading to Europe. He soon climbs onto a platform, looks over the Berlin Wall into East Berlin, and tells 150,000 listeners Ich bin ein Berliner, “I am a Berliner.”  On that same June 22, I climb onto a platform at the front of Temple Beth Israel’s sanctuary in Waltham, Massachusetts, ready to proclaim the traditional message of a bar mitzvah day: “Today I am a man.”

At age thirteen I feel Kennedyesque: perfectly—even elegantly—dressed, with short-sleeved white shirt over a white crew neck undershirt, plaid polyester sports coat, silvery clip-on tie, brown belt, gray wool pants, white socks, and black shoes. The Temple Beth Israel sanctuary has padded pews facing east toward a city 5,511 miles away, Jerusalem. An ornate cabinet houses two tall Torah scrolls, each containing in Hebrew the first five books of the Bible.

Traditionally, each thirteen-year-old chants a portion of Scripture during the bar mitzvah rite of passage into manhood. On this Saturday, it’s chapter 11 of the book of Judges, which tells of local warlord Jephthah the Gileadite offering God a deal: You give me victory, and I’ll sacrifice the first creature to emerge from my house. I nail the chanting. Uncles slip checks into my coat pocket.

When someone in the Bible makes a rash vow, the result is predictable. Here, Jephthah wins, his daughter races out of the house to greet him, and he acts “according to the vow he had made.” It’s the second instance in the Bible of plans for child sacrifice. Jephthah’s pledge and Abraham’s almost-sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 both seem wrong to me. What could God possibly be teaching through such stories?

In September 1963, my father wants me to go each Tuesday and Thursday evening to a post-bar-mitzvah class for Talmud study. I’m reluctant, since the Boston Red Sox and the Boston Globe interest me more. Still, for a month I sit with five other male teens in a room with wooden desks surrounded by bookcases that cover every inch of wall space. The teacher, Reb Yitzhak (the Hebrew word for Isaac), is sixty or so with a long beard and a Polish accent. In each class, playing an Orthodox Jewish version of Name That Tune, he asks a student to give him several words in Hebrew from anywhere in the Torah, the five books of Moses. Then he rapidly recites the rest of the chapter from memory. Flawlessly.

On Halloween, spoiling for a fight, I pick out from Genesis 22:2 the words kana et-binka (“take your son”). Reb Yitzhak is off and running with—I’ll continue in English—“take your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering.” Then I ask him what for me are killer questions about Abraham’s almost-slaying of Isaac and Jephthah’s apparent slaughter of his daughter: “What kind of God wants such obedience? In what kind of family do fathers kill their children?”

Reb Yitzhak says we’ll get to that later, but for me there is no later. Now that I’m a man, I’m plotting my own course. When it’s time for the next class, I stick a thermometer in hot water and claim to be sick and feverish. My father isn’t fooled, but he gives up. Thus ends my Jewish education, not with a whimper but a sneer.

I move from the Talmud study room to the small West Newton public library, which has similar wall-to-wall bookcases but sharply different content. One bookcase has recent novels, including The Sirens of Titan. In it Kurt Vonnegut writes, “Why thank God? . . . He doesn’t care what happens to you. He didn’t go to any trouble to get you here safe and sound, any more than He would go to the trouble to kill you.” Another bookcase has Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion. He says believers in God are imagining a perfect father. Childish!

My life as a teenager isn’t all about reading books. I make some Sunday afternoon trips to my uncle’s warehouse. He sells fifty-pound sacks of rice and other ingredients to Chinese restaurants. Filling the sacks gives me money for cheap seats at Fenway Park and copies of Mad magazine. The words of anti-war activist Tom Hayden—his “radical journey began with Mad”—could be mine.

Like climate change for some teens now, the Vietnam War hangs over me. It makes me ready to believe Mad’s cynicism. Brian Siano of The Humanist summarizes the magazine’s effect on teens like me: “It was the first to tell us that . . . our leaders were fools, our religious counselors were hypocrites, and even our parents were lying to us about damn near everything.”

I’m alienated, but so are my high-school classmates and my teachers, many of whom have graduate degrees from nearby Harvard. In summer 1966, post-Judaism, my nightly reading is The Outline of History by H. G. Wells, first published in 1920. Its subtitle, The Whole History of Man, indicates its one-stop shopping appeal. I like the tale of humans, “at first scattered and blind and utterly confused,” then moving “slowly to the serenity and salvation of an ordered and coherent purpose.”

The goal for Wells is worldwide socialism, for “in no other fashion is a secure world peace conceivable.” Wells treats religion with condescending sympathy: “It is quite understandable that the Exodus story, written long after the events it narrates, may have concentrated and simplified . . . a long and complicated history of tribal invasions.” That condescension helps me think my parents and grandparents aren’t evil, just antiquated.

Jacqueline Wollan, a willowy twenty-six-year-old, teaches the tenth and eleventh grade journalism elective courses at my school. All the guys have a crush on her as she drills us on the six lovely questions reporters ask: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Writing for the Newton High School newspaper is a perfect fit for a smart but poor and socially awkward high school student eager for after-school conversation, since silence most often awaits me at home.

One of journalism’s joys comes my way during spring 1967, when fires twice break out at school. I write about the damage, with an official-looking press pass allowing me to saunter past the no-trespassing sign and guard. Going where ordinary mortals can’t go is an intoxicating feeling that reporters never quite outgrow.

On most days I walk the mile and a half home from school while folding and reading newspapers page by page and only occasionally running into fire hydrants and mailbox pillars. The news from Vietnam is particularly riveting because my older brother, after dropping out of the University of Chicago, is a private there in the First Air Cavalry. He writes, “Everything is messed up, really SNAFU. I’d like to expose the boneheads who start wars to just a tenth of the misery we go through.”

I’m drawn to graphic interviews of returning soldiers and doctors. One National Guard medic describes his surgical hospital as so crowded that it’s “like opening night at Fenway Park.” He describes racing out to a helicopter carrying bomb victims and unloading all that’s left of one soldier: a steel pot helmet with only an ear, a hand, and some dog tags. Another soldier recalls smells and sights in the burn unit, where “you had to walk by these guys who were literally cooked. I mean cooked.”

Baby Boomers swing far to the left in response to tens of thousands of American deaths in that war and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese deaths. Many of us feel figuratively cooked and start thinking that America—some call it Amerikkka—isn’t as great as we’ve been told. Donald R. Cutler’s The Religious Situation: 1968 records the search for meaning among smart teens and college students who use their summers to explore not only Yoga and Zen Buddhism but, in the words of Huston Smith, “astrology, astral bodies, auras, UFOs, Tarot cards, parapsychology, witchcraft, and magic.”

I sneer at weirdness and consider myself immune to addiction: gotta work! The Olaskys live in a lower-middle-class section of affluent Newton. During the summer I work and play chess. I do well in the New England high-school chess championships but as a junior give up the game to concentrate on journalism—and then lose an election to become editor in chief of the high-school newspaper for my senior year. The winner is a rich kid who hasn’t written much. In my disappointment, I attribute his victory to social class bias.

I get a consolation prize—editor in chief of the yearbook—and make the snarky most of it. The yearbook will open with ambitious words: “In past years, a yearbook was assumed to be just a record of the year’s activities. It produced nostalgia and spread good-will.” This yearbook, though, will include “a critical appraisal of our school organizations and activities.” Looking back fifty-five years later, that goal seems audacious and even ludicrous—it’s a yearbook, and why expect from it anything more than nostalgia?

The volume reflects anxiety about riots, assassinations, and war. We run photos of students stepping into puddles, standing alone, looking confused. One full-page photo shows a senior with a startled look reading The Holy Bible (big letters on the cover). Captions such as “What can I do?” and “Who knows I’m here?” capture our angst.

My answer: Nothing and no one. We’re all alone.