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THIS IS MY TEACHER
by
Dr. Bill Carden
Dr.
Ralph Lynn Memorial Service
First Baptist Church; Waco, Texas
July 13, 2007
There are exceptions to all rules. My
own rule is that I will not use notes when I speak. On this occasion,
however, when I cannot be confident of my emotions, I am going to speak
from a prepared text.
Dr. Ralph Lynn has had a greater impact on my life than anyone outside
of my own immediate family. For 51 years, from 1956 when I entered
Baylor University as a sophomore transfer student until this past last
Tuesday, he has been at various times a close friend, advisor,
colleague, surrogate father and critic, but he has always been first and
foremost – my teacher.
My sophomoric naiveté and Baylor’s ineffective record keeping at that
time allowed me to enroll that Fall in Dr. Lynn’s advanced course on the
French Revolution and Napoleon without the prerequisite courses. The
first class session was a maddening experience. I was hooked immediately
when he began to talk about the uses and abuses of history, quoting
Churchill’s judgment on “the confirmed unteachability of mankind and the
fruitlessness of human experience.” But I was also frustrated and
angered when he announced a spelling test. Furiously, I asked myself if
I wanted to be in such a Mickey Mouse college class that would involve a
spelling test. What a disastrous experience it turned out to be. When he
returned my paper the next week, I discovered that I had made the lowest
grade that I had ever made on any test of any kind, and my humiliation
was compounded when I finally deciphered his scribbled comment on the
bottom of the paper that maybe I should reconsider taking this class. It
was my academic wake up call.
I am happy to say that was the nadir of my Ralph Lynn experiences. Over
the next three years, I took every course he offered, and I frequently
sat in on his classes that I had already taken. The high point of my
undergraduate experience with him was getting one of his infrequent “As”
on an essay on “Condorcet and the Idea of Progress,” on the bottom of
which was written “First Rate.” I must quickly admit, however, that all
too frequently my experience was getting a paper returned with a lesser
grade and the written comment “This is not your best work” or “You could
have improved this if you had….”
When I decided to continue at Baylor by working on a Master’s Degree in
history, I was thrilled beyond words when he agreed to supervise my
thesis. But I was also humbled and frightened when he told me that mine
would be only the fourth master’s thesis he had agreed to supervise. I
actually felt my greatest compliment that year came when he asked me to
substitute teach for him in his History 103 class on four different
occasions when he had to be away from Waco for family reasons. The very
idea of standing in front of even his freshman class was overwhelming.
Ralph Lynn arranged my first college teaching job at Mary Hardin Baylor
College without my even knowing about it. He simply told me one spring
day that next fall I would be teaching history there. When I drove down
there for an interview, I found the contract was waiting for my
signature. And, in the fall of my second year at MHB, Dr. Lynn
telephoned me to say that he had arranged for me to receive a doctoral
fellowship at Emory University to begin my PhD work the next fall. I did
not even have to apply. (These uncommon gestures of helpfulness to me
are similar to stories that countless other of his students can also
relate.)
My first year at Emory was rough. I was in a brand new rigorous
interdisciplinary program that covered six academic fields; and during
the fall quarter of the first year I was required to pass written
language exams in both French and German -- and my college language had
been Latin. During the winter quarter, I decided that an uncle of mine
in Texas who wanted me to join him as an executive in an insurance
company had the right idea and I resigned my fellowship and bought a
plane ticket to Austin with visions of big dollars dancing in my head. I
was literally sitting in front of the Atlanta airport set to get out of
the car and say goodbye to the academic world, when I turned to my wife
and said, “I can’t do this. What would Dr. Lynn say?” I drove back to
Emory, begged their forgiveness, and followed my doctoral program to a
successful conclusion.
When Merilyn and I returned to Waco and Baylor in 1968, our friendship
with Ralph and Bessie Mae grew stronger and warmer than ever. We named
our youngest daughter (Amber Lynn) for him. But we were back for over
three years before I could accept his invitation and bring myself to
call him “Ralph” and not Dr. Lynn – and the shadow of his influence on
me has grown stronger and stronger year by year. To this day when
Merilyn and I take the kind of reading vacations that we are fond of
taking, I always include for rereading two or three books I have already
read at Dr. Lynn’s instigation.
Over the years I have saved every test, paper, class notes, letter, and
message that I have ever exchanged with Dr. Lynn. All of this material
amounts to over a dozen very full file folders. Over the last four days
I have reviewed nearly all of this material in thinking about what I
should say about him today.
Perhaps the most obvious thing to stress is his integrity (he had enough
for a dozen people) – or it is tempting to focus on his role as the
conscience of the Baylor and greater Waco communities because his life,
his teachings and all his columns challenged the shallowness and bigotry
of our ordinary thinking and living.
Instead I want to conclude by saying what I said in the beginning: He is
my teacher.
What have I learned from Ralph Lynn?
-
The earliest lesson I learned from
him is that I brought some baggage with me to Baylor that I urgently
needed to discard. I learned because I was born an American white
male, a Texas Southern Baptist that this did not mean I enjoyed a
special six-fold blessing from God, nor did it mean that I was a
member of God’s small chosen elite.
-
From Dr. Lynn, I learned that
America was not always right and good and that God could not be
judged to be on the American side of things; I also learned that
other nations (particularly the Russians) were not always wrong and
evil.
-
Through Ralph Lynn, I discovered
that human nature has probably not changed very much in the past
several thousand years and that Americans are really not very
different from or better than other peoples in the world. A good
person is a good person, whether in Iraq, Vietnam or the United
States, and an evil person is evil whether in Waco, Jerusalem or
Moscow.
-
Ralph Lynn taught me that
ignorance, racial and religious prejudice, and hatred are forms of
spiritual blindness and are the worst possible handicaps under which
anyone can labor and suffer.
-
It was through Dr. Lynn that I
discovered gender equality. I discovered that contrary to a number
of professors, he took women students seriously (known to him
affectionately as “Sister so and so”) and that he often favored them
over male students – not because they were obviously more attractive
but because they were often more focused, disciplined and smarter.
-
Dr. Lynn taught me that education
is not about indoctrination but about liberation; about freeing the
student’s mind and spirit from mean, short-sighted petty
ethnocentrisms often packaged in the extreme forms of jingoistic
nationalism and religion. (“My country right or wrong” --- and “my
denomination right or wrong…” were not part of his vocabulary.)
-
He slowly taught me that grades
really do not count. I finally understood that what does count was
what I actually learned, saw, and heard. What was important to Dr.
Lynn was how I was different as a result of the course experience,
what I now understood or realized; and how I was now a more
effective person and citizen -- how I had grown and not how I was
rated. What was important to him was that I had stretched myself and
reached a little bit farther than I thought I could reach. He did
not think in the subjunctive mood about his students; it was not “if
you can do better…” – it was always “you can do better.”
-
I learned from Dr. Lynn that
answers in history and life are secondary, tenuous and fleeting but
that effective and appropriate questions are always primary and
foundational. I was working on my masters’ degree before I finally
learned that the really important questions never have a final
answer. From his teaching and comments, I formulated the three
questions that I continue to ask myself:
a. What do I not know that I do not know?
b. What do I think I know that is wrong?
c. What are the key facts behind this article, story or report that
I am not being told?
-
Dr. Lynn taught me that the good
guys do not always win and that the denouement of the many
life situations is not going to bring me satisfaction or happiness.
As a wonderful friend of mine was fond of saying, “What a world!” He
was right; you do have to laugh to keep from crying. It is what
allows you to “bear up nobly.”
-
One of the most important things I
learned from him is that religion is something that man creates to
define God; but that worship, reverence, peace, devotion and love
are the heartfelt spiritual responses of all of mankind to the
Mystery of Being behind everything.
One of the most pleasant evenings Merilyn and I have ever spent was
when we had Abner and Mary McCall and Ralph and Bessie Mae to our
home for dinner. The after-dinner conversation was long and
wonderful, and I was especially enchanted with their studied
responses to my question, “Do you think any ancient writer equaled
the heights of monotheistic clarity achieved by Second Isaiah in the
sixth century B.C.?”
A couple of days later, I received a note from Dr. Lynn suggesting
that the following passage from Aeschylus’ tragedy Agamemnon was of
similar quality:
Zeus – who’er He be, Whose state exceeds
All language syllables.
Knowing not so much,
As whether He has that name or love it not;
Zeus – while I put all knowledge to His touch,
And all experience patiently assay,
I find no other name to cast away
The burden of unmanageable thought.
If Zeus’ triumph be your victory song,
You shall be founded in all Soothfastness.
He makes men to walk in Wisdom’s way;
In Suffering He lays Foundations deep of Knowledge.
At the heart remembered Pain,
As of a wound that bleeds, wakes in sleep,
Though we reject her, Wisdom finds a road.
-
I discovered from Ralph Lynn that
he believed as I do that the unqualified love found in the life and
death of Jesus Christ is the clearest way yet to understand that
Mystery beyond our being, whether we name the Mystery God, or Zeus,
or Allah, or Yahweh.
-
Finally, from Dr. Lynn I learned
that reading widely in history and literature, listening to great
music, absorbing great art has the important effect of creating
free, independent, critically reasoning world citizens who cannot be
manipulated by the puerile, petty partisanship of a corrupt
government.
Ralph Lynn did not have the dazzling
mind of a world-class scholar, but he did possess the brilliant
intellect and scintillating insights of a world-class citizen and human
being. For me, Dr. Ralph Lynn was a twenty-first century rebirth of
Erasmus.
The Chinese have many wonderful stories about their ancients. My
favorite is about the Chinese emperor who sent his agents throughout the
empire to bring him the wisest man in China. After months of searching,
they returned with two people. A young man approaching middle age and a
very stooped old man. The younger man was identified as the wisest man
in China. When the emperor inquired as to the identity of the old man,
the younger man replied, “This is my teacher.”
Dorothy (Lynn), I will be forever honored to have stood here on behalf
of the hundreds, if not thousands, of students who have sat at the feet
of Ralph L. Lynn, and point to him and say, “This is my teacher.”
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