"A Voice of Undiluted
Reason"
by
Stacy Cole
Dr. Ralph Lynn Memorial Service
First Baptist Church; Waco, Texas
July 13, 2007
One cannot circumscribe with words a
life so long and so fruitful as that of Ralph Lynn. Better that those
who knew this man and bore him such affection should silently stand and
pay him tribute with imaginations richly endowed with our memories of
him.
There are voices whose loss leaves a silence so profound and so keenly
felt that we find ourselves leaning into death’s chill wind in the vain
hope that we may hear them just once more. But we hear them not, and so
we shall now fill the void with the sound of our own voices.
In that spirit I recall an observation by Francis Bacon, who four
hundred years ago said: “It was a sparing speech of the ancients to say
that a friend is another himself.” The loss that I am feeling at this
moment is indeed the loss of a part of myself. I ask your leave,
therefore, to speak in an intensely personal way, but in so doing I
speak for a multitude of those who knew and loved this great and good
man—of that I am certain.
Over a half century has passed since I met Dr. Lynn at Baylor and I have
never been able to address him informally, and I cannot do so even now.
Those of us who arrived at Baylor in that time traveled there along the
rutted roads of conventional thought, expecting upon our arrival to find
comfort in our own kind. Aware, if only faintly, of the discreet
hypocrisies of our elders, we were certain that we would be different.
Myth and superstition, we thought, had no hold on us, even as we
presented our Amen-faces to the world.
Our lives had been moved by some invisible influence, like an inconstant
wind.
When we entered his class, comfortable and secure in our enclosures,
there standing before us was a sensitive, superior intellect, one not so
unlike ourselves, it seemed, humble and without pretense, examining the
complex layers of cultural and social institutions in order to find the
quivering human within. As the weeks passed, we began to realize that
that human, so vulnerable yet so precious, was each of us, for through
his eyes we began to recognize ourselves on every page of history, in
all of the forms and in all of the guises that humanity has assumed in
its many manifestations.
His was not so much a voice of eloquence as it was one of undiluted
reason, so sweet to the ears of his young audience that our rapt
attention must have seemed at times like a chorus of audible silences,
some in agreement, some in disputation, but all in wonderment.
He could detect unsuspected possibilities in the unlikeliest of his
students and with his characteristic cheerfulness he would go
prospecting for it. His skepticism about human nature was balanced by
his abiding respect for human dignity and the democracy of talent. Above
all else, he paid us the compliment of taking us seriously, although he
did it with gentle humor and mock exasperation.
A few years ago Harvard University Press issued a book on great teachers
and their methods of instruction, and he was the first cited as their
example of a great teacher at work. When I mentioned this to him he
smiled ruefully and with a chuckle said, “I have no method. I do not
know how to describe what I did in the classroom.”
There are those who have a sweet tooth for praise, but he was not among
their number. He could accept praise with grace and criticism with
equanimity. There was never a false note with this man, not even false
modesty. He was the most authentic human being I have ever known, and
the most intellectually honest.
But it was, of course, not what he did but what he was that inspired us.
I do not recall that he ever mentioned excellence to his students, but
he exemplified it and we were not slow to grasp the concept. His example
was a reproof of our many sleepy generalities and our unexamined
premises.
Because he exacted so much from himself, he expected much from us, and
in various ways we stretched to meet his expectations. For the better
students it was like mental calisthenics. For others, myself among them,
it more nearly resembled the medieval rack. He inspired affection in us
all, even and perhaps especially in those who resisted his appeal and
departed more in relief than in gratitude.
But when we became fully formed in the crucible of our crowded years,
buffeted by the very experiences that he had foreseen would be our lot,
many of us, pleased enough with the outcome, have fastened our gaze in
the direction of the Brazos, stretched ourselves to our full height, and
said, “I owe it all to you.”
He had become at home in our minds, for that is what great teachers
do—they take up residence in the minds of their students, invited
guests, and there they remain, as he does now, for all our days. And
though the envelope of life lies empty now, the message that it
contained is as full as ever it was when we opened our minds to receive
it.
We left his presence comforted by the surety that life had sequels—death
was episodic, but life went on. His life experience informed his study
of history, and his study of the past deepened his understanding of the
forces at work in his own life, thus he enabled us to not only see more
in his subject than we could have imagined, but even more he enabled us
to see more in ourselves than there was before.
His span of years challenges the imagination. His grandfather tethered
his horse at the hitching rail when he came to visit his daughter and
grandchildren in McGregor. He awoke in the chill dawn of a Central Texas
winter to discover a powdery blanket of snow covering his attic bed.
From infancy through his early adult years he was driven by the dry wind
of poverty. Work and the struggle to survive almost broke his health and
left little time for leisure or for games, but there was a champion’s
medal to be won in the state cycling competition.
The deprivations of his youth were succeeded by a crippling, searing
depression, and then by the second of the world wars that he would know.
In his thirties and married, he disguised the fact that he had a
punctured ear drum and entered the army, where he served at home and
abroad. It was a shattering experience for a gentle, sensitive spirit
and left its imprint upon him for the rest of his days. He rarely
discussed this experience, but when he did the pain was there in his
eyes and in his voice, and his abhorrence of war was absolute and
unyielding.
This may in part explain why someone so deeply sentimental would come to
distrust sentiment, and so naturally romantic would cultivate an
unblinking realism about the human condition. He was intimately
acquainted with the relentless pressure of reality and with the power of
his mind and the scope of his imagination, he pressed back against it.
He had early been scarred by the randomness of life and found in few of
his days any assurance that whatever favorable circumstances he might
encounter could be taken for granted. If life was no longer short and
brutish, neither was its beneficent outcome certain.
He bore in silence his secret wounds, revealing them only in occasional
anecdotes and cryptic comment, small blots of sadness which shaded his
otherwise sunny disposition. He had known too much of human suffering to
dwell overlong in optimism, but his respect for the innate dignity and
the stoic courage of so many of his associates tempered his tendency
toward pessimism. His robust laughter, familiar to all who knew him,
often was as much despairing as it was gleeful, an expression of a
sensitive spirit nursing its wounds in the solitary spaces of memory.
It is not surprising that the ordeal of his formative years fostered in
him a tragic sense of life. What is of compelling interest was his
spirited approach to life, a kind of tempered optimism, and when he
uttered one of his most familiar phrases, “I give up!” we all knew that
he never did, that death alone would extinguish that spirit.
Another utterance, “What a world!” spoke to the great good humor which
leavened his tragic and sometimes pessimistic view of human folly and
its seemingly inevitable consequences. Rather early in life his
conscience and his consciousness had been pricked by the bittersweet
thorn of justice, imperfectly rendered by imperfect human beings.
Devoted to Christian principles, his parents had brought him up to
believe in divine justice, but he devoted his life to the endless task
of securing secular justice in a less than perfect world.
This brings us to the third of his favorite utterances: “Bear up nobly!”
This was an admonition to do each day that which is needful, and to form
a clear understanding of the consequences of our actions as a prelude to
accepting responsibility for them. These three words summed up his
approach to life and the tolerance he extended to those he met along the
way. He was representative of the best of his generation, possessing a
grace and civility to which succeeding generations have attached less
value.
Above all else, when one thinks of Ralph Lynn, one thinks of his
connection to Baylor University. His parents had moved to Waco in 1923
so that their sons might have access to a college education. The year
following, he secured a job at Von Blon’s bookstore in downtown Waco. He
worked there for seven years, continuing during his time at Baylor. It
was there that he formed a taste for books and ideas, and for the
conversation of those who shared his passion. He set his course upon a
passionate pursuit of learning. On a visit some ten years ago, I
commented upon a stack of books and magazines by his chair, and he
commented, “I am eighty years old and still trying to understand.” Mr.
Von Blon would have been pleased.
Dr. Lynn was nurtured in a religious culture that fostered a hunger for
absolute values, and the values of his familial orthodoxy were the ones
that he honored in the dailiness of his life. Soon enough, however, he
came to understand that his intellectual development required that he be
independent of unquestioned absolutes, and the contrast between these
two parts of his life would preoccupy him until it was dissolved in
death. In a sense, therefore, his life and thought embodied the very
unique qualities that inhered in his beloved Baylor, a university
founded upon religious principles, championing Christian values, but
holding to the independence of mind that intellectual growth requires.
The reconciliation of the dictates of faith with the skeptical and
inquiring mind was for him a creative tension that produced some of the
best columns in his many years as a contributor to the Waco
Tribune-Herald.
He had a profound belief that the desire for some version of the
religious experience is universal and that the manifestations of that
desire are as varied as life itself. As for his own view, religion was
the poetic expression of the tragic dimensions of the human condition.
Profoundly spiritual, he exemplified this poetic sense of mystery
inherent in the interaction of the self with the world. He was
disinclined to metaphysics, but possessed a great reverence that
informed his view of matters which we usually assign to religion. The
source of his meditations and reflections on the human condition was the
agitated rope of life against which we chafe and struggle.
He believed that there was a sort of divinity in the search for
knowledge and the understanding that might be derived from it, and would
have agreed with Carl Sagan’s view that science was “informed worship.”
“God,” he once remarked to me, “is infinite intelligence.”
The blessings of a lengthy life are tempered by the realization that the
years have borne us forward into a melancholy twilight when the world we
have known, with those ways and values familiar to us, is dying that
another might take its place. The possibilities of youth are replaced by
the inevitabilities of age.
He loved life and savored its simplest and most commonplace pleasures,
and he made life more enjoyable for all who were in his presence. How
then could he know that he would live so long, surviving so many of
those he held dear and feeling so deeply their departure? Could not we
who loved him see that it was not that he loved life less, but his
struggle to live it, that was wearying him to the edge of despondency?
Ralph Lynn’s long, productive life was a blessing, attended by deepening
shadows. The voices of those whom he had cherished would fall silent,
one by one, and the beauty of shared experiences would fade and be
forgotten. The country roads where once he had pedaled his way to the
ring of champions had become busy highways, hostile to bicycles and to
those who rode them. Mile upon mile of sun-baked fields that had felt
the soft tread of the young hunter were forested now with houses, the
last of the animals he had hunted there long since vanished. Both the
world he had inhabited and his way of recognizing it preceded him in
death.
This is the fate of all whose lives span four generations, immigrants in
time who have forfeited the squatter’s rights that sustained them in
their years of youth and maturity. The dawning recognition that we have
outlived our time, that the world is no longer our home, is life’s way
of preparing us to leave it.
But even in the twilight, it was all still there—the smell of spring
along the Brazos, the bite of early winter winds, bearing the hint of
rain—his heart knew nothing of urban renewal, of concrete malls and
arteries of commerce. It was always there, in the geography of
remembered youth.
He did not fall into the snare that old age sets for us, when so few are
left who shared our past that we become free to invent it. He recalled
how dreadfully difficult it was and never romanticized it—but his heart
was always there, and at the center of that world was Waco—and Baylor.
It is not for princes or warriors that we sing our eternal requiems, but
for the wise. It is they who introduce us to the marriage song of the
world, and by word and example teach us to sing it, so that when our
time has come, we depart with that song resounding in our hearts. The
man we honor here today was such a one.
And so we are here, waiting for our own time soon enough to come, and
hoping that we will know the peaceful resolution that our friend has
come to know, that we may sing our farewell song like that of the Greek
writer of over two millennia past: “…but when it is time for us to go…we
will leave life crying aloud in a glorious triumph-song that we have
lived well.”
