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© J. Glenn Friesen 2003.
At the Golden Temple (Age 21)
Elephant Blessing in Tamil Nadu (Age 49)
“Who are You?” is one of the most important philosophical questions. Dooyeweerd devotes a considerable amount of attention to knowledge of self. I was once a “celebrity” greeter at a drive-thru McDonald’s. A woman at the pickup window looked at my name badge and said, “I know your name, but who are you?” Indeed. Well if Kierkegaard is right that our life makes sense only in retrospect, perhaps there is a thread that can be discerned in the following brief history of my life, which you may find hilarious, although I assure you it has had its moments of pain.
I was born on Easter Sunday 1952 in a Catholic hospital in the big city of Saskatoon because my mother did not trust the hospital in our home town of Rosthern. My mother dedicated me to God, but the attending nurses pointed out that this was something only I could do. So theological questions arose even at my birth. You might have thought that my mother would have adopted the nurses' point of view, since it was so evidently Anabaptist. But my mother wanted to engineer a replacement (me) for her father, I.P. Friesen, who died shortly before I was born, causing me an as yet undiagnosed intrauterine trauma. He had had a spectacular conversion in Long Beach California. He and his family had been attending revival meetings held by Aimee Semple McPherson; his conversion was certainly related to her preaching. This fundamentalist influence continued to rule my childhood.
On the other hand, my family was Mennonite, and this brought with it its own tensions, such as a mistrust of all education. There was the general attitude of “geleerder verkeerder” [the more that you learn, the crazier you are]. But my grandfather I.P. had sent his children to public school, which resulted in his being shunned by the rest of the town and even by his own family who would not even eat at the same table with him. As a merchant, his business suffered, and he appealed to the Lieutenant-Governor of Saskatchewan for “British justice and fair play.” This is the first legal influence in my history. The shunning stopped, but the tension in my family between Christ and culture did not. The family desire for education was evident in my uncle Ike, who earned his doctorate from the University of Basel when he was 70 years old. One of his supervisors was Oscar Cullman. The thesis was entitled, “The Glory of the Ministry of Jesus Christ.”
My great-grandfather on the other side of the family had been in trouble with the Old Colony Mennonite Church for riding a bicycle. His son John C. (my other grandfather) purchased an automobile and had to join a different congregation; only a horse and buggy were permitted. My grandmother was disciplined for playing a harmonica; musical instruments were part of the worldly culture that was to be avoided.
The revivalist influence on my family was evident in how I spent my summer holidays. Every summer my mother took us on a three day train trip (coach class) to Winona Lake, Indiana, to three weeks of conferences of Youth for Christ and Moody Bible Institute. Uncle Ike had discovered the place. My father wisely refused to go. At Winona Lake, I was subjected to two emotionally wrenching hellfire and damnation altar calls every day. I was quite happy for a change of mood when I returned to school in the fall.
In the eighth grade, I made a break from the Winona Lake routine, and I attended a cello workshop at a Catholic monastery, where one of the priests taught me how to shoot pool. There was also a swimming hole behind the monastery. This was all very liberating. When I was 16, I spent my summer on a BSA Thunderbolt motorcycle, driving across the Western United States on a budget of less than a hundred dollars. This was before the movie “Easy Rider.” My idea of hostels was to knock at the local jails along the way, where I was locked in for the night with the inmates, given my bowl of porridge in the morning and then released. I don’t recommend this to teenagers today.
I got kicked out of high school in Grade 11 for wearing my hair too long (hey, this was the 60’s!). The next year I ended up at a Quaker high school in Ackworth, Yorkshire, England, where I appreciated the inner light mysticism of George Fox. During the long school breaks I did voluntary service for Oxfam and at a Cheshire Nursing Home. Both of these experiences showed me suffering that I had not noticed before. It was almost too much for me to take.
During a rowdy game of soccer in a church hall in Bradford, (how did we avoid the stained glass windows?) an Anglican vicar told me to visit Francis Schaeffer in Switzerland. So in the spring of 1970 I spent two months at l’Abri. This was my first introduction to Dooyeweerd. Schaeffer had obtained some of Dooyeweerd's ideas through his friend the art historian Hans Rookmaaker. I was impressed because here was a Christian who was not afraid to engage in intellectual thought. I resolved to study apologetics, and I read all I could of Cornelius Van Til, too (not knowing at that time the disagreement between Van Til and Dooyeweerd).
I went to a Missionary Alliance Bible College the next year. I was regarded with suspicion because I had been to l’Abri and was therefore too philosophical. This tension, of always being on the wrong side of the school I attended, seemed to follow me. When I transferred to the University of Saskatchewan to study philosophy, my attempts to integrate Dooyeweerd’s ideas were regarded with suspicion in the prevailing environment of logical positivism and analytical philosophy. I was the sole student to study Kant. So my class of one traveled to a beach outside of Caracas, Venezuela, and I read the Critique of Pure Reason lying in the hot sand. I think there is something rather northern about Kant's philosophy; it did not particularly fit in with a beach resort.
I did take some courses through the Catholic College St. Thomas More on campus, where the priest who was so enthusiastic about Gabriel Marcel also surprised us by shouting “Holy Moses!” at frequent intervals,and then rushing over to the nuns who were sitting meekly in class; he then marked large white “X’s” with chalk on their black habits. I was not sure of his meaning, but it made a strong impression. He later practiced exorcisms, but outside of class.
In another class on the Philosophy of Language (a trendy subject at the time), a student made the outburst, "But what about Baby Face Nelson?" The professor did not understand the question, and neither do I even today. But again, it made a strong impression.
During this time I was baptized into the Christian Reformed Church (as an adult! this had never been done before by the pastor, and he had to consult the manual). I thought that Dooyeweerd was necessarily tied to Calvinism. This was somewhat of a courageous act, in view of Calvin's involvement in the burning at the stake of the Anabaptist Michael Servetus in 1553.
In 1972, I briefly attended the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. I bought a set of Dooyeweerd's New Critique, and the first of many underlinings and notations began at that time. Unfortunately, I was again on the wrong side. After I gave a class presentation, Henk Hart announced to the class that I was “a prime example of apostate thought,” because of the analytical philosophy I had picked up at university. His observation was probably true, but not particularly helpful to me at the time. What I had been trying to do was to relate Frege's idea of sense and reference to Dooyeweerd's distinction between central and peripheral. Perhaps there is still merit in trying to do that.
So I left for a 7 month trip to India, following the example of another ICS student, and following in the footsteps of Marco Polo many centuries before (I actually carried a copy of his Travels with me). My idea was to go south from London, hitchhike down the coast of Yugoslavia to Greece and then to turn left at Istanbul. My naïve belief that no one could possibly harm me was based on my identification with the character Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. My first encounter with harm came when I visited the holy peninsula of Mount Athos, where no females, animal or human, had been allowed for 900 years. After reaching the peninsula by boat, my passport was taken from me and I was told to meet the rest of the passengers at the monastery on the other side of the mountain. They drove away in a Jeep. I almost died in a blizzard that was as strong as any Saskatchewan storm. I could hardly see my running shoes (I had foolishly discarded my hiking boots in London, believing that southern Europe would be warm). When I finally reached the settlement, an Orthodox monk with long white hair said I would have to leave because my hair was too long. This seemed remarkably inconsistent. I refused, and the local police me up for the night, serving me some baked beans and allowing me to warm up by the fire. The next day I left the peninsula. I regret not having seen the beautiful frescoes or mosaics that National Geographic assures me can be seen in these monasteries.
In Istanbul I caught a freak bus at the Pudding Shop (opposite the Blue Mosque), and for the next few weeks we drove slowly through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, with a collection of six 8-track tapes that were played over and over at high volume. One of them was “Concert for Bangladesh.” It was an amazing trip that could not possibly be replicated now. The group on the bus included two guys who wore bowler hats and whom we referred to as the New Jersey droogs in homage to “A Clockwork Orange.” Another fellow at the back was typing out poems that he hoped to present to the President of Ceylon (as it was then called). Other passengers were concentrating on buying as many narcotics as they could from the pharmacies we passed by. At one of the many obscure inns where we stopped for the night (this one was near Mount Ararat, where unfortunately I saw no sign of the ark), we had quite a discussion about Ezekiel's visions of the wheels within wheels. My fellow passengers took a distinctly chemical interpretation. To me it sounded more like a prophecy of Dooyeweerd's modal spheres. Along the way, there were landslides and road closures. The road itself was usually only about six feet wide. And for a week we drove through snow and ice that made it look like we were visiting the Columbia Icefields in Alberta. In Iran, the Shah was still in power and Iranian students would talk to us in whispers about their political situation.
And then we got to Afghanistan, and that remains one of the most magical of my memories. In Herat, camels proudly walked up and down the street. After seeing the open air meat market, most of us became vegetarians. We lived on spinach omelets. I had some beautiful knee-high boots made for five dollars by a cobbler who was smoking dope and who wanted to hide hashish in the heels of the boots. The boots were too small, so when we reached Kandahar, I went to the market, waving them around my head. An excited group of Afghans tried on the boots (just like a scene out of Cinderella), and eventually I traded them for two embroidered shirts that proved not to be colourfast. We stayed at the Peace Hotel in Kandahar, where for a few cents I was able to get a hot shower. One of the employees had to build a wood fire under the water tank, and I had to wait for the tank to heat up. In Kabul I shared a room with an Italian fellow who liked to meditate in front of the open window with the Kabul snow coming in. Even at this time it was dangerous to travel in these parts. Seriously, there were signs warning you to get out of the Khyber pass before nightfall because bandits would regularly shoot at the passing travelers. On the bus, I read Hesse’s Journey to the East.
The border between Pakistan and India was open only one day a week at that time because of hostilities. In Lahore, children had thrown rocks at me, and I hoped that India would be more welcoming. We had to walk across no man's land. I took a train to Amritsar, where I visited the Golden Temple, and listened to the Sikhs reciting their holy Scriptures.
India had an enormous impact on me, although like most other hippies of the day I was disappointed. I did not find a guru, although I was impressed by Aurobindo’s ashram at Pondicherry. I was told by a former ambassador in Delhi that most of the Indian population was more concerned about finding food than about spirituality. I have since learned that that is not so. Two more trips to India have shown me a great deal of its spirituality. But at the time, it was hard for me to overlook the poverty, and I experienced only disillusionment. Hesse’s book should have alerted me to the fact that, like the pilgrims he describes, the problem was in myself and not in the East. In Jung’s terms, India constellated in me a huge personal shadow that I then projected outwardly.
For three months I traveled over the subcontinent, mostly by train, third class, wooden seats. The trains were pulled by huge steam engines, and the soot came in through the open windows. A three day train ride from Delhi to Bombay cost two dollars, after the student discount. Buying the ticket could sometimes take half a day. For fifty cents extra, I could get the right to sleep on what looked like a luggage rack. I made the mistake of getting off the train to visit some place or other and found it was not so easy to get on another train, much less get a seat. I ended up spending a night with about twenty other passengers crammed into the corridor next to the toilet. While waiting for the train, I was approached by a friendly stranger whose first question to me was, "What is the historical, political and geographical significance of your country?" A question truly worthy of Dooyeweerdean analysis.
In Mysore (a city that certainly lived up to its name), I was stung by a swarm of hundreds of angry bees as I was visiting a church. It is interesting that Christianity came to India with the disciple St. Thomas, long before Christianity reached northern Europe. But these thoughts of historical significance did not really concern me as I tried to run from the swarm. This was the second time I thought I would die. I ran to a bus, but the driver saw me with the bees chasing me like the dark cloud around Charlie Brown, and he slammed the door shut. My glasses were broken, and I sat on the church steps and watched the bees sting me one by one and break their bodies off leaving their stings. When there were no more, I went into the church and told the priest, and he responded with equanimity, "Yes, my son, they are stinging me, too." But the altar boy helped pull out the stings, and got me to a hospital where I spent the night surrounded by people who were screaming in pain. They gave me antihistamine, and only afterwards did I think that I was probably more at risk from the syringe.
I visited a leprosy clinic in Andhra Pradesh that my grandfather (the shunned one) had paid for. (How had he learned of India? He was in fact a well-traveled man for his day. He never visited India, but he had made a grand tour to the Holy Land and to Monte Carlo. I still do not see the connection). I arrived at nearest village to the mission station on a very late train. I asked for directions and got the usual answer of "Go straight." And as usual, several people gave this advice while pointing in different directions. Eventually someone appeared to actually know, although he mysteriously did not even look at me while he pointed in yet another direction. I walked off in pitch darkness, hardly able to see my feet. Mount Athos déja vu. But here the danger was not of blizzards, but of snakes and other things that go bump in the night. I must have walked for two miles. I suddenly heard a creaking noise in front of me, and I almost did bump into an oxcart. I hailed the driver, but both he and his passenger dived out of the cart and ran away. They must have thought I was a dacoit (bandit). I guess my huge silhouette with my frame backpack didn't help much, either.
I flew out of Delhi to Amsterdam, where I hitchhiked up to the tip of Norway. That's a long way. From Oslo to Hammerfest is the same distance as from Oslo to Rome,or so I was told. Norway was beautiful. Coming back through Lapland, though, the mosquitoes were so fierce that we rushed from the VW microbus into our tents. The guys in the other tent didn't set it up right, and the pole collapsed during the night. But they were too frightened to get out and face the bugs, so they spent the whole night under a flat canvas.
But I fell in love with the Netherlands. It was clean, beautiful, and there was something of my heritage there, although it had been more than 300 years since my family had lived in Friesland. I resolved to study at the Vrije Universiteit, where I hoped to get to the roots of Dooyeweerd’s ideas. I understood that systematic philosophy was being taught by Hendrik van Riessen. I purchased his book Wijsbegeerte, and was able to read the Dutch with the help of a dictionary, and my knowledge of the cognates from the low German we spoke at home.
A year later, I received a Netherlands Government Scholarship to study at the Vrije Universiteit. In the summer, I took courses in Dutch through Calvin College in order to prepare myself. Along with my courses in philosophy, I had to choose a minor. I chose to study the phenomenology of non-western religions, and of Hinduism in particular. I often visited the Rijksmuseum, which had on display a large Natraj (sculpture of the Hindu god Shiva, portrayed as the Lord of Creation). I was overwhelmed by the beauty of this sculpture. But I was also uneasy at the impact that this non-Christian religion was making on me. I had felt this same combination of fascination and fear during the three months I had spent in India.
But again there was something missing in my studies. Although I completed my "Kandidaats" degree there, I was not offered even one course specifically on Dooyeweerd. I was very disappointed in van Riessen’s teachings. I did not see anything particularly Dooyeweerdean in his view of theory as the abstraction of universals. I expressed disagreement with him on a few occasions in class; this type of interaction with the professor was not encouraged. At one of my oral exams (tentamens), he told me, “You Americans do not know how to read a book.” And again there was some truth in the observation (although not in his reference to me as an American). But there was also a noticeable disconnect with the fact that I had just graduated magna cum laude in Canada, and that I was a scholarship recipient. Anyway, my oral examinations tended towards a memorized listing of the main points in a text. It was based on an intensive reading of a few texts, as opposed to the piles of textbooks that North American students are expected to read and digest. I have learned from both educational systems, but the lessons have not always been easy. But the requirement of knowing what was on a given page of an assigned textbook was a skill that would later serve me well in my practice of law.
While I was studying in Amsterdam, I was fortunate to meet Dooyeweerd, although he had retired from teaching. He confirmed that he, too disagreed with van Riessen’s idea of abstraction. He told me that he still maintained the view of theory as a Gegenstand relation, and that others had not understood it. Unfortunately I did not understand it at the time, either. I also met Dooyeweerd on a less formal occasion. I had met his granddaughter, and I was invited almost every Sunday to a music evening at their home where everyone present would perform on a musical instrument or sing a song. I played classical guitar (badly). One evening Dooyeweerd was present. I recall him leaning on the piano, listening to his daughter (my friend’s mother) singing Debussy’s “Noël des enfants qui n’ont plus de maisons.” There were tears in her eyes as she sang about the children who lost their homes in war. I learned that the Dooyeweerd family had sheltered some Jews during the German occupation. Then Dooyeweerd spoke to me about music. He told me that Barth had said that when the angels in Heaven are required to play before God, they play Bach. But when the angels play for themselves, it is always Mozart. I shall forever remember and appreciate this human side of Dooyeweerd.
Although I had had such great expectations of the Vrije Universiteit, my studies there were not enjoyable. After completing my Kandidaats, I returned to Canada to do my MA at Western Ontario. Again I was subjected to disdain. My study advisor sneered at the “survey texts” that we had used for philosophy in Amsterdam. I learned from this that every institution has its own standards, and each believes that its standards are the best. I realized that the academic world is not the pure ivory tower that people imagine it to be. Observing the power games and the departmental squabbling, I decided that I should enter a profession where I would at least get paid for fighting. So I studied law and then practiced as a litigation lawyer for almost twenty years (Hey, Dooyeweerd was also a lawyer!). You can look up the reported cases if you are interested. While in law school at McGill, I was confirmed in the Anglican church, and I learned to appreciate its rich traditions. I did question the vicar about that portion of the 39 Articles [the Anglican Confession of Faith that no one reads anymore] that condemns the Anabaptists. He said it was unfortunate.
Due to health reasons, I had to leave the practice of law. I took a second magical trip to India, where I attended a most amazing wedding–I stepped out of my taxi and I found myself high up on an elephant with painted eyes and trunk. The groom rode up on a white horse, accompanied by a brass band and a dozen guys carrying chandeliers on their heads, with the last fellow carrying a portable electric generator to supply the power. There was dancing in the street, and ferocious fireworks, and the marriage itself took place around the sacred fire at the auspicious time of two in the morning. And the next day the hijras came around. They are hermaphrodites who have their own society, and who come to every house where there has a birth. The men, dressed as women, danced and sang, and the more we laughed, the more we had to pay them to prevent them putting the evil eye on the child. My host, a lawyer, told me that if the child had been born with any obvious ambiguous sexuality, they would have taken it away with them.
I met privately with the Hindu priest who had performed the wedding. He asked me the name of a flower, a colour, and a river. He then told me some most amazing personal details of my life, including my recent departure from work. Now I am not saying that this type of psychic ability counts as a mystical experience. But it was certainly outside of my ordinary experience, and it made me question my previous way of looking at the world.
I decided to return to university to get my doctorate in Religious Studies, and to explore the issue of Hindu-Christian relations. As a grad student, I was able to teach courses in Eastern Religions, The Nature of Religion, and Comparative Mysticism. I added some basic Sanskrit to the other languages I already had–English, French, Dutch, German, Greek. I loved my students; their desire to integrate spirituality into their life was so evident. However, this was not encouraged by the Department. The analytic philosophy of the 1960’s had been replaced with constructivism and postmodernism. Religious experience was regarded as the result of the concepts that we bring to our experience, and these concepts were analyzed in terms of their sociological factors. There was much talk of politically correct ideology, and which religion was oppressing whom, but there was very little interest in comparing the truth of different religious experiences or in actually experiencing them. One member of the faculty was proud of the fact that when his students asked him what his own beliefs were, he would reply that it was none of their business. I knew from the courses I taught how eager the undergraduates were to discuss precisely these issues, and I thought how sad it was that these topics were being ignored in the name of academic objectivity. It was also philosophically inconsistent, since to speak of the scholar’s objectivity depends on the very modernist assumptions that were being criticized in the name of postmodernism. So I found myself too consciously religious for Religious Studies.
I then had the good fortune to enroll at the University of South Africa, where my supervisors fully supported my spiritual quest within an academic framework. My doctoral thesis explores the experience of the French Benedictine monk Henri Le Saux (known by his Indian name Abhishiktananda), who spent most of his life trying to reconcile his Christian beliefs with his nondual (advaitic) experience in India. Abhishiktananda experienced tremendous personal anguish, keeping his beliefs in tension while he lived out his experiences. His life is an example of genuine religious dialogue. I believe that his experience, and his understanding of nondualism, can help us to interpret Dooyeweerd’s mysticism. And, as I indicate in my thesis, I believe that Dooyeweerd’s ideas can help us to relate theoretical thought to mystical experience. I made a third trip to India to investigate the Abhishiktananda archives, and to visit several of the ashrams, including the beautiful Christian ashram Saccidananda [Being, Consciousness, Bliss] that he founded, also known as Shantivanam. Still another name is the ashram of the Holy Trinity. This ashram was later directed by Fr. Bede Griffiths.
After completing my doctorate, I turned again to Dooyeweerd. From 1970 I had never really stopped thinking about his philosophy, or reading the writings of those who claimed to be his adherents. My studies in nondualism had shown me what attracted me to Dooyeweerd, and why my previous studies of him were unsatisfying. I wanted in particular to examine Dooyeweerd’s idea of time. When looking at this issue of cosmic time, I discovered the writings of Franz von Baader. I was astonished at the similarities between Dooyeweerd and Baader, not only with respect to time, but for many other issues. I spent the next six months reading everything I could of both Baader and Dooyeweerd. The remarkable convergence between Dooyeweerd and Baader confirmed for me that my mystical reading of Dooyeweerd was correct. Dooyeweerd’s ideas, like Baader’s, form a complex interconnecting system. They are both difficult philosophers to read, because one idea cannot be understood in isolation from the others. But once we see the centrality of Dooyeweerd’s mysticism, many of his ideas can be understood, perhaps for the first time.
Unlike many mystics, Dooyeweerd values theoretical thought. But he also insists on the experience of the supratemporal heart. He said that his ideas on time and the supratemporal heart are key to his philosophy. But many of his followers rejected these ideas very early on. His Philosophy of the Law-Idea does not make sense without these ideas. But I am confident that when we recover this spiritual experiential dimension in Dooyeweerd, his ideas will again have tremendous appeal for today’s students. I know, because I have taught them. Constructivism, deconstruction and postmodernism will not satisfy their spiritual longings. But a mysticism that affirms both God and world, connection with others and an experiential knowledge of our true self–that is what they are looking for, and that is what Dooyeweerd can give them, if we read his philsophy, as opposed to the misinterpretations by many of his followers.
I have three wonderful children. Two are at university; one is studying music and the other is in engineering. My third child has just turned 6, and she also gives me great joy, particularly in the wonder with which she explores the world. I presently attend a Roman Catholic church, where I love the incarnational emphasis on the sacraments (as Abhishiktananda says, the sacraments are a sign that the world is real and not maya). I also still love the Quaker silent listening to the inner light, with no recognition of any specific sacraments, but rather seeing all of life as sacramental. As they say, "les extrêmes se touchent."
Revised Mar. 28/07