By Bob Connor

                                                                – John 8, 32

It was the late 1960s and I was completing my university studies. I simply did not know what to do with myself. I did not even know what I believed. Particularly, I did not know what my faith – if any – was.

What was the problem? I had had a full four years plus of study in one of the best universities in the country, the University of Houston, and I didn’t know what it all meant. I was looking for myself and had not been able to find any meaning.

I began to wrestle with my own religious beliefs. I had been raised in the Methodist church, but stopped going to church when I began going to college. I could not see God or his works. I wanted a sign and did not see any.

During my college years, I had known people who were from a wide range of religious beliefs. Some questioned everything. Others accepted without questioning. Some rejected everything without questioning.

There was a person named Art. He was a humanist and did not believe in God. I called him “Art the Anti-Christ.” He wore a black patch over one eye and was very intelligent. We had many discussions about religion, which tested not only my beliefs but also my knowledge, intellect, and repertoire of books I had or had not read. His favorite tactic was asking me “Have you read…?” and I had not; so I immediately felt inadequate and took a blow in the debate.

I was very active in politics. There was Earl who was also active for a while. He was super religious but dropped out of political activity, concluding that it did not matter who won any election since God would be in charge anyway. But I had always thought that God uses us as His tools to achieve His will. Should we just “lie down” and let things happen?

Another person, Vincent, was a devoted Roman Catholic. I remember that Vincent and some of us were going to travel out of town to attend a political convention. We had to take Vincent by his church (St. Vincent de Paul, coincidently) and wait in the car for him to attend morning Mass before we could hit the road.

David and Eleanor were already married and working their way through college. He called her “Puddy” – as in the Sylvester and Tweety cartoon in which Tweety the bird would say “I taut I taw a puddy tat” whenever she glimpsed the obviously hungry Sylvester the cat. David was very intelligent and called himself a socialist. This challenged my traditional background and ideas. He was an agnostic and did not know whether there was a God or not.

I was even banned from one of my friend’s apartment by his mother. Billy Graham was in town with his ministry which prompted my friend, his mother, and I to have a discussion about whether God intervened in a person’s daily life. I remarked that I did not think that “God was going to swoop down and pay your rent for you.” She instructed her son to not let me come to her apartment again.

On a less controversial but very enlightening side, there was my World Literature professor, Dr. Cooper Philips Speaks, who opened my eyes to the panorama of music, literature and art available to me for the asking. I just did not know that so many wonderful things existed. (During the second semester of his class, my eyes were also opened to the beautiful Joan Elizabeth Brezik, a student also in the class, who would later make the mistake of agreeing to become my wife.)

Dr. Speaks made a profound mark on my life. Through his teachings, I developed a taste for classical music, fine art and literature. (As I am writing this, I have my earphones on and am listening to Itzhak Perlman performing various violin concertos. It helps to inspire me.)

We became friends, and he would later write a poem commemorating the dedication of a portrait of John F. Kennedy to the university after the tragic event of November 22, 1963. I had raised the money for the portrait and had it painted, framed, and had an engraved plaque made.

Dr. Speaks read his poem at the dedication and Mayor Louie Welch of Houston gave the keynote speech. The portrait still hangs in the reading room of the old portion of the library at the University of Houston.

My best friend and later roommate then was Jewish. We graduated from the University of Houston about the same time - 1967. He caught me one time saying, “let’s jew them down” in reference to negotiating prices during a meeting. Fortunately, we were good enough friends that he forgave me and even kidded me that we should, instead, try “Christianing them down”.

I learned a lot about the Jewish faith from my friend Jan. I never forget that Jesus was a Jew, that three of the four gospels in the New Testament were written by Jews, that the Last Supper was a Jewish Passover Meal, and that most of the Christian Bible is about the same as the Jewish Bible, except for the order of the books, and that 7 books found in the Catholic Bible were extracted from the Jewish Bible about the time of the rise of Christianity.

Jan went to New York to live with his parents, and I joined the Peace Corps for a short time but dropped out. I decided that I did not need to go to a foreign country to find people who needed help. He was drafted and went to Vietnam. Yes, he survived, thank God, but he lost some of his idealism there.

I went to work as a Math teacher in Spring Branch I.S.D. in 1967, to encourage young minds to sip at the fountain of knowledge - and to earn a living. I again became active in politics in my quest to save the world, but I wasn’t sure that the world wanted to be saved. Furthermore, I did not know what I believed. As I began my search for the truth, the trauma of the times escalated in the following year – the Year of Our Lord 1968.

To be continued next time

Bob Connor is a continuing education teacher at St. Ambrose Catholic Church. You can reach him at bobconn@earthlink.com

(The Banner, July 9, 2009)