Some Poetry: Poetry and Thoughts by Arthur Turfa: How One Decision Can Lead to So Much- Or Was it Part of Something Larger?

Saturday, December 28, 2024

How One Decision Can Lead to So Much- Or Was it Part of Something Larger?

I spent most of 1975 at the University of California Berkeley in graduate school for German. I also spent most of 1975 searching for something beyond that.

Berkeley, the flagship of the UC system, had settled down from the turbulent 1960s. While I enjoyed much about the Bay Area, I had a growing suspicion that something was not quite right. While I liked what I was studying, my approach and interests conflicted with what others expected. There was a growing expectation to stick solely to the text, not to anything else in the writer's experience. Sometimes that was legitimate, but not always.

The campus was about the size of Penn State, where I had done my undergraduate work. It was harder to connect, partially because Berkeley was part of a major metropolitan area with an entirely different vibe.

Instead of semesters, there were 10-week quarters, as Penn State had at the time. By the end of the second quarter, I realized that my chances of a teaching assistant were very low. the department offered 1 each year, and people would split them at times. I was eighth on the alternate list.

Desperation set in; I worked part-time at the Main Library and even thought about going to library school. Someone in the department said a professor from UC Irvine was recruiting, so I spoke with him and received a teaching assistantship.

That summer I took some classes as a part-time student, audited an English course, and worked in the library. One of the courses I took was on Martin Luther, who reformed the German language as well as the Church. The seminar was taught by a rather staid but approachable professor, Reinhard Henning, who was born in what used to be Danzig.

For a few years before this, my participation in any religious community was minimal to non-existent. As I read Luther, I was impressed by his ability to keep what was good and to transform or abandon what was not. I was a confirmed Protestant but wondered where I should turn. My previous orientation was Presbyterian. I resolved to find a community of faith before I went to what was then ultra-conservative Orange County.

Two options were available. I had lived a block from St. Joseph of Arimathea Episcopal Chapel. That was interesting, but my previous experience with Episcopalians is that they were all WASPs. I was not of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. The other option was the University Lutheran Chapel, very close to where I lived then. I decided to go there first.

The pastor had a bear, wore sandals without socks, and had what I later came to know were full eucharistic vestments. Music was a guitarist, who played a Bob Marley song for an offertory. I felt at ease the few times I went there, and never went tot St. Joseph's.

A few weeks after I moved to Irvine I started attending St. Matthew's a mission of the Lutheran Chruch-Missouri Synod, and joined a few months later. A year or so later I realized that I enjoyed teaching but wondered about graduate school. It was the insistence of considering only the text. That's when I felt the tug to seminary.

Because of the Luther course and University Lutheran Chapel, I entered seminary in 1977 and was ordained in 1981 in the Lutheran Church of America. Fifteen years later I was licensed in the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem, PA, to be followed by two others. I realized that the Episcopal Church was different from what I had thought earlier.

I also went back to teaching, being bi-vocational long before the need was recognized. by ecclesiastical higher-ups. Now I realize that God subtly and consistently guided me through all this (and there is much more to tell) to make full use of the gifts given to me.

From one decision so much has come. I have been blessed, and hope to have done more good than harm over the decades.