How and Why

Hello on a quiet, but beautiful June morning,

The time from Winter to impending Summer has another season, and it is transitional, but this concluding last couple weeks of that connection between the shortest to the longest day of the year seemed anything but predictable. Some warm days in the 80s in early April spoiled up, but what has followed since then has been cool, incredibly damp with incessant rain (which was probably more needed that most might realize), and finally, this last week we have returned to the 80s. The continued rain has kept things blooming, keeping allergy medications close by, and the vegetation (and corresponding greens) is (are) lush and beautiful.

The recent response of someone about my blog caused me to ponder a number of things, and most importantly the role my undergraduate education played (and continues to play) in my life, and perhaps as importantly, how that happened as well as why it matters to me more than four decades later. While Dana and its influence have been a significant thread in my writing, this blog is about the how and why. As it is the rationale for much of what I write, I hope that some find my musing is relatable, and that it might offer them some reflection on their own experiences. As a professor, I worked diligently to not tell people what to think, but rather to teach them how to think. One of the things I found most disturbing, particularly in the last decade in the classroom, was the propensity for many well-meaning students to merely want a recipe card. I think that is the first thing I realized when I enrolled at Dana as a soon-to-be 24 year old veteran. While I arrived in Blair quite unsure of my scholarly abilities, my professors with Danish names like Jorgensen, Nielsen, Hansen, or Neve, as well as a Warman, Hutton, or Bienz, not quite as Danish, each of them pushed us to participate actively in their class. Generally, they welcomed questions, and would require us to ponder and integrate. This expectation of integration is what prepared me for life, fostering my desire to understand and learn in a way never anticipated. That first year’s interim class, an in-depth consideration of the Civil War, with King Rich, opened my eyes to the conflict that wracked the fabric of our country. Years later, after being assigned to the NEPA Synod of the newly formed ELCA, I found myself walking the fields of Gettysburg. Some of Dr. Jorgensen’s insights bubbled to the surface a decade later. When I traveled to Europe for another interim, the reality of what it meant to learn was finally realized. Memorization had its place, but learning was being a sponge and soaking up as much as possible. Those 3:00 a.m.conversations with Dr. Nielsen on a train from Venice to Paris changed my life. They were not in the curriculum or a syllabus, but they mattered as much as our planned tours in København, in München, or in Paris. All these years later, I know the pneumonia I managed to catch while traveling that January were the initial symptoms of what has been a life-long health struggle. That trip to Europe is integrally connected to my own taking of students to Eastern and Central Europe or to my choice of studying Polish two summers, hoping to teach in Kraków the fall of 2020, which COVID scuttled.

Too often, which is not surprising, we compartmentalize things, we become too granular, failing to see the connective elements that explain our lives. I believe my Dana education taught me, instilled in me an appreciation for the complexity of life that integrates the philosophical, the physical, and the spiritual. I remember struggling to wrap my head around determinism in that first Introduction to Philosophy class. Dr. Clifford Hanson, in his soft-spoken way, admonished my consternation, “Michael, you do not have to agree with it, you merely need to understand it.” That sentence has served me well now almost a half century later. There is little in my life that was not either formed or solidified at Dana. It is so apparent to me with minimal reflection. The why that happened can be considered from two different points.

When I arrived at seminary, other Dana students were there, a Grorud, a Tyler, a Holz, a Brockhoff, but I often called LNTS the Norwegian pipeline to ministry. Certainly the sister institutions (most of them in Minnesota) were outstanding in their own right, but what I received in my classes at Dana not only prepared me for seminary, but for my eventual PhD.. And yet, as importantly, it taught and established a profound foundation on what it meant to me an informed and critical thinker. Dana took what I learned in the Marine Corps about respect and decorum, adding an evaluative, an interpretative element to it that serves me to this day. Much like the person questioning the why I might write and post, which is a perfectly legitimate, honest, inquiry, it caused my own consideration of how I might, how I should respond. When I walked the oval across the steps of Old Main that May day of 1983, I had a nascent understanding of what Dana meant, but I was looking forward to what would happen next.

Much like the footings of a building, what is build upon them obscures their appearance, and as the years go by, it is only when the building remains steady and true that their true value becomes apparent. If the appropriate care is not given when the footings are dug, the concrete poured, and the bricks laid, what happens does not show through immediately. It is the reality of time, the result of weather, seasons, or years that will provide the evidence of what happened at the outset. Similar to what I say about my father who passed that late December day in 1997, in spite of his quarter or a century as a memory, he is still getting smarter. The lessons learned in classes, at Hum Events, in choir concerts, sitting with classmates in the Dragon’s Head or at campfires, I still see and experience their consequence today. I still have all of my Humanities classes’s notebooks. The number of times I referred to them as I prepared something in my own class decades later are too many to count. This past week I got my Heritage Center newsletter; two words written on the back of the envelope are more meaningful than words can express.

So the how and the why of Dana are basic to the individual I am today. Most certainly there is an element of nostalgia in this, definitely there is a reminiscence that creates some degree of wistfulness for those times that were so influential. More importantly, there is a thankfulness and gratitude for what a visit on a Lutheran Youth Encounter team, and yes, a Grorud, a Beltz, a Kendall, a Rowland, a Brockhoff, and a Merc, who made Dana more than a stop on a year-long journey. Those people changed my life; Dana and those individuals blessed my life. They started me on a path that has made me much of who I am. The how is still being realized. The why is because that is what the Holy Spirit does.

Hail fair Dana, and thank you for reading.

Michael (Class of 1983)