Lee Note 17 Raymond Brock April 7, 2001

Dear Fellow REL 1960 Grads,

Where does one begin after over forty years? What a daunting task, especially when one's life has been as full of tumult and radical change as mine! Keeping it as simple and direct as possible might well be the kindest course to take.

Perhaps just jumping in and providing you with a brief sketch of just exactly where I have been all these years might help to provide you with a framework for visualizing my journey.

Right after graduation I spent four and a half years in Greenville, S.C., at the notorious Bob Jones University, where I majored in Religion with minors in Hellenistic Greek, English, History, and Education (secondary school teaching fields in English and Social Sciences). They disowned me long ago!! It was most mutual.

Then, for three and a half years, I attended theological seminary and taught Greek at what is now known as Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (then Gordon Divinity School), which is about 35 miles northeast of Boston near Cape Ann. After completing seminary, I spent one semester at the Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University in Dallas, doing some special studies in philosophical theology; the plan had been to stay there longer, but nearly nine years of straight studying, including several summers, had definitely extended me to my limit.

While we were both at BJU, Tina Lee Dickson, who is also a Class of '60 member, and I married in 1963. After what proved to be that monumentally difficult year in Dallas in 1968-69, we both found teaching positions in Gloucester, Massachusetts, only 15 miles from where we had resided while I was in seminary, and moved back to New England, which both of us had learned to love very much, and still do. She taught first grade mostly, and I taught in the social sciences department of the local high school.

Because it was possible for me to introduce entirely new courses related to psychology, philosophy, and religious studies into the curriculum of this public high school as long ago as 1970, I ended up remaining there for three years, receiving tenure and resigning shortly afterwards in order to enter a Ph.D. program at Harvard University in the Comparative Study of Religion. I tried to focus on Chinese folk traditions generally, but actually came to concentrate on the interaction of Taoism and Buddhism as the latter entered China about the same time that Christianity began spreading throughout the Mediterranean world. Through all of this, Gloucester, of The Perfect Storm fame, truly became my spiritual home; to this day I still miss it so very much, even though I have not lived there since May 1976. Have been back a bunch of times, though, and will continue to do so.

By the way, while walking on Good Harbor Beach, near where I lived then in Gloucester, during the winter of 1972 with the winds, rain, and waves pounding at me, I discovered the name that I have come to prefer: "Rayn," pronounced like the rain that I love so much and miss here in California equally much. All my life I had had reasons for not liking to use the name "Raymond" and had never liked the nickname "Ray" at all; thus, it was wonderful to discover on this exquisite beach that I could just add an "n" to "Ray" and come up with a name that I truly liked and that combined part of my first name with part of my middle name (Wayne). Alas, however, all too many people think that I simply don't know how to spell, that my true name is "Ryan."

After two years at Harvard, preceded by a most amicable divorce from Tina (she and I had one son, Eric, born in 1971, shortly before our divorce, and I have never had any other children) due mostly to the development of a huge gap in our spiritual lives and overall values, I resigned from the program to try to find a career in some very different field.

In life it is rare to make a decision that, after twenty-five years, still stands the test of time. March 1976 saw such a marvelous decision for me: my mother was having a coronary artery bypass done at the Methodist Hospital in Houston, and a dedicated PA served on her cardiologist's team. Sven directed me to the PA profession, to Baylor College of Medicine, and to what has become the most profound blessing in my life. Thus, two years after I left Harvard, I learned of the Physician Assistant profession, moved back to Houston, spent three years studying at Baylor College of Medicine and working in the laboratory at Texas Children's Hospital to pay bills (I had picked up training as an unlicensed medical laboratory technician after leaving Harvard), and graduated from Baylor in July 1980.

For the last twenty-one years, I have delighted in my professional life as a PA and have worked mostly in Virginia (1980-86) and California (1986-Present), but have also either trained or worked briefly in both Texas and Florida. Over the course of this career, my specialties have been Family Practice, Internal Medicine, and Nephrology.

Currently I joke with my friends about how my life as a professional student has made it impossible for me ever even to dream about retiring, but also about how I am now "semi-retired" due to a position with a county health department where I am off more days a week than I work. Seriously, I am still working full-time, but my schedule is 8:00 A.M. to 9-10:00 P.M. on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday with no call or holiday responsibilities. My daily work in clinical medicine has been far more meaningful to me than professional and academic religious life ever was, believe me!

As to my spiritual life, suffice it to say that Chinese things have come to mean more to me than Middle Eastern things. My lovely partner in life is Yunxia Huang, who calls herself in this country "Lisa"; she is a professor of Mandarin at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. Born in far northeast China, with ten seminal years just north of Hong Kong in the Shenzen Special Economic Zone, Yunxia has been in this country for only six years. What a delight and blessing she has been for me!! We share an interest in Daoism/Taoism and taiji (t'ai chi) with a sense of devotion to the Chinese goddess of compassion and mercy, Kuan Yin. As to my family, both my father and my mother passed on in 1984. My brothers, Richard (REL Class of 1962) and Melton (REL Class of 1964), still live in Texas and are doing quite well with lives and families that provide them with much happiness and fulfillment.

Thoughts of retirement do increasingly come to my mind, though I still cannot figure how. The reasons for these more urgent thoughts lie in the fact that in November 2000 I was diagnosed with cancer: renal cell carcinoma of the left kidney. In early December I spent a while in the hospital having a radical left nephrectomy performed. Post-surgical pathology reports suggested that the malignancy was still within the capsule of the kidney, even though it was large and even though, as one pathologist put it, "it was damn close." Thus, no chemotherapy or radiation therapy are planned, especially since neither of them are much good for this type of cancer; therefore, we will just be positive and endure the next one-two critical years with regular surveillance procedures along the way. Remember me in your meditations!

Know that many of you still maintain a rich place in my mind and my heart, particularly those of you who shared with me the trail from Baytown Elementary to Baytown Junior High. It has been nice to see many of your names in the list that Kay keeps adding to (thank you, Kay, for working so hard to provide us with at least this limited means of communication).

All that I can say, as I look back to our years in high school, is that for many of you I must have seemed in those days like such an insufferable shit. Hopefully, over the years and through many hard, dark days, I have acquired some sense of compassion and ability to open up more to others in a mellower fashion.

Feel free to write or to call if you should ever care to do so. If you don't, then I understand and will look forward to seeing you at some reunion in the future of the Robert E. Lee High School Class of 1960.

By the way, do you know which high school teachers I still remember the best? Mrs. Plagens, Mrs. Gelber, and Mrs. Huckabee (hope I remembered how to spell their names correctly). What a hoot!

Your friend,

Rayn Brock