My Life’s Transition Points

Reflections on the Redirections in My Journey’s Path

Being in my 90s has given me a new appreciation of life as an adventure that proceeds through the years in ever changing directions. I am keenly aware of the constancy of the self that I sense within me throughout my journey. My varied experiences that fill my memory are all connected in a time line that is ME. I am still that little boy of five, I am that fifteen-year-old going off to a boarding school, I am a 20-year-old Ensign in the U.S. Navy in World War II, marrying my highschool sweetheart at 20, going on to graduate school in Physics, and so on. A series of experiences that become a lifetime.

But there seem to be two different aspects of my life’s journey . One is my physical life with its daily happenings with family and school and career, with houses and cars, vacations and sicknesses, babies and dogs . . . My everyday real life. The second is my thinking life, my curiosity about everything which probably led me into science, my search into those deep questions, such as “Who am I?’, my study of the Bible and theology. And there have been significant turning point in both aspects. Those in my physical life have been obvious and significant. But I now can see that in my thinking life there have also been turning points that set me off in new directions. And I have reached a point in my thinking life that gives new meanings to the transition points that have been a part of my physical life. What seemed at the time to be breaks into new directions, I now see as fortuitous turns in one continuous pathway of 90 plus years. And I am comfortable with that. And very grateful.

My “thinking life” clearly developed throughout my academic studies. In addition, I grew up in a “liberal” Christian home where I was taught to think for myself. Both my Father and Mother had Master’s degrees. My Father was a Methodist minister. I never had to “unlearn” dogma of the fundamentalist churches. While my academic studies were Math and Physics, I also had academic courses in Bible both in high school and college. I also started to read history and theology books extensively . I soon had Bible Commentaries as well as the latest Bible versions.

A major turning point was reading Honest to God, by Bishop John A. T. Robinson in the 1960s, followed especially by the books and weekly email essays of Bishop John Shelby Spong starting in the late 1990s. My reaction was “That’s what I’ve been trying to say all along.” And in 2004, I started writing my own short essays, trying to articulate my understanding of my of my own basic beliefs. They became my learning documents. By 2012, I had 37 essays in a folder on my computer when a friend introduced me to WordPress, which I then used to create my own blog [lorenbullock.com] with those original essays. I have been adding ever since, and the blog now has over 100 essays and thoughts.

So now I approach a new transition point, one that comes to all life, whether an oak leaf, a rose, a robin, a tiger, a human being. Birth and death are together basic to all life. What a privilege to be such a part of life. But it’s more than that. Transition, change, motion are all basic to the entire Universe, from its galaxies and stars to its atoms and molecules, to the mountains and oceans and life of the Earth itself. We human beings are part of something grand – of something sacred. There is a oneness to it all. I see God in every part of it, including me.

Loren Bullock
May 24, 2019