Paean to the men I’ve loved

I’ve reached that time in life for reflection. And a recent cancer diagnosis (see prior post) has me thinking: Write while you can! If only for the sake of my two sons, I create this record.

The first man I loved was my father. Because he was so wonderful—nurturing, kind, affirming—I have found it easy to love men! I’ve had my share of sorrow in the process, but that’s life.

There were numerous heartthrobs during my teen years but no serious romantic interest until my 20s. Steve and I met at university: his law school years and my nursing studies overlapped. He sharpened my questioning/debating skills and—per his Swedish heritage—introduced me to Ingmar Bergman and a well-made cup of coffee. I ended our six-year, on-and-off relationship soon arriving in Africa to teach nursing; we’d spent long enough trying to make it work.

A dashing doctor, brother of my best friend during

the Zambia years (British midwife, later curate

in the Church of England), seemed a more ideal match. John was emotionally warmer than Steve, equally intelligent, plus he planned to work in Africa. “It would have a lot going for it,” he said, when I suggested a possible relationship while in England for the wedding of his sister, my friend. A few months later an engagement! But not with me. 

No man has matched the one I married at 33. I’d recently returned from Africa and Bill from U.S. army intelligence work in Germany. Our families had been friends for more than a decade via church connections. Early on he dated my younger sister…but “You have the wrong sister” said his favorite aunt after meeting me just prior to my exit to Zambia in 1976, aged 24. Bill and my sister were then 21; he soon joined the army and she married someone else.

Bill embraced and honored my strengths. He was my cheerleader and I his. Confidence in ourselves, in our work, and in our parenting grew as we supported one another. Together we did good things in our church and wider community. Witty and wise, urbane and unpretentious, he nurtured a love of learning in our sons and—with his Russian language skills—shepherded us through an unforgettable visit to Russia and Ukraine, funded in part by his teacher-of-the-year award at the college where we both worked.

His love language was gift-giving: beautiful, unique earrings from every work-related trip he made, always fine chocolates and roses on my birthday and Valentine’s. A talented wordsmith with a poet’s heart, he co-published a popular textbook on writing. I treasure lovely things he wrote or said to and about me. 

We made music together—first with recorders, later him on guitar, then cello and me on the piano. For fifteen years we hosted annual holiday musical evenings with dinner for all ages. Bill was a creative chef and an unfailingly generous host.

Bill and sons accompanied by their cello teacher

Our challenges were linked to his struggles with

depression, anxiety, and alcohol use. He dealt bravely

with all! Medication helped somewhat but cumulative stressors related to medication side effects, retirement, relocation to Ecuador, and disagreement over a son’s crisis were all too much. He departed a year before our 30th anniversary. Photo to right was taken at our goddaughter’s wedding, just months before things fell apart.

“Free drinks for this woman the rest of her life” quipped a young cousin after my update at a 2018 family reunion—something like “Since we last gathered (four years earlier) I’ve experienced legal separation, divorce, marriage, and annulment of marriage. What next?”

My four-month marriage to Steve (not the lawyer) took nine months to annul: lots of paperwork, money, and multiple trips from Mexico to California. Divorce would have been easier and cheaper! I took a firm stand, however, on the grounds of fraud.

The praise for this man? Picture me 40 years earlier—a young volunteer in Africa overwhelmed by new duties as “sister tutor” in a rural mission hospital/nurse training school. Along came Steve (with nurse wife Ruth)—too charismatic for the staid Brethren with whom they had worked for awhile but maintaining ties through periodic visits. A shared dinner, their compassionate ears, a prayer from Steve that strengthened me all served to create a bond.

We met again from time to time in Zambia. And then a grand adventure to visit them in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo). A nurse friend and I floated down the Luapula River on a ferry—hoisted up the sides from a dugout canoe launched at a riverside village where the headman covered my vehicle with palm fronds to hide it from would-be thieves. Steve met the ferry in a small boat, took us for a delightful week’s visit at the mission he and Ruth had founded.

The couple spent half a century in Africa—building, educating, healing, caring for orphans and refugees,

Steve & family at time of my visit

inspiring others to serve. From them I learned more about sacrifice and perseverance. But as would become evident later, their remoteness and independence from supportive oversight and accountability were liabilities. They visited Bill and me several times during fundraising furloughs but we lost touch when our email address changed upon the move to Ecuador.

What a surprise, then, to hear from Steve on the one-year anniversary of Ruth‘s death (I think he’d learned Bill was gone). He pursued me. I was intrigued. Then a bombshell—a hint of infidelities in Africa from a person outside the circle of our many mutual acquaintances. Ensued numerous consultations (all were positive about him), gentle confrontation, denial of wrong. I chose to believe him. But within a month of the marriage, boundary issues with women emerged. Gently pressed, he confessed his history. “Had you been honest, Steve, I’d have remained your friend, but I’d not have married you.”

My next romance began a year later at church coffee hour. John and his wife/Bill and I were members of a small Episcopal fellowship for years, their grandchildren and our children peers. John’s opening line:“What happened with Bill?” I briefly summarized the complex situation I was still sorting out myself (see post of January 2019).

Like Steve—widowed for about a year—John was eager for a new relationship. So we had a date…and then another. “If I were younger (he was 83, I was 67) I’d marry you in a heartbeat,” he enthused. “But you don’t really know me yet,” I cautioned.

So we got to know one another, enjoying our mutual interests in jazz, growing flowers, and good food and wine. He was generous, kind, affirming. His extended family welcomed me. We did consider marriage: “You would have a house and some benefits when I die,” but I was ambivalent about taking on a caregiver role in the probable near future. I missed him when I moved several states away for family reasons. We Skyped weekly and tentatively planned a cruise together. He died of a respiratory illness the morning after I arrived back in Colorado for a family Christmas.

Dave and I met via eHarmony—touted as the safest (though most expensive) online matching agency. Having returned to Colorado after a romantically dry but otherwise delightful fifteen months in Kentucky, the chances of meeting someone in the small mountain town where I resettled near my mother and two youngest sisters seemed slim.

Another widower, Dave—three years my senior—had been active on multiple dating sites and party to a couple longer-term relationships that fizzled. “It’s a numbers game,” he explained. “I don’t have the energy for such an effort,” I replied, “so lucky I met you right off the bat.”

We took turns spending weekends at his place and mine—an 85-mile drive. What delightful times together

in our kitchens, watching good movies, talking history (his interest in addition to computer programming), going to his gym! He endeared himself to my family at Thanksgiving with his fabulous homemade pumpkin cheesecake. I helped decorate his lovely home for Christmas and met his friendly neighbors. He was grateful for my help in creating a family portrait wall (his son and daughter with their spouses and children lived in other states).

Dave was involved at the large Presbyterian church where Bill and I had married 37 years earlier…and my youngest sister two years later. It was somehow comforting to return there, albeit for a memorial service (for wife of Dave’s acquaintance)—a poignant reminder of our mortality…and why we should love while we have breath! Family concerns generated my return to Mexico but Dave and I have kept in touch and expressed gratitude for what we shared. I’ve invited him to visit me here. 

We’ve been made for love, for the delights and character-building challenges of intimacy. Sad that many are reluctant to engage due to unhealed wounds, that others can’t seem to find what they desire. Some choose not to make the effort. I’m deeply grateful for the men who did make the effort—three of them bravely so, after long, reasonably successful marriages—with me, a divorcee (a bit of a risk…did she do something to deserve it?). As happened with Bill, all at some point encountered my strongly held convictions about truth (including emotional honesty) and justice. The widowers and I worked through conflicts; they all had more experience than I (or Bill) at doing so. In the process I learned more about patience…and humility. 

Of Conflict and Cancer

A quarter of the earth’s people now live in a conflict zone per a recent article in Foreign Affairs. I can only take in so much of it – graphic photos of destruction and death, tribalistic hatred on full display in never ending media cycles. Can we not do better?

“We…are more easily stimulated by emotional expression than by reasoned complex analysis,” writes Richard Gingras on Medium. “We prefer that our biases be confirmed…we have no innate sense of reasoning. We are first and foremost, tribal beings.”

Strength to the brave souls who are trying to work toward peaceful solutions to conflict…and to those caring for the wounded! Meanwhile we fortunate enough not to live in a conflict zone deal with our own challenges. For me? A recent diagnosis of uterine serous cancer. Though a total hysterectomy and pathology investigations imply no spread at present, it’s an aggressive cancer that can recur.

The proverbial sword of Damocles hangs thus over my head. I’ve been roundly supported by sustaining prayers of friends and family—very specific prayers that the cancer would not spread. God sometimes intervenes supernaturally in our lives (I wrote my personal experience in “Of Saint and Miracles,” posted here October 30, 2015). More often, God gives us grace to cope with whatever comes our way, and for that I am filled with gratitude. I choose to embrace each new day with joy!

Given the amount of suffering in the world, I think more and more—with longing—of the Revelation to John (chapter 22): “Then he showed me the river of the water of life…flowing from the throne of God…on either side of the river the tree of life…and the leaves…were for the healing of the nations.”

Writing outside my rented home in beautiful Baja California; photo by son Owen who has helped me through challenges of recent months. 

Hurricane Watch

Less serious than “Hurricane Warning” but still worrisome enough. I woke at 2am to rain beating on the roof of my rented house in northern Baja California, visions of flooding in the town of Santa Rosalia—halfway down the Baja Peninsula—swirling in my head. I’ve stayed twice in that place en route to Cabo San Lucas for a holiday with my sister. One descends denuded mountains, past mining works, to the beautiful Sea of Cortes. A ferry service used to run from Santa Rosalia to mainland Mexico.

Next vision: One meteorologist (I am following many!) mentioned sea surge—possible 40-foot waves. Could this house be inundated!? We could (how quickly!?) move to the smaller house above that my son is renting. What of my neighbors below with their two young girls? I send an email inviting them up should they be concerned.

I should try to sleep, but instead interact with some folks on Twitter/X…perfect strangers expressing concern, sending me best wishes, prayers. Hmm…the rain has stopped…oh good, the water can soak in.  

But how much can this sandy hillside hold? What of that house on stilts above us? I think of the song I sang in Sunday School “The foolish man built his house upon the sand…”

Relaxing, but then the rain starts up again. Will it enter the house in spite of sandbags in place? I should probably move my keyboard—most prized possession, away from the sliding doors. What if everything just slides into the ocean!? Now thinking of my friends in Gonaives, Haiti. Amazing, brave women I came to know over ten years of back and forth…first meeting soon after Hurricane Jeanne had washed 3000 souls and the possessions of many of my friends into the sea. 

I get up at 6am and make a pot of tea. No rain…even a little blue sky out to the west…out where the US naval ships usually docked in Southern California have gone to wait out the storm. But as I finish this, the rain is again heavy, steaming the windows. Latest report says the storm center, at 5 am, was 100 miles south of here, moving at 17 mph. I continue my watch.

Angels Among Us

He sits--head bowed, face buried in a hat held in his right hand--on a low retaining wall separating a dirt parking area from a row of small shops. Sitting close to him, a diminutive, dark-skinned woman holds his other hand on her lap, gently soothes it with both of hers.

I became accustomed to my son's friendly interactions with local folks during the years we previously lived in this small town in Baja California. Many we met, on a market day like today, came from the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Guerrero. Humble of means, they found work harvesting the tomatoes, etc. that fill produce bins in U.S. grocery stores.

Beyond friendly, Owen has a gift for discerning spiritual and emotional needs...and a deep compassion for others. Often--even before the Mexico sojourn--I'd seen his hand on a trembling shoulder, praying for someone.

Is he praying for this woman? Can/should I help in some way? 

Taking a couple steps from the shop where I'd found a basic Mexican cell phone, I lay my hand on Owen's shoulder: "Are you helping her...or she you?"

He briefly lifts a tear-stained face to mine: "I'm receiving comfort."

I glance at the woman. Serenity in her small, round face. Clad in the modest attire typical of older indigenous women, she seems almost a child next to 6'5'' Owen, her feet barely touching the ground.

I move to her side, put my arm around her shoulder, lightly touch my head to hers: "Gracias por darle consuelo a mi hijo (Thanks for giving comfort to my son)." I back away, think about Owen's struggles since our recent return to Mexico...and my own angst as a mother watching him struggle.

Transitions are inherently challenging. Uncertainties about housing, work, relationships.

After a couple minutes Owen dries his tears and hugs the woman. We get into our car.

"Thanks for waiting, Mom."

"Of course, honey." We're both silent for awhile as we drive to a nearby grocery store.

Then he speaks: "I need to let go of a lot of bullshit stuff in my life."

"How did you encounter that woman?" 

"I was just sitting there waiting for you, troubled by things. She walked by, waved, and extended her hand to me. I waved but withdrew my hand and she sat further down on the wall. I felt bad, went to apologize to her. She took my hands in hers and began caressing them. My tears came. I haven't been able to cry, Mom, but I needed to."

"Something similar happened to me soon after Dad and I moved to Ecuador. We were seeking a place to rent in a city we liked and the dozen apartments we'd looked at were depressing enough to reduce me to hopeless tears one rainy afternoon. I stopped at a small chapel to rest and upon leaving met a sweet woman at the door who held my hand and told me she would pray for my needs. I asked her name. "Angelica." 

"This woman had a similar name! Angelique or Angelina."

"They may have been angels*," I said.

"You know, Mom, I had to come to the end of myself, trying to figure everything out on my own."

Now my own tears flow. "I'm thinking of that scripture: God dwells with the one who is of a contrite and humble spirit (I looked it up later: Isaiah, chapter 57)."

* Aunt Lois (my mother's sister), who lived with us in Baja for several years, wrote of her early experiences in Mexico when she and her Mexican co-worker Biachi began taking in babies given to them by parents unable to care for them; a couple infants were left on their doorstep. Once, literally prostrate with physical/emotional exhaustion and desperate for sleep, Biachi left a full bottle at the head of a crib holding a baby next to her bed. She slept soundly and the bottle was empty the next morning. "An angel," exclaimed Lois, who during a later night--their nursery now full of nearly a dozen babies--saw angels amid the cribs.

                                  Aunt Lois & Owen, Baja California, March 2016

Choices and Transitions: My Larger-Than-Life Uncle John, Part 2

Part 1, published just prior to this, provides an overview of John R. Raser's life with details on his writing, teaching, and other activities up to his transition from Professor at Western Australia's Murdoch University to life in a small costal community south of Perth.

Gracetown Groove

The following excerpts from some of John’s letters provide a picture of the Gracetown years…and his thoughts about life…and death.

April 1987 (to his father): It is Sunday afternoon in Cowaramup Bay and our house glows golden and green with an early autumn rainstorm. I’m writing from the garden house at the back of the main house…converted into a study, library, carpentry workshop and surfing equipment area…it’s a bit of a retreat for me…surrounded with fruit trees, grapes, garden, and flowers. It’s hard to imagine that the ocean is just a hundred yards away, except for the booming of the surf off the rocky point that encloses our bay. The autumn swell has begun to run and nearly every day I spend a couple hours riding the big waves that pour their energy onto the reefs with long and feathering breakers.

I’m revelling in the joy of spending about two days a week carpentering and transforming this house into a work of art, planting trees and gardening, surfing and taking long hikes, reading a lot…and administering the rentals that provide my major income. 

December 1987 (to his father): On Christmas eve it will be two years since I resigned my professorship. It still feels good. Now, at the age of 52, my academic life of 25 year feels more like an interval than a lifetime career. I also have not written much during that two years. It has seemed like a time to withdraw from active participation in the social affairs of the culture and to learn silence and reflection, to learn to listen rather than to speak so much, to cultivate solitude rather than interaction, to immerse myself in the natural world more rather than in cities and institutions and ideas.

October 1989 (to a sister): I’ve been surfing and working. Becoming intimate with power tools and building skills is deeply pleasurable to me and I intensely enjoy the designing side of it—when a design is transformed from an idea into a part of a house—and looks even better than you thought when visualizing—there is a sense of satisfaction something akin to writing a good article.

Surfing remains my passion, my muse, my fountain of youth, the bellows for my metabolic fire, my preoccupation, my daily joy, and teacher about power and fear and ageing and grace and ecstasy. My surfing is also a great mystery to me. I’m supposed to be much too old. But I just get better and better (my thought: his natural testosterone levels helped).

June 1990 (to a sister): I’ve made it my work (for income) to do up properties which I bought very cheaply because they were run down and unlivable. So what I’ve done is transform myself from a professor into a builder. If I work at the rate I have been for the past two years, then in about five years…they will all be in quite good condition, worth quite a lot on the market, paid for, and bringing in good rentals. That’s my real retirement plan. 

We had an early birthday party for me and then I went off to my land near Bridgetown to spend some time alone there in my cabin. It was absolutely beautiful in midwinter, with mist and frost and daily rain and then sun showers. Cold at night but I chopped wood, read, tended the winter garden, wrote a bit of poetry, mused, enjoyed solitude for a spell. I thought 55 was a good time to do it. 

I decided cowardice is one of my failures and one I have never had the courage to face or admit. Not that I’m big on brooding about my failures. I also came to realize that nearly all the writing and teaching I have done in my life has been powered by a sense of moral outrage. I seem to have lost that. I live now more in a state of wonder.

June 1993 (to a sister): The Australian Supreme Court has just passed down a decision granting aboriginal groups the right to lay claim to vast tracks of Australia which have been held as “Crown Land” for 150 to 200 years and exploited for the benefit of the European world. The country is in an uproar. After 20 years and two months in Australia I do not know a single aboriginal well. Or even, to be accurate, at all. The same would be true of 99.99% of all non-aboriginal Australians. Never in my life, from the American ghettoes to Javanese villages to African desert dwellers, have I encountered people who seem so utterly “other” to me. I guess that’s what the Europeans who came here and enslaved and exterminated them thought [and] what the aboriginals thought about the Europeans too. The dance is not over.

October 1995 (to his sisters, on the death of their father): For me as a small child, Daddy was God on earth. Huge, bearded, all powerful, he was quick to anger and to laughter…my confessions of sins…were made to him in quaking fear and tears and he personally made judgement, punished with deliberation, forgave, and then held me close in love. Later as I became sexual and developed a questing mind he became my antagonist, my wrathful judge, and for a time my just barely tolerant and tolerated Father. From the age of about 14 until perhaps 30, he seemed almost my enemy. But as I became a strong adult and my life vision—my youthful life vision—disintegrated with too much success and too much madness I became wise, he became compassionate, and we became friends. Friends we stayed—though we sometimes were angry with one another—until death claimed him. I have often been left in astonishment at the strength of my love for him. Of his for me.

His living so long with mental vigor, good senses, physical mobility and even enjoyment of his sexuality despite diabetes and overweight have been a source of confidence for me about my own future and natural life span. Largely thanks to Daddy’s course, I feel myself at 60 to be a youngish man with a fair expectation of 30 or 40 more good years. If I do live so long and if my children, grandchildren, and all who are to come should venerate me when I am old in the way his tribe have venerated Daddy, I shall consider myself very fortunate indeed.

January 1997 (to his sisters): I suppose most of you have by now heard of the tragedy in our little village of Gracetown. A section of sandstone/limestone cliff fell down onto the beach at a very popular surf break just 200 yards from our house and crushed nine people to death, while four others escaped with injuries. I ran to the spot with a shovel and pick. Faced with a hopeless task, I despaired, but more people arrived and within an hour 150 or so of us were working under the still threatening cliff hang to dig the bodies of our neighbors out. 

The media descended…pitiless in their exploitation of our children’s and our grief. State and national politicians came and strutted and posed and extended their sympathy in a pre-electoral frenzy.  Professional counselors and social workers…sums of money offered by magazines for [someone’s] story. After it was over, the crushed bodies solemnly reburied, the cliff face madly and senselessly demolished by bulldozers, our names and faces off national television, the whole town—all 200 of us—came together at the beach one night and all got roaring and tearfully and hilariously drunk. Now three months later, I can say that tragedy transforms communities. A touch of the sacred has entered our relationships. We are more serious, more generous, more respectful of one another, but most of all, more affectionate.

I have become increasingly disenchanted with most of what the human project spends its time doing and more enchanted with the world of nature, the ecstasy of dreams, the flight of imagination…I sense the Cosmos as a living thing, humanity as we know it a brief flaring, too violent and vainglorious but an enchanting flame for all that. I love my life and feel the most fortunate of men.

July 1998 (to a sister): We are all well and happy as the human condition permits at the end of this most fascinating and troubling century and millennium. I”m eager to get into the next one, to see what it’s going to hold. Probably unimaginable things. Wonders and horrors, I should think. And the transformation of the human race into something quite different, I’m sure, given our increasing development of an external nervous system and our explosive capabilities for fiddling with genes and body chemistry. Questions about the future we don’t even know how to formulate.

One of the joys of my life is the abiding (or growing) warmth between we siblings. Not only do we “love” each other but we all seem to be genuine friends as well. Not one of the six I don’t seriously enjoy being with. I don’t think that’s very common. It’s probably because we are all such excellent persons! I’m still expecting you in Oz at some point. 

Three of John’s sisters were able to visit him in Australia, at different times. Lois, who wrote of his golden tongue, also noted in her tribute: “He was a man with a special talent for expression and for friendship. As the only brother, his sisters rare times with him not only were full of laughter but of his sensitivity to each of our personalities and needs.”

March 2000 (to his sisters): The pellucid light flooding my Garden House on this hot summer day inspires me to try to write a letter…but it’s hard to concentrate. On one side of the newly floored patio next to my typewriter, the fig tree is plumping overripe fruit onto the ground every few minutes with a loud rustling of leaves as the figs fall through them and a soft plop as they hit the ground. On the other side, the ripening olives are starting to purple the olive tree and the flower garden underneath. I eat a half dozen figs each morning…and every couple of days I pick a quart or so of olives and put them in brine. Our gardens here and on the land at Bridgetown have reached such a state of development now that we are in year round harvest.

It’s been a bit of a party atmosphere around here. An inpouring of friends and progeny has kept the house humming. So much so, in fact, that we get quite desperate to find time to live a normal life…and to engage in healing practices.

Then there is this…do I really want all this fuss (re his cancer diagnosis) made over most fortunate me when tens of thousands of children and helpless people all over the world are being starved, shot, maimed, diseased, and otherwise slaughtered by greed, religious and political idiocy, and callousness and ignorance everyday? Something wrong somewhere. But one must not reject love.

Still I ponder these things. I’ve been reading the journals of Thomas Merton, who—along with Tielhard de Chardin—is, I think, the greatest Catholic philosopher of the twentieth century and whose writing has had a major impact on my life over 50 years. His question is “How much is my wealth and privilege costing other human beings in suffering?” His agonizing over the question led him to take a vow of poverty. My answer is that I simply don’t know, but because of how I understand the world, to not seek power or wealth, to love beauty rather than possessions, to cultivate a garden rather than a position.

I thought I might make a few comments on death, as one who over the last three years has become much better acquainted with this inevitable outcome of life. First of all the cliff fall with its nine killed taught me that death could enliven those left behind. Secondly, I was overwhelmed to learn from Amanda (sister closest in age to John who died at age 67 on June 26, 1999) that death could be peaceful, loving and full of grace. Before I had believed it must somehow be horrible. For myself, I have no fear of it at all, though I do regret it. Like Daddy, “I love this world,” and am reluctant to leave it.

I’ve spent the last fifteen years surfing giant Indian Ocean waves, and you must understand that every time you put on your wet suit and begin to make your way over the reef you are quite aware that you are doing something that may well kill you, but you are doing it anyway for the sheer joy of the ride. So you get used to facing the prospect of imminent death, and choosing to continue doing what you love despite the danger. And when you are taken by a wave and hammered onto a reef as I’ve been several times…it comes as a cold realization that you may well be dead in two minutes. But you keep fighting. Automatically! You don’t give up and let it take you.

I am afraid of prolonged, intense pain. Not only for its effect on me, but for its effect on those around me that I love. I’ll try my best to avoid it if it comes to that. On this score nature has provided some serious help. Thank God!

So am I going to live on awhile or die in the next few weeks or months as the doctors have decided? Who knows? Sixty-four-year-old men are not supposed to survive advanced lung cancer very long. But [they] are not supposed to surf the outside bubble at South Point or to be virile and generally healthy as they were at twenty or to be full of mental and emotional piss and vinegar either. So if I’m going to bow out, I’m going to have to be knocked flat on my back and unable to get up before I accept it as inevitable.

When it does, I’m pretty sure I’ll go contentedly. Who knows, there may be a whole new adventure ahead. I do believe the cosmos is alive, and I always have been and always will be a part of it. I can imagine being able to abandon this metabolic fire of flesh, this individual spark of consciousness, without regret. The spark may flicker out, or it may become part of a larger knowing. If the first, that seems OK—though somewhat out of character in this radiant cosmos. If the latter what a glorious surprise!

Choices and Transitions: My Larger-Than-Life Uncle John, Part 1

John R. Raser’s life makes for rich biography. From the Pentagon to anti-war writing/teaching; from New Zealand’s oldest university to Australia’s newest one; from academics to surfing the big waves of Western Australia into his 60s, John’s virile intellectual brilliance and colorful persona dazzled and inspired. I’ve long thought someone should undertake the task of telling his story, but until then I offer this small sketch, moved by the confluence of two events: the eighty-eighth anniversary of John’s birth on June 8, 1935 and my imminent exit from the U.S. to Mexico—a move in sync with John’s values. 

I dedicate this work—a welcomed labor of love—to my son John Gerald Lewis. “I have a namesake!” wrote Uncle John to his sister, my mother Esther, upon learning of his grand nephew’s birth. I honor John G. on his thirty-first birthday (June 9), admiring the now decade-long embrace of his own adopted country, Japan. Had he lived longer, Uncle John and his namesake would have delighted in comparing notes.

John Rudolph Raser’s journey in a nutshell? Raised on an Iowa farm by a religiously conservative family, he attended Messiah Academy and Upland College (both of the Brethren in Christ Church). Declaring himself a (philosophical) conscientious objector, he did “alternate service” with UNESCO and Hungarian refugees in Europe. After attending Harvard and Stanford (PhD in Political Science, speciality in international affairs, 1964), he worked with the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI)—then focused on international negotiation and deterrence strategies for defense, among other things—leading to consultations with the Pentagon, the Office of Naval Research, and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

While still with WBSI, teaching at Claremont Graduate School during the time of growing concerns about the Vietnam War changed the course of John’s life. He made a big jump across the Pacific Ocean to the University of Otago in New Zealand, then to Murdoch University in Western Australia, and finally to Gracetown—a small coastal community south of Perth where for the last decade and a half of his life John created homes and gardens, generously hosted family and friends, read widely, traveled around Australia, to the U.S. and elsewhere, wrote deliciously descriptive letters, and surfed…until lung cancer took his life on May 18, 2000, a few weeks shy of his sixty-fifth birthday.

Upon his death came many tributes; two succinctly capture something of his essence:

“The only brother—a toddler with golden curls adored by his six older sisters, the boy weeping bitterly over his dead dog, the college student feeling his rising powers, debating with golden tongue in various countries.” (Lois Raser, sister/subject of other posts here, d. 2021)

“John chose his life. He had the strength, the energy, the power to do anything he might have selected. He chose to teach. He chose to build. He chose to love.” (Luke Little, lifelong friend from childhood, d. 2020)

Pentagon Hello, Goodbye

As a teacher, John had the humility—a trait that tempered his imposing intelligence—to learn from his students, revealing in an interview with the official magazine of the Otago University Students’ Association (Critic Te Arohi, Vol. 48. No. 3, March 21, 1972) the role students played in the move from California to New Zealand:

“At Stanford I came under the influence of people…working with the U.S. government on how to design and deploy nuclear weapons systems (John became an expert in simulation and games theory; his book Simulation and Society: An Exploration of Scientific Gaming was published in 1969). I felt about my work with Polaris Submarine deployment, the Minuteman Missile System and others that it was the obligation of the thoughtful scholar…[and it was an] ego-building way to spend your late twenties…wined and dined by the White House and the Pentagon, flown around the world in military jets and delivering papers at conferences.” 

How did an “Iowa farm boy cum pacifist,” as John described himself, end up thus? “It’s not as strange as it sounds,” John told the interviewer, “for at that time in the U.S. there was a real feeling of optimism about the world and most people then felt that the U.S., despite all her faults, was probably the best bet the world had for keeping some kind of peace and sensible world order.”

He continued: “For a long time I didn’t give much thought to what I was doing…then…Vietnam got crammed down our throats. I took a professorship at a graduate school in California and my students taught me that I was a fool. I came to believe that what I had been doing…was a part of the whole death machine that America has been so busily creating in the last couple decades. So I quit. I said no. I devoted myself to teaching and to writing anti-military essays. And soon I wasn’t invited to the Pentagon anymore.”

“I thought constantly about leaving the U.S. I know you can’t divorce yourself completely from sin. But you can decide how closely you are going to be associated with it. So I thought about going to Sweden or Denmark or Mexico or Canada. About a year ago a friend said, ‘Why don’t you try New Zealand?’ I wrote to universities here and soon had a job.” 

Not just a job, but joy in new discoveries: “The train I take into Dunedin when I go to teach passes the Port Chalmers docks with their complement of half a dozen ships—Japanese, British, Russian, American, Dutch, and the N.Z. ‘coasters’ which are everywhere. The ferries…which handle the traffic between North and South islands, are romantic…with songs, waved goodbyes, strips of confetti…and with the tipsily sung Maori farewell song. Something in those trips releases a reservoir of joy in me, so that I want to shout with the delight of being alive, young, healthy, and at home in the world.” (letter, March 1972)

More delight…in the unexpected cosmopolitan milieu: “Any [small] gathering is almost certain to include Americans, English, Dutch. Tens of thousands Chinese and Indians have made their homes here too.” And comments on socioeconomics: “The Maoris are much like the American blacks in social standing; the island immigrants: Cook Islanders mostly, are at the bottom of the economic totem pole.” (The three generations photo from New Zealand labeled by my mother, Esther Raser Engle; from her collection)

While appreciating the “philosophy and atmosphere” at Otago, John, well into his first year there, was already considering a move. As a recent southern California transplant (with wife and two children), weather was a factor: “There is too much wind and not enough hot sun here.” He was also struggling with a professional decision: “Seems like a choice between doing what I know I can do well—teach, help build groovy organizations, be an institutional man—and what I don’t know whether I’m really capable of doing or not—that is, being a serious writer.” He was looking at opportunities around Australia, feeling drawn to Western Australia—to Perth, which he’d heard was “sunswept and beautiful.”

Murdoch Years 

Teaching in Perth it would be. Geoffrey Bolton*, John’s colleague at Murdoch University (the two were among ten foundation professors of the school birthed in 1973), shed more light on John’s growing interests (John Raser: a Memoir, In Touch, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2000):

“He looked to a role as a university teacher who might integrate the exploration of emotional consciousness with the more traditional concerns of the social scientists. He also wanted to work in a society with power structures less entrenched than those in the United States…He was attracted partly by the knowledge that Murdoch was under sustained pressure to develop a program in peace and conflict studies…it also helped that Western Australia has fine beaches, and he was already a dedicated surfer” (yes, but new to the sport; John started surfing at 35, noting in a letter to his father that most people are giving it up by that age).

As for the “golden tongue” John’s sister referenced, Bolton continued: “I have never known an interviewee to give a more brilliant performance…charming, eloquent and persuasive, he sketched a vision of…the university’s role as a place for social healing. John even admitted—with a candor refreshing after the relentless self-advertisement of most short-listed applicants—that he had made mistakes in the past and would make more at Murdoch.” Shortly after his appointment John “became dean of what he insisted should be called the School of Social Inquiry, suggesting open-ended pluralism rather than the conventional ‘Social Sciences’.”

John Raser was anything but conventional. Bolton again: “The people of Perth hardly knew what to make of this Murdoch phenomenon with his sparkling blue eyes, ear-ring, kaftan, boots, and ambience of genial testosterone.”

Testosterone indeed. John’s sexuality (“a bit like a blowtorch,” he wrote) was frank and freely expressed. My first exposure to it came as a teen riding with him from Colorado Springs to a camp in the Rockies for a Raser family reunion. He turned from the driver’s seat to his wife and said: “Let’s stop and have a quickie…we only need five minutes.” That didn’t happen; instead he belted out “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder” as we made our way up a mountain pass. 

Biomedical tidbit: Research indicates a strong heritability for serum testosterone—genetic factors account for 40-70% of the variation in testosterone levels in men and 65% in women. John’s father Rudolph Raser was, per his daughter Evelyn, “highly sexed, no doubt about it.” While visiting Grandpa Rudy (b. 1899) and his second wife in the early 80s, Rudy said to me, “You’re a nurse; is there any reason why a woman in her 80s should not enjoy afternoon sex?” 

Rudy’s religious conversion soon after marriage shaped and guided the rest of his long life. “Daddy’s faith ruled his intellect,” wrote John. But it did little to dampen Rudy’s tendency to racy commentary. Sharing a meal with him at a restaurant when I was fifteen, he said, “That girl has a beautiful ass,” eyeing a table across the way where sat a young woman in short shorts. “He just liked to talk, partly to provoke a reaction,” said Aunt Evelyn when I shared this anecdote with her years later.

John’s robust sexuality—likely influenced by both nature (genetics) and nurture (I imagine comments he heard from his father over the years!)—was given free rein per his views on intimate relationships (expressed in a 1983 letter): “My fundamental life metaphors are open-ness and exploration [so] I have always itched under the closure and emotional immobility which seems the inevitable (?) consequence of coupling on a long term basis.” 

Those “life metaphors” were no doubt shaped by the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s—a movement largely promoted by California’s Esalen Institute—espousing the ethic that the inner-self should be freely expressed in order to reach one’s true potential. An early letter from New Zealand (John’s wife Charleen writing) notes the possibility of several new friends forming an “Esalen East type of thing…with the usual bag of encounter, gestalt, bio-energetics, rolfing, yoga and potting, etc.” As to sexual freedom, John and Charleen were among numerous couples interviewed by Carl Rogers for his book Becoming Partners: Marriage and Its Alternatives (1972). An interesting read. Rogers—considered by many to be the most influential psychologist in American history—and John were colleagues at WBSI.

Perhaps John’s itch abated. But during that circa 1983 interval, between relationships, he wrote: “It’s the first time I’ve lived alone in 27 years and I’m utterly astonished at how much I like it. I also like me as company in my house, which I didn’t even know. My main problem seems to be fending off eager ladies from 19 to 50. I occasionally get the feeling that the empty house is the irresistible bait—the male who goes with it is incidental! Or conversely, that it is my public image which is attractive—the person behind it reshaped in perception to fit the image.”

I’ll not write more about John’s personal life (“private” life doesn’t seem to fit one who was so open about his thoughts, feelings, and activities!) except to note that over the course of his years he engaged in three significant partnerships (with beautiful, intelligent women)—unions that produced and/or nurtured six bright, gifted children. As with all families, however defined, there were joys and sorrows, ruptures and repairs.

What was John’s “public image” in the 1970s, early 80s? Bolton explained that soon after settling in at Murdoch John was “in demand as a commentator in the media, challenging the accepted and encouraging the permissive. Identifying with the local community, he was…a leading figure in the ‘Fremantle renaissance’ of the 1970s. On campus he was at times an exasperating colleague, but he was never dull and never mean, and to many he proved uniquely stimulating.” 

Golden Tongue

John gave radio talks on the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s “Notes on the News” program. Edited versions of the talks plus other essays (some co-authored by Frances Rowland) on various aspects of Australian society—urbanization, education, medicine, violence, drinking, drugs, militarism, politics, and foreign policy—were published in Cabbages & Kings: Essays on Australian Society (1977). Here two excerpts from the talk/essay “Global Chess,” in response to the revelation that the U.S. (Nixon/Kissinger) played a role in the 1973 Chilean coup that ousted Allende and ushered in the brutal Pinochet era:

“I’m not surprised—he (Kissinger) was a professor of mine at Harvard in the early 1960s, and even then he made his morality quite clear. For the diplomat, taught Kissinger, there is only one rule—and that is for his country to win. The world is seen as a kind of global chess game, in which nations make moves and counter-moves. The great powers are the players, while lesser counties, revolutionary movements, military hardware, populations, and other resources are the pieces to be defended and taken. There is no compassion, no concern for human joy or sorrow, no moral code limiting what can and cannot be done. There is only strategy.”

“Sometimes I think it’s about time for the pawns—the people of the world—to stop being so easily pushed around and to demand something better. Why don’t we? The evidence of duplicity, self-seeking and manipulation on the part of politicians is overwhelming. What keeps us from rising up in rage and stopping it? I suppose the answer is two-fold. On the one hand is a kind of weary cynicism which expects nothing better. On the other hand is a simple naïveté which permits us to be gulled over and over again. But both these attitudes produce apathy and thus are luxuries purchased at the expense of democracy. America is learning the bitter lesson of how expensive those luxuries are.”

John was prescient in predicting societal trends as revealed in those essays and in some of his multiple publications from the WBSI. He was able to synthesize knowledge from many fields and create new paradigms for understanding the world. His writings on peacemaking in a militant world won him the United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Prize** four consecutive years.

The “golden tongue” of John’s Harvard debating days was diminished (his perception, at least) when he moved to Australia, per these poignant lines to a sister: “As someone who’s spent most of my life as a word-smith, my loss of voice in immigrating to Australia has probably been the most severe price I’ve had to pay—especially in the years of my professional life here. May have been good for me though, over all. My native eloquence was always a two edged sword in many ways. Here it cuts little ice. Australians are pretty scornful of eloquence in general and certainly not inclined to credit American forms of it. They clearly find it rather embarrassing. The quick retort, the clever put-down, and the cynical barb are more admired forms of presentation here.” (letter, 1998)

Culture-related communication issues aside, did John have professional weaknesses? Bolton noted: “His lecturing style generated widespread appeal, although critics alleged he was better at challenging orthodoxy than in offering students systematic alternatives. If he rejected the capitalist work ethic he was certainly no ally of the Marxists. He saw himself as enabling individuals to live life more abundantly.” 

“John became easily bored with bureaucratic practices,” wrote Bolton, “nor could he find the taste for the infighting on committees and lobbying necessary to protect the innovative. Having been viewed by many as encapsulating the Murdoch ethos in its first years, he seemed in danger of becoming a more peripheral figure as the seventies gave way to the pragmatic eighties. Tenured impotence on a professional salary did not suit John. He took the honorable course of resigning and moved to Gracetown.”

* Geoffrey Bolton went on to become Chancellor at Murdoch and was named Western Australia's 2006 Australian of the Year.

** John's letter to a sister offered this information. My query to the UN Association of Australia for details did not receive a reply.