"My Younger Voice"

Here's the reading I shared at one of our sessions. I missed the first quarter and the first several weeks of our middler year at Luther because Rose Ann and I joined the Peace Corps in June of 1966, shortly after completing my first year at the seminary. We were in the Peace Corps and serving in India until mid-December of that year and returned to resume studies after Christmas--Paul Lundborg

“My Younger Voice”
January, 2005

In 1966 Rose Ann and I recorded our early, not exactly first, impressions of India while beginning our Peace Corps assignment in a small village in northern India. We were impressionable, on our first journey away from the land of our birth, but once we returned home we never took the time to listen to the tape..
In January of 2005 we listened to those words—20 minutes worth—recorded on reel to reel magnetic tape and now digitally reproduced. We were preparing to return to India with a study group focusing on the theme: "A Spiritual Journey Through India". The trip would lead us to study Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism--religions that began in India--plus the influence of Islam in India. We listened to our words 39 years after we had spoken them, following other journeys abroad and preparing for a new experience of India. We heard voices from our past. Our own.

Listening to the younger me
Was an exercise in incredulity.
It causes me perplexity
Why a lad of merely twenty three
Could cross the world and only see
Weeks and months of responsibility.
Why so somber, no room for glee?
You’re young, o so young, why not carefree?
Now I can name it. Anxiety.

Taking life so seriously,
Feeling burdens internally,
Not a reaction you’d expect to see
When a decade proclaimed its liberty
From church and state and all the powers that be.
But we were born in ’43,
Raised by parents who set the whole world free,
And survived the depression, fortunately.
And they told us, “We want you to be
Advanced, improved, far better than we.”
And we said, “Yes. Now you just wait and see.
Our goal is to serve humanity.”

Cold war, Korea, Viet Nam;
After affects of the hydrogen bomb;
Values exploding all over the place;
Authority, abstinence, issues of race.
Equality, freedom, love, peace and joy.
Booze, drugs and sex for each girl and boy.

Reflect for a minute and I think you will see
We countered our culture, just differently.
With purpose and zeal we set out to be
Pleasers of parents—not wild and free.

Here we are now, over sixty,
Looking back ever so thankfully.
We are who we are and ever will be
Pursuing life a bit dutifully,
But having more fun and feeling more free,
Relaxed and chilled out. Seriously!