How the Peace Corps helped me combine my spiritual energy and rational thinking to live a creative life
Raymond Gray
Dominican Republic 1962-1964
I was nineteen years old in 1961 when President Kennedy made his famous speech announcing the idea of the Peace Corps. I was ready to explore the larger world beyond the fifty miles I had traveled to go to college. I pondered two choices: would I, as Ernest Hemingway, move to Paris and become a writer, or would I join the Peace Corps? I wasn’t much of a writer, I feared going to a foreign country alone and I didn’t speak French so the Peace Corps seemed like a safer choice. It was run by the government, and like the military, I imagined, it would have some organization and support for a young person going out into the world. What did I know about life?
I applied for the Peace Corps in 1962 and was accepted for school building project in the Dominican Republic. Somehow, I had convinced them that I had construction skills because I had helped my father build our family home!
After six weeks of training at the University of Washington in Seattle I was sent to the Dominican Republic where after a bit of struggle, I found my purpose working with a community on the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, near the town of Dajabon. There, we built a two-room school in a community that had no school before our Peace Corps project. This was no easy task: the site had no electricity and no running water.
I kept a journal of my experiences and in one entry I wrote: “If I had nothing but my mind, then it would be logical to seek God, to know God through my powers of reason; but I also have feelings and emotions of the heart that help me to seek and experience the Divine in myself.”
As an old man of eighty-three years, I find it heartening to read this young man’s thoughts and to think about the ways that I have integrated the energies of reason and spirit in my life.
After service, I returned to college to finish a degree. I chose Temple University in Philadelphia in order to be near a Spanish speaking community. There, I started a community center at Temple Presbyterian Church. This connection led to my decision to earn a MDiv degree from Princeton Theological Seminary.
While in seminary I returned to thinking about the connection between our rational and spiritual engagement in life. I began reading the writings of Carl Jung and thinking about the relationship between the conscious/unconscious involvement in our lives and the idea of archetypal energy engaged me. Also, at this time I married and started a family. I started creating stories to engage my son. I like to say that I might never have discovered my storytelling gift if I had not been gifted with a child in my life!
My engagement with the Presbyterian Church did not develop along with my storytelling. It was the 1960’s and as a young hippy I was more interested in social causes than saving souls. In any case, the Presbyterian Church in western Pennsylvania refused to ordain me so I took a job working at US Steel to experience the world of the steelworker that spawned me and to earn a living for my family while continuing to explore my creative energy.
It was in Yardley, Pennsylvania close to the steel mill where I started a story-hour at the local library. Through the library storytelling I met a staff member at the New Jersey State Museum and he invited me to tell stories at the museum. This was the first time I was paid for telling a story! From this beginning I developed my multi-media form of oral storytelling.
Here I want to share the idea that living a creative life requires of us the practice of integrating our rational gifts with our spiritual…or archetypal energy…and I will suggest that we often do this unconsciously. For example, I started my multi-media form of storytelling without consciously recognizing its connection to my dyslexia, my difficulty with learning by reading information in a book. I developed a way to teach children by seeing pictures, hearing music and sound effects that all supported the spoken word teaching.
My creative/spiritual/archetypal energy has helped me to teach a million children, but I could not have succeeded at this task without the rational thinking that helped me to promote my product and deliver it on time to the audience! I give thanks to the Peace Corps for helping my younger self discover how to combine my spiritual energy and rational thinking to live a creative life!
