There is no Norb…

Norbert Schedler is a life-long skeptic, a student, a professor, and now, an old man. I remember the first time I saw him walking across the campus of the University of Central Arkansas. A bit younger then, he strode across the quad with his head in the clouds, wearing a grey tweed jacket, complete with brown suede patches over the elbows, a navy blue sweater vest, blue oxford shirt, bright red bow-tie, glasses, khakis, and bright white New Balance tennis shoes. His salt-and-pepper beard hid a half-way smug smile. The only thing missing was a pipe. “What a relic,” I said to myself.

After spending nearly 60 years in academia, Norb can look back with satisfaction over a career, and a life, now in its twilight stage. He has a bachelor’s degree in classics, a master’s in theology, and a doctorate in philosophy from Princeton University. He has taught at Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, and Berkeley, among others, and founded the Honors College at the University of Central Arkansas.

He once said to me, “I believe that we are multiple selves. There is no Norb, there are Norbs.”

This is the story of three different selves: Norb the first, Norb the second, and Norb the third.

I sense myself rooted in the natural world,

whelmed over by its mystery, lost in its expanse,

deafened by the silence between it and me,

yet surprisingly accepting of my place.

I can say of my life:

I was given a role and I played it very well.

Yes, stoically!

—Norbert O. Schedler (adapted from Camus)

The Little Skeptic
The Story of Norb the First

By Gerard Matthews

“My father said that when I was born I came out index finger first and immediately began to babble and have ever since.”

Norbert Oscar Schedler was destined to be a man of the cloth. His maternal grandfather was a Lutheran minister. Three uncles on his mother’s side were Lutheran ministers. His father was a Lutheran minister. His father had seven brothers, all Lutheran ministers.

One Sunday night, at the age of nine, Norb’s father put him to bed. As he lie there, he began to ask his father questions about the sermon he delivered earlier that day. Somewhat startled, his father replied, “Norb, you are my little skeptic.”

For as long as he can remember, Norb has been naturally curious. Always asking. Always wondering.

“My dad loved ideas. And he loved talking about world issues, and the world coming to an end. I remember as a boy, on Sunday night he would invite over the local preachers. They would all come over and they’d drink beer and smoke cigars and talk about all the big issues that were going on. As conservatives, you know, everything was going to hell in a hand basket, and the end of the world was coming soon. So I would pretend to go to bed, and then sneak to the top of the stairs and listen to their conversations, because I’ve always been fascinated with social and political kinds of issues.”

Talk of the apocalypse can have quite an impact on a small child. His father’s worldview became part of his own at that tender age.

“I can remember the week that the atomic bombs went off and I can remember my father saying that the end of the world was coming. Can you imagine hearing that at that age? It profoundly influenced me, and reinforced within me my desire to preach the gospel so people don’t go into eternal damnation. I thought in those kinds of categories then.”

At fourteen, Norb was sent to a seminary preparatory school.

“My father basically told me, ‘You’re on your own.’ And I remember my brothers putting my suitcases into the car, my mother and sisters crying, and I thought to myself, ‘What is going on here?’ I mean, so much of my life has been getting caught up in the flow of things and just going with it without really making a decision for it. That was very characteristic of that first person, Norb the first. My father had named me again. ‘Little preacher.’”

It was at that school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that Norb learned Latin, Greek, German, Hebrew, and taught himself French. He studied Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Hume, Descartes, and Nietzsche, all in their original language. After graduation, Norb found himself at Concordia Seminary, where his grandfather had been president.

At the seminary, Norb’s intellectual pursuits took on more of a subversive bent. Authors challenged him, ideas enchanted.

“When I got into the seminary, I got in with a group that controlled the bookstore so we bought all the books that we were told not to read, which I then read. And I can remember going over to the secular university, and I was scared to death but I took a class and really did well.”

All these new ideas, theories, papers, books, conversations, and classes started to change Norb’s views on the religion of his upbringing, the theological underpinnings of his education, and the way he thought about God. These new notions, however exciting, were not only challenging his basic assumptions, but those of his professors as well.

“One day we were each given a couple of passages and we were to write a little sermon on it. The passage I had said, ‘and God repented.’ And of course, that’s a violation of everything I had ever learned. I mean, God’s all knowing, right? God’s omniscient, right? And God changed his mind? That can’t be right. But I had been reading Bultmann, and Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich and people like that who talked about God as changing. So I wrote a little sermon about how God sometimes changes his mind and about integrating that into my new theological view.”

“The professor absolutely blew his stack!”

“When I walked into class the next time, his face was red and he was ranting and raving about my paper. I sat down and he chastised me and said it was blasphemous, and I said to myself, ‘under no circumstance will I ever do anything again for his class.”

“At the end of the course, he didn’t know what the hell to do. So apparently the seminary had a faculty meeting on what to do with Norb Schedler. And they decided they better pass me, so he gave me a D and I passed.”

Norb finished his degree at the seminary at the age of 24 and started taking more and more classes at Washington University in St. Louis. His education had opened his eyes to a new world view and Norb began to think of himself as more of a teacher than a holy man. I asked if the personal changes he was going through at the time made him feel guilty for abandoning the strict doctrines of his father’s religion.

“You know. I had very little trauma over it. I have my diaries from seminary and early on in those dialogues there are some tears on the pages. ‘Lord, save me from doubt and give me courage to stay the course.’ There certainly was that. But there was always that delight in all these new ideas that were popping up in my head.”

While Norb was working on his PhD from Washington, he took a temporary job as a minister in a parish in Bunker Hill, Illinois to make a little more money for him and his wife, Carol. The young couple moved into the parsonage next to the church and started to talk about where the couch would go, where they were going to put their bed, and which room would belong to the baby when they decided to have a family.

“Carol wanted to nest. She was going on 25 years old. We had the house all planned. And I was sort of rejecting that. That was because of the person I was then. But the parish I was in loved me, and they offered me a job and said I could go on with my degree. So Carol and I thought, well, maybe we would do that. But in order to do that, the seminary fathers said I had to go back and be quizzed, to make sure I was still kosher.”

So, I’ll never forget, I walked into this room and there were all these grey-haired old men sitting around this table. They were scared shitless I could tell. Because they were going quiz me on theology?”

After two hours, Norb was asked to wait in the hall while the fathers decided his fate. To his amazement, they decided he could better serve the church as an intellectual and they encouraged him to continue with his education.

“I never expected that. I was shocked.”

“It was freeing. I mean, that released me from the church. It was like taking my religious garb off. I took one belief, and another belief, and another belief, and I took them, like you take worn out clothes, to the Salvation Army. It was like, I don’t need that anymore. It changed my life. And so, there again, another decision had been made for me.”

The Provider
The Story of Norb the Second

By Gerard Matthews

“Norbert the Second is a different person – he is a serious guy and plays no word games. I often stand in awe of him. In Indian thought, he is the householder, married with children, and in a profession. This phase is about creating, producing, doing. ‘What is it?’ and ‘Why is it?’ are traded in for ‘What ought I to do?’”

After the seminary fathers at Concordia decided that Norb could better serve the church as an intellectual, he decided to leave Washington University for one of the top philosophy schools in the country, Princeton University. Naturally, he excelled, and finished his class work quickly. Although he was officially a PhD candidate, he had not completed his thesis.

“Once I was out of Princeton, I went into a parish right outside of Philadelphia. And I wanted to do that because mother church educated me and I felt I owed her. I wanted to teach in a church–related school where I could help young men and young women deal with the questions that I’m sure were coming up when they confronted Darwin and Freud and linguistic philosophy, and existentialism and all that.”

Working in a parish also gave Norb the opportunity to do what he loved: preach.

“I’m a hell of a preacher. The trauma in Norb I – well it wasn’t trauma, it was excitement with all these new ideas, and playing them out – then I went into the parish, and when I taught Bible classes I could do that. The parishioners loved my Bible classes because I gave them all these ways of looking at all kinds of things. That was the fun of it.”

It was in teaching, and preaching, that Norb really felt he was making a difference. However, as almost any man of the cloth could tell you, sermons are not the only thing parishioners expect from their church leader.

“What was traumatic about it, was when someone finds out they have cancer and then they call you and you have to go and try to comfort that person. What do you say? A woman called me over to her house because she and her husband were fighting during dinner, and her husband dropped dead. So I went over there, and I tried everything but I could not comfort that woman.”

“I’m the kind of guy that if I see a worm that’s been stepped on, I feel bad. I’m a cosmopath. It’s like I have connections or antennae out to everything, and anything that hurts, I hurt, anything that’s cheering, I’m cheering. And that’s been a real problem in my life. One of the reasons I left the parish is I couldn’t emotionally handle all that. I had been in the parish for one year and then Concordia offered me a teaching position and I knew I had to take it.”

It was at that point that Norb made the decision to enter academia for good. He soon learned, however, that teaching philosophy at a religious university like Concordia didn’t allow him the freedom he was looking for. Just like in his days at the seminary, Norb’s ideas caused quite a stir.

“I got up to give a talk in the chapel, and said that my text for that day was going to be on Frederick Nietzche, and the text was “I can’t believe a God who couldn’t dance.” And I proceeded to give a sermon on how God is a person and God interacts with us, and if we pray there’s the possibility that we could convince God to do otherwise as Abraham had done.”

“So, after that, the religion department had a meeting and they voted to appeal to the board of trustees and the president that I be fired. And the head said to me, ‘If any of these young men shack up with a woman this weekend, then it’s your fault, because you know what dancing leads to!” At that, he lets out an almost sinister laugh.

After having left the church for what he knew to be the last time, and faced with intellectual constraints of the seminary, Norb was finally confronted with his own question: “What ought I to do?”

“I was evolving to a place where my integrity was being challenged. I was saying things I didn’t believe any more so I could stay there, and I didn’t have the freedom to move because I didn’t have a PhD. So Carol finally said to me, ‘You’ve got to get that PhD.”

“Plus, you’ve got to understand that there were all these practical considerations. I had to provide for my family. So that became a primary motivator for me.”

So Norb began teaching night classes, and when he returned home, after putting the kids to bed, he worked diligently to finish his thesis. Around the same time, he befriended a professor at near-by Purdue University and eventually started teaching there as a visiting professor in one of the top philosophy departments in the country. He eventually finished his thesis and was offered a permanent position at Purdue, which he accepted.

For the first time, Norb and Carol seemed to be settled. The couple became very active in their community and took part in the first ever Earth Day activities at the University. Norb began writing critical essays on the environment and got involved in protest movements against the war in Vietnam.

“For me it boiled down to, if I really believed these things, then I needed to do something about it and not just play with it intellectually. It came out of being a house-holder, being a father, being a husband, being a citizen. So I wrote things on the environment and that became really critical for us in wanting a more simple life.”

Then one day, while at the library at Purdue, Norb took a break from reading Kant and perused the “jobs” section of the Chronicle of Higher Education. At the bottom of the page, in a tiny little box, was a listing for a department chair of philosophy at the University of Central Arkansas.

“I looked at that and I thought, boy, wouldn’t that be idyllic to go to small town America, in the south, where Carol wanted to live, to a small university, where I wouldn’t be under the pressure of publishing and all the intrigue, and where I could spend time with students? And on a lark, I applied for the job, and I knew I’d get it.”

“Of course, everybody thought I was out of my mind. My mother-in-law said, ‘Arkansas, where is that?!’”

“I remember I went to a conference and I was coming down the escalator and one of my colleagues yelled at me, ‘Norb! Arkansas?! What the hell is wrong with you?’”

Norb’s laughter goes from a chuckle to hysterical as the memory returns. “Of course, a couple years later he asked me if I’d hire him. Hahaha!”

“As a father, a husband, an educator, it was the best move I ever made in my life.”

The Author
The Story of Norb the Third

By Gerard Matthews

Your days here were short, God knows;

This is the last of your springs.

And now in the serenity and quiet of this lovely place,

Touch the depths of truth, feel the hem.

You go away with old, good friends.

Take your memories with you.

And don’t forget when you leave why you came.

Keep the conversation going!

To each of you, Godspeed.

(Adapted by Norbert O. Schedler from Adlai E. Stevenson)

“I’ve been thinking a lot about death.”

My old professor was never one to hold back.

“I’m serious. At 75, you have friends that you suddenly hear that they dropped dead. I mean, I’m 75!”

“You know, in Hindu thought you go through a number of stages. You’re a child, you’re a student, you’re a house-holder, and then when your children are gone and they’re on their own, and your career is finished, the final stage - certain people get to this stage, not everyone – it’s called a ‘sannyasin.’ It means wise man. Or it could mean forest-dweller. Old men, in the Hindu culture, who are at a certain age just leave everything and they go out and live in the quiet of the woods. And in a way, I feel like that’s kind of what I’m doing more and more. In other words, I’m reflecting on my life and what it was. And so ‘quiet’ becomes a real important part of that.”

Norb, who has technically been in a phased retirement since 2000, is still teaching courses at the University of Central Arkansas, advising students, and spending quiet time writing his biography.

“I find that I need, more often than not, to be quiet. And I find that I’ve been doing a lot of that. There are favorite places that I like to go where I feel stimulated, comfortable, secure, and where I can do my best thinking. My favorite places are memories, not physical places. And a lot of those are with students, and experiences I had in front of a class or things like that, and those are simple moments where I just reflect.”

Throughout our series of interviews he constantly reminds me that the “self” is constantly evolving, taking on new characteristics, thoughts, and ideas as one goes through life. This is why he says he’s writing a biography, not an autobiography. When he writes about his past, it’s like writing about different characters who have authored different chapters.

“The ‘self’ is the narrative that we write about ourselves. As long as I’m alive, I’m writing that narrative, and I’m the hero in that narrative. And when I die, or when I cease to exist, then I become an item in your narrative. And I can’t control it. You know, there’s a famous saying from Foucault who talks about the death of the author. You author your life in a certain way, but once you author it, it’s gone.”

And that, he says, is all the immortality you have.

“Now I’m beginning to feel that everything that I was, and notice the tense, is fading and blending into the noise that is the cosmic process. I think a person’s life ripples out into the universe, and some make a mark, some less. It’s the fact that you planted a tree, shaped a building. That’s who you are and it’s gone.”

“I’m not afraid of death anymore. I think death is a duty that all of us have, like the death of being a good parent, or a good student, or a good reporter. And I think the one duty we all have is dying, and I want to die well. I want to die with courage. I don’t want to die with anxiety and being worried about what happens afterwards. I give it all up to the cosmic process to do with it what it will because that’s what’s going to happen anyway, whether I like it or not. Dammit.”

At that he laughs heartily as he tells me his new favorite Bible passage.

“It’s Ecclesiastes. It’s ‘All the glories of man, are like the flowers of the field, they grow up, wither, and die.’ And I know that sounds pessimistic, but to me it’s been terribly freeing. I don’t worry about my immortality.”

He finds comfort in the fact that he is here now. Ever the educator, Norb holds study sessions at his house where students talk philosophy over Woody Allen movies. He teaches a course every now and then and is always available for guidance, should the students need it.

“Everybody keeps asking me to do all these things, and I’m trying to just be,” he tells me.

“I’m in a culture that abounds with noise of all kinds. So, I create silence. I slip myself into quiet and lull there. And then somebody sees me sitting there, doing nothing, lulling in the silence, and they say to me, ‘What are you doing Norb? Just sitting? Don’t you have anything to do?’”

“My response is, ‘Sure do.’ Then they come back to me, ‘No motivation? Are you depressed Norb?’”

“I say no, just letting silence quiet me. I think of playing golf with my son. I think of my wife, my students. I think of these beautiful quiet moments, these memories you have of people who, when you were around them, thrilled you and brought out the best in you.”

He has been able to carve out some quiet at least, and aside from his work, his time is spent at home with his wife, Carol. “Carol,” he says, “is my grace.”

I ask if he’s had any time to work on his book. He laughs and says, “Not really.”

“You know, it’s probably egotistical, but I want there to be one witness to Norb the first, Norb the second, Norb the third, or however many there end up being. I want one of the witnesses to be me. I just thought it would be nice. I think all my different selves would like for there to be a Norb the fourth who gives witness to who they were. And I’m going to give my witness to my grandkids.”

He pauses. He is thinking about his grandchildren, possibly his own childhood. It’s been a long time and he’s come a long way from the little kid, crouched at the top of the stairs, listening to his father talk about the end of the world.

“You know,” he says, “I try more and more to be a child. Not childish, but like a child. A child is trusting. There are people who trust the cosmic process, and open themselves up to all its grandeur, and ugliness, and horror, and its beauty, and its diversity. At this point in my life, and you can call me an old fart, and I’m 74, but I’m feeling three or four. I don’t have to worry about what anybody thinks about what I’m saying, including you.”

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

—T. S. Eliot