Grace, wisdom and recycling: Is Dr. George Ball changing the world one student at a time?
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At 85, George Ball careens around campus on a creaky red bicycle, counsels college students about tragedy and romance, worries humans will destroy themselves, lifts weights every morning at the YMCA, is an ordained Methodist minister, believes in the Hindu notion that time has neither beginning nor end, paws through garbage to recycle aluminum cans, thinks everyone has an ethical obligation to care for everyone else, grows way too much zucchini, recently camped in the Moroccan desert with his wife of 51 years. He started out as a lawyer but went on to get a doctorate in religion at Yale because he wanted to explore bigger questions.
What is the meaning of life? Why is there a universe? What is the essence of love?
George Ball founded the Department of Religion at Whitman College 41 years ago. Known as "Dr. Ball" to generations of students, he officially retired in 1980. But he still teaches Religion 101 today and also acts as a religious counselor to college students for whom spirituality encompasses politics, classes, career, family, romance. "The wounds of a broken romance remain the same," he says, even though student attention has shifted over decades from the Vietnam War to choosing a career that will pay the mortgage.
The professor emeritus and his wife, Nancy, have hosted a student "cell group" in their home every Sunday afternoon for 40 years. It's a bowl of apples and an hour of discussion about any serious subject the students wish to tackle. Topics this spring: violence, death, atheism. The latter recently sparked lively debate about Kierkegaard's leap of faith, American voters, Buddhism, Islam, pushy parents, Galileo, Nietzsche.
Annelise, 19: Can't you prioritize making someone feel good without getting some kind of eternal reward for it? ...
Sumir, 20: You don't need the concept of God to teach the concept of right and wrong. ... I'm going to make my kids read Bertrand Russell.
Becca, 18: Religion covers what science doesn't cover. ...
Dr. Ball: In the Old Testament, whenever they want you to reflect on a truly religious thought, they ask you to look up at the stars at night. ... How could this majestic universe be insignificant and without meaning?
Whitman College is nestled among wheat fields and wineries in Walla Walla, a land of long horizon in the southeast corner of Washington state. On clear spring nights like these, the heavens display a spectacular spread of stars.
Which prompts this question: Can one teacher on a tiny campus tucked in the corner of the state in the corner of the country have a significant impact on the universe?
This particular Monday evening, Dr. Ball sits in the basement rec room of Anderson Hall dormitory talking with a dozen young women about the nature of love. He is perched in a stuffed armchair, with crimson cardigan neatly buttoned, legs crossed in gray slacks, feet in black sneakers barely touching the floor. For the amount of energy and wisdom and benevolence he exudes, Dr. Ball occupies a surprisingly compact space. He looks like a cross between Yoda and Mr. Rogers.
The teenage girls rush in. "Dr. Ball! Dr Ball! I'm going to Alaska just like we talked about in your office!" Kate Johnson squeals and hugs the religion professor - all 5 feet 4 inches and 125 pounds of him.
Kate is 18, crowned with Bo Derek braids, smitten with a young man in Juneau. Around the circle, her first-year dorm mates run the gamut: shy, ebullient, barefooted, combat-booted, ponytailed, bobbed, blow-dried with aerosol mousse.
As for their hearts, some are broken, some throb, many are unattached. Regardless, everyone leans forward, elbows on knees, to hear what the octogenarian has to say.
NOTES from Dr. Ball's 30-Minute Lecture on the Nature of Love:
How do I know when I'm in love?
• It'll knock you over. Any romance on its upswing is like a bonfire. Infatuation - fatuous - Latin for foolish. It's not bad, just be careful not to do anything rash early on. Real question is whether you'll know which is the right person to marry.
• Forget the single-bullet theory. There's more than one true love out there. Marriage is not a matter of finding the right person; it's a matter of being the right person. You each have to adjust.
• Love is a decision, not a feeling. (But passion often accompanies love.) Jewish scholar Martin Buber's "I and Thou" relationship: Love is responding to another person's needs for the rest of your life at whatever cost.
5 Components of Love.
1) Mutuality. Talk and do things together. Agree, deep down, on what's important in life. Prince Charles and Princess Di needed more mutuality.
2) Respect. Watch how your sweetheart treats other people. Their mother. The cashier. Don't expect to "make over" anybody - that's always hopeless.
3) Communication. Be open. Forgive. Avoid anger, the most common destroyer of marriages. Anger is dangerous, contagious, prevents clear thinking and communication.
4) Imagination. Helps you understand, feel, what another person is going through. People with imagination can respond to others' emotional needs.
5) Sacrifice. You'll never have an intimate sustained relationship without sacrifice. Love means going way out of your way for a friend. Marriage intensifies this. Actually, there's no difference between romantic love and general love - it's the same obligation to care for other people. But romantic love is more intimate, sustained. And of course, in romantic love you can do a lot more damage.
SEX??!!
If sex works well, doesn't mean you're right for each other; if it doesn't work, doesn't mean you're wrong. Good sex means adjusting, responding to each other's needs, same as love. Sexual intercourse doesn't create a relationship; it merely reflects what you mean to each other - the quality of love, sacrifice and care.
WITH THAT, the half-hour is over. A few giggles, but no questions, so Dr. Ball rides into the night on his little red bicycle and the girls clatter up the stairs to Kate and Heather's room, where talk ricochets from the revival of vinyl albums to long-distance boyfriends to Kate's amazing coppery braids (extensions woven into her real hair, took 4 hours, will last weeks and resemble a dead dog come time to unbraid).
Mostly, they talk about Dr. Ball.
Kate Ritley (there are three Kates on the second floor) has already jotted Dr. Ball's key points about love on a yellow stickie on her computer screen.
Kate Johnson, meanwhile, has donned a sandwich-board "ALASKA OR BUST!" featuring a color photo of long-distance boyfriend Travis. Determined to visit him during spring break, Kate has launched a one-girl campus fund-raiser: baking cookies, decorating flower pots, peddling small paintings (acrylic on cardboard Tampax boxes) of young handsome men who, coincidentally, resemble Travis. She needs $469 for a ticket to Juneau and has collected $415 so far.
Love? Infatuation?
Earlier in the week, she visited Dr. Ball in his office, a cozy basement nook decorated with a world map and books: Zen, Islam, bibles, essays on why and why not marry, novels by Anne Lamott, the latest New York Times and Economist magazines.
Travis! Alaska! Spring break! Dr. Ball listened, smiled, and then chipped in $5 to Kate's fund, telling her, Have fun, kiddo!
"Dr. Ball, like, totally gets it, all the big issues," Kate says. "The guy has a pretty good clue. He's been married so long and whenever he talks about her, his little eyes get so lovey. He gives us positive ideas about what love is. Doing things for the other person and giving and not have it be so much something that's physical or selfish but something you share."
At 18, the mind is amazingly bold. It will take on Chassidic philosophy, Alaska airline fares, hair obsessions and sex advice, all while digesting cafeteria fish sticks for dinner. What's harder is to picture Kate at some later moment, a month or 25 years from now, her hair unbraided and this love, or another, unraveling.
What will remain of Dr. Ball's lessons?
Maybe quite a bit. As it turns out, Kate's mom, Regina Butler, graduated from Whitman in '75 and still counts Dr. Ball as one of the most influential teachers in her life, even though she never took his class.
"It didn't matter whether you were his student. He stopped and shared and conversed with everyone," Butler said. "I went to his house. We sat and talked and he shelled peas with his family. I learned about quality. In your relationships, your work, how you enjoy life. No matter what you do, you want it to be the highest quality. You know, when you're very close and connected, that feeling of always questioning and probing and learning. Now I'm a third-grade teacher. I try to do that with my own students. I try to help them to be the best person they can possibly be."
EVERYONE WHO has been in the presence of George Ball for more than, say, five minutes has something warm and fuzzy to say about him - a story about how he comforted them when their grandmother died, or shoveled their sidewalk during a snowstorm, or arranged emergency dental care for a student from China. And though Dr. Ball has interacted with thousands of different people in his two score and one year at Whitman College, all their stories wind up sounding fairly similar: Dr. Ball reached out. He listened. He made me think clearer and feel better.
Jessica Witherspoon, '03: "At the beginning of the year, I had a roommate problem. I was feeling bad about it - in tears all week. I went in to talk to him and he put it into perspective. He has a way of making you feel, even if everything's wrong, you're still a good person and there's still love in the world."
John Stanton, '77, CEO of Western Wireless and VoiceStream Wireless: "It was a tumultuous time to be in college. ... The whole Watergate mess. Students wanted to protest, but they didn't know what to protest. George Ball was a stable and calming influence. He understood the importance of things and tried to channel the angst into things more meaningful. You can't pin it to any one thing he did, but in a sense George Ball is and was the soul of Whitman College. He taught less about a particular subject than he was a conscience."
Funny thing is, even though the religion professor influenced so many people in major and subtle ways, hardly anyone can say how. Mostly they describe small moments. Together, these add up to human grace.
Perhaps this sort of grace is not uncommon among octogenarians who've had decades to figure themselves out. George Ball, apparently, has lived like this much of his life.
"He came that way - without ego," says his wife, Nancy, who met her husband when he was a 34-year-old divinity student at Yale.
Subsuming individual identity runs contrary to Judeo-Christian teachings, democracy and capitalism. Nonetheless, Dr. Ball believes, "Unless we can think of the welfare of the total, instead of the welfare of the self, family or nation," he says, "we will destroy ourselves."
Born in Australia, the son and grandson of Methodist ministers, Dr. Ball was raised on a small farm in upstate New York hearing his father preach Sunday sermons and his mother warn daily against smoking, alcohol and girls. By the time he met Nancy, he'd already been through the Depression, romantic rejection, Yale Divinity School and Cornell Law School, and had served as an army chaplain for a medical battalion during World War II.
Taking part in war was the hardest decision he's ever made.
"Normally, I would think nearly all wars are ethical mistakes," he says. "But I was at a concentration camp, Ohrdruff, the day it was liberated. The Germans had fled. Before they fled, they shot all the remaining Jews in puddles of blood. There were sheds of bodies, naked, simply skins, emaciated, piled up like cordwood. It amounted to me as a justification for the effort to suppress Hitler ....
"The Quakers say someone has to break the habit of solving problems through the army, and to my mind, the Quakers are close to the truth on all of this. That's immediately followed by a thought that given the degree of greed and cruelty in the human race, it's a terrible risk not to make some kind of response that includes force .... In the war, I never doubted ethics. I doubted people ... But I didn't generalize that this was the human race at its truest."
Human cruelty causes Dr. Ball to feel great anguish, he says, but not anger. In his whole life, he can't ever remember getting angry. Not during World War II. Not during the Vietnam War, when he led candlelight vigils to the Walla Walla courthouse early on in the protest movement.
Not even when he lost his job. Twice. The first time he was fired by the University of Denver during the McCarthy era after he refused to sign an anti-Communist oath. The second time, also during the McCarthy era, Oberlin College wouldn't renew his contract after he led a group to Washington, D.C., to protest universal military training and then declined to censor a student letter critical of religion.
Wasn't Dr. Ball worried about being blacklisted? His career? Supporting Nancy and their four children?
Oh no, Dr. Ball smiles. You see, something else always came along. The McCarthy era ended. And eventually, he landed on the campus of Whitman College.
JUST AFTER dawn, hours before other professors and students converge on classrooms, Dr. Ball glides up to Olin Hall on his little red bicycle and slips in clutching a grotty plastic garbage bag.
He scampers up and down the stairs, checking for aluminum cans in every wastepaper basket and recycling station. He plucks them out, three by three, deftly emptying leftover soda. Amber drops glow in the slanting morning light. His white turtleneck peeks above his dark sweater like a priest's collar.
The scene isn't holy, but it is a ritual.
Dr. Ball doesn't pray in the traditional on-your-knees way because he doesn't believe heaven deals with private destinies or personal fears. The minister does think there are things we can say and do to make ourselves more aware of our responsibilities.
Recycling cans, for example. Today he's collected 111 empty cans, including three rescued from outdoor garbage bins. He rattles off his speech: It takes 95 percent less energy to recycle a used can than to manufacture one from raw materials; so each recycled aluminum cylinder saves about half its volume in gasoline.
Let's see ... 120 cans a week since the '70s energy crisis ... Dr. Ball has saved enough gas to drive around the world a couple times! (Of course, he'd prefer to pedal his bike.)
Calculating a teacher's impact on students is much more abstract.
Even if a student jots down a teacher's wisdom on a mental Post-It, how long will it stick? And if it does have staying power, in what situation will it come into play?
Try ... the big 1989 San Francisco earthquake. Residential hotels crumbled. Hundreds of people lived in tent cities - for years! - while lawyer Steve Ronfeldt, Whitman '64, bickered with federal agencies about rebuilding affordable housing.
Ronfeldt, who was a freshman the first year Dr. Ball taught at Whitman, says his mentor's "affirming spirit" kept him company during countless long nights in the offices of the Public Interest Law Project.
"Religion to him is not something that's off in a plateau, that one just reads and thinks about. It's socially meaningful," says Ronfeldt, who founded the poverty law agency. "It takes a lot of spiritual struggle in this work .... I think of him weekly. More than that."
Several years ago, Ronfeldt and his former tennis teammates (who were often cheered courtside by Dr. Ball) set up a scholarship in their mentor's name. More than 500 contributors have donated more than $400,000, and on the professor's 80th birthday, sent hundreds of letters.
Former students told Dr. Ball he inspired them to volunteer for the Peace Corps in Malawi ("You have encouraged me to care for others and welcome diversity that this world brings"), to join the clergy ("I am probably your only C student who ended up in the ministry"), to realize the cost of love. (Dr. Ball has officiated at hundreds of marriage ceremonies.)
A quilted orange banner reading "Be Swift To Love" hangs in his office, a gift of appreciation after a student's wedding.
The banner reminds Dr. Ball of a question the student once asked:
What are you doing here? If you put into practice the kind of stuff you taught, you'd be in the slums of San Francisco, or off doing Peace Corps work somewhere.
Whitman's campus is a gem of precious lawn and library in the arid hills. Tuition and other costs at the small private college run $27,500 a year.
"I realized she did have an accurate point," he says. "My answer is, to some degree, mitigating failure. I had four little children. I didn't want to walk out on them or submit them to what a slum life might require .... The other justification is not so sure-fire. Sometimes when I see these books, I think I have a particular gift ... These people here need somebody who can speak in their language at their level of thought."
From Alice Cunningham, Whitman '87:
I want you to know that I picked up garbage today because of you. I'm camping in the Mojave desert, dirt-road miles from anywhere. .. I saw a park service trash can with the lid blown off and litter strewn all around. I hurried to pass so I wouldn't have to look at it, when I saw you stopping to pick it up. Of course you weren't there, so - with a grumble and a sigh - I did it myself.
I can't help but feel that God shines through you.
I realize now why I loved going to your classes, to bask in the Light for an hour or two. In your presence I see a possibility - a torn hope - that the world is a good place. That there is a possibility for love, for kindness among people. .. I value that more than any brilliant thing you ever said.
Yesterday a man asked me for money on the street. I was dubious, but I listened to his story, then he said, `I promise to pass your kindness on to the next person.' Well. That is the point, isn't it? So many years after the fact, I promise to pass it on, Dr. Ball. Thank you for your light. It does keep spreading, reaching out, on and on.
Paula Bock is a Pacific Northwest staff writer.