 Age 5 at Ocean City, NJ |
Autobiography: Success, At Last! Although I am not rich or famous, I consider myself a success. You see, over 50 years, I have traveled a journey that has brought me to a point at the beginning of each day when I can turn my life over to the ineffable essential unity that is the ground of our being -- and proclaim. . . . |
"this is the day the Lord had made; rejoice and be glad in it"
. . . . and ask
"give us this day our daily bread."
Oh, I don't live day-to-day trusting completely in providence. Far from it. I still pay attention to the big questions: Who am I? Where am I going? Where did I came from? My ego experiences separation, isolation, and loneliness -- and I get angry and frustrated and worry.
Yet life has taught me about myself -- and I basically like what I have learned. So I wake up each morning, thanking God for a new day and asking God to help me meet its challenges. I enjoy my life -- my work, my leisure, my relationships.
I know of no better definition of success!
My life's journey started in Wilkinsburg, PA (just outside Pittsburgh), on December 15, 1948. My parents were Robert Hickman Arnold, a quiet educated man of faith whose chief life concern was providing for his family, and Helen Moses, a wise, strong-willed woman whose chief life concern was both her personal growth and that of her children.
In the early 1950s, Westinghouse Electric Corporation relocated my dad to Fairmont, WV, as an auditor at its florescent and seal beam lamp plant. My family lived some 15 years there in an area that was then the heart of the nation's coal mining industry. I acquired most of my formal education in West Virginia, graduating from Fairmont Senior High School in 1966 and then going on to receive a BS in Journalism from West Virginia University in 1970 after my family had returned to the Pittsburgh area where Westinghouse had moved my father in another job. My sister Beth was born in Fairmont in 1963.
In the summer of 1969 before my senior year at West Virginia University, I went to New York City to work as an intern for a small public relations agency where I returned in 1970 to work for the next 23 years. In 1993, I brought together my vocational skills in communication and avocational background in Church mission in an emergency management career at Church World Service which I continue to pursue. In New York, I received an MA degree in philosophy and the arts from the New School for Social Research in 1975, married my wife Julia in 1980, and became a lay pastor in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in 1997.
Major life-shaping influenes included: