MEMORIAL MINUTE: RALPH LADDIE SLOTTEN
Carlisle Friends celebrate the life of Ralph Laddie Slotten, who was born June 19, 1926, in Casey, Iowa, and died in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on February 12, 2007.
He was the son of Rollie M. and Bessie (Maughan) Slotten. A descendant of Norwegian immigrants, he grew up in the Iowa towns of Exira, West Des Moines, and Fontanelle, where his father was a teacher and a school administrator. He and his sister Jean , who preceded him in death spent summers with relatives in the Dodgeville, Wisconsin, area, while his father completed his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin.
Ralph entered the U.S. Army near the end of World War II and was stationed at Fort McClellan, Alabama, where he worked as a journalist for the camp newspaper. After leaving the Army, he earned B.A. and B.D. degrees from Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. In 1951 he was ordained as a Disciples of Christ minister and pastored churches in Las Cruces, New Mexico and St. Paul, Minnesota, also serving as a youth minister in Gary, Indiana. Under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee, he worked in psychiatric hospitals in Hartford, Connecticut, and Dayton, Ohio.
In the course of his work with the American Friends Service Committee, Ralph met Martha Calvert. They were married on June 29, 1957. Ralph’s lifelong love for Martha provides the subtext for one of his poems: “The Sunday we Danced in Meeting”. The poem recalls “a spritely Quakeress …she who by the courtesy of Jesus I most cherish … looked on me with favor, lavished on me her smile, and drew me in.” Ralph and Martha spent the first years of their marriage in St. Paul, where their children, Amy and Hugh, were born.
Ralph studied the history of religions at the University of Chicago, where he earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees.. After a brief period of teaching at Defiance College in Ohio, he joined the faculty of the Religion Department at Dickinson College in 1966. At Dickinson during the Vietnam War, Ralph became involved with the Conscientious Objector Organization and counseled young people faced with decisions on the military draft.
Ralph’s scholarly interests as expressed in journal articles and critical reviews, were varied. For example, he was an authority on the Chinese religious philosopher Wang Yang-Ming, the Master of Animals in archaic hunting religion, and Celtic and Nordic mythology and religion. His teaching of world religions led him to develop a lifelong interest in India, which he visited three times. One signature element of his teaching was his eagerness to develop new courses.
Ralph delighted in conversations with anyone but especially students. This extended to collaborative efforts. Ralph wrote the libretto for an opera on Beowulf in collaboration with Jan Tyler Andrews, a musician who died six days after Ralph’s death. He traveled to India and Nepal with Jon Thiem, and the two produced journals based on their experiences in 1996. During this trip, he also spent time with Doug Kelly. He and Brad Shingleton shared many religious interest and critiqued each other’s ideas about the Old Testament Book of Job. Ralph and Mark Zengerle wrote book manuscripts and articles together, particularly on the topic of perennialism. Other former students with whom he shared poetry, critiques, and publication honors include Jenni Holm, Jonathon Pryce, and Matthew Baker.
Ralph was a prolific poet. He authored or co-authored three books of poetry: Shards, Twenty Poems (with Carlos Cortinez), Book of the Mermaid and Nine Waves(both of these with Bettie Anne Doebler and Jon Thiem).
The poems were as varied as his interests. Some were metaphysical. Others expressed his love for his family. Ralph took great pride in Amy’s and Hugh’s historical scholarship. He was always interested in news about the teaching career of his son-in-law (Rob Schutt) and about his grandsons, Tom and David.
He is well remembered for his love of walking. Often in years past, he was seen walking from “Dwen Cottage,” his former home on North East Street, to the Dickinson campus or making his way to paths along the LeTort stream or in the Seven Gables woods.
Ralph helped found the Carlisle Friends Meeting and later became a member. His spoken ministry was invariably both Christian and universalist, and he saw no contradiction in that. In recent years, a form of Parkinson’s disease slowly took away his physical strength, but not his mental agility. Even when he could no longer live at home, he continued to work at editing old poems and writing new ones. Friends loved him, visited him, and admired his courage.
In a short note he wrote near the end of his life, he described himself as “a simple Christian.” If pressed, he might have acknowledged that his claim to being only “a simple Christian” was an over-simplification. His students, colleagues and friends knew him as an extraordinarily complex man who delighted in examining an idea from many different, often diametrically opposed perspectives – a lover of paradox. In an entry in one of his personal journals, written years ago, he mentions that he received his first Bible – the King James version – at age eight, a gift from his father. He wrote that in the Gospel According to Matthew he found three verses that remained, in his words, “the essence of my experience of Christianity.” In these passages Jesus is quoted as saying: “It is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven…The kingdom of heaven is with you…[and] unless you become as a little child you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” Ralph wrote: “I learned from these verses that Jesus’ central doctrine is the kingdom of heaven, defined as mysteries; that it is to be found inside oneself, and that the requirement for entrance into this kingdom is childlikeness.”
Reading that note decades after it was written, one can only say, “That sounds like Ralph.” There was nothing simple about his mind, but there was a sense in which his personality and spirit were childlike. Throughout his life he retained a child’s sense of wonder, a child’s enthusiasm for new experience, and a child’s eagerness to share and talk about whatever interested him – which was, at one time or another, almost anything and everything. The complexity of his mind led him to become a scholar and college professor. The subtlety of his perception, combined with his ear for language, combined to make him a poet. His mysticism and his eagerness to share his glimpses of the Spirit that Quakers call “the Inner Light” were what made him loved as a teacher and as a friend.
