Sermons From Rev. Feelgood !

By Stefan Kanfer

For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Early in 1989, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten climbed to the highest reaches of the best-seller list. Nine months later, the sequel was born. It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It followed the leader straight to the top. Both books still beam down on a world they analyze and celebrate. The author has not only remained popular with readers; he is also in demand on television and in concert halls. Last February he conducted the Minneapolis Chamber Symphony in the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth -- no mean accomplishment for a man who could not read a note. Next fall he will work with the same musicians in Suite for Kindergarten, a piece he commissioned. One PBS special was broadcast last Thanksgiving; another will air next year. Random House is currently offering a seven-figure contract for the next collection of his thoughts. And the Rev. Robert Fulghum bobs in his houseboat on Lake Washington in Seattle, staring at the words of Matthew 16: 26.

"It's not that I'm ungrateful for all this attention," he says. "It's just that fame and fortune ought to add up to something more than fame and fortune." So these days Fulghum (pronounced Full-jum) tends to write a lot of checks to charities. Then again, he was always devoted to good works. "I never stopped supporting the efforts of those devoted to world peace, like the Quakers, or SANE, or Greenpeace, or the NAACP. Only now I have more to donate."

The giving includes psychological and philosophical counseling offered in easy-to-take capsule form. The advice was first dispensed in sermonettes over the counter at his church in suburban Seattle. The Rev. Fulghum also wrote a column for the church's mimeographed newsletter, handed out every other Sunday. Some of the reflections enjoyed a modest afterlife, fixed with magnets to refrigerator doors or folded up and carried around in wallets and pocketbooks. But one message made its way over suburban boundaries and vaulted into the national consciousness.

"The piece was full of elusive truths," recalls Fulghum. "Elusive because they had been in plain sight all the time. Everybody had tripped over them in kindergarten -- without realizing that they were words to live by."

Among the sandpile aphorisms:

Share everything.

Play fair.

Put things back where you found them.

Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.

Wash your hands before you eat.

Flush.

Take a nap every afternoon.

When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.

Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.

Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup -- they all die. So do we.

Washington Senator Daniel Evans thought the kindergarten essay was too profound to be confined to his home state, and he read it into the Congressional Record. Televangelist Robert Schuller got hold of a copy and broadcast it to his congregation. Abbreviated versions were published in "Dear Abby" and the Reader's Digest. In 1987 a Connecticut schoolteacher passed out copies to her class. The mother of one child was a literary agent, who sensed commercial possibilities in Fulghum's entry-level insights. She traced the author to his home and dangled promises of publication. The minister was astonished: "I've been writing this stuff for years," he told her. "How many boxes do you want?" As it turned out, there was enough stuff to make a slender 196-page work, issued without fanfare and ignored by major reviewers. But there is no advertising like word of mouth, and within three weeks All I Really Need to Know had become the little book that could.

In every epoch some sage is appointed to state the obvious in block letters. During the '60s the advice of Kahlil Gibran was revived. In the '70s Richard Bach made Jonathan Livingston Seagull a feathered superstar. Then came Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, who explained the times When Bad Things Happen to Good People. And suddenly it was Fulghum's turn. The rabbi found a simple explanation for the reverend's overnight success: "In a world of complex ethical decisions, he cuts through the details and says, 'At the heart are a few simple rules. You can be a moral person; it's not as complicated as it seems.' "

Across the country, readers began treating those simple rules as their personal mantras:

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge.

That myth is more potent than history.

That dreams are more powerful than facts.

That hope always triumphs over experience.

That laughter is the only cure for grief.

And I believe that love is stronger than death.

To date, nearly 5 million copies of Fulghum's works have been sold, and more printings are under way. Three virtues propel these slim volumes: they are unabashedly affirmative, their wit is unobtrusive, and their punch lines could fit in a fortune cookie. The author notes, for example, that headlines shout stories of "crookedness and corruption -- of policemen who lie and steal, doctors who reap where they do not sow, politicians on the take." Don't be misled, he warns. "They are news because they are the exceptions. The evidence suggests that you can trust a lot more people than you think."

Fulghum pauses to make some calculations. At the age of 53, he has spent some 40,000 hours eating, 35,000 hours in traffic getting from one place to another, 2,903 hours brushing his teeth, 875,000 hours coping with odds and ends, filling out forms, repairing, paying bills, getting dressed and undressed, and 223,000 hours at work. "There's not a whole lot left over when you get finished adding and subtracting," he concludes. "The good stuff has to be fitted in somewhere. Which is why I often say: It's not the meaning of life, it's the meaning in life."

If such apercus are reminiscent of love-ins, mood rings and Woodstock, it is no coincidence. The author began life as a strict Southern Baptist in Waco, Texas. "I guess it was a pendulum reaction to what had gone before," he recalls. One grandfather had abandoned his family of seven children; the other had been shot to death in a tavern. Robert parroted the Fundamentalist line until the pendulum swung back. "On prom night we went to a country club where the girls wore lipstick and hose, and the next day, at Sunday School, the teacher thundered about going to a den of iniquity. It occurred to me that God had better things to do than to worry about people dancing."

His head full of questions, the youth headed northwest for the University of Colorado. In summers he supported himself by acting as a singing cowboy on a dude ranch and riding in an occasional rodeo. But in Robert's junior year, his father, a retired manager for Sears Roebuck, became seriously ill. The tuition money ran out, and the undergraduate finished his studies at Baptist Baylor University in Waco. "By then, however," says Fulghum, "I had seen a wider world, and there was no going back." He spent one year working as a salesman for IBM in Dallas but then forsook the old-time religion and set out for Berkeley. There he enrolled in a small Unitarian seminary. "The beatnik thing had just happened in San Francisco, and I jumped into that with both feet." The feet were covered with sandals; the face was decorated with the beard he still wears. He and his new wife sat up listening to jazz and drinking cheap wine. "Oh, it was gloooorious."

The marriage was something less than gloooorious. The Fulghums had two sons and adopted a daughter, but their union ended with the Age of Aquarius. "It was life's low point," Fulghum sighs. "I thought there was no way up." He retreated to a Zen Buddhist monastery in Kyoto, Japan, seeking spiritual solace. There he met a Japanese-American teacher named Lynn Kohara Edwards. Even in his depressed state, Fulghum impressed Edwards as the "most entertaining person I've ever met." He still does. The couple journeyed back to Seattle and were married in the summer of 1975. Instead of exchanging rings, he gave her a silver flute, and she presented him with a fiddle. Fulghum always had a knack for painting and drawing; to supplement his small ministerial income, he became an art instructor at a local high school. His maverick approach became a point of local pride. On one examination the class was challenged:

Suppose all human beings had tails. Describe yours.

Did you ever think about doing something terrible? Pretend that you did it.

Describe the crime you committed, and make your own mug shot and fingerprints.

In time the personal clouds lifted, the marriage took hold, the students were inspired, and the instructor-minister began to issue the upbeat sermons that were to make his name. Fulghum summed up his new attitude with a quote from Albert Camus: "In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

Since then it has been mid-July every day of the year. Dr. Lynn is now the head of a group health clinic, and the Rev. Robert has retired from his parish in order to devote himself to "staring at the walls of my houseboat." After all, he figures, "to ponder is to wonder at a deep level." Besides, out of all that woolgathering, book No. 3, Meatloaf in B Flat Major, will emerge next year. Even now, thoughts are surfacing like salmon in Lake Washington. "The grass," he notices, "is not, in fact, always greener on the other side of the fence. No, not at all. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered." Moral: "When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass wherever you may be." He recalls the Greek phrase he learned as a seminary student: asbestos gelos -- unquenchable laughter. "I traced it to Homer's Iliad, where it was used to describe the laughter of the gods." Moral: "He who laughs, lasts."

Fulghum's sons live in the neighborhood, and in order to stay in shape, two generations frequently go jogging in a nearby park. En route, readers hail the shaggy, benign figure, and he is often asked for advice. He rarely breaks step as he shouts his inarguable credo: "Life is so . . . unique! Trees, people, dogs, cats, comedy, love . . . don't miss it!" The springy, affirmative footsteps clatter like laughter as they echo down the path. The Rev. Feelgood is off in pursuit of another elusive truth.