Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Eugene Wiesner.
Eugene Wiesner grew up on a farm in western Kansas in a large Volga German family. He was one of ten or eleven children, and his family was the only Catholic family in a Swedish Lutheran community. He grew up with a deep dislike of Protestants, something that would make what happened to him later in life all the more striking.
His father had bought a new farm in the middle of the Dust Bowl without having the money to pay for it. Eugene expected to remain a farmer, but at thirteen he came down with rheumatic fever and was sick for three years. He lost nearly half his body weight, dropping from 130 pounds to 67. Convinced that he would never again be able to do a full day’s physical work, he entered a Catholic seminary and spent five years preparing for the priesthood and missionary work in Papua. Then, at twenty-one, he fell in love.
At his brother’s engagement party, he looked up from a slice of watermelon and saw a young woman standing about fifteen feet away. As he later put it, “something inside of me went boing.” His Latin grades promptly fell from A’s to D’s, and his pastor told him that if he had been bitten that hard, he had no business becoming a priest. He waited eighteen months before speaking to her. They married in 1950 and eventually had five children.
Wiesner was drafted during the Korean War and afterward returned to farming. At thirty, he sold the farm and moved his family to Lawrence, Kansas, to attend the University of Kansas. He went on to earn a doctorate in clinical psychology and eventually became a professor and department chairman at Eastern Montana College in Billings. He also maintained a private practice.
By his late thirties, he had achieved the professional success he had worked toward, but something was missing. He had spent years around psychology, including colleagues who were openly atheistic, yet he knew that he did not have a personal relationship with Jesus. That changed in December 1967.
Wiesner had gone to a retreat near the Canadian border and was not happy about being there. He had arrived in a priest’s car and was pacing a hallway when a dentist came out and began talking with him. The man was loving, kind, and gentle, and eventually asked Wiesner if he would pray with him. Wiesner got on his knees but did not know what to say. He had spent his life praying from books, and now he found himself unable to find the words. Then the words came to him: “Come Holy Spirit, enkindle in me the fire of your love.” He began to pray them, and the Holy Spirit answered.
Wiesner described what happened as a fire that came into him. He said he was literally throbbing with heat. Something changed in him immediately. The hatred toward Protestants that he had carried since childhood was gone. For the first time in his life, he could truly love Lutherans.
His experience with the Holy Spirit also changed the way he looked at psychology. He had spent years studying human behavior, but he now found himself confronted with something his professional training had not prepared him to explain. He began speaking openly about his experience and about Jesus on the college campus. That brought trouble. He was accused of proselytizing, and rumors circulated that he was casting demons out of students. The administration told him to stop. He resigned as director of the counseling center and continued teaching psychology under his academic tenure.
Wiesner later said that he lost his reputation as a psychologist. Some of his colleagues even tried to have his professional license taken away. He went to Helena to defend himself and ultimately kept his license. His Christian faith changed the way he taught psychology as well. He had previously taught that the basic motivation of human behavior was the enhancement of the self. He came to believe that the answer was self-denial instead. If what Jesus said contradicted what he had learned in school, he said, then what he had learned in school had to go.
Wiesner developed a practical way of explaining the difference between problems of the mind and problems of the heart. The mind could be renewed through the process described in Romans 12, while the deeper compulsions of the heart required confession and cleansing. He warned people not to confuse the two. His clinical experience became part of his ministry at The Camps Farthest Out. He described the troubled person as being shut inside one of seven rooms of darkness: fear, helplessness, hopelessness, guilt, rejection, condemnation, and confusion.
He knew those rooms well because they were the kinds of problems he encountered in his psychology practice. But he did not believe people had to remain in them. The answer was to bring light into the darkness, and he often did that in a surprisingly simple way. He had his patients sing Scripture. Wiesner required some patients suffering from depression to memorize songs based on the Word of God and sing them. His instruction was simple: “I’m not saying sing when you feel like it. I’m saying sing until you feel like it.”
He taught that there was no point in continually analyzing darkness. Instead, bring the truth of God’s Word into it. He told of patients who recovered through this kind of treatment, including one woman he described as an involutional melancholic. He told her that Jesus had the cure for her depression and had her memorize and sing a large collection of psalms repeatedly. She recovered, and people in the community wanted to know what kind of psychologist had helped her.
Wiesner also dealt extensively with anger and painful memories. He taught people to bring the people who had hurt them before Christ and forgive them. He practiced the same thing himself, deliberately bringing to mind people who had angered him throughout his life and forgiving them. He turned the practice into a memorable phrase: “Hi, anger. Jesus gives you goodbye, anger.” That became part of the practical ministry he brought to the camps. Instead of allowing anger and old wounds to remain hidden, he taught people to name them, confess them, forgive, and allow Christ to cleanse them.
Wiesner began speaking at The Camps Farthest Out in 1975, first at Camp Magruder in Oregon. He later chaired the Washington camp. His fellow CFO speakers remembered him as a brilliant man, a Spirit-filled Catholic who loved Jesus and the Scriptures. Jim Christian described him as a little German fellow who did not take himself too seriously and who was, first of all, a man of God. Wiesner retired from teaching in 1987 but remained active in service. Into his eighties, he volunteered at a St. Vincent de Paul thrift store.
For a man who had spent much of his life as a Kansas farm boy, a Catholic seminarian, a psychologist, and a college professor, his own description of what mattered most was remarkably simple. Jesus had become the center of his life.
As he once put it, “it sounds corny, you know, for a Russian-German farm boy to be in love with Jesus.”
*Note:
Many speakers lived before the days of the internet and many had very limited biographical information available. The information in these biographies came mostly from transcripts of their messages, and relies heavily on their own spoken words. Please contact us if you have any corrections.