This morning, June 6, 2025, I received word that a longtime member of our Friday-morning men’s group had passed away. He was just a few weeks before his 86th birthday. I wasn’t surprised, since he had been failing for the last few years. But what made his death more tragic, if I can use that word, was the death a few weeks earlier of his son Mike. I’ll be going to the  Celebration of Life honoring both father and son this coming Father’s Day Sunday, June 15th.
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At 85 ½ I am now the oldest member of our group. Most of the other men are in their 70s, with our “baby” in his late 60s. So the image of the three-meter diving board comes to mind. The person at the end is, metaphorically, the next to take the trip into the Great Unknown. Meanwhile, at a certain age we begin to place ourselves on the steps going up to the board, where the Angel of Death greets each new arrival with the word “Next!” Oy!...

Silly me! When I originally tried to save this blog title, my computer told me I already had a blog with that title, written last year. I had totally forgotten. But the topic still fascinates me, so here is Part Two with some additional thoughts.
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The Book of Jeremiah turns out to be the third longest book in the Bible by chapters, both Testaments included. Weighing in with 52 chapters, it is exceeded only by Psalms with 150 and Isaiah with 66. Jeremiah’s many prophecies are generally warnings from Jehovah that “He” is about to organize the destruction of this country or that, this tribe or that, for their having done something execrable in God’s sight. Although a singular universal deity, the Creator of all and everything, the Almighty is reported in the Judeo-Christian Holy Book as acting like a tribal deity who favors “His people,” Israel. How human to play favorites!

​In his song of this name, Tom (Thomas) Lehrer, whose surname means “teacher” in German, sent up his university—the country’s oldest, founded in Boston just 16 years after the Plymouth Rock landing as a seminary for future Congregational ministers in 1636. The first and last verses of the song go like this:

Fight fiercely, Harvard
Fight, fight, fight
Demonstrate to them our skill
Albeit they possess the might
Nonetheless we have the will…

Come on, chaps, fight for Harvard's glorious name
Won't it be peachy if we win the game?
(Oh, goody)
Let's try not to injure them, but
Fight, fight, fight…
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(Oh do fight fiercely)
Fight, fight, fight.

As a thrice-over Yalie I always appreciated this ditty. For to us Yalies, Princeton was the social school of the Big Three Ivies, while Harvard was the effete intellectual one. Yale, in our not overly objective opinion, epitomized the proper balance between the two just as our university  was placed pretty much in the middle geographically between them.

As I write these words, four months into the second Trump Presidency, however, I see Harvard’s fight in a whole new way, with admiration and praise. Along with the lower courts, Costco, and perhaps Walmart, it is saying yes to in its case academic freedom and no to the Don of all dons, the Bully in Chief, or BIC. Harvard’s president and others there seem to know that this is the only way to deal with a bully, the consequences be damned. Bullying just can’t handle being stood up to.

As a retired professor, dean, and academic vice-president, I hope other American colleges and universities will follow suit, show their teeth, and make sure the Trump Administration knows that our country’s higher-education community, a major source of America’s and the world’s brighter future, won’t be pushed around by the anti-intellectual federal administration that happens to be in power in 2025. Coraggio!, as the Italians say.

May Harvard’s glowing example inspire all of us Americans to join the fight for a country as imagined by our Founding Fathers. If we fail to rise up as Harvard has done and is doing, the global future as well as our own may likely be ugly, brutish, and short.
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Forward to victory! Fight, fight, fight!

​On Easter Morning, 2025, my wife, Cedar, and I flew to Dallas-Ft. Worth followed after lunch by a 10 ½-hour second flight to Rome, Italy. It was the start of a three-week trip that would take us from Rome along the Amalfi Coast and then around Greece to Athens on a large sailing yacht followed by eight days in Egypt highlighted by a five-day Nile cruise and ending with three delicious days in Paris. We got back to our Front Range home in Boulder, Colorado, the evening of Mother’s Day. You might say we left on a religious holiday and returned on a secular one...

​The same thing happened a few years ago on a weeklong cruise in the Inner Passage of Alaska. Our ship, one of the “-Dams,” belonged to the Holland America Line, so I was not surprised. Our cabin steward was a middle-aged Indonesian man whose name I no longer remember. On my first ocean-liner trip in 1972 on the S.S. France, the cabin steward, if memory serves, was Filipino. The other stewards in fact all seemed to come from that island country. The same thing seemed the case in later cruises until that Alaska one. Weird! I figured, okay, Holland ruled The Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, for 350 years. So for them the logical choice, the folks they could turn to for such work, were natives from there, the Filipinos’ racial cousins...

​It was April 15th, 1985. Cedar was 40 years old. She and her pregnant friend Amina had just moved into their brand-new house in North Boulder. Cedar’s husband, Tom, hadn’t moved in yet. Each had put up one-third of the downpayment, all with money borrowed from their families. The house, one of the few on Sumac Avenue at the time, was surrounded by active farms and ranch country. The area had just become part of the City of Boulder. Not many months prior, it had belonged to unincorporated Boulder County. The house, like its twin to the east, was brand-new and huge, composed of six bedrooms. In time a seventh bedroom would be added.

Pine Street in downtown Boulder, Colorado is also known as “Church Row.” In a space of three or four block there are six churches. One of them, St. John’s Episcopal, is my wife’s and my church. A block to the west is the Pine Street Church, an American Baptist congregation. Now for those unfamiliar with the Baptist Church nationally, the larger, better known Southern Baptist denomination is quite conservative. The American Baptist denomination, or Northern Baptist Church, by contrast is liberal in the mode of mainstream Protestant churches like the United Church of Christ (Congregational). So, not surprisingly, last year (2024) the Pine Street Church started a program called The Common Good Forum. Its first offering in November 2024 was a weekend keynoted by the theologian Brian D. McLaren, whose opening talk was based on his just-released book, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart (St. Martin’s Publishing Group). Given that Donald J. Trump was about to win his second Presidential term, that title seemed especially justified, and as I write on April 2, 2025 that assumption seems more and more the case.

​Most likely many of you know the Chinese saying, also considered a curse: May you live in interesting times. Well, no doubt the Chinese and others are happy to see how interesting the times have now become for us Americans under second-time President Donald J. Trump. Unlike during his first Presidency, where his professional staff often kept him from realizing his worst ideas, this time the professional staff members are gone, replaced by amateurs with sometimes no experience in the areas in which they are serving but with unquestioned loyalty to POTUS. Moreover, this time around, both Houses of Congress and the Supreme Court are in Republican hands. It’s like Holland without dikes. Meanwhile the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who helped Donald Trump win the November 2024 Presidential election with donations approaching $300 million has been given free rein to slice and sometimes as in the case of USAID kill federal programs and agencies in the name of ridding the government of waste and fraud while intending to save it and the American people some $3 trillion. Now all fair-minded Americans will admit that no government is perfect. Most likely every program and agency could be slimmer and more efficient. But as many have pointed out, the brilliant immigrant from South Africa in his first two months as President Trump’s righthand man is using a wrecking ball, not a scalpel, and doing his work at warp speed. And like a fanatic driver in a top-of-the-line Tesla, he is going at speeds beyond the capacity of the roads he’s on. The result: many Americans, including some of Mr. Trump’s own voters, are beginning to see results that are the opposite of what they had hoped for...

​Those of you who have been reading my blogs over time—there are literally hundreds of them available without charge at my author’s website, www.reynoldruslan.com—know that wisdom is a frequent theme of mine. This makes sense since I’ve written five or six books on the subject. This is however the first time where I’ll talk about wisdom in the Bible, above all in the Old Testament. At another time I’ll follow this blog up with wisdom as found in the New Testament. I’m now reading through both testaments for the third time...

​This concept is something we have inherited from the ancient Romans who themselves got it from the still more ancient Greeks. The Greek philosopher most closely associated with The Golden Mean is the 4th Century BCE philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE). In his Ethics he describes the ideal human virtue as the mean between the excess of a particular quality and its lack. A common example, one that Aristotle himself used, was courage. If you have too much of it, that’s foolhardiness. An example would be riding your horse out into a clear view of a line of enemy soldiers who are pointing their loaded rifles at you. You are basically committing suicide. But the lack of courage is called cowardice. In this case you don’t have enough of the basic quality to take a stand or face an adversary or an unhappy boss one on one.

​I suppose my first men’s group of sorts was elementary-school recess. It wasn’t a real group so much as little boys’ apartheid from the great other, the girls! They just couldn’t or, more likely, wouldn’t play rough and tumble like us. Somewhat similar but for a better reason were participation in segregated team sports, which were of course all-male or all-female, or single-sex sleepaway summer camps. Perhaps my first real community-forming boys group, however, was Boy Scout Troop 3 in Scarsdale, New York. When my family moved back to New York City and I went to a boarding school in New Jersey, that was the end of my brilliant Scouting career: at 12 I was already a Life Scout, a mere five merit badges away from Eagle. The boarding school, Peddie, had no troop. I suppose I could have joined one in town and arranged to be driven to meetings, but for whatever reason, I never made the effort. Still, mine was a boys school in 1951-56, so I was at least in an all-male environment. Yale, especially for undergraduates in the later 50s, was also an all-male institution, although that changed in graduate school despite the fact that my roommates stayed all-male, sometime to my regret.

​Both our fathers, my wife’s and mine, were early adopters. Cedar’s dad, the Connecticut Education Association’s lobbyist at the state capital, discussed with his family decades ago whether or not he should hire the first African-American secretary in the Association’s history. (He did.) My dad, a grain merchant, was among the first in his peer group to buy a teletype and, then, a computer. With wonder in his voice he would tell our family at dinner about the wonders of these new then-state-of-the-art machines.

When I was studying Latin in high school—I later added two more years in college to those four—I learned that the language had two words for man, homo and vir. The first meant generic male, the second a virtuous one. As can be seen, the concept of virtue is literally incorporated into vir. To be sure, the distinction was sometimes based on class rather than behavior, as in being a gentleman versus an everyday man on the street. Other languages make a similar distinction, though not always so gender-specific. 

​The other day I had, for me, an unusual experience. While doing my homework for the “Read the Bible in a Year” course, I was also listening to the first of two CDs of Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier. The first unusual thing is that I don’t usually listen to background music while doing concentrated work of this kind. There’s no special reason why I don’t. I just don’t. Part two of this unusual experience is that I finished my homework just as Andras Schiff played his last notes. But part three, the most unusual bit of all, is that I was inspired to write a short poem, which I proceeded to do. Now although I’m a retired university English professor who has taught courses on poetry and specific poets, I haven’t written a poem myself for years, in fact, not for decades. So, before I go any further, here is the poem that came out in what seemed like a fit of automatic writing, no thought required.

​What we know about the chief Roman god, Jupiter, is that he is, or was, a vengeful deity, quick to hurl lightning bolts at—from his perspective—misbehaving mortals. It was a matter of be good or else! Strangely, my Jewish ancestors in the Holy land some 2500 years ago had a one-and-only god called Yahweh, the name based on Biblical Hebrew, or Jehovah, its Latinized version. Strange! Both deities had names that began with the J sound. And, as it turns out, that’s not the only thing they had in common.

​With five published books on wisdom for living, you’d think I’d said all I was planning or able to say on the subject. But, oh well, I guess there’s a little more, or at least a one-page blog’s worth of wisdom (I hope!) on wisdom. Here’s why. I was stopped at the corner of our side street in Boulder, Colorado, with the intention of turning right onto one of our busiest north-south arteries, Broadway Street (sic!). There I saw a long, seemingly unbroken line of cars heading north. What with my powerful Tesla Model 3, I wondered if I should silently gun my engine and take a chance on jumping safely into the line. But, a bit afraid of undergoing such a clear risk, I took one more long look to the left and saw an apparent break in the traffic opening up about two football fields away. I waited a few (long) minutes and then made a safe right turn.

​My long-time mentor, the late Dr. Varindra Tarzie Vittachi (d. 1993), was a crusading Sri Lankan journalist who rose to become an Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations. His doctorate was conferred honoris causa by Harvard toward the end of his life. Although for the world he worked tirelessly for freedom of the press as well as for human rights, especially in Third World countries where they were often limited or denied, for me he was for many years the chairperson of the International Subud organization, my under-the-radar spiritual association with members now in 100 lands. But, more importantly, he had chosen me and perhaps a half dozen other young people in Subud around the globe to mentor. As a result, wherever I, my wife, and family were living, he would stop by for a few days and stay with us on his way to here or there. He would always regale us with stories of the big world as well as the Subud world and generally take us out for a fine meal. Through him, in fact, I came to know and work for a while with Dr. Jonas Salk, his buddy and the founder of the first polio vaccine who at the time was interested in wisdom and how to cultivate it. Meanwhile, he (V.) came up with ways to mentor me and “his” other young people to become future leaders in Subud and beyond.

​What a second here! Isn’t that a contraction in terms? I mean, isn’t the very concept of socialism anathema to good American Christians of the Nationalist variety? The very worst term before the Berlin Wall fell was of course Communism. But since then, the ”C” word has taken a back seat to that awful “S” word. But don’t Christian Nationalists also tend to believe that a literate understanding of the Bible is required as the inerrant Word of God? 

​In summer, 2024, the rector and a group of parishioners from St. John’s Episcopal Church, Boulder, Colorado, went on a 120-mile pilgrimage from Fatima, Portugal, site of the Marian visitations of 1917, to the Cathedral of St. James in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. By coincidence in 2017 Cedar, my wife, and I also did a 120-mile Camino pilgrimage to the same destination, but from a small town on the Castile-Galicia border in Spain: the so-called French versus the Portuguese Camino.

​As a retired English professor who last had a science class—and it was physics—in his freshman year of college back in 1956-57, I am hardly one to claim scientific knowledge on this subject. But since 1962 to the present, I have had a series of five cats, with one exception all long-lived. So, my conclusions are all based on personal observation. Like humans, cats are individuals and have diverse personalities. Gender may also be a factor in their individuation. Still, there seem to be certain traits that they all have in common. So, my opinions expressed here are just that, based on what I’ve seen in my kitties over the years.

​When we’re walking down the street, visiting a store, or out dining in our hometown, we’ll occasionally run into someone we know from a different context in our locale. For example, my wife and I go swimming three times a week in a water-fitness class at our local YMCA. If that person we “run into” happens to be from our class, the usual line is, “What are you doing here?” followed by something like “I almost didn’t recognize you with your clothes on!” It’s a pleasant enough meeting but it’s clearly just a coincidence. I reckon similar run-ins happen at least two or three times a year. But let me recount three meetings so unique and unlikely that I’ve always wondered, are they coincidences or miracles?

​My parents were secular Jews. Consequently, I got little by way of religious instruction let alone acquaintance with the Bible at home. That really started at my then-American Baptist boarding school, Peddie. In those days, the early-to-mid 50s, we had required daily chapel, Sunday convocations or visits to local churches, and Sunday-evening vespers, which we boys referred to as “The Holy Hit Parade, since we could choose our favorite hymns to be sung: “Mr. Hicks, Number 114 please: ‘Day Is Dying in the West.’” Also required was a year-long religion course where we read a good piece of the Bible. In college I continued attending church, generally New Haven’s High Episcopal parish, Christ Church, and on occasion the University’s Chapel (Congregational), where the chaplains—the Rev. Sidney Lovett followed by the Rev. William Sloan Coffin—gave good-to-excellent sermons on the scriptures. Then, as an English major, I needed to review Bible passages relevant to the various literary works we were exploring.

​Many of the world’s religions and a number of indigenous peoples have a belief in reincarnation. Mainstream Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do not. In fact, per the extensive article on the subject in Wikipedia, “The Catechism of the Catholic Church completely rejects any doctrine of reincarnation.” Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), an Italian philosopher and poet, was found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition for his belief in and dissemination of writings in support of the concept. By contrast, the Yoruba religion of Africa teaches that the divine Creator established reincarnation to bring about the “Good Condition” (Ipo Rere), or a balance between heaven and earth (Wikipedia). And a Pew 2009 survey found that at that time 22% of American Christians believed in reincarnation, while in a 1981 survey a startling 31% of regular churchgoing European Catholics did as well (Wikipedia).

Those of you who have been reading my blogs for a while know that I have had quite a religious pilgrimage. Born into a secular Jewish family, I originally received religious instruction from our African American housekeeper, Florine. She was a devout Methodist who attended weekly services at a local church in our New York City suburb of Great Neck. She would sing or hum hymns, tell me about Jesus, and invite me to listen with her to the George Beverley Shea Bible Hour on the radio. We’re talking here about the early 1940s. When I was in 7th grade—we were now living in the New York City suburb of Scarsdale—I spent a year in a Reform Jewish congregation and [sic!] Sunday School in nearby White Plains...

Altogether I have lived in Hawaii’s capital, Honolulu, for 17 of my 85 years, during the period of 1967 to 2007. For most of our time there, my wife and I belonged to Calvary by the Sea Lutheran Church in the district of Aina Haina. At one point four of us men congregants discovered that we were all born in 1939. So we established an informal 1939 Club and would do things together like occasionally going out for breakfast or lunch and sharing about our lives.