My Pilgrimage to WE

​I have four virtual hiking poles for this pilgrimage: People, places, religions, and languages. Let’s begin with people—those heaven-sent witnesses who showed me that the Other was not to be feared but to be learned from and embraced as fellow members of the human family. The first was Florine, our African-American housekeeper who came when I was 1 ½ and stayed till I graduated from high school. She was black, working-class, religious, and Christian. We were white, middle-class, secular, and Jewish. Even as a toddler, however, I understood that, different as she was, she was the strongest, most loving person in the house. The next was Al Watson, my boarding-school English teacher. Al was my equivalent of the charismatic teacher played by Robin Williams in the film “The Dead Poets’ Society.”..

Because of him, I went to Yale, studied German, and became a teacher and a writer. The next was my Yale English advisor, Professor Alec Witherspoon, Reese’s great uncle. His love and knowledge of literature was infections, but what really moved me was that he was a person of faith and a worthy descendent of his Witherspoon ancestor, John, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, the only clergyperson to sign the Declaration of Independence, and the first president of Princeton. After that came Simone Zimmermann Feldman, my German wife of 43 year who proved that someone from the country of our Jewish people’s mortal enemies could be a loving, loyal, and supportive wife and mother of our two daughters. Next was Bapak Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo (d. 1987), my Javanese (Indonesian) Muslim guru since May 1961, the individual who opened the door to my spiritual development. Then there was Varindra Tarzie Vittachi, a U.N. Assistant Secretary-General from Sri Lanka, whom I met through Subud, my spiritual practice, and who mentored me in the fine art of living effectively with one foot on the inner path and the other on the outer. After that came the Rev. Douglas R. Olson, our Lutheran pastor in Hawaii and the product of rural Minnesota, “the land of ten thousand Olsons,” as he liked to say. Finally I’ll name Cedar Barstow, my wife of 14 years; a worthy daughter of New England, she is a member of the most functional family I ever met and a truly good, wise, and engaged human being and life partner. And besides these special people, I have made it a practice to befriend and hang out with diverse individuals of all kinds, in part to see what I can learn from them.

​As for places, I was born and lived most of my first 16 years in and around New York City. To be sure, most of 1951 through 1956 was spent in central New Jersey at an American Baptist boarding school called Peddie. After that life took me to New Haven, Connecticut, and Yale University. In those days the latter was a national motherhouse of male, white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and the related culture. My class of 1960 was the first with a sizable Jewish minority. Nowadays Yale is a coed mélange of nationalities, ethnicities, and religions—diverse through and through. A big “other” place for me of course was Germany, where I spent my junior year. I traveled widely in Europe; studied German, French, Spanish, and Italian with native-speaker girlfriends; and found my future first wife. My career after Yale graduate school as an English professor, program director, academic dean and vice president took me to Honolulu, Hawaii, where I lived for 17 years, as well as to Chicago (14 years), and St. Paul, Minnesota (9 years). As a national higher-education consultant and through personal travel, I have visited 49 of the 50 U.S. states and 49 foreign countries, in North and South America, Europe, Africa, the South Pacific, and Asia. Moreover, I’ve spent significant time, aside from Germany (2 ½ years), in Spain, Denmark, Morocco, Ireland, and Indonesia. Nowadays I live in Boulder, Colorado.
 
Turning to religion, Florine, daily chapel at Peddie, and Professor Witherspoon launched me on a religious search. After joining a Conservative Jewish youth group (Atid, Hebrew for the future) in grad school, I decided that Judaism was a bridge too far for me. I attended a very “high-church” version of Episcopalianism as an undergrad but was baptized in March 1967 with my then infant first child, Marianna, in a Yale chapel by the then Lutheran Campus Pastor, Richard Olson. Subsequently I spent 37 years as an active and confirmed ALC/ELCA Lutheran in Chicago, St. Paul, and Honolulu. In Hawaii I converted to Roman Catholicism, was confirmed, and remained an active Catholic there, in Europe, New York, and Boulder, Colorado, until I became disenchanted with the conservative nature of the Church in Colorado and switched to the Episcopal Church, where I was also confirmed and have happily stayed for the last 13 years. In addition, I have attended Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim services; have fasted on occasion for Ramadan, Lent, and Yom Kippur; and have studied both Confucianism and Taoism. Alongside all these changes and experiences, I have remained an active practitioner for 63 years of the Indonesian-originated spiritual practice called Subud, a contraction of Susila Budhi, and Dharma, which the founder, Muhammad Subud, interpreted as meaning right living (Susila) by surrender to and guidance (Dharma) from one’s true and highest inner self (Budhi), the self placed there by God.

Finally come my languages. I discovered my linguistic gifts early. As a little kid I would hide behind our large console radio and do programs for guests where I imitated the famous comedians and singers of the day. I came home from Kindergarten with a note from my teacher telling my parents that I had a “speech problem.” Apparently I thought how our black housekeeper spoke was the source of her power, so I switched to it in school “for protection” but switched back at home. In 3rd grade I taught myself elementary conversational Spanish from records, in part to keep up with my younger Argentine cousins. Starting in 5th grade I learned basic American Sign Language from a deaf-mute young man who lived across the street. At Peddie I took four years of Latin and two of Spanish followed by two more of Latin and three of German plus that year abroad in Germany as an undergrad and a year of Italian and one of Indonesian in grad school. From then to now I have studied Chinese, Japanese, and Danish plus a little Russian and Arabic. Nowadays, I have spent a half hour every day for nearly four years studying French, Italian, and—more recently—Indonesian via duolingo.com: this in part as a form of “brain gym” to hold off the end-result of the saying that “old deans never die; they just lose their faculties.”

The French say “Vive la différence!” (“Long live difference!”) This bon mot implies that differences are or can be good and useful. Nevertheless, many of our fellow human beings don’t have much close-up experience with individuals and cultures that differ from their own. As a result, they don’t learn firsthand how human differences can be delicious and educational versus strange and scary. Walt Whitman once wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes!” I feel that way myself and believe that the more we can experience, learn from, and even embody human and cultural differences, the greater the chances for world peace. I therefore give my pronouns these days as “He, him WE.” So, in light of all this, please consider joining me on my pilgrimage to WE. All of us—WE—are worth it.

WE-ness in a single photograph.