​Next Stop—New Haven, CT, for My 60th Yale Class Reunion, June 2-5

​Okay. Nota bene: The “WE” in question has just one “e.” This is an important distinction, because in this case, size really does matter. The rest of this wee essay will explain why...

It was supposed to happen two years ago. Covid happened instead. So, it actually took place this year, the first weekend of June 2022. We’re talking here about my 60th Yale Reunion. The last one I had attended, with my late wife, Simone, was the 25th. Lots had changed at Yale in the intervening 42 years. For one thing, this reunion, which I went to with my second wife, Cedar, was farther away. We traveled this time from Boulder, Colorado, rather than St. Paul, Minnesota. But that of course has nothing to do with changes at dear, old Yale...

​There are two buildings on the Yale University campus that were no more than 50 yards from the dorm complex (Jonathan Edwards College) where my wife and I stayed for my 60th College Reunion. Both of them played important roles in my life. Now I’d like to tell you about what happened in them in chronological order...

​Today is Tuesday, June 7, 2022. Cedar, my wife, and I are visiting her brother and sister-in-law near Boston. As part of my daily wellness routine, I’ve just come back from an hour-plus walk, the last 40 minutes of which I did on my own and could thus walk faster than with family and friends. I did however stop here and there to take photos of New England houses I liked. After all, I’m on a road that runs alongside Lake Boon in Stow, Mass, founded in 1635, just a short drive from Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Midway in my mini-hike I begin to notice American flags of all sizes and configurations, from little ones adorning doors and fences to large ones above garages or atop flagpoles. It’s a veritable festival of red-white-and-blue patriotism. Yet Memorial Day is now behind us, and the Fourth of July is still a month away...

​The ancient Romans had a word for it—three, actually: Nomen est omen. Literally, “the name is ominous,” that is, full of deep meaning. The Hebrew word for name, SHEM (שם), also means “nature.” So, when the Third of the Ten Commandments in the Hebrew Scriptures forbids one’s taking the Lord’s Name in vain, the meaning is much larger and more significant than simply using a synonym for the Deity in a profanity. Rather, it’s more like living so as to disrespect the Creator, others, and ourselves. On a more temporal note, when we have just met someone and they remember and use our name while we have forgotten theirs, we have a feeling of embarrassment, even shame. It’s as though they value us more than we value them. Oy!

​Whenever the pre-Christian me passed a church with a sign assuring me that Jesus saved, I always wondered what that savings entailed. I eventually learned that Christ saved the bodyless dead from burning eternally in hell. Then I thought, how can a fleshless spirit burn? Without a nervous system, how could they feel? What was the point, then? Would the unsaved dead simply be upset because they were thrown into the everlasting fire pit? Further, how can you throw a spirit anywhere? The question also comes up about whether you can hurt a ghost’s feelings?

​I recently had a conversation with a German neighbor. I asked her if she knew our nearby German friend. Not only did she know her, but they were both from Hamburg. I mentioned that our mutual friend’s father had been a well-known Lutheran pastor there. “Ach,” she replied. “My husband is a Lutheran too, but I’m a nothing.” “Hardly a nothing” I responded. “If there is any justice in the universe, we’ll be judged by our actions, not our memberships.”...

​University towns have lots of advantages. Ours, Boulder, Colorado, is home to the main campus of the University of Colorado (C.U.), the state’s flagship institution of higher education. Every April for decades now, C.U. offers a weeklong gift called the Conference on World Affairs. Public figures join academic and lay experts on panels or give keynote speeches on topics related to current events. This year, unsurprisingly, many of the dozens of presentations focused on the war in Ukraine. The thousands who attend these free offerings come not only from the Boulder area but from around the country and even from abroad. A year or two before the pandemic, I attended a keynote on the future of electric vehicles.

​Here I’m of course riffing off that old Sunday-school bromide, “How do I know? The Bible tells me so!” Well, it is true that the Bible tells us lots of just-so stories. Every college graduate will know that the so-called “inerrant Word of God” is plenty errant. Sportin’ Life in the Gershwins’ great American folk opera “Porgy and Bess” tells us in song that “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” One of his first pieces of evidence is, ahem, the Biblical assertion that Methuselah lived 900 years. Okay, the Bible is protein-rich in truths; they just don’t happen to be of the scientific or academic-historical kind. But this little blog is about how truth can be buried in language. Here are three examples...

A good question! Good Friday, as even non-Christian Americans know, is the day on which Jesus of Nazareth was crucified. It is also the day on which observant Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and perhaps others spend three hours, from noon till 3 pm, in church. In this so-called Tre Ore [Latin for “three hours”] service, they are presented with sermonettes on the last seven words Jesus is said to have uttered from the cross. In some of these services, a classical ensemble—in our congregation this Holy Week, it was a string quartet—intersperses the seven corresponding movements from Josef Hayden’s dramatic Last Seven Words of Christ...

​Thomas Hardy, the late-19th-century-early-20th-century English novelist, is famous for such works of fiction as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Additionally, he wrote poetry, with a first volume, The Poems of Thomas Hardy, published in 1895 followed by Late Lyrics and Earlier in 1922, six years before his death. One of his later poems, clustered under the rubric of “Satires of Circumstance,” took its inspiration from the April 12th 1912 sinking of the Titanic. In that work, called “The Convergence of the Twain,” the two things referred to were the supposedly unsinkable ship, on the one hand, and the iceberg, on the other. That fated and fatal coming together resulted in a score of Nature one versus Humanity zero. The novelist-poet lived up to his family name, moreover, for he died at the ripe old age of 87 ½, a huge achievement for an Englishman born in 1840...

​John Donne (1572-1631)—Anglican priest, English Metaphysical poet, and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral (1621-31)—has a Holy Sonnet with this startling line, “The first minute after noon is night.” Talk about the relativity of time! Because I had a hand operation for carpel-tunnel syndrome recently, I too have experienced the phenomenon of no time having passed. I’m on the operating table. The anesthesia enters my vein through the IV. I feel a pressure inside my skull, and in an instant I’m out. Then, not a second later, I find myself mysteriously recovering in the room where I’d been prepped. From my perspective, no time had passed. Yet the reality was, it was an hour later, the operation was over, and I was lying there with my left hand all bandaged.

​A current go-to term is mindfulness. You hear it in conversation, you read it online. The concept makes perfect sense. Be here now, not in yesterday or tomorrow. The old-fashioned adjective, mindful, is a synonym for thoughtful. You know, think before you act. Turn your mind on and ponder a matter before you say or do something connected with it. Off-the-top-of-one’s-head speech or action often leads to personal regret or even harm to others.

​An admirable quality of the Japanese is their unwillingness to show off. This manifests in many ways, most notably in home architecture. The outside of their houses is rarely ostentatious. A McMansion in Japan would stick out like a sore thumb. But go inside, and although there is a tendency toward minimalism, costly ceramics and lovely wall scrolls will adorn the interior. The lovely inside contrasts sharply with the bland exterior. I noticed the same tendency in Morocco. One of my meditation brothers is the scion of a well-known French couturier family. At last count he owned eight houses, apartments, or farms around the world. For my honeymoon in 2011, he gifted my new wife and me with a two-night stay in his mansion in Marrakesh. His house, inside the walls of the old city, was as modest and nondescript as its neighbors. But go inside, and it’s like moving from blurry black-and-white to sharp, glorious color. After meeting the staff of eight, who would be at our beck and call for the next 48 hours, we were taken by the head housekeeper on an extended tour. We learned that the current king’s sister had sold this mansion to my friend in appreciation for his funding of an orphanage in the nearby mountains...

​One of Mark Twain’s many bon-mots concerns smoking cessation. “It’s not hard to quit smoking,” he said. “I’ve done it hundreds of times.” Well, I feel the same way about dieting. I don’t know what happened. When I was a little kid, I was rail skinny. My parents were so worried they consulted with the pediatrician. How could they fatten me up? By the time I was 11 or 12, though, things had changed dramatically. They were now taking me to Barney’s, a men-and-boys clothing store in New York City that specialized in garments for the big and stout. Awe, as the Hawaiians say. It’s the Polynesian equivalent of Oy Veh! Now my worried parents were calling the pediatrician about something quite different....

​Okay, so the literal translation from the German saying—one of many pieces of folk wisdom I learned from my first mother-in-law—leaves something to be desired. But stay with me. For those of you with some German, the original goes Die Strafe fällt auf den Fuss. Our equivalent proverb would be “As you sow, so shall you reap.” In other words, we’re talking about Karma here: cause and effect. The Hindu concept adds the idea of reincarnation. So, if you were a wife-beating husband in this life, for example, you might merit rebirth as a beaten wife. It’s kind of a cosmic camper-counselor day. The hope is you’ll learn not to abuse your spouse in your next life....

​These are questions I am supposed to write a one-page response to in my Episcopal Education for [Lay] Ministry course, a four-year program of 36 two-hour sessions. In all, we spend 288 hours creating in community a theological grounding for our faith. Two-thirds the way through Year 3, I’ll answer in this way. You, my blog readers (and classmates) will share with me what I have discovered...

​When we are kids, we go to birthday parties, our own or our friends’ bar- or bat mitzvahs, or, in the Christian context, confirmations. Then, as we age, first it’s weddings, then anniversaries—we continue to go to birthday parties of course--, high-school or college alumni reunions, and finally it’s mainly funerals, or in today’s euphemism of choice, memorial services. My favorite, to be sure, is Celebrations of a Life Well Lived. That’s what I want for myself...

​Okay, I’m getting more philosophical today than usual, but, hey, I’ll keep the prose understandable. Promise! After all, I’m an English major, not a Philosophy or Physics one. So, to quote our current President, here’s the deal. We Americans along with the rest of the Western World tend to think in opposing dualities: night vs. day, black vs. white, good vs. bad—what the French Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre referred to as Either/Or. But I guess the paired opposite of either/or is both/and, although the latter is harder to reach. Today as I write these words, Russia (I almost wrote “The Soviet Union”) has just invaded Ukraine. It’s easy for us to support one side, the Ukraine, versus the other, the invading bad guys. Praying for both sides is much more of a stretch. Still, it’s what Jesus called on his followers to do. But I digress...

​Okay. In a recent blog I wrote about individual differences. If you’ll recall, I used a photograph of two amaryllis flowers growing at dramatically different rates as my meme. The beat goes on, by the way. Although the smaller stalk has entered a growth spurt, the bigger one has stopped growing and has begun to burst forth in lovely bright-red flowers. But at the end of the day, both are the same variety of flower and both inhabit the same box...

​Normally, when I compose these blogs, I do the writing first. Then I’ll search for a suitable meme, generally in www.getstencil.com, which has millions of images searchable by topic. Every once in a while, though, I’ll use a photograph, either one of my own or one in the public domain. In my blog called “Don’t Think!,” for example, I used a photo from one of the websites of my spiritual association, Subud. Today I’m featuring a photo I took myself. Moreover, I’ve placed it first rather than last, since it is my point of departure. Let me explain....

​What a thought from a certified thinker! Not to brag, but I [uh, was] graduated from Yale magna cum laude as a member of Phi Beta Kappa and then followed up with a Yale Ph.D. So, I’m supposed to regard cognition as the number-one way of solving any and all problems, right? Yet consider this statement from the recently deceased Vietnamese Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nath Hanh: “Do not try to find the solution with your thinking mind. Nonthinking is the secret of success. And that is why the time when we are not working, that time can be very productive, if we know how to focus on the moment.” Or recall this well-known piece of advice from Jesus: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matt. 6:34, KJV)...

I don’t usually start these weekly blogs with quotations, especially not extended ones from the Bible. Today is an exception. This quotation, attributed to the Prophet (not the bull frog) Jeremiah, is one featured in Lutheran churches on Reformation Sunday, which generally occurs around Hallowe’en. The passage is often referred to as “the new covenant between God and God’s people.” Here goes:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

​Now 82, I’m a junior in the demanding four-year weekly lay-ministry course of America’s national Episcopal Church. Another year-and-a-half and, God willing, and I’ll graduate from EfM, as we students refer to the program, formally Education for Ministry. Anyway, all four classes just spent two weeks reading and discussing a humdinger of a book entitled The Dream of God—A Call to Return by Verna J. Dozier (c. 2006). In it the author argues that we are not meant to worship Jesus, who, she asserts, is not God but the Divine in human form. Instead, we are to follow the way of living Jesus modeled for us. That’s much, much harder than mere worship. The latter is like walking up a local hill versus climbing one of Colorado’s 58 14ers, mountains that exceed 14,000 feet...