​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...

​If you’ve been following my weekly blogs, you may recall that I’ve written several on close encounters of the iconic kind, about my meetings with famous people, and one on close encounters of the eerie kind, on my experiences with ghosts. To round this series out, I’ll now share my one and only blog on close encounters with UFOs. Read on...

​The Bolder Boulder—notice the spelling—is an annual 10K foot race. If I had arrived here ten years earlier, back in my running days, I’m sure I would have participated. As someone who’d done the Honolulu Marathon six times, the last when I was 64, 10 kilometers would have felt like a piece of cake or a walk in the park. Choose your cliché. I also sometimes call my town “Boldeer” in honor of the families of deer that like to walk down our streets and chomp on grass in our gardens. Their ancestors were here centuries before we two-leggeds invaded their space, but they still roam their old habitats and let us approach them really close before they gambol away. And when it’s time for my birthday, I’ll sign my emails “Reyn-older-in-Boulder.”

As far as I know, I’ve had four. Of course, I’ve been scared more times than that, but we’re talking here about ghostly visitors. So, four. The first occurred in November 1978 in Farnam Castle, Surry, England. Now old British castles are known for their ghosts. My late wife and I were there for a smallish week-long gathering on Educating for the Future, organized by Dr. Jonas Salk, the inventor of the first polio vaccine. The castle was genuinely old, the first part built around 1100 by the grandson of William the Conqueror...

​Last night my brother-in-law and I were discussing the phenomenon of anti-vaxxers. Then, like a bolt of lightning it struck us. They could really be a Democrat plot of Antifa undercover agents. I mean, consider this. Those not getting vaccinated are mainly less educated, rural Republican voters from red states. And guessing who are getting Covid in all its variants and dying from it. That’s right. Less educated rural Republican voters from red states. Not only that, but most of us know that it’s the older voters who historically have been the group that votes the most in elections, and it’s these very folks, the elderly, who are dying in greater numbers.

​When I was living and working in Greater Chicago (1973-87), I had a somewhat older thrice-weekly tennis partner named Dr. Sargon Odishoo who alas recently passed away in his 90s. He was the family optometrist. More importantly, he was the father of my older daughter’s best friend, Arbella, and a walking-distance neighbor. Doc Odishoo, as his first name suggested, was Assyrian. He was proudly named after Sargon II, the famous and feared ruler of ancient Assyria. Until meeting him, I thought the Assyrians had disappeared from history not long after the Old Testament era. Apparently, they had had their own diaspora. So, Doc and Wilma Odishoo had immigrated to the U.S. from Iran, where they had been minority Eastern Rite Christians. Not only that, but Sargon claimed that their Assyrian language, which he and his wife still spoke, was a close relative of Jesus’ at-home language of Aramaic. Hence, his family name, not unlike the related Arabic Abd-Isa, meant the slave (or servant) of Jesus...

​I haven’t seen many of the well-known performers or groups in person. I did see Maya Angelo once in Chicago in 1960 or ’61 before she became world famous as a writer. She was the warm-up act, as a dancer (!), for the Clancy Brothers at Mr. Kelly’s. Many years later, when I met her and told her about that experience, she smiled in a kind of “that was then” way. I did see Peter, Paul, and Mary, though, at around the same time. They too were not yet the big-name group they were to become a few years later, performing when I saw them to a small audience of no more than 200 people. Mary Travers died in 2009 at age 72 of leukemia. I guess she was following the principle of “ladies first.” To my knowledge, Peter and Paul are still with us, both well into their 80s...

​Okay, I have nothing against happiness. I think it’s great. In fact, I am always happy when I’m happy. So, what’s my problem? I think pursuing happiness is an exercise in futility. I’m a fan of the late Victor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) and the post-war founder of logotherapy, a psychotherapeutic healing process based on helping the client find and/or create meaning in his or her life. Frankl believed, and I agree, that chasing happiness directly is like running to find the end of the rainbow and, of course, the pot of gold said to be buried there. Since rainbows are visual rather than material phenomena, one can never do more than see one of its ends. Pursuit, as the Borg in Star Trek would say, is futile. And by the way, which end conceals that pot of gold anyway? Frankl’s basic point here is that happiness is the byproduct of something else. And to his mind, that something else was logos, meaning. Hence the term logotherapy. So, our Founding Fathers would have been more helpful had they only known to give us a national motto that read “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Meaning.” Then, per Frankl, as the day follows the night, happiness, or its more stable sister, contentment, would be sure to follow...

​I know, I know! We live in a time of cancel culture. So why am I complaining about this particular cancellation? Well, it’s the painful—and I mean painful—irony of it all. So, consider this scenario. You are sound asleep, aided by the heating blanket you wife thoughtfully bought for you so you wouldn’t wake her up at night to warm yourself up. You see, she is generally warm when she’s sleeping, no doubt because of being five years younger than me and blessed with better circulation, while I become cold, especially when I get up in the middle of the night to go to the . . . well, you can guess where. Anyway, her strategic generosity worked, and when I keep the blanket on #1 or #2, I manage to stay on my side of our king-sized bed most of the time, at least statistically better than in the bad old heat-blanket-less past...

​As a retired English professor, I’ve been struck by how some new crisis, social or personal, causes us to learn a hitherto unknown technical term. When my late father was diagnosed with it, for example, I became acquainted with the disease multiple myeloma. Now even little kids speak routinely about the pandemic, a term only trained medical personnel had spoken of prior to March 2020. Yet there is one pandemic, arguably the world’s oldest, that is totally under the radar, possibly because it is so taken for granted. I mean the pandemic of the misuses and abuses of power. From verbal and physical abuse at home to the boss from hell at work to authoritarian governments and ultimately war, this deadly disease has been with us since the first human society. You don’t need to be a Sunday-school summa cum laude graduate to remember that Cain slew his brother Abel in one of the earliest chapters of Genesis. And, as Sonny and Cher would say, the beat goes on...

A friend of mine in the Twin Cities, a former Catholic priest named Joe, asked me if I had ever written a blog or a section of one of my books on the relationship between wisdom and happiness. I hadn’t but promised that soon, as the Brits say, I would give it a go. Well, “soon” has come, so here I go...

​This is something David ben Gurion (d. 1973), the principal co-founder and first prime minister of the modern state of Israel, is reputed to have said. My research hasn’t yet been able to confirm that claim; nevertheless, given current trends, the concept may be borne out in the not-too-distant future. Certainly, the Jewish national movement founded in the 19th century, Zionism, asserted that if the Jewish people hoped to last, they would need a country of their own, and the Holy Land had been promised to them by no less a personage than God. At the time, to be sure, Jews and Judaism had managed to survive nearly two millennia in diaspora. Still, where were the Hittites now? ...

​It used to be so easy. The good guys wore white cowboy hats and were clean-shaven like John Wayne. Their leader often rode a white horse. And their horses had names like Silver, Trigger, or Tony. The bad guys, by contrast, wore black hats, often had evil mustaches like Governor Dewey of New York, Harry Truman’s unsuccessful presidential opponent right after World War Two, and tended to ride dark horses. Then as now, moreover, superheroes, even if they wore masks like bank robbers—I’m thinking of the Lone Ranger and Batman—they were the good guys and always prevailed over the bad guys who lusted for power and would do whatever it took to acquire it for their personal gain. Also, as someone who was a little kid during World War Two, I knew without a doubt that we and our allies were the good guys and that the Germans and the Japanese and, to a lesser extent the Italians were the baddies...

​Wow! I really thought I was finished with this series. Then, in a recent conversation with friends I happened to mention some work I had done with one of the most famous people of the 20th century. What! They said. And you’ve managed to omit him from your stories of meetings with illustrious individuals. Why, he’s the most famous of all! And so he is, not to mention the fact that his wife is well-known in her own right, as often happens with the mega-famosos. Okay. Brother Reynold. Don’t be coy. Who is this person? None other than Dr. Jonas Salk, discoverer of the first polio vaccine, and his wife, Françoise Gillot, better known as Picasso’s frequent model and mistress...

​Okay, to paraphrase President Reagan, here I go again. Good news: It’s my final venture (for now) into the world of the fancy and the famous. Who knows? I may meet Joe and Kamila on my next trip to DC. Anyway, I thought I had only one more famoso encounter to describe. Wrong! In fact, the biggest, most important of them all I nearly forgot. Fortunately, it came to me in a flash a few days ago. The person in question? None other than the Airlift mayor of West Berlin, the erstwhile chancellor of West Germany, and the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. Can you guess? Right, the late Willy Brandt. And in Berlin or Germany or even DC? Nope. In a big Presbyterian church in humble St. Paul, Minnesota. And I didn’t just see him, but thanks to my off-the-charts e-scale rating on the Meyers-Briggs and even more, my fluency in German, I actually interacted with him as did my late wife, Simone, a German native. The occasion was a sponsored lecture...

​In Part 1 of this blog, I recounted vignettes of family meetings with well-known public figures. And now for two more of mine. The first took place many years ago at the Great River Country Club in Sayville, Long Island, New York. To give you a hint about just how long ago, I was sixteen at the time and today am less than a month from my 82nd birthday. My parents, who lived in “the City,” as we New Yorkers refer to Manhattan, belonged to the club. A golfer, I spent my summer weekends with them out on the links. Moreover, as a prep-school sophisticate, replete with a phoney draft card which I had joined the Photography Club to learn to make, I could be found in the evening at the club bar, drinking something upscale like scotch-on-the-rocks or Drambuie, which my teetotaling dad would dutifully pay for. On one such Saturday night, a middle-aged man with a face I thought I recognized joined me and engaged me in conversation. There I was, drinking illegally—the legal age at that time in New York State was 18—talking with New York City’s three-term mayor, Robert Wagner. What a concept!

Unless you’re a public figure yourself, your close encounters with famous people are probably limited to one or two in a lifetime. My dad, my older daughter, and I defy the odds in this regard. We seem to have a knack for bumping into the well-known. Let’s begin with my father. Back in the day when cross-country trips were mainly by train, bus, or of course car, my dad would usually come home with a story of his latest close encounter. Before all that, as a young businessman in Lower Manhattan, he would pal around with a young Englishman whose family had sent him to the Produce Exchange in New York City to learn the grain business. On his return, he would take over the family’s thriving concern. The Englishman in question was John Houseman, who would later be a distinguished actor, however, not a grain merchant, and become known to us Americans as the crusty law professor in the “Paper Chase.”...

​You may ask where I get my ideas for these weekly blogs. The answer is mostly from something I’ve recently heard, read, or experienced. In the case of this blog, it’s a matter of something I’ve just read, in fact, of two things. Let me explain. One of the periodicals I subscribe to is The Economist. Generally, I read just the editorials—what the Brits call “leaders”—and maybe one or two of the articles if something happens to strike my fancy. The day is just too short for more, I rationalize. The issue of September 11th-17th 2021, however, caused me to read more. Based on the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, it is titled “9/11—America Then and Now.” The issue attempts to weigh the relative plusses and minuses of the United States’ response to what some consider its second Pearl Harbor. After all, unlike many other countries, the U.S. has managed to avoid attacks on its own sovereign territory and citizens since its two wars with England some 200+ years ago. I’ll tell you about the second thing I read in a minute...