The Richest Man in Town

During the past few days, we celebrated All Hallow’s Eve on Thursday, All Saints Day on Friday during the Headmaster’s Holiday, and yesterday was All Souls Day, the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed.  You remember well the first night on Thursday with your delightful costumes, but the other days are often ignored, or forgotten.  All Saints and All Souls are days when the Christian tradition comes to life as we remember those famous people, and those people we have forgotten, who came before us.  The celebration of All Saints Day on November 1 dates back as early as the 9^th Century as a tradition in the Church, a day of remembrance that was begun in Ireland.  Though it is a celebration that has changed over the years, it is an observance that is infused with the mysticism of Celtic Christianity, Irish spirit and wisdom, and the date of November 1 goes back even further with Pagan roots.  It is a day when the living and the dead lean towards each other in greatest intimacy—when we look for the thin places in our lives, the places where God is near, and the spiritual presence of the dead is palpable.  In the thousand years of All Saints Day, and the tradition of All Hallow’s Eve, this is the time when the living and the dead come into closest contact.     

Today is about celebrating the people, both living and dead, who have shaped you as the person you are.  There are so many people out there who care for each of you, even if you have never thought of them as saints before.  All Saints Day helps us to remember what makes a good life.  In his extraordinary novel East of Eden, John Steinbeck zeroes in on precisely this question as he retells a famous story from the Greek histories written by Herodotus.  From East of Eden:

“Herodotus, in the Persian war, tells a story of how Croesus, the richest and most-favored king of his time, asked Solon the Athenian a leading question.  He would not have asked it if he had not been worried about the answer, ’Who,’ he asked ‘is the luckiest person in the world?’ He must have been eaten with doubt and hungry for reassurance.  Solon told him of three lucky people in old times.  And Croesus more than likely did not listen, so anxious was he about himself.  And when Solon did not mention him, Croesus was forced to say, ‘Do you not consider me lucky?’

Solon did not hesitate in his answer, ‘How can I tell?’ he said.  ‘You aren’t dead yet.’

And this answer must have haunted Croesus dismally as his luck disappeared, and his wealth and his kingdom.  And as he was being burned on a tall fire, he may have thought of it and perhaps wished he had not asked or not been answered.

And in our time, when a man dies—if he has had wealth and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man’s property and his eminence and works and monuments—the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil?—which is another way of putting Croesus’s question.  Envies are gone, and the measuring stick is: ‘Was he loved or was he hated?  Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come from it?’” 

Every human life has a cloud of witnesses, as Dr. Greene referenced on Thursday night from Paul’s letter to the Hebrews, chapter 12.  This cloud of witnesses can be those who inspire you, and even those who scare you a little bit. 

There are some people about whom you can say: Without this individual, I would not be here right now.  For me that person was my mentor, The Very Reverend William Power Clancey, and I’d like to share with you this morning a little of his life.  He was a cathedral dean—a priest of the church--in San Jose, California, and he shepherded me through the political process towards ordination in the church.  It’s actually a politically difficult process at times, and Bill got me through the maze.  Bill Clancey—Father Clancey--was all about service: service to his country first and later to the church.  Bill was a father figure to me when I desperately needed one.  He was also a criminal lawyer for the Justice Department, along with being an Episcopal priest.  Powerful abilities and identities could be combined in a single individual; I learned that from Bill.  That was one of the many interesting things about him.  He had significant talents that were employed full time in helping others.  As a priest, he printed his pager number in the Yellow Pages.  He was nearly always on duty, ready to help a person in need.  The joke was that he would always beat the ambulance to the hospital.  But it was no joke to Bill.  Semper fi was a way of life for him as a former marine.  Former Marine: I love that term.  Some would say that there is no such thing as “former marine.”  Despite his service in the church, he was also never a former attorney.  He was always a lawyer.  My understanding of my own calling as a priest, teacher, and writer didn’t seems so strange when I watched Bill in action.             

Help is the ordinary and extraordinary offering of the public servant.  This is the first shift in thinking of All Saints: that your skills are to be used for the common good, not simply, or exclusively, for self-gratification and making money.  Bill was a lawyer and a marine and a priest all rolled into one, and he brought all of those experiences and abilities to the table.  He certainly gave away lots of free legal advice—hundreds of thousands of dollars of free legal advice.  He was a walking Legal Aid Society with a priest’s collar.  As a marine, he fought in two wars.  He was an enlisted man, fighting in the Pacific at the end of World War II.  He came back as a captain in the Korean War, and he actually volunteered for Korea.  He felt it was his duty.  After the war, Bill excelled as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley.  He called Berkeley “The People’s Republic of Berkeley.”  Even though he was a lifelong Republican, he always loved Berkeley, California: the largest open air mental health facility in the world, he called it.  Bill collected three UC Berkeley degrees, including a JD from Boalt Law School, and then another degree in divinity from the local seminary, where I also graduated.  Four degrees in Berkeley.  He worked for the Justice Department in Washington, and then as Assistant District Attorney of San Francisco.  Bill had mad skills, and he even had a cameo in the movie Milk when a real interview with him was placed in the documentary footage of the movie starring Sean Penn.  Bill once argued a case before the United States Supreme Court.  Of course he did this case pro bono.  That was his style, and he had plenty of it.  When you looked into the face of this tough, wiry Irishman, you could see the swift turnings of a highly intelligent and playful mind.  But you could also see the psychological scars of someone who had served in combat for years--and also the prosecutor who had sent people to prison, sometimes for life.       

Two years ago, at the beginning of 2011, I was aware that something was wrong, in my world.  There was some subtle change in the universe, like a change in the earth’s axis.  Yes, sure enough, my mentor had reached the end of his life—Bill had died.  He had “crossed the Jordan,” as Bill loved to say about the end of the journey for all of us.  He lived eighty-five years, and nearly all of that time was in public service: both military and religious.  Bill was an active e-mail guy, but he never made it to Facebook.  He was one of the lucky ones.   

Bill was born in 1926.  He was initially the golden boy of his Irish family.  However, a blot on his early record came when he was expelled from Milton Academy.  The expulsion charge was initially kidnapping.  Because the local bishop’s son had gone missing, the police had been alerted of a missing person--the bishop’s son was nowhere to be found.  Bill and the boy had just gone into Boston for an afternoon away from campus; they were playing hooky.  No one seemed worried about Bill being missing.  After all, he was just another Irish kid among the Blue Bloods of Boston.  When the boys were located back on campus that evening, kidnapping was dropped to mere truancy.  But it was enough to send Bill packing, and out to New Mexico to finish high school.  Throughout his life, he took pride in being the black sheep in his family.  But for Bill, all adversity was just grist for the mill; it could and should make you stronger, wiser, a better human being.  My theory is that it was at this moment of his development that Bill decided to be a lawyer.  He did not believe he had been treated fairly.  And he could prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt in a real trial and not some prep school farce.  Bill loved a good legal battle all his life.  The man could cut through red tape like a flame thrower, and I believe he preferred defending to prosecuting (though he was equally adept at both), especially if he thought someone powerful had abused his authority.  Which happens often.  I don’t particularly like conflict, but Bill didn’t give a damn about ruffling feathers.  The world is full of injustice and mendacity.  If you want to do something about it, powerful people will not like you.  “Deal with it,” Bill would have said.     

As mentioned, I know that I would not be here today without his expertise and constant stream of advice and wisdom, sometimes more than I wanted to hear, usually right on the mark.  I literally would not be standing here in this pulpit, or working on this campus.  Bill was the person who taught me you better have opinions, and you better be able to express them.  There is nothing noble in pretending to be wiser than you are; or just hiding, being aloof, hanging around, playing the game, and acting a part without intelligent engagement and conviction.  Bill would catch me, call me out, and challenge me to do better.   

His one liners still echo in my mind.  For a marine, he could be hilarious.  He was a man of ready, constantly streaming wit.  People who serve and protect this country include every kind of personality you can imagine.  Father Clancey taught me that our duty in life is to make a difference; to make a difference to each other.  There is a quotation from the minister, former school chaplain, and writer Frederick Buechner that perfectly fits this Sunday after All Saints Day, and my time with Bill.    

“On All Saints’ Day it is not just the saints of the Church that we should remember in our prayers, but all the foolish ones and wise ones, the shy ones and the overbearing ones, the broken ones and the whole ones, the despots…and the crackpots of our lives who, in one way or another, have been our particular fathers and mothers and saints, and whom we loved without knowing we loved them and by whom we were helped to whatever little we may have, or ever hope to have, of some kind of seedy sainthood of our own.”

Bill Clancey is one of the most important people in my cloud of witnesses.  With his array of skills, he could have made a fortune in this world, but he made different choices with his life.  “And in our time, when a man dies—if he has had wealth and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man’s property and his eminence and works and monuments—the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil?”  The living take stock of the dead, and remember them in the here and now.  And so, for my part--and my memories, I will always consider Bill Clancey the richest man in town.  Happy All Saints Day to all of you.    

Convergence of Knowledge on the Western Flyer

Two years ago, at about this time, there was a change in St. Joseph’s Chapel.  A change so subtle that many didn’t notice it.  Because of the change, whenever there is any seismic activity in Kent, here in Northwestern Connecticut, scientists at Columbia University can study the earth directly because of St. Joseph’s Chapel.  How is this possible?  We have a state of the art seismometer.  Where is it located?  You ask.  Wonderfully, it is located in our bell tower.  I say wonderfully because I love it when forms of knowledge intersect, especially science and theology.  When I was your age, an idealistic and bright-eyed scholar, one of my favorite parts of the educational experience was when knowledge of one class flowed into another, and when knowledge from two or more different directions converged to mutually inform each field. 

I thought about the seismometer in the chapel last week when Dr. Green and Mr. McDonough shared their thoughts on the strange lives and extraordinary thinking of Isaac Newton and Athanasius Kircher.  After those talks, my pensive and neurotic hunchback intern—his name is I-gor…he lives secretly in the bell tower…I-gor and I spent hours meditating in front of the seismometer.  We were on fire with the consilience of knowledge; and I could almost hear the seismometer join us by saying “Om” in the darkness of the tower.  I-gor had a hard life growing up in the Carpathian Mountains of eastern Romania, but he loves it here at Kent.  Despite the fact that he grew up in a family with twenty-six children and assorted livestock and reptiles, he still gets very skittish around Kent students.  Most students have never seen him.  Ok, I don’t really have a hunchback intern living secretly in the bell tower (or do I?).  But no bell tower is complete without a hunchback and a seismometer.  So I’m half way there, maybe all the way.                      

Several years ago, I accidentally discovered a hidden gem of a book at the Monterey Aquarium on a visit there with my daughter Beatrice and my brother Kevin.  All three of us get very excited—positively giddy--about aquariums, and Monterey is our favorite.  Zoos make me sad, especially the gorillas, but I become theological at aquariums, almost instantly.  Just the sight of the Leafy Sea Dragon—a creature that appears to be part sea horse, part plant (species Phycodurus eques)—can send me into a religious trance.  On this particular visit, the gift shop had a large display section on the novelist John Steinbeck, the most famous person to ever come from Monterey, California, which is just a few hours from the small boring town where I grew up in California.  The Steinbeck book that caught my eye was The Log from the Sea of Cortez.  Steinbeck is one of my all time favorite writers, but I had never heard of this non-fiction book--an account of Steinbeck’s participation on a science research ship visiting the Sea of Cortez, otherwise known as the Gulf of California, on the western coast of Mexico.   My brother said it was definitely worth reading, which was a change in our usual relationship--with me recommending books to him.  So I left the Monterey Aquarium with a book to read.

My brother Kevin and I look and sound alike to many people; some describe him as a stretched out version of me, pulled by invisible forces, or secret knots—or I am a compressed and much more handsome version of him.  Either way is fine.  Kevin is a scientist who spends his day in a laboratory on the coast of California.  His specialty is environmental toxicology.  What does he do all day?  He spends a lot of time on his invectively coupled plasma mass spectrometer.  He also has his ion chromatograph, a gas chromatograph, and don’t forget the always necessary ammonia analyzer.  I can’t get through a day without an ammonia analyzer either.  You should see what it did to my copy of Hamlet.  Kevin also has an i.c.p. without mass spectrometry, which makes it faster, along with the carbon nitrogen analyzer where samples are combusted at 1000 degrees. 

Wow, that is hot as hell.  Which brings us back to theology. 

On other hand, I am a priest of Jesus Christ who spends his time teaching theology and humanities, religion and literature.  I analyze and interpret ancient texts.  I teach modern literature as well.  I perform rituals that are 2000 years old, with today’s teenagers present.  I think the Roman Empire is recent history, and Jesus of Nazareth and I spend a lot of time together.  He is my home slice, after all.  Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are also old friends.  I don’t moodle or skype.  I waited out moodle, and now it’s gone.  It disappeared.  Victory is mine, once more.  No one moodles anymore, just like me.  When a student asked me this fall about my Haiku page for my class, I explained, with a straight face and a stern voice: I don’t speak Japanese.  The student backed away from me slowly.  I don’t have an i-phone or a droid.  I do have a seven year old Nokia cell phone, with a cracked screen, which is perfect because I can’t read texts or tell if I have any messages.  People laugh at me when they see it.  They rejected Jesus too.  Unlike you, I am not itching to get at my phone as soon as chapel is over.  (Pause to show physical signs of addiction to technology).  I prefer this: the dialectical space between us.  Give or take the pulpit.  Give or take.  The closest I come to being interested in technology is that I watch every episode of “Ancient Aliens” that I can find on the History channel.  I-gor and I take copious notes in the bell tower.  Makes perfect sense to us, especially Machu Picchu and the pyramids.  Oh by the way, I think there’s a 50-50 chance that both Dr. Green and Mr. McDonough are modern aliens doing research here for their home planets.  With their advanced technologies, the cross country team’s recent success isn’t so mysterious.  I like to run too.  But only when I’m being chased.

To honor Mr. McDonough and Dr. Green, I will now don safety goggles, which I will wear for the duration of this chapel talk.  Ideas are powerful…and dangerous.          

I talk to people, my species, Homo sapiens, all day long, preferably face to face, or thereabouts.  There are many days when Kevin the scientist talks to almost no one, except for his fantasy football friends.  We are worlds apart.  Yet I love bouncing ideas, both scientific and artistic, historical and psychological and mathematical, off my brother; and he does the same with me.  However, we never discuss economics because the field makes him very sad.  We both have to be a little slow at the beginning with the jargon and terminology, from our respective disciplines, until the other one catches on, and then we can really fly.  But there once was a time when we both did science and the humanities; which is exactly where you are as students today.  You shouldn’t be in a hurry to specialize; so please slow down and enjoy all of your subjects, and the different parts of the mind they open. 

So what do my brother the scientist and I the priest have to do with the author John Steinbeck?  Yes, back to him.  The Log from the Sea of Cortez was written by two people, not one.  One of the writers was John Steinbeck, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.  But the other was Edward Ricketts, a biologist from Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California, right next to Steinbeck in Monterey.  In the book the novelist and the scientist collaborated on the written log of the science voyage.  Ricketts was a scientist who studied at the University of Chicago.  He specialized in animal behavior: the group vs. the individual in the animal world.  Steinbeck was fascinated by the very same question in human beings.  How do we behave when we are alone?  How do we behave when we are around others?  How should we behave in both situations?  Both Ricketts and Steinbeck were critical, and often pessimistic, about the future of our species.  They were worried about the environment long before it was fashionable to do so, and both men were skeptical of American society.  Among the many odd pastimes of Ricketts was his personal interest and medical care for local prostitutes in the Monterey area.  He gave them free medical treatment right from his lab in Monterey.  Locals in Monterey referred to him as being “half goat, and half Christ.”

What inspired me about the book was my inability, as reader, while reading, to discover where Steinbeck’s thinking stopped and Ricketts’ started, and vice versa, as they charted their scientific oceanic journey.  This is how Steinbeck described the intellectual friendship he found with Ricketts.  Their rapport he referred to as “speculative metaphysics.”  According to Steinbeck, speculative metaphysics was a kind of sport, a deep intellectual bonding between them.  In the novelist’s words:  “It was a sport of lopping off a piece of observed reality and letting it move up through the speculative process like a tree growing tall and bushy.  We observed with pleasure how the branches of thought grew away from the trunk of external reality…we worked together so closely that I do not know in some cases who started which line of speculation since the end thought was the product of both minds.  I do not know whose thought it was.”  In the book, the scientific mind and the literary mind are wed in one mind: the mind of the naturalist.  The observer and lover of nature.  Think Mr. Klingebiel, or Hunter White (he’s probably out foraging for grubs right now in Maine--that lovable hobbit). 

So what does this have to do with us?  I think the experience aboard the science ship The Western Flyer is an apt one for thinking about Kent School, and for thinking about your purpose here.  For Ricketts and Steinbeck, no question was out of bounds.  Nothing was sacred, and everything was.  Both men actively questioned common sense and group think, the human tendency to continue to think ridiculous ideas only because lots of other people think them too around you.  Both men were fascinated by religion, and when they were ashore they went to churches and religious festivals in Mexico.  They were touched by poor people who shared their incredible food and their beautiful customs with the crew without demanding anything in return.  The Mexican people were likewise amazed by a ship that wasn’t buying or selling anything at all, but was simply gathering knowledge wherever it could be found.  If you do this in the world, people will find you strange, and they will be drawn to you. 

What was the synthetic thread of the diverse experience of the voyage?  What was the deepest shared assumption between Ricketts the biologist and Steinbeck the novelist?  Perhaps it is the same shared assumption between my brother the environmental scientist and me the priest of an ancient religion.  Ricketts and Steinbeck both fundamentally agreed on a line from the poet William Blake to explain their shared passion.  The line is this:  “All that lives is holy.”  All that lives is holy.  Holiness is not simply a category for the faithful.  It is a quality that is everywhere you look, in all living things.  It grows and branches from the smallest living creatures to the animals of greater complexity, and we are all connected to the same holy source of life. 

All that lives is holy. 

I encourage you to kindle in yourself an active spirit and intellect that seeks knowledge in many fields, and also seeks to synthesize that knowledge into your own philosophy of life.  And your own theology of God.  The universe is too beautiful for only one way of seeing it.  I hope you will combine the many branches of knowledge and discovery into your own vision of the holiness of all creation, and then protect it with all your heart and strength and mind.  These are the sacred places of knowledge where truth and beauty, the physical and the spiritual, have kissed each other.  These are the places that give hope for humanity and our common future.  I hope you have a good evening.  Your technology awaits you.  But so does Mother Earth, dear Mother Nature.  This planet is a jewel.  Take care of her always.  

Parenthood and God: The Gravity of Gratitude

Parents’ Weekend

Kent School, St. Joseph’s Chapel

Several years ago, a magazine called Yankee magazine ranked Kent, Connecticut, as the #1 place for autumn in New England.  Of all the places to experience this golden season, this community came out on top.  Now I had never heard of Yankee magazine, and I haven’t seen a copy of it since that fall when this small community in northwest Connecticut graced its cover.  But the ranking did change us for a time.  Busloads of tourists came to Kent.  There were suddenly traffic problems down Route 7, both north and south.  Local residents complained about the crowds who had read the magazine, but they did not complain about the business they generated.  The irony of magazines—any magazine, that dying medium--trying to raise their own stature by ranking others has never been lost on me; U.S. News and World Report has made this an industry with their college rankings.  But consider, for a moment, that Yankee magazine might have been right.  It was hard to argue during this Parents’ Weekend.  There was golden perfection all around us.  Could it be possible that this river valley was the very best place to be?      

Yes, it is a stretch, a potentially preposterous idea.  But it is just the kind of spiritual stretch we need at the end of a busy but joyful Parents’ Weekend.  It makes you want to slow down, to savor each moment unfolding in your life; to remember carefully the words exchanged between parent and child, teacher and family, before we rush off to the next chapter of our busy lives.  These moments, if we look at them just right, might really be the best ones—as good as it gets, if we see them correctly, perhaps as God sees them, and us living them.   

The gospel this morning is about the fullness of gratitude changing one life pretty significantly.  In the gospel from Luke, ten lepers are cleansed by Jesus.  This is a big time miracle, healing on a wide scale.  But only one of them praises God afterwards.  Only one is filled with gratitude—an outsider, a Samaritan.  Samaritans were cut off from the ritual observances of Jews in Jerusalem; they were not even allowed to enter the temple; you weren’t even supposed to talk to them in public.  But the Samaritan is the one who praises God in a loud voice.  Jesus observes: “’Were not ten made clean?  But the other nine, where are they?  Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’”  The extraordinary miracle is forgotten, or taken for granted, except by one person.  So Jesus says to the Samaritan: “’Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.’” 

Hundreds—even thousands of people—have come to Kent, Connecticut, this very weekend.  But how many of them made it to chapel this morning?  How many of them saw the turning, falling, golden leaves and praised God with a loud voice?  Luke would also highlight the outcast behaving the best in his beloved parable of the Good Samaritan.  In this gospel, the power of faith and the feeling of gratitude are deeply, powerfully related.  They are two sides of the same coin.  Luke portrays the outcast of the ten lepers as the one who is most grateful, and therefore most faithful, to God.   What kind of outcast Samaritan do you have to be to see the miracle of our being with open eyes? 

I will never forget the moment when my first daughter Beatrice was born, or the events of labor that led up to it.  The details are indelible to me.  We had an authoritative, very talkative nurse in the delivery room.  And I still cherish the moment when my wife told her to shut up for a change—it would make things a whole lot easier.  We all laughed, in the moments before birth, and she did shut up.  But the experience of witnessing the miracle of the birth of your child changes you forever.  More love is pulled out of you—literally, physically, spiritually, naturally—than you ever knew was inside of you.  But every moment from that point on, you forget a little, you lose a little.  You lose track of the golden lessons of how powerful the gift of life really is.  Yet in moments at school for your child—at soccer games and musical performances—you remember snatches—you get glimpses of the miracle that you once possessed in completeness.  With the faith and swelling gratitude that makes us well.  Sadly, it often in loss and grief that we learn not to take any of what we have for granted.  But we forget how to see with the eyes of faith, and how to live with a debt of gratitude to God: the origin of our being and also our ultimate destination.      

As Parents’ Weekend approached this past week, I thought of how to reclaim this gratitude, the full memory of the miracle of life.  Of the gift of parenthood and childhood that makes us, for some precious moments, glimpse the divine love that formed each of us in the womb.  Full memory of the love around every life, a cloud of witnesses.  The Church in its early formation called the recollection of this love anamnesis—the polar opposite of amnesia.  Anamnesis was present for the early Church in the Eucharist that we celebrate this morning.  Eucharist is a strange word, but it only means, simply, “thanksgiving.” 

As I thought about how to recover this anamnesis as your preacher, I did the only reasonable thing: I went to the movies to escape the burden.  Fortunately, my wife Amy and I did not go to see an ordinary Hollywood movie.  We went to see a film that, even now after a few days, is hard to describe; it’s a movie called, simply, Gravity.  The movie is not really about gravity because gravity is precisely what is missing for 99% of the film.  The film is about two astronauts, Ryan and Matt, played wonderfully by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, who lose their space shuttle and their fellow astronauts.  They are the only survivors of a freak space emergency.  I don’t want to give away any of the movie’s plot, but, in some ways, I’ve told you everything.  The two astronauts have to survive in space together, and they don’t even particularly like each other at the beginning.  The movie is shot in real time, and we don’t know anything about the characters except what we find about them during their conversations with each other. 

Gravity is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen.  The direction by Alfonso Cuaron is absolutely courageous.  The eye candy of the space scenes is extraordinary, and yet every scene from space also reminds the viewer of the peril of these two individuals.  The movie is quite frightening at times.  Even with the technology that allows human beings to exist in space, the movie is a slow, meditative study of the ordinary things people do to stay alive, high above the nation states that don’t really have borders from space.  They are far from the civilization that we often place in the role of God.  What begins to rise above the scale of the planet, and the universe, and the improbability of their survival, is the spiritual power of human connectedness.  It is simple and powerful, this human bonding that we do on this planet, and above it.  George Clooney’s character is a bit of a clown—a chatterbox of stories that Sandra Bullock’s character Ryan doesn’t want to hear (just like our delivery nurse).  Clooney’s Matt reminded me of Buzz Lightyear with his cheerful attention to space duty despite the extraordinary dangers all around them.  Their bonding is profound, and yet simple and straightforward.  Matt is able to draw forth the event that changed Ryan forever: the loss of her only child.  The most profound loss that any human being can experience.  Because it hits us at the deepest place of being human.  We eventually find out the child’s name is Sarah.  Matt handles the story gently, simply, lovingly, and the memory or presence of a child seems to guide them in their attempt to stay alive together. 

Gravity is a profoundly theological movie, without trying to be.  It is effortless, floating close to questions of God without ever naming that divine reality directly.  Yet the movie is existentialist as well, harsh and bleak, out beyond the sheltering sky of our atmosphere.  The movie provides a study of the human body in the act of survival—Sandra Bullock’s in particular.  But there is nothing remotely gratuitous about it.  Focusing on the biological needs of her body to survive in space, we remember the little things we all do every day to stay alive.  You feel gratitude for the life we live on land.  You want to kiss the ground we walk on.  You feel thanksgiving for the air we breathe, the oxygen that enters our body and feeds every one of our cells to stay alive.  Upon entering an air duct at a space station, after breathing carbon dioxide for several minutes, Sandra Bullock curls up in a fetal position, floating, like a child in her mother’s womb.  You remember the love that planted us in the universe, each of us children of our universal mother and father. 

As mentioned, Ryan and Matt are mismatched, an odd couple in space.  They reminded me of the recent story of the fawn and the baby bobcat.  These two sweet creatures survived the fires in Southern California.  The fawn was three days old and the bobcat three weeks old.  They both lost their parents, and yet they bonded immediately when they saw each other, snuggling together, becoming litter mates—becoming family, almost immediately.  The pictures of them are unbelievable--inseparable together.  Like the Samaritan, the outcast practices the greatest devotion, freshly remembering the gift of water, food, shelter, and the physical comfort of a fellow creature, snuggled up.  These are the moments when you really do love your neighbor as yourself.  Astronauts and animals remember what we have forgotten.  The connectedness, the bonding that makes us human, is alive, but not awake; the deep gratitude that feeds our faith slips away.  Maybe out in space it’s natural to remember, but even right now, in this beautiful chapel, we too are floating in space, if we could but remember the wonder and beauty and peril of our being alive.  Perhaps it’s easier for the outcast bobcat and fawn to really love each other, like it was for the Samaritan who was healed by Jesus to remember God.  And for our two astronauts just trying not to die today.  There is one moment of the film Gravity that might be described as supernatural (don’t worry, I won’t give it away).  But the movie subtly doesn’t name the miracle as God, though the intervention is certainly miraculous, connecting the living to the dead.  Scientists and existentialists might explain it away—as a dream sequence, or a hallucination.  But the person whose life is touched, in this case an astronaut in space, will never forget it.  She will praise God with a loud voice because her faith has made her well.       

There are a few moments still left of Parents’ Weekend and this Eucharist, the great thanksgiving, where all are welcome at God’s table: Embrace them and each other.  The weekend isn’t over yet.  Maybe there is one more sacred, ordinary meal before goodbyes.  There is healing in these moments as they pass, and as they linger in our minds and memories.  Take the time to be present to each other, with every breath you take; like astronauts without a ship, and small confused animals bonding without their parents.  Yet all of us children of God.  God loves each of you if you were the only person on the face of the earth, and floating in space as well.  That is the gravity that binds us, one to another.  When we know this presence and return love to it, the voice of Jesus can be heard in our time as well when we slow down, and give thanks to God, the Master of the Universe: You’re back on Planet Earth.  Get up and go on your way.  Your faith has made you well. 

Hazards and Fairways: The Sometime Grace of the Recovery Shot

15 September 2013

St. Joseph’s Chapel, Kent School

This morning I will be shedding one of my most tightly guarded secrets.  In twenty-one years of preaching--giving sermons and chapel talks, I have never preached on this subject.  Never, not once.  Even people who know me well have never heard me speak of this personal obsession.  It’s my little secret.  Here it is:  I am fascinated by the game of golf.  Where this passion began exactly I don’t know; but it has been coming on strong since the late 1990s.  Maybe it was when the novelist John Updike, one of my favorite authors, said that sports writing got better the smaller the ball.  The smaller the ball, the better the writing.  I was intrigued.  Baseball sports writing is good, but golf writing is even better, I’ve discovered.  The game appeals to my perfectionist side, but then it explodes this way of thinking, almost completely.  If you are swinging a golf club, you cannot be a perfectionist...without going crazy.  The golf swing has so many moving parts—it’s like trying to keep trying to keep fifty ping pong balls underwater all at once.  It’s so simple, and impossible, at the same time.    

When people ask me if I play, I always say no.  No, I don’t.  I’m just a friend of the game—a fan, a golf intellectual perhaps.  I look at the game from the perspective of a writer, like Updike; with detachment, appreciation, and a nose for irony.  But the truth is I secretly play.  My swing is awful, but it is mine.  It is a little like becoming really interested in someone because they don’t like you, or they have rejected you.  That’s golf for me, a fickle and capricious lady who tortures me.  For what it’s worth, I follow the men in the PGA tournaments, but I prefer the Ladies Tour.  Yes, I’ll say it, their clothes are fabulous, and they can really play. 

                        So what do I like about golf?  I already mentioned that I like the clothes, and this is true for both the men and women.  For me, it’s the way in which perfectionism and realism, the ideal and the real, collide in the most beautiful of settings.  A well made golf course is a work of art, and yet the artist is still nature herself.  But the real collision of the ideal and the real is in the mind of the golfer just before the swing.  The mental game is everything in golf.    

I took my daughter Beatrice, who is eleven years old, to her first tournament this summer, just before school started.  We went to the Barclays Tournament played at Liberty National Golf Course, a course along the New York Harbor, and just under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.  We saw the tournament on both Saturday and Sunday.  I don't take Beatrice to a lot of sporting events. She gets bored with spectator sports—it’s a little tedious.  She has yet to attend at Mets game (too much human suffering there—it’s bad for children), though she likes MLS ok.  Beatrice loved the Barclays Tournament, in particular the choice to go wherever you want to go, and to watch whatever you want to watch.  There is so much to see: from people watching—lots of fashion choices to study--to the animals on the course in a peaceable kingdom.  Like many children, she was mesmerized by the errant shots. These are shots that go wildly off course, and often into the crowd.  This is also one of my favorite parts of the experience as well, the collision of perfectionism and realism, the moment when everything goes wrong.  Within ten minutes of arriving at the Barclays, a golfer hit a ball at least a hundred yards off course.  The ball landed in the food court, next to a pretzel stand.  I didn’t have to worry about my daughter being bored; she was hooked by the crazy physics of it all.

A professional golfer hitting a shot wildly out of bounds is schadenfreude for the crowd.  I used a word there: schadenfreude.  There is no direct English translation of the German, but the word means something like “pleasure (or glee) in response to the misfortune of others.”  One of the most disturbing human tendencies is the real pleasure we get from the mistakes of other people.  As the writer Gore Vidal once said:  “It is not enough to succeed.  Others must fail.”  But in golf, schadenfreude goes in surprising directions; it changes shape, becomes something very different. 

Let’s go back to the errant shot that can give the crowd so much pleasure.  Let’s find where the little white ball actually landed. 

The crowd knows more about the shot than the player, as caddie and pro make their way to the gathering spectacle, the new station of life after the disastrous tee shot. The children are ecstatic, so happy—it’s like an Easter egg hunt, except you can’t touch the magical egg.  You’ll be stupefied if you touch it (Harry Potter reference there).  In many cases, the spectators help the golfer locate the ball if it’s in the woods or tall grass.  Is it pleasure the crowd is feeling?  Sure, you can see its gleeful ripples, but there is something else as well.  People deeply identify with the golfer.  There is humor, but there is also a swelling compassion.  Everyone knows all about mistakes; and here comes the so-called celebrity, reduced to the common man, having to join the peanut gallery.  No other sport has the player enter the crowd like the sport of golf, to play an actual shot.  Caddie, golfer, and marshals give stage direction to create a pocket for the shot, opening outward, towards the new target for the golfer.  The caddie, who is much like the medieval squire, dutifully marches off the new, unusual yardage in nobody's book. That is, he takes a walk to the flag, if that’s where the golfer is aiming, and he then walks back, carefully counting his steps.  It all takes time; it is not over fast.  Though the crowd loves the reduction, the humbling moment--the humiliation, they are all pulling for the amazing recovery.  The recovery shot is right after the shot out of bounds.  Sometimes the golfer ends up in better position than he or she would have been had nothing gone wrong.  Everyone is rooting for the golfer because everyone identifies with the mistake.  I saw Phil Mickelson early in the summer, at the Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio, hit a ball straight off a tree trunk, after already being out of bounds. The crowd, the golfer, and I all had to scatter together to avoid the ricochet.  And we got to do it all over again, in nearly the same spot.  It made the crowd love Phil even more.  That guy hits some crazy shots.  And he is also crazy good.       

                        So, back at the Barclays, Beatrice will never forget the shot a golfer named Jason Kokrak hit a hundred yards off course.  It was her introduction to the sport.  From the pretzel and beer stands with hundreds of new friends around him, Kokrak then hit a recovery shot to within ten feet of the hole.  I had never heard of Jason Kokrak, and I watch golf every weekend.  I looked him up on the leaderboard after the hole.  Was he about to lose his tour card?  Was he on the edge of a nervous breakdown?  Was it time to find a new career, maybe selling real estate or life insurance?  Maybe go to divinity school?  Jason Kokrak was in the top twenty of the Barclays Playoff.  He was having a good day at the office.     

All of us are going to hit shots out of bounds.  I do it every day.  We make mistakes, sometimes big ones.  If you are not used to failing at something, you haven’t tried anything very hard.  But the disastrous shot doesn’t have to define you.  It doesn’t define your worth, or your abilities, or your future.  It’s actually when you join the human race.  But the very next moment—the recovery shot--may very well define your character forever.  How you respond to ordinary adversity is when your character is forged.     

            So what does the gospel of Jesus Christ have to say about recovery shots?  Here’s what Jesus has to say about the wayward sinner, and the mistakes we all make:

“’Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?’  ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’

‘Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully and find it?  When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’  ‘Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.’”

It is clear from Jesus that God loves recovery shots.  To repent is literally to turn around; to choose a new target of wisdom and morality, to go for the right flag.  God cares for us most deeply when we are out of bounds, when we have run off the map of how we think our lives are supposed to go.  Anybody can handle success.  How you handle a big mistake or a major personal failure are the moments when you discover your faith, and the size of your heart.  Courage is fear turned inside out, and the recovery shot may be the most remarkable shot you have ever hit.  You will find, in some cases, that you are in a better position than you would have been had you never made a mistake.  This is the moment of grace; and we get a chance to participate with God’s grace and become stronger at the most painful or embarrassing moments on the course of life.  Jesus says there is greatest joy in heaven when one person does this.  This is because the recovery shots are the moments when we develop compassion for other people.  We get out of our own heads and really learn to love each other.  It is the moment when we reverse the schadenfreude of Gore Vidal’s quotation.

“It is not enough that I succeed.  Others must succeed too.” 

            This is Kent after one week of school in our river valley.  People are hitting shots out of bounds every day.  Tee shots sail into the river, or off the chapel.  They land behind dormitories, or roll past the mail room into the student center.  Oops, that one’s going in Macedonia Creek.  It’s in the hazard.  You’re going to have to take a drop.  The disaster does not define you, the gospel tells us.  But the recovery shot, the one that God is watching closely, can change your life; and it can land right by the hole, making you richer for the wayward journey.  It can be a great show here at Kent, watching other people make mistakes.  Or: your own recovery shot can change how you see yourself and everyone around you, and their fundamental worth as children of God.  It is not enough anymore that I must succeed.  Others must succeed too.  Have a great second week.  I’ll see you on the fairway. 

The Native Call of Education: Manifestos and Making History

Opening Service for Faculty

3 September 2013

St. Joseph’s Chapel, Kent School

I’d like to wish everyone a happy September.  It really is here.   In the last few weeks of summer, especially the dog days of August, I spend my time working on my bucket list.  This is nothing dramatic—it’s a list just for the summer.  Things I absolutely must do before the summer ends.  The items on this list, mostly in my head, are the books still left to read, the hikes to take, or that last trip to the city.  But in my years at Kent, I have learned not to give up the bucket list once the year starts.  My list continues this week, with intention, and I’d encourage yours to continue as well, even into the fall months.  Don’t forget to have a life.  It’s only Early Week, after all.  Take it slow.  If you do, I think you’ll find it’s actually good to be back.  It is a grave understatement to say that we begin a marathon, not a sprint. 

            Since we have established when we come back--tonight, it is helpful to consider why we come back.  The quick answer for me is that I come back for the students.  Not all of them, that’s for sure.  Just last week we remembered the 50^th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the Washington Mall—the words that changed our hearts.  I thought of the special educators who taught King—taught him to think, about the history of his nation and the history of his people.  From grammar school to divinity school, who were the people who inspired him?  And who were the people who stood in his way?  The powerful role models he resisted.  We know that Dr. King did not go to Kent School, but how would we think about our own school history if he had?  How would this change, if at all, how we approach the students who are arriving this week? 

And this is the moment where things take a surprising turn.  What would you say if I told you that a Martin Luther King did go to Kent School?  Well, it’s true, in ways stranger than fiction.  One of the greatest leaders of a beleaguered but surviving people graduated from Kent School in 1951.  This individual might be our most famous and influential graduate, though there is significant competition there.  Only no one knows who he is.  Who he was, since he died in 2005.  His name is Vine Deloria, Jr.  He was only the greatest intellectual activist and political leader of the Native American community in the twentieth century—the MLK of his people, and time.  Deloria wrote over twenty books and 200 articles in his prolific academic career as a college professor.  Yes, he became a teacher, like you… He taught at Western Washington, the University of Arizona, and Colorado-Boulder where he was a graduate of their law school, and taught law.  He founded the discipline that we now call Native American Studies at Arizona.  He was the first academic to recognize that the Native American experience could only be accurately assessed with an interdisciplinary approach–one using history, literature, anthropology, music, law, and yes, even theology.  Along with being a law school graduate and professor, he also went to divinity school.  We’ll come back to that training. 

Deloria was an intellectual powerhouse—a rigorous, independent, and often sarcastic polymath.  Deloria was an iconoclast who rejected intellectual, political, religious, and even scientific orthodoxies.  He rejected the Bering Strait land bridge hypothesis of archeology, arguing that American Indians were always indigenous, from the very beginning.  Deloria is sometimes called a creationist because he believed that Native American creation myths were real.  They are true.  He rallied his people, and he definitely pissed some people off with books titled Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, God Is Red: An Indian View of Religion, Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact.   Like our current president, Deloria was a grassroots, and eventually national, community leader.  He was also a feared and respected lobbyist in Washington.  Deloria ascended to arguably the most important post that a Native American could hold in the United States: National Director of the Congress of American Indians.  During his tenure in this position, the Congress grew from 19 tribes to 156.  He was the voice of his people, and he was our conscience too.  Like King, his career and thinking went in surprising directions because of his faith in God; and the arc of justice bending to earth that we must seek with all our hearts and minds in every age.  Justice doesn’t just happen, not in the real world.  And that’s where Deloria lived.  He was also willing to call out and challenge his own people.         

Just imagine Deloria arriving at Kent School from South Dakota in 1947…meeting his white roommate, going to the dining hall for the first time, walking under the portrait of our founder, Father Sill.  I try to see him in mind’s eye, strangled with a tie that he would never need in his career, sitting in one of our wooden desks on the first day of school…The image fills me with inspiration, hope, some sadness, and humility.  What was going through his mind?  What was this young man thinking in chapel (which occurred everyday in 1951)?  There is evidence that this religious exposure in St. Joseph’s was not a complete disaster.  Like Black Elk before him, Deloria was quite comfortable with Christianity at its best; he just didn’t think white people knew their Jesus very well at all. 

For Native Americans who made it to boarding school in the last century, the message was straightforward and unyielding for those offered scholarships.  Your job is to assimilate, to fit in.  The message that came through loud and clear was that you had to forget your heritage in order to be successful.  We’re giving you this once in a lifetime opportunity—look at how wonderful we are.  We’re putting you on the fast track.  When I hear this kind of language, I always want to know where the fast track is going.  I see a lot of miserable people who are right on track, just perfect.  Deloria had an additional influence in his ambitions, and personal trajectory, one which affected him in ways both large and small, for his whole life, I suspect.  Deloria was here to become an Episcopal minister, just like his father and more famous grandfather, the Reverend Philip Deloria (known among the Lakota as Black Lodge), the Episcopal missionary to the Sioux tribe.  Become like your grandfather and father; that was the family message, and why Deloria was sent to a church school in the first place.  Deloria rejected, very thoughtfully, this particular doorway of assimilation, and he chose not to serve in the church despite graduating from divinity school following his days at Iowa State.  Vine Deloria, Jr., was one of our own, but he was not one of us.  In the significant histories written on the Native American experience in the twentieth century, no Native thinker gets more praise, more attention, more respect than a Kent graduate.         

I like to think the English Department gets partial credit for Deloria the writer, but I’m sure he suffered at times in our classes.  At any rate, he became a remarkable writer and thinker.  His powerful sentences did not take him to the ivory tower, but rather deep into the seemingly insoluble problems of Native Americans.  His prose has an energetic charge that possesses, at times, the soaring rhetoric of Martin Luther King assuming, eloquently, the prophetic mantle of his people.  But his writing is more regularly in the trenchant and sarcastic realm, or better yet, in the satirical pitch and range of Ralph Ellison in his novel Invisible Man. 

Here is Deloria at the beginning of his Indian Manifesto in Custer Died For Your Sins.  This seemed like a good choice after yesterday’s mighty thunder storms--and eventual rainbow over Kent, Connecticut—a small arc of justice reaching the earth perhaps.    

“Indians are like the weather.  Everyone knows all about the weather, but none can change it.  When storms are predicted, the sun shines.  When picnic weather is announced, the rain begins.  Likewise, if you count on the unpredictability of Indian people, you will never be sorry.

One of the finest things about being an Indian is that people are always interested in you and your ‘plight.’  Other groups have difficulties, predicaments, quandaries, problems, or troubles.  Traditionally we Indians have had a ‘plight.’

Our foremost plight is our transparency.  People can tell just by looking at us what we want, what should be done to help us, how we feel, and what a ‘real Indian’ is really like.  Indian life, as it relates to the real world, is a continuous attempt not to disappoint those who know us.  Unfulfilled expectations cause grief and we have already had our share.

Because people can see right through us, it becomes impossible to tell truth from fiction or fact from mythology.  Experts paint us as they would like us to be.  Often we paint ourselves as we wish we were or we might have been.

The more we try to be ourselves the more we are forced to defend what we have never been.  The American public feels most comfortable with the mythical Indians of stereotype-land who were always there.  Those Indians are fierce, they wear feathers and grunt.  Most of us don’t fit this idealized figure since we grunt only when overeating, which is seldom.”

The most significant thing that Deloria accomplished, intellectually, and practically among the tribes, was reversing the unquestioned assumption that assimilation was the only route to survival, and economic success.  To him this was the way of extinction as a people.  In his work as a writer and national leader, Deloria presented Native heritage and its revitalization as the medicine for the future, and not just the past. 

Now, for just a moment, a show of hands.  True confessions with the priest.  How many of you, before tonight, had never heard of a Kent graduate named Vine Deloria, Jr., class of 1951?  It really is time to go back to school.  Anything can happen here. 

For example.  In the spring each year, I teach a course in Native American Literature.  Every year since its inception, at least one student has done his or her research project on the longstanding legal dispute between Kent School and what remains of the Schaghticoke Tribe (there are actually two branches in this lawsuit, with one supported financially by Subway Sandwiches…yes, the gods must be crazy.).  But not until last spring did a student actually walk down Schaghticoke Road to interview the chief, whose name is Alan Russell.  Our student and the local chief met many times—and I was not aware of these interviews.  I probably would have discouraged them, with the so-called wisdom of safety first.  It’s dangerous down that road…imagine what they say about us.  The result of these meetings was the best research project I have ever received.  It was not a well-written paper, let that be said.  It was not even a formal academic essay, though the documentation of the research was ok, certainly passable in New Student Seminar.  But no student had so thoroughly explored the Native point of view, by talking to those involved, and trying to walk in their shoes.  The student was inspired because of his own Indian heritage from Canadian tribes.  The paper is now in our library, along with the eight titles that we have by Vine Deloria, Jr.  Chief Russell was deeply moved by the personal interest and courtly manners of our student.  And so was I.  Amazed is more like it. 

Who wrote the research paper Schaghticoke Tribe: Seeking Land?  It was supposed to be 7-10 pages long, but this student wrote twenty and could have written more.  This research project was undertaken by one Alexandre Villeneuve.  For those of you who are new, let’s just say Alexandre was not our top student in last year’s class.  But his extraordinary work last spring reminded me that we do is extremely important, and subtle, and shocking at times.  Our work with our students is life-giving, holy, and even magical.  It is always mysterious, even when we fail, or think we have.  This is our blessing and our burden as teachers, our soaring inspiration and our thorn of conscience that keeps us grounded.  It is one of the few vocations that is clearly undertaken in the name of God.  Atheists can be quite good at it too. 

So why do we come back?  We come back to meet our students, of course.  To begin a journey that will last the rest of their lives.  Graduation is just a beginning in that vein, and so is tonight.  Your journey as an educator begins with that first practice, the first class this Monday with a list of names—some known and others just a question mark.  Who are these people?  The prickly and tickling curiosity—the great mystery--of this year begins with a single step forward.  Tonight we move into the future again together.  To make our own little history.