Alden Flanders’ Blog

 

[This was my second chapel talk at Brooks School, in September of 2013.]

What did you do over the summer? When I was young I had almost no structured activities over the summer. I wandered around on my own a lot, lying in the grass. My best friend lived right on the shore of the Great South Bay, and I’d walk the mile and a half to his house and we’d get in his boat and go out and get some clams, or fish, or ride along the shoreline seeing what was going on. And I will admit that we occasionally got into trouble. We went through a phase of putting cherry bombs in plastic model ships, lighting the fuses, and sending them out into the water. We took pictures of these efforts as though we were the directors of great action films.  Your teachers are rolling their eyes, and rightly so. More than once we came close to losing fingers when a fuse sputtered and we thought we ought to try and relight it.

My parents did try to provide some structure to the summers.  One kind of structure was when they signed me up for swimming lessons at the town pool.   Every day for a week I had to troop down to the docks where the pool was and stand there with 60 other kids leaning forward over the urinous and and chlorine water, windmilling my arms in hopes that this would translate into motion when I fell into the drink.

The other kind of structure came when we would go to my mother’s parents’ house in the hills of north central Massachusetts. My brother was five years younger than I was, so he didn’t qualify as companionship. I knew nobody in that town, so I wandered through the streets and through the woods. I climbed hills. I read. Can I confess to you that I was a fearsome fan of the Hardy Boys. And this was the original series, not the rewritten ones from the sixties. I didn’t read much improving literature and had no summer reading lists.

I will admit to being lonely some of the time, and I will admit that I spent humongous amounts of time daydreaming. I suppose that if I’d been an extravert I’d have been jumping out of my skin and have found more friends. But I spent hours upon hours daydreaming. It may have had something to do with why I ended up doing the work I’m doing.

All of this may help you understand why I found Mary Oliver’s poem The Summer Day so compelling. Mary Oliver is one of those rare poets who reached the point where she could support herself by her writing. She lives and has lived for years at the end of Cape Cod and has spent the parts of her days when she wasn’t writing, wandering. She wanders the beaches and the fields, and the forests and the town year in and year out, observing, revisiting the same places over and over. As she grew older she saw more and more in the everyday things she’d been seeing for years. She discovered the richness of the act of paying attention. Eventually this attentiveness became her door into what we might call the spiritual dimension of life.

The words ‘spirit’ and ‘spirituality’ are very vague, and it’s hard to say what we mean when we use these words. They apply to many aspects of our reality, and they are used by different people to describe very different kinds of experiences. But my understanding and my experience is that the spirit is that aspect of our being that gives meaning and life, not just to individuals but to communities as well. Spirit is passion and energy and vision and creativity. It is the spark that gives me courage to stand against the crowd and the spark that can make a crowd into living breathing, loving community. Spirituality is the word that refers us to the practices that put us in touch with the creative center of our own lives and the lives of those around us.

There are many ways we can connect to the realm of spirit. Nature is one of those ways. Art is one of those ways. For Einstein the mystery of the relationships of Mathematics and Physics were his portal into the world of the spirit. Birth and death, and the love of family connect us to each other and to the spirit within us. For many of us, though, the way to the spirit is through religion. Our various religious traditions are the distillation, through thousands of years, of the spiritual wisdom of particular tribes, families, and communities.

But religions, by definition, are institutions, and in institutions power and obedience can overwhelm the spirit. The prophets understood this, the Buddha understood this, Jesus understood this. The terrible scandal of clergy sexual abuse, against children and adults is the direct result of losing touch with the spirit in the temptations of institutional power.

Enough of this. There will be times and places to consider these sorts of issues. Before the Summer is entirely gone, let’s join Mary Oliver on her ramble through the fields, and consider her grasshopper. Have you held a grasshopper in your hand? I’ve held one. Did I notice that she moved her jaws back and forth? Did I notice her eyes? Did I see her wash her face? No, I never looked that closely. But then, as the grasshopper snaps her wings open and floats away, Mary Oliver says something astonishing, and for me, liberating.

“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.” The grasshopper has invited her into the world of spirit, and she offers up her lack of any deep experience of religion. “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.” I can point in books to prayers, I can listen to preachers pray, I can want to win a game, I can be scared for my health or the health of someone I love and I can ask God to fix things. But if prayer is that deep connection with the world of meaning and spirit, if prayer is the expression of a relationship with God (and not God the wish-granter of myth, but the source and ground of our being and of all that is); if prayer is that deep connection, do I, do any of us, know what prayer is?

Then Mary Oliver says, “I may not know how to pray,” but “I do know how to pay attention.” How to kneel down in the grass and pay attention to the grasshopper, and the millions and millions of other creatures and people, and phenomena that make up my world.  It is in paying true and deep and respectful and prayerful attention that we connect; that we move out of ourselves into new worlds, new ways of being, and new possibilities, and new relationships. Mary says that she knows how to be idle and stroll through the woods and fields and pay attention. And in doing so, she is blessed. Then she asks us, who are consumed with accomplishment and acquisition and power, she asks us what else should she have done. Finally she turns on us that devastating question, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Can you sit still and pay attention? I know our mothers and grade school teachers used to say that to us a lot, but can we as adults, those moving into that vague and variable state of adulthood, sit still and pay attention and let ourselves be transformed by the spirit?

[We then read the poem together. It had been reproduced by permission in the chapel leaflet. I don’t reproduce it here, out of respect for Mary Oliver’s copyright privileges, but you can find it in her books, House of Light, (Beacon Press, 1990,) and New and Selected Poems, (Beacon Press, 1992.) After we read the poem I talked with the community about what it might mean if we entered chapel more quietly and attentively.]

I know that it’s important for you to connect with each other as you come into chapel. But what if we connected, not so much by talking, when maybe in our talking, we aren’t listening? What if we came and left the chapel quietly, greeted each other with a nod, a smile, a murmur, and a look that pays attention to how the other person is doing? Silence is not separation, silence can be the deepest sort of connection and attention and respect we can give another person.  This isn’t about being obedient or being punished, this is about our sense of integrity and inner well-being and our comfort in the world and our connection to each other.

Can we try this? Can we come into chapel this way?  We’ll all forget, and when I forget you can jump all over me. I promise not to foam at the mouth if you forget. But I don’t know how else to tell you how absolutely vital, central, to your education, to your future and your well-being can be this cultivation of attention and the loving respect that goes with it.

This is a chapel talk I gave at Brooks School  during Holy Week of 2014.

 

I

 Can I tell you a story? It must be around thirty-five years ago now, so Mikey would be fifty-three or fifty-four if he were still alive, but this happened in the summer between his sophomore and junior years. I was teaching in another boarding school, running a dorm, all the stuff teachers do in boarding schools.

Mikey was a good kid, good-hearted, friendly, but he was also sassy, with a fresh mouth, and he loved to see how close to the limits he could come without getting caught. He was something of a hero to the other kids, who loved to stand back and watch him almost get himself in trouble. And he was in my dorm. There were serious questions early in that summer as to whether he’d be asked to come back to school.

It was a night, probably in early August, when I got a call from the headmaster. Mikey had died a couple of days earlier. He and his family had been on vacation in the Adirondacks and he had gone off hiking by himself. When he didn’t come back for lunch the family searched all over for him. Nobody had cell phones in those days and they were hours from a rangers’ station. So they searched frantically and found him some time in the midafternoon. He was weak and unconscious, but still alive. When they got to the rangers, a helicopter was called in, but Mikey had died long before they could get him to a hospital.

When he called, the headmaster said that the family wanted me to preach at his funeral, and he and his wife and I would fly to Newark and drive to Princeton. The funeral was going to be held in the Princeton University chapel. I’d never been to Princeton University before, never been that far south. I was astounded when I walked into the chapel. If you’ve ever been there you know how huge a building it is. I walked in and my heart sank. ‘That poor family,’ I thought, ‘How upsetting it’s going to be for them when they see how empty this huge chapel is.’

But how little I knew the love people held for Mikey and his family.  The chapel was filled and people were spilling out the doors. Almost our whole dormitory was there. As the service began, it wasn’t the organ that was playing, it was a selection of songs from the Grateful Dead. I was appalled. This was the music that the dorm blared out its windows as the school filed in for seated dinner, getting me and the kids in trouble.  But it was perfect. Mikey’s family had the intelligence and sensitivity to know what the people filling that chapel needed.

The required religion course at that school came in the Junior year and I had most of the juniors from my dorm in my religion class. The primary book we used was called Dynamics of Faith by a theologian named Paul Tillich. Over the years I came to love this book, but the kids were simply terrified by it. His idea was that the human personality is organized around symbols, rituals, myths, stories, beliefs that express something about the things in life that are larger and greater than we can express in our day to day language.

Part of the problem students had with Tillich was that he wasn’t writing for high school students, he was writing for other adults with PhD’s in theology. He used big words that most adults don’t run into and his primary idea and toughest word was ‘ultimate’. Every year we spent several classes trying to help students understand the idea of ultimacy; some got it, some didn’t, but almost all were simply relieved to get beyond the language of the ultimate.

That September after Mikey died, the kids in the dorm were struggling with Mr. Tillich and his ideas just the way every junior class before and after struggled. And as I did every year, I tore my hair out trying to find ways to help them understand it.  “Ultimacy, you know, from ‘ultima’, the last, the end, the limit; ‘ultimacy’ is the quality of something that brings us up against the limits and challenges us to look beyond that limit. What are the things that limit our lives?” Over time we came up with the limits of the body, time, space. And then someone dropped into the conversation that last and defining limit of our human lives, “Death.” We all looked around the room at each other and you could see the realization dawning on face after face. They were thinking of Mikey. And we looked at each other, and everyone started to cry, quietly; everyone reached out to the people around them. They understood the hardest of our concepts because they had experienced it in their own lives. Suddenly religion and spirituality were no longer boring subjects about unbelievable things imposed on them by gullible adults.

II

 That was thirty-five or so years ago. All I have ever hoped for in the communities I’ve served, schools, parishes, towns, was that people from many different backgrounds, traditions, religions, could form the kind of community where we would be drawn together by that kind of shared experience rather than divided by distrust and difference. But distrust seems to be much easier than reconciliation.  The divisions I’m talking about are not just between people of different religions. I’ve served congregations where people wouldn’t talk to each other, would walk away from each other. And I’ve served in congregations where the rabbis and imams and the clergy of various other denominations and traditions helped me get through significant difficulty in my own parish.

Today is Monday in Holy Week in the Christian Calendar, and for Jews, Passover begins tonight. These are two festivals about life and courage and risk; life rising out of the most dreadful circumstances; about the faithfulness of God to the Covenant; about love and hope where there seems to be little love and less hope.

I would hope that Christians and Jews could share all this, but it’s so hard. From the earliest years of the Common Era Christians have blamed Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus and persecuted and killed their Jewish neighbors. How hard it’s been to remember that Jesus was Jewish, and never intended to start a new religion. His disagreements with the Jewish leadership were about differing views of Judaism. How appalled Jesus would have been, or is, depending on your theological position, to find Gentiles killing his brothers and sisters in his name. And all because it’s so much easier to blame someone else for our pain than to accept our own responsibility.

What Jesus wants his hearers to know is that power is a terribly dangerous thing because it distorts our sense of our values and ethics. And for the two thousand years since Jesus’ death, Christians have used our massive power in Western culture to blame and persecute the Jews, and after the Prophet came, the Muslims, rather than to examine how we are doing exactly the things that Jesus condemned in his own time. The things that we hear about in the Bible day after day and week after week condemn our blindness to our own misuse of power and our ignoring of those who have no power, the poor and cast aside.

I believe that what God wants for us is what happened in that classroom thirty-five years ago: to find our way across the things that divide us and to stand together as human beings in the face of death and despair and unutterable evil. I believe that that’s what our communities are for: they are places where we can learn to value the things that unite us and understand the things that divide us. The things that divide us will not go away, but they don’t need to destroy us. They can build us up as we understand them better. Isn’t this what we’ve seen as we approach the anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings? A community that has come together around what unites them rather than what divides them.

Isn’t that at least part of what Phillips Brooks and Endicott Peabody and Frank D. Ashburn wanted when they envisioned a school where religion has a significant place? They wanted mutual understanding and respect, they wanted us to comfort each other in the face of death and to challenge each other in the face of evil and the misuse of power, our own and others.

This community of people from many different backgrounds, different religions, different spiritual understandings, different forms of disbelief, provides us with a place like few others we will have in our lives, where we can work at understanding each other, sharing our pain and fear and hope, and finding paths to new understanding and reconciliation.

Passover and Easter are celebrations of new life in a world of pain and difficulty. May we who celebrate them this week always remember not only to give thanks for our own joys, but to pray for all of us who share this community of Brooks. And you who are not part of one of these traditions, know that as we celebrate we are giving thanks for your presence in our lives.

Shall we try a little interfaith singing?

(At this point I brought out the banjo and as a school we sang ‘Dayenu,’ one of the songs from the Seder, and ‘Lord of the Dance.’)

What follows is a meditation I shared with the candidates and postulants, those who are preparing for ordination in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.  The occasion was a retreat at the  Barbara C. Harris Camp and Conference Center in Greenfield NH from thursday March 19 through Saturday March 21, 2015.  The retreat was held under the auspices of the Bethany House of Prayer where I’m a colleague, offering retreat work and spiritual direction.

 

From I Corinthians, Chapter 1

18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ¹⁹For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’ ²⁰Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. ²²For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, ²³but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

26 Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. ²⁷But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; ²⁸God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, ²⁹so that no one might boast in the presence of God. ³⁰He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, ³¹in order that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.’

 

From Groucho Marx:

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

I intend to live forever, or die trying.

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.

 

From Annie Sullivan (about Helen Keller):

At another time she asked, ‘What is the soul?’ ‘No one knows, I replied; ‘but we know it is not the body, and it is that part of us which thinks and loves and hopes.’ . . . [and] is invisible. . . . ‘But if I write what my soul thinks,’ she said, ‘Then it will be visible, and the words will be its body.’”

 

#

Who are you bringing with you on this journey toward ordination? I ask because my own experience has been that, in my own inner life, I have been host to a number of people over the years, who have shaped my thinking and my praying and my ordained life. These people have been my companions and my comfort and my conscience; they have helped me through crises and difficulties, they have helped me discern and learn, they have coached me in what to say, and when to shut up; people living and dead, real and fictional, believer and atheist, saint and sinner. They have sparked my imagination and my relationship with God and my relationship with the world. I have been a veritable ark of thinkers and dreamers and doers who have been passengers and crew of this leaky old boat, and they have helped me navigate the rather choppy seas of my ordained ministry.

As you work on your own lists, don’t be too quick to add names. Over the years there have been lots of people I’ve wanted to think of as mentors and guides, people whom other people admired, people whom I thought I ought to know and admire and follow. I’d quote these people and enjoy sounding like I was smart and knew what I was talking about. BUT, capital B-U-T, over time I finally came to realize that these people may have been helpful, but they were not flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, and spirit of my spirit.

I find that I don’t choose these companions, they choose me. I suddenly realize I have to read that book again, hear that record, have a chat with this or that person. Some of them aren’t very admirable, some aren’t popular, some of them aren’t people of faith, but they are part of who I am, for better or worse.  I’ve been making a list for myself recently; it could start with the Hardy Boys, The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, There are two or three of my seminary teachers on my list. Dorothy Sayers, the T S Eliot of Four Quartets, the Polish theater director, Jerzy Grotowski, St. Paul, Paul Tillich, Ed Friedman of Family Systems thinking, a certain psychotherapist, Asey Mayo, the Cape Cod detective. There are others.

In recent years, as I’ve worked with congregations in difficulty, and now that I’m back into teaching religion in high school, I’ve discovered that there are two folks who keep coming back to me over and over and over. One is Groucho Marx and the other is Annie Sullivan. Film and movies are very popular among the kids at Brooks School; they watch them, they make them. I was talking with a class recently and asked them what films they liked. They were into all this dark stuff, Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, raunchy bad boy comedies. I’d thought that they’d have a broad experience, a literacy, of film, but not only had they never seen a Marx Brothers movie, they’d never heard of the Marx Brothers. I was stunned. I don’t know why. I suspect I was stunned because Groucho and Chico and Harpo are so much a part of my inner life, my inner landscape. For a kid who was raised to be so obedient, what a gift that Marx Brothers humor of teasing and ridiculing the establishment was.  But recently, as I’ve gone back to their movies, I’ve notice a pattern. Groucho is always a figure of some stature and authority. In Duck Soup he’s Rufus T. Firefly, the president of the nation of Freedonia. In Horse Feathers, he’s Quincy Adams Wagstaff, the president of Huxley College. In A Day at the Races he’s Hugo Z. Hackenbush, Director of the Standish Sanitarium. In film after film he’s a president, a director, an agent, a store manager, a hotel manager. In film after film he’s a fraud who hoodwinks poor Margaret Dumont and bad guy after bad guy after bad guy.

I remember being the rector of a parish. I was rector of a parish where there had been significant sexual misconduct on the part of my predecessor. The Bishop (many bishops ago now) clapped me on the back and said, “Alden, you’re perfect for this job, just go in there and love that parish to death.” I didn’t say that my predecessor had just about succeeded in doing that. But I went into that parish convinced that I was a nice guy and that everything would work out. I don’t need to tell you that it didn’t work out, at least not in the short term. Within days of starting on that job, my anxiety level was through the roof.

Rabbi Friedman has a lot to say about anxiety as the scourge of leadership. He suggests in Generation to Generation that humor is one of the best ways to keep our anxiety in check and to convince the congregation that we’re not anxious. While I was rector of this parish, I saw Friedman do a demonstration of a family therapy session, a real session with a real family who had agreed to this ordeal. As I watched, my own anxiety level went up and up and up. I couldn’t believe the things Friedman was saying to that family, disguised as humor, difficult truth upon difficult truth. Just watching that much truth telling made me anxious.

Sometime over these last few years of working with congregations I realized that what Friedman did with that family was exactly what Groucho did as head of all these institutions. Both Friedman and Marx completely ignored people’s distress, showed no sympathy, and made jokes out of their pain. And lo and behold, the patient improved, the bad guys went to jail, the lovers’ way was cleared to marry, and everyone lived happily ever after, more or less.  So when I’m working with a congregation or group and the anxiety level is going up, I no longer ask what technique or quick fix I should use, I just channel my inner Groucho. I’m still pretty susceptible to anxiety, but this is a huge help.

The other person who’s been my constant companion these last few years, has been Annie Sullivan. I begin my 10^th grade course at Brooks, ‘Human Understanding and the Search for Meaning’, by having the students read The Miracle Worker.

Annie Sullivan is a parish minister. Or I should say, Annie reminds me of me when I became a parish minister. She was a half blind orphan. She was 20 years old and much too young, with no idea of how to begin to teach Helen Keller. She brought terrible guilt with her, feeling like she was responsible for her younger brother’s death. She was poor. She was a stranger in a strange land, a child of Irish immigrants alone in the deep South, a Yankee in rebel territory.   She had no idea what kind of behavior the family expected of her and had a very difficult time being polite. She wept at night feeling like a failure. She was desperate for a teacher of her own, who could help her in this terrible and lonely work.

Unlike me, Annie brought some instincts with her that stood her in good stead. She stood up for herself, against everyone in that Southern family who wanted to be nice and be kind and be tolerant of Helen. She was stubborn; Captain Keller’s son James compares her to General Grant several times in the course of the play. She doesn’t know much about teaching, except by thinking about how she herself was taught. She has no techniques for breaking through Helen’s blindness and deafness, except to spell out words to her in her hand, over and over and over, and to demand obedience from Helen, again, to the horror of Helen’s family.

Annie carried people in her head, one was her old teacher from the Perkins School for the Blind, Mr. Anagnos, and she hears his voice frequently, and she writes him letters. The other person she carries is her little brother, whom she couldn’t save from death, whom she took care of from orphanage to orphanage to asylum, until they were separated and he died and she couldn’t save him. Her brother’s voice spurs her on to help Helen. More than once Annie says in the course of the play that “God owes me a resurrection.”

After the loss of her brother, Annie defends herself against relationships, against vulnerability, but in the end she falls in love with Helen, and she gets that resurrection, that sense of new life. She finds this love, and she helps Helen find light and life and understanding, not because she is an expert in anything, but because she can only do what she knows how to do and stays open to the spirit, trusts her instincts.  The Kellers are dumbfounded at the lost child who is cast up on their shores. They wanted to hire an expert teacher, and what they got was a scared but gutsy kid. They wanted to give their daughter into the hands of a professional and instead they put her into the hands of God. Annie is indeed a parish minister.

^“20Where is the one who is wise? Where is the expert? Where is the technician of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” “²⁷But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; ²⁸God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, ²⁹so that no one might boast in the presence of God.”

Neither Groucho nor Annie is an expert in anything. One feels like a fraud, the other really is a fraud, and what’s the practical difference? Expertise and information are a terrible trap: “I’ll be a good deacon or priest when I know a little bit more, or when I’ve learned this particular technique. We are all wounded, half blind impostors who have been given an awesome and terrible vocation. And at the heart of that vocation is the cross of Christ, that demands of us that we not hide our pain and vulnerability, that demands that we trust God absolutely and risk everything, that demands that we remember where we come from and where we are going and remember the genuine, odd, foolish, fearful, fraudulent people who helped us along the way. At the heart of that vocation is Jesus himself who takes our hands and walks with us and helps us laugh our way through the journey. Who are your companions on this journey toward ordination, on this journey toward the cross, on this journey toward life?

Does anybody read Asey Mayo mysteries any more? I’ve said elsewhere that I love to listen to Dorothy L. Sayers and Rex Stout and some Agatha Christie novels while I’m driving. But I don’t listen to Phoebe Atwood Taylor novels. And I don’t listen to them for the simple reason that I can’t find any audiobook company that has Taylor’s Hayseed Sleuth, Codfish Sherlock, in their catalog. So I actually read the Asey Mayo books, over and over and over again.

Phoebe Atwood Taylor started writing about her Cape Cod detective in the early 1930’s. She herself was from a Cape family and lived her life around Boston and the Cape. Asey is a native of Wellfleet, former crewman on various Cape vessels, factotum for the Porter family of automobile manufacturers, and a local man of all work who helps out friends and neighbors and the rich summer people who inhabit the Cape for parts of the year. Asey is possessed of a wry wit, a sharp native intelligence, and a trustworthy countenance, all of which draw him into the seemingly endless numbers of murders that just happen to occur in the fictitious towns of the outer Cape.

Asey is funny; not farcical, yuck it up funny, but sly, witty, observant, and an ironic commentator on the passing scene. And Phoebe Atwood Taylor is funny. She has an eye for human foibles and a fundamental sympathy that combine to create amusing, well observed characters. She has a an ear for dialect and voice that gives her characters some depth, and she has a talent for spinning plots that keeps a situation at a constant simmer.

To say that her characters have some depth isn’t to say that they are full, complex, well-rounded characters. Taylor has a stable of stock characters who recur from book to book. There are the ones who actually do come back book after book: there’s Asey, of course, and there’s his Watson, also a doctor, Doc Cummings, who’s cynical, loyal, smart enough to ask intelligent questions and dumb enough to need to ask them. He’s described as rotund, and reminds me of William Windom as Doc Hazlett of Cabot Cove on Murder She Wrote. (You see, I’m giving away my really lowbrow tastes.) Other characters who recur: Asey’s cousin Syl, who’s short, with a walrus mustache and a rather annoying habit of finding lost articles and people by asking, ‘If I was a hoss, where would I go and I went there, and it was.” But he’s loyal to Asey and does a lot of dogsbody work in the books. If Syl is short, his wife, Jennie, is large in most of the ways you could measure largeness. She cooks and cleans for Asey. It feels like Taylor sort of fell in love with Jennie Mayo, because Jennie not only makes an appearance in a goodly number of the twenty-four novels, and she often moves the plot along in some number of ways. She has a way of badgering Asey, and fighting with him that keeps the tension high and the plot moving. The last of the characters who come back frequently in the novels and who have developed personalities, is Lieutenant Hanson of the Massachusetts State Police. As I read about Hanson, I always think of the actor Donald McBride, who usually played officious comic characters in movies of the 30’s and 40’s. He’s the hotel manager in the Marx Brothers’ movie Room Service. Lieutenant Hanson is actually in some awe of Asey, and holds him in high esteem, but also, he’s trying constantly to prove that he’s as good as Asey. One of the things that makes him different from the run of the mill stock policeman is that he always has the grace at the end of the novel to admit he was wrong and thank Asey. He and Asey share a mutual respect and friendship that’s a bit unusual in this sort of story and it’s fun to watch.

These are the recurring characters. (Most of them. There are actually a number of policemen who show up book after book, but we don’t see much of them except as they run errands, do forensic tasks, and comment wryly on the action. Also there are members of the automobile magnate family, the Porters, who get talked about a lot, but play key roles in only a couple of the books.) But there is another kind of stock character: the character whose name changes but plays the same sort of role book after book. There is the sassy, attractive, independent young woman from off Cape who summers around Wellfleet and took sailing lessons from Asey when she was a kid. There is the young man, also from off, usually a little confused about the direction his life is taking. He is often a suspect for a while but ends up learning a little about life and falling in love with the young woman. The young men and the young women usually have family, parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, with whom they’re summering on the Cape. There are stock bad guys, who rarely end up being the murderers. Usually they’re Portuguese, Cape Verdeans, ‘Portygees’, who ran rum during Prohibition and are involved in any number of shady activities. And there are the stalwart locals, the Nickersons and the Bangses and other familiar Cape names, who may be suspects, but are usually salt of the earth, good old everyday folks.

The names change, the situations change, but the basic elements of the plots are remarkably consistent and remarkably durable. The crime is usually a matter of anger and revenge over a slight or ill done someone years ago. The murderer is one of the visitors to the Cape, usually someone whom we’ve been led to believe is a good, upstanding, sympathetic person. The action of a number of the books takes place within a twenty-four or thirty-six hour period during which Asey either doesn’t sleep, or sleeps only a little. There is at least one footrace in almost every book; Asey chasing the murderer, or a red herring, usually through the woods, over pine needles, where Asey almost catches the person but ends up getting knocked over the head instead. Old, circular Cape cellars play a prominent role, with people getting trapped, or dying in them. The car chase is ubiquitous; sometimes Asey’s in his huge powerful Porter 16, sometimes in a small borrowed car chasing the murderer. He knows every back road on the Outer Cape and knows just how to cut over old coach roads filled with stumps to cut the culprit off. But he never quite does it: an air raid warden stops him, he gets caught at a road work site. In these chases he always drives at furious speeds, with his lights off so the bad guy won’t know he or she is being pursued. This invariably terrifies the passenger Asey has taken with him. It would be much harder to be impressed with Asey’s driving skills if there weren’t someone to scream in terror as he tore over a stump filled, rutted old road, or to say that they couldn’t see the tail lights up ahead that Asey’s using to navigate by.

There are times when her plots seem talky and slow, maybe a bit repetitive from book to book, but Asey isn’t an action hero. These are books to be enjoyed on long vacation afternoons, and if you nod and snooze over one of Mrs. Taylor’s stories, it’s easy enough to pick it up again at bedtime or the next lazy afternoon. For all the stock situations and characters, to my taste, the books bear rereading over and over. The humor is always fresh and I find the characters attractive, so I greet them like old friends whenever I pick up one of the novels, and I usually have one percolating slowly on the back burner.

#

 I first met Asey in the late 60’s. My mother was director of the local public library and she brought home some paperback mysteries she was deacquisitioning (interesting word). A couple of them were Asey Mayo mysteries which she offered to me and Birgitte. I’d never heard of Asey.

My mother’s taste in mysteries and my own were similar, and many of the mystery series I learned to enjoy were ones I saw on my mother’s bookshelves: Rex Stout, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey. But I don’t remember ever having seen a Phoebe Atwood Taylor mystery on her shelves. So I was surprised when she talked as though this Asey Mayo character were common currency and a favorite of hers, someone every mystery reader would just naturally know about. But I’d never heard of Asey.

“You’ve never read Asey Mayo? My God, you’ve got to read Asey Mayo.”   So I did. Birgitte and I made time every summer to spend time at Cape Cod with Arne and Karen Madsen, her parents, who came East from Iowa for a week or two in a rented cottage in West Dennis. On lazy afternoons I would put my feet up and read the Asey Mayo books. Then when we went out for excursions, I would picture Asey tearing over the roads. From Orleans on North, Taylor territory, we’d run across arms and spits and bays and rivers that had given the places in the Asey books their names and it always felt like an adventure, a discovery, a secret shared with Mrs. Taylor, “Ah, Phoebe, I know where you got the name of that town!”

What is there about these books that draws me back to them? Well, there’s the setting. The Cape has been part of our family’s life for more than sixty years in Birgitte’s case. I love the sand and the sun and the sea, the sky, the famous Cape light. Cape Cod for me was a place to relax and put my feet up and be away from the crazy schedules that a busy family has to keep. To lie on the couch or the bed or the deck and read and listen to the breeze in the pines and the hawks and gulls screaming overhead was paradise. And when the kids were young we spent the days at the Bank Street Beach, or Coast Guard or Nauset (Nauseous) Beach. Geologically Cape Cod is just like Long Island, where I grew up: a large moraine on the north shore, and the sandy outwash plain that defines the south.   The outwash plains with sand and marshlands and birds and animals, attacking the nostrils at low tide with the tangy, salty smell of rotting plant life. I get all warm and snuggly just thinking about it. The Cape is rest and peace, it’s a time of innocence, it’s nostos, home.

So what draws me back to these books? Taylor’s characters may be stock characters, but even so their Yankeeness rings true to me as someone with old New England roots; I hear my family as Taylor’s people talk to each other. As a parish priest who has always served parishes divided between old blue collar New England Episcopalians (usually from Nova Scotia or Newfoundland) and younger wealthier parishioners who may not have a strong denominational or regional identity, I feel right at home in the humor of situations where poorer working native Cape Codders make fun of the summer people from away, who don’t know they’re being made fun of.

The plots aren’t brilliant, they don’t bring me back. They’re, in most cases, very good, or good to very good, you know, in that neighborhood. But Taylor’s plots exist as hooks to hang the humor, the entertainment on. The plots exist so that Asey can be himself. The earlier books feel to me like Taylor was trying to write a really good detective story, but to my mind she tries too hard, Asey’s more serious, and the plots drag on a bit. But as the mid and late thirties come along, Taylor hits her stride and so does Asey.

It doesn’t seem at first blush as though there is much emotion in The Asey Mayo books. Mystery stories, after all, have to be careful. It’s the puzzle that drives the mystery, and so we rarely see all the emotion involved in violent death in any mystery story. But to the discerning Yank-o-phile, there are touching moments. Since the classic portrait of the old Yankee is that he or she is stoic and avoids emotion those times when a scene portrays an understated and momentary show of affection or grief can move those who recognize how real it is. I remember my grandfather Beaman (Phineas) saying once that he would never have a dog, because they only die and break your heart.

I’m drawn back to these books, I think, by their sheer familiarity. I’ve read them so many times that my brain is reciting the dialog before my eyes have reached that part of the page. And for all their familiarity, the books carry me along with the humor that doesn’t get stale, the nostalgia, the characters who are old friends.

#

 So, what was the first Asey Mayo book I ever read? I think it was Banbury Bog. It’s still one of my favorites. Mr. Banbury, a wealthy baker who has turned a small corner bakery into a nationwide chain, comes from the Midwest to vacation in the Cape town his family originally came from. The town has fallen on hard times and Banbury, in the course of a couple of months, pours not only money, but energy and affection into bringing it back to prosperity. But someone resents his efforts and frames him for the murder of one of the selectmen, murder committed after a town celebration is ruined by rat poison being sprinkled over hundreds of Banbury’s tarts. Why do I like this book? Well it can’t be only because Banbury’s first name is Phineas.

My favorites? Probably the books written in the years before and during World War II: Banbury Bog, Octagon House, The Perennial Boarder, Figure Away, The Proof of the Pudding, The Six Iron Spiders. But over time, I read them all. Tom Buckley, the native Cape Codder who sells Cape Cod themed books out of his place near Pleasant Bay in Chatham, has named me honorary president of the Phoebe Atwood Taylor Fan Club. As far as I know there is no such club, except as Mr. Buckley has constituted it among the people like me, for whom he has searched out Asey Mayo hardcovers, first editions, original dust jackets. And I suspect that there may be several presidents. But I’m proud of my exalted position, nonetheless.

To have my name linked in any way with Asey’s makes me feel like I have a place in history. And besides, my name will always be linked with Asey’s. As we learn in the second book of the series, Death Lights a Candle, Asey’s full name is Asa Alden Mayo.

I don’t read much any more. In my day I’ve spent a good deal of time with a book in my hand: mystery stories, literary novels, theology, church history, Biblical commentary, developmental psychology, Freudian psychology, organizational management and development, plays, theatrical memoirs, books about acting, directing, theatrical theory, the occasional self-help book. And I loved to sit and look at them resting their souls on my shelves, proud of the books I’d read, feeling, maybe not guilty, but a bit rueful, over the books I had acquired but hadn’t read yet. We preachers, I think, need to be careful about condemning people’s greed for money when we hungrily acquire so many books; ah well.

But nowadays the only actual books I hold in my hand are the books I assign my classes. I keep the hard copies so I can mark them up, make notes, build layer upon layer of thoughts as I think about how to help the kids understand the material; as I try to hide from them the fact that I only half understand it myself. And I enjoy reading and rereading both the books and my notes, seeing the dialogue I’ve been carrying on with the author. But that’s about it as far as real, actual, book books go with me. Wait, I forgot, Phoebe Atwood Taylor; most of her books I have to read in the form of bound copies filled with paper pages.

I’ll bet you’re assuming that nowadays I read on Kindle. Well, my iPad has lots of the books I enjoy, from Kindle and from iBooks. I read myself to sleep with Dorothy Sayers on my Kindle app. But I only read on my iPad at bedtime, and a few other odd moments: I take it traveling, or I read on my iPhone if I have to wait for a dentist’s or doctor’s appointment. But I don’t read on my iPad all that often.

And yet, for someone who doesn’t read, I have become a voracious consumer of literature in my dotage. Or to be clearer, perhaps I should say that I’ve become a voracious listener. I do a lot of driving, and whenever I’m in my car, even on the short fifteen minute hop from home to Brooks, I’m listening to an audio book. I began with books on tape. Driving to take my parents out to lunch and to do their weekly grocery shopping, I’d shove the little cassette into the slot on the dash made for it. I’d listen to readers interpret old faves. Michael Pritchard reading Rex Stout, Ian Carmichael reading Dorothy L. Sayers, Tony Brittain reading Rumpole of the Bailey. I even developed a taste for Agatha Christie. Somehow, on the printed page Christie’s novels felt flat and formulaic, but as a reader performed the sacred act of incarnation (“the hint half guessed at, the gift half understood…”) Poirot and Marple, and Tommy and Tuppence sounded more like human beings; I discovered that Agatha was a good plotter, even if she stole a bunch of her earlier plots from Conan Doyle.

But the apex, or acme, or apogee or perigee or whatever it is, of my listening to books on cassette tapes was the discovery of Jim Dale reading the Harry Potter books.   Absolute magic. Not only a voice for every character, but a depth of personality for each character. I listened when I was driving alone. Birgitte and I listened; we listened with the kids, book after book. Even when the hardcopy books got so long and so dark that I couldn’t read them, I could listen to Jim tell me the stories.

It was Jim Dale who helped me make the jump from cassettes to CD’s. Remember when CD’s came out and you swore you weren’t going to pay perfectly good money for recordings you already owned? And then you read a review of the Beatles’ records on CD and the reviewer told you how much clearer they were, how much more detail you could hear, what a rich listening experience it would be? So you bought a CD player so you could get some recordings on CD, but, by God you weren’t giving up on vinyl? And remember the day you walked into the record department at the Coop and they didn’t have any records? And the worst thing about it was that I could never tell the difference between the CD and the vinyl, when everyone told me how huge the difference was. Well, the same thing happened with my books on cassettes.

As the later Harry Potter books came out I couldn’t get them on cassette, and my new car didn’t have a cassette player and I swore I wasn’t going to give the recording companies the satisfaction, but I had to hear Jim Dale telling me the story. So I went back and bought on CD a lot of the same books I’d owned on cassette. And as I went to the record store to buy my mystery stories on CD, I branched out. Simon Winchester and Bill Bryson reading their books. And Ulysses! Am I the only person who read Joyce’s epic in College as though it were holy writ? As though it were the most sacred of texts and should only be approached with the deepest reverence and awe? And then I heard it read aloud, rollicking, funny, irreverent, I’d be laughing my ass off as I tore up the road.

Jim Dale got me onto CD’s, but from Harry Potter I branched out beyond the boy wizard and my mystery authors to Joyce and Trollope and Heller. And then, of course, there were fewer and fewer record stores, where would we have been without Barnes and Noble? And the record stores had fewer and fewer books on CD. And it happened all over again. And this time I wasn’t just angry because of the arbitrariness and expense and having to acquire my books in a new medium, I was afraid. I am something of a technophobe, and friends and family all talked about downloading and uploading, and I couldn’t figure it out and was terrified that I’d lose a book or destroy it or some such, and I stayed away from the online audio book thing as long as I could.

But Audible.com makes it so easy that even I’ve gotten comfortable with downloading. And I get my automatic credit at the beginning of the month and I browse this huge range of books, especially modern novels that I’d never thought I had time for. Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Rick Moody, Haruki Murakami, Anne Tyler, as well as all my old favorites. I, who ran from Dickens as from a steamroller of hot moist tar, listen to him with relish and grieve when the book ends.

I am a far more literate person than I was, and my range of reading is significantly more broad (and my writing, I think, is better too.) The literature I learned to love before audio books was very limited. Certain books I had read and fallen in love with in college, and then I’d pick up the odd author here and there, Robertson Davies, Eric Kraft. But now the Sunday Times arrives (yes, I need at least the Sunday Times in hard copy) and I read the Book Review and something catches my eye. With infinite confidence and panache I take up my iPhone, or my iPad, and go to Audible.com and find the book , buy it, and then and browse through the store. On the first of the month, I wonder what I’m going to buy with my new automatic credit.

That doesn’t mean that I like every audiobook I buy. If I only bought books I knew I’d like how would I ever discover new gems, new authors? And some books I need to try two or three times to get into them. I’m about an eighth of the way through The Brothers Karamazov and just didn’t have the patience to listen to more. But I was really touched by Crime and Punishment, so I’ll go back to the brothers. After I finish a big serious novel, I have to clear my palette, sherbet so to speak, so I listen to Michael Pritchard breathe life into the old brownstone on 35^th Street, or to Jonathan Cecil knock Jeeves and Wooster out of the park. And then I thumb through my library and ask myself what might I want to listen to again, or what’s in the library that I haven’t listened to yet. And there’s no guilt, not even rue, over what I haven’t listened to yet, because these aren’t books I buy to acquire them and look at them. These are books that I really think I want to listen to. If I don’t end up liking them I’m none the worse off and I’ve learned something about myself and my tastes and about where I stand with my fellow human beings who read. I may agree with the bestseller list about this author, but not care for another who is right up there in sales. I may love an obscure author whom no one else seems to know about and I can clutch that author to my breast as a secret that only I am privy to (well, me and several thousand others, but a discerning few.)

I don’t read much any more, but I devour book after book after book.

The only magazine I can remember my parents taking away from me was Mad. Not Playboy or some other girlie magazine, as they were called. Not some gory, scantily clad science fiction comic book. They took away my Mad. And I can remember, they were really angry about it. I was at a loss to understand why at the time. Mad was funny; funny’s good, right? But I learned that Mad funny was a special kind of funny. It still fascinates me that humor, especially anarchic, skeptical, self-sustaining, life-affirming Jewish humor, was more threatening to them than pornography.

But they were fighting an uphill battle. Jewish humor was everywhere when I was growing up. My best friend in that South Shore Long Island town was Kenny Herman, the Jewish kid who lived down by the Bay and got our drama director so pissed off he couldn’t see straight. The class play for our senior year in high school was a little confection called ‘You the Jury’. It was a courtroom drama of no discernable significance that ended by the audience voting to determine who was guilty of the eminently forgettable crime. The one thing that stands out for me about that play is Kenny’s role. He played a witness who was supposed to say the line, “He had one of them there photographic memories.” So it’s opening night. I’m playing the judge (with my script open in front of me on the bench because I hated learning lines). In my exalted role I’m seated on the judge’s bench a couple of feet from the witness box. The drama builds and builds, what there was of it, and Kenny comes to the stand, takes the oath and sits down. I’m looking over at Kenny with that stern, judicial, yet impartial air that a seventeen year old knows to be what judges do, after years of watching Perry Mason. The prosecutor asks him the question, and Kenny looks out at the audience and says the line, “He had one of them there pornographic memories.” Every other head on stage snaps as one into the upstage position, trying not to guffaw. In the service of full disclosure I need to say that Kenny had warned the rest of us in the cast that he was thinking of doing this, but we didn’t believe him, bravado, trying to impress the girls, blah blah blah. When he did it we were blown away. I was blown away; I couldn’t believe he’d done it, right out there on stage. If I hadn’t been laughing so hard and long it would have been very scary for me. I wasn’t a rebellious kid, far from it. This subversive jokery that laughed in the face of authority and did it in front of an audience full of our parents, was so funny, so risky, so edgy. I was in awe.

And I’m sure that that was why my parents got so angry and took away my Mad. If I’d ever had the guts to get angry at them, they’d have gotten angry back and overtopped my anger and there’s no question who’d win, but this subversive humor was really threatening to them. What would I end up as if I read all that pinko/liberal subversive trash?

Now you may think that my ending up as an Episcopal priest was about as good an outcome as my very conventional parents could have asked for. I was pretty conventional, acorns and trees after all. But way down deep there’s the part of me that wants to find a way to be jokey and subversive like Kenny. I think I must have been a Jewish standup comedian in another life, and my poor parents were nervous. As Mel Brooks is my witness, what hope did they have when the TV was filled with Uncle Milty and Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner and the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen and Mort Sahl and The Three Stooges and Morey Amsterdam and Victor Borge?

After my first terror-filled years of standing in the pulpit and reading an agonizing sermon word for word from my text, I learned to relax. When I was teaching at St. Paul’s, I had a little church for several years in Weare, a town twelve miles or so west of Concord. And after staying up until 1:00 AM on a Saturday night checking in the dorm and checking on the kids, who had time to write out a formal sermon? So on Sunday morning, on the ride from Concord to Weare, I’d rehearse in my head what I knew about the biblical passages assigned for the day and when it came time in the service for the sermon, I’d wing it. At first I was nervous and halting, but after a while I realized that what I was doing on Sunday was like what I did in the classroom every day of the week. So I relaxed, counted on what I knew, and trusted the interesting mix of people in the little church to work with me. We usually got a moderately decent sermon out of that mix. And at some point I realized that with my occasional one-liners and zingers, my preaching was more like an improvised stand up routine than a formal disquisition.   And it’s amazing what comes out in the spontaneity of those moments.

How easily those of us who claim to be Christians forget that the Gospels are Jewish documents. And how easily we who uphold the Establishment forget how subversive Jesus was, more like Mel Brooks than Billy Graham. Not that I was or am some gutsy, risky challenger of the status quo in my sermons, but in the spontaneous one liners that have slipped through the cracks over the years, I managed to say some things that were, maybe, pretty funny, and pretty true. And I certainly had a lot of fun.

How much, not just my preaching, but my faith and my view of the world, owe to Kenny and to all those Jewish comics who wouldn’t take anything seriously but the truth, and would take any risk for a laugh and the zinger that made the laugh a little uncomfortable. To allow the laughter to bubble up in the face of the tragedy and pain, and to discover that the laughter refuses to let the pain have the last word. What a gift it was to me, I think, that my parents got angry when I got Mad. Somewhere I realized that I, who couldn’t rage, could express all that stuff in humor. How cleansing and healing to laugh in the face of that Yankee Puritanism. And the older I get, the more fun my inner stand-up Jewish comedian is having.

Chapel Talk, 02.04.15

Arne Madsen used to sit at the end of his driveway smoking a huge, foul cigar. As he sat there the neighbors came by to say hello and chat. Arne greeted the kids coming home from school and became the honorary grandfather of Coffelt Avenue. And he was one of the most imposing men I’ve ever met.

Now, you need to understand why he sat outside to smoke his cigars. He sat outside because his wife wouldn’t let him smoke inside. Karen Madsen was the nicest, kindest woman you could meet. She helped take care of the poor and hungry, she helped raise money for hospitals and other organizations. And she had a backbone of steel. After Arne retired and smoked his cigars in the house all day, stinking it up, Karen fixed him with her basilisk stare. “Arne!” Arne blustered and tried to look tough. “Arne!!” And he dragged his lawn chair out to the end of the driveway.

There was one other member of the Madsen household. That was Birgitte, the nicest, sweetest, prettiest, toughest, most determined person I know. Birgitte is my wife and Arne and Karen, who died just a few years ago, were my in-laws. When Arne was intimidating, Karen took care of me; when Karen was intimidating, Arne left the room. When Birgitte’s intimidating, we have to just work it out.

In late October 1950, Arne, Karen, and three year old Birgitte, got on the Polish ship Batory in Copenhagen harbor and sailed to the new world and a new life. The post World War II Danish economy was in shambles and Arne felt like he didn’t have much of a future if he stayed in Denmark, so, with $600 and minimal English skills he took his wife and child and left their home and their large families.

It was hard, but Arne succeeded. He was an engineer who developed armaments, rifles. And when the Department of Defense eventually recognized Arne’s talents he had a job that made him and his family feel like he had found an important place in the USA. But my story isn’t about what happened to the Madsens after the war, it’s about the courageous and inspiring events they were part of during World War II, before they were married and before Birgitte was born.

The Nazis invaded Denmark and occupied the country on April 9, 1940. Denmark was not at the time at war with Germany, but the Nazis needed Denmark as a gateway to Norway, which was enormously important to them in the war against Britain. The Danish government did not want open war with Germany and cooperated with the Nazis to a point, with the proviso that Danes would not be conscripted into the German Army and Danish Jews would not be sent to concentration camps.

But this state of cooperation did not last. King Christian X and most of the Danish people hated the German occupation and came to realize what Denmark lost by cooperating with the Germans. Resistance to the Nazis grew. And it was in this tense atmosphere that Arne Madsen met and fell in love with Karen Ditlefsen. Karen’s brother Hans was involved in the Danish resistance to the Nazis from early in the war. Arne worked in a Danish munitions factory, making rifles. He used to tell us that every third rifle that went out of that factory was sabotaged. Karen worked for a Jewish family in Copenhagen as a housekeeper.

As the war went on it became clearer and clearer to the Danes that Hitler was evil and that cooperating with him only dragged Denmark deeper into a moral quagmire. In 1942 King Christian snubbed Hitler with a curt response to Hitler’s fulsome birthday greetings to the King. In March of 1943 Germany allowed elections to take place in Denmark, to show the world that they believed in Democracy. But only 2% of the people voted for the Danish Nazi party. After that election the Danish leaders, along with the King, began to resist the Nazi policies more and more openly.  King Christian would get on his horse most days and ride through the streets of Copenhagen, with no guard, surrounded by crowds of supporting, admiring Danes.  So finally in August the Germans imposed martial law, dissolving the Danish government. In response, the Danish resistance became more and active and more and more violent.

Arne and Karen decided that things were only going to get worse and if they were going to get married they’d better do it, so they set a date in December of 1943. But before they were married they played a small part in one of the most inspiring and courageous actions that any nation undertook during World War II.

After August 1943, with no Danish government to get in his way, Hitler decided that it was time to remove all the Danish Jews to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. This amounted to around 8,000 people who were slated to be deported and gassed.  A courageous German diplomat, Georg Duckwitz, stationed in Denmark, tried to get the Jews deported to neutral Sweden instead, but neither Germany nor Sweden would agree. He then, at the risk of his life, revealed to the Danish leaders and the chief Rabbi of Denmark that plans were in place to arrest and intern all Danish Jews.

The Danish Nobel Prize winning Physicist Niels Bohr, whose mother was Jewish, escaped to Sweden, and when the Swedes tried to put him on a plane immediately to head for the US, he refused to go. He negotiated with the Swedish King, and in part because of Bohr’s efforts, Sweden reversed its position and made radio broadcasts into Denmark saying that Danish Jews would be welcomed.

The Gestapo’s plans were to raid Jewish synagogues on Rosh Hashanah, the night of October 1, 1943. But when they raided, there were no Danish Jews in the synagogues. In the course of less than a week the Jewish leaders, and the Danish Resistance, and the Danish Lutheran State Church had worked together to make almost all the Jews of Denmark disappear. They took what they most needed and what they could carry, and disappeared into barns and church attics and basements, into private homes of Danish Christians, and over the course of a few days in that first week of October 1943, all but around 500 of the 8,000 Danish Jews were taken across the strait that separates Denmark from Sweden.  They were taken secretly, by night, by fishing boats, pleasure boats, kayaks, all sorts of private vessels, sailed by Danish fishermen, yachtsmen, recreational boaters, anyone who could make a boat move forward. When the Gestapo tried to raid Jewish homes to deport the residents they only found around 500 people, who had refused to believe that the Nazis could do such a thing.

Uncle Hans was part of this rescue. Karen Madsen hid and cared for the belongings of her Jewish employers, who escaped to Sweden. Because the Danes were not willing to consider their Jewish neighbors as aliens, or second class, or worse, as had been true though much of Europe since the early Middle Ages, they rose up almost as one and saved their fellow citizens.  And this is important. The rescue of the Danish Jews was not something ‘nice’ that the good Danish people did for an alien and downtrodden people. The Danes were not willing to consider the Jews anything but their fellow Danes. And the Danish Jews always knew they were Danish, and after the war they were welcomed back with rejoicing.

It depends on how you draw the frame. Hitler drew a frame around his nation and his culture and defined Jews as being outside the frame. He had no use for Jews, or Gypsies, or gay people, or blacks, or anyone else who wasn’t pure “Aryan” whatever that might mean. When he looked in his frame he only saw White, Aryan people, everyone else was expendable, to be used and then killed.

When the Danes drew a frame around their nation, it included everyone. King Christian is reported to have said, when asked about whether he would cooperate with the deportation of the Jews, “There are no Jews, only Danes.” His frame was wide and broad and inclusive. The rescue of the Danish Jews challenges all of us to examine the frame we put around people and nations and to see who is included and who is excluded from the picture of our world and our life. It challenges us to remember that we can choose, we are responsible for how we frame the people who are part of our lives. And I can’t tell you how proud I am to be part of a family had framed their world that way and took such risks to save their friends and neighbors.

There are two footnotes to this story. The first reminds us not to idealize individuals and people. Denmark and the other liberal European democracies in the present day, are having a very hard time including in their frame the Muslims who have immigrated into the Eurozone in the last twenty or so years. Many, many Muslims from various countries have sought refuge, or sought economic opportunity in Denmark, and many ethnic Danes are having trouble seeing these immigrants as fellow Danes.

The second footnote: On December 12, 1943, in the midst of the Nazi crackdown, Arne Madsen and Karen Ditlefsen were married in the little country church in the town of Jystrup, west of Copenhagen. Karen had been baptized and confirmed in that church, and their daughter, Birgitte, would be baptized there a few years later. Years later, the Madsens told how, in the months following their marriage, there would be desperate knocks on their door in the early morning hours, and they would never know whether it was Uncle Hans and members of the resistance looking for a place to hide, or whether it was the Gestapo, hunting them down.

Everyday, complicated unheroic people are capable of doing heroic things, are capable of reaching out beyond the frame that they know to embrace a world that is filled with hope and possibility. What can that mean in our dorms and classrooms, what can that mean on the playing fields and in the studios and on the stages? I think of the production of Columbinus that challenged us this fall. Who are we at out best, and what are we capable of? And how are we touched by Grace?

 

I mentioned that I begin my Theology course at Brooks by having the kids read ‘The Miracle Worker’, by William Gibson.  I want to talk more about both the play and the author.

The Bill Gibson who wrote ‘The Miracle Worker’ is not the modern sci fi dystopian author (if that’s how you’d describe William Gibson) but the 1930’s progressive, who in the 1950’s wrote two of the best known plays of the decade and won the Pulitzer Prize.  ‘Two for the Seesaw’ was a smash hit on Broadway, opening in 1958, running for a year and a half.  It starred Henry Fonda and Anne Bancroft.  ‘The Miracle Worker’ was first a TV play, and then another Broadway smash from 1959 to 1961, starring the young Pattie Duke as Helen Keller, and, again, Anne Bancroft as her teacher, Annie Sullivan.  Gibson wrote several other plays, with varying degrees of success, as well as a novel, poetry, and a wonderful memoir about his parents and his growing up in the Bronx, called ‘A Mass for the Dead.’

My path crossed Bill’s during my senior year at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  While finishing my Masters degree in Divinity, the degree that prepares you, if anything can, for ordination, I began an MFA in playwriting at Brandeis.  The playwriting program at Brandeis then ran in two year cycles, with a professional, produced playwright teaching for two years, and then going back to full time writing.  It was thought that this would attract top flight playwrights who might not otherwise want to take on a permanent teaching post.  I came into the program in the fall of 1971, as Bill began the second year of his two year stretch.

I’m not sure what I wanted from a playwriting course.  Theater had been a lifeline for me in high school and college, and I’d taken a leap of faith after college by resisting the blandishments of my English professors, not applying to graduate schools in English, and instead going into what was basically a theater training program at the University of Maine in Orono.  I had no undergraduate courses in theater, just acting and directing experience.  But Maine took me and I learned a lot.  Probably the most important things I learned was that I didn’t really have the heart or the passion or the talent for professional theater.  What I’d have done if the draft hadn’t been breathing down my neck I’m not sure, but by the summer of 1968 I was married and classified 1A.  So I went to seminary.  (Why seminary and how I got there is a whole story of its own and I’ll probably tell it sometime, but not now, this is about Bill Gibson.)

At Maine and in Cambridge I fell in love with the environmental theater movement.  Something about the audience involvement, the immediacy of the experience, the rejection of what seemed then like a tired and artificial theatrical tradition appealed to me deeply.  I wrote theater pieces, they weren’t plays in any recognizably traditional sense; I wrote two character sketches, most of which had distinct anti-war messages; I reworked Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus into an environmental piece that was really very exciting.  These we put on at the seminary and it still felt, in spite of my experience at Maine, like this form of immediate theater experience was life-giving, not only for me, but for churches, where my stuff was designed to be produced.

I guess I thought of what I was doing as playwriting.  When I applied to Brandeis, it never occurred to me that it wasn’t playwriting.  It evidently occurred to Brandeis, however; they turned me down.  But over that summer I had a letter from them saying that one of the students accepted had dropped out of the program and did I want to accept that place?  I did.

Our first class was in an undistinguished contemporary cinderblock classroom.  We all sat there checking each other out and I suspect that I wasn’t the only person in the room who felt like both I and Brandeis had made a big mistake.  Way down deep I felt that I had to pretend that I was really good, really experienced, really sophisticated, really suave, really and completely unconnected with anything religious.  The teacher was late, we were told he had to drive from his home in Stockbridge, so we sat there getting more uncomfortable, thinking how we were going to prove ourselves to this prodigious theatrical talent.

Finally a tall, thin man, gray hair, craggy , bushy eyebrows, more than bushy, shrubbery eyebrows, from under which gazed penetrating, amused eyes.  He sat down on one of the tables and talked to us for a while.  The first thing he said was that he wasn’t going to teach us playwriting, he didn’t think it could be taught, at least in the sense we usually thought of teaching.  He expected us to write, and write a lot.  And based on that expectation he told us that at each class we would distribute what we’d written and go over it together.  The second thing he told us was that we would not meet weekly at Brandeis.  He had a bleeding ulcer and that kind of travel was difficult for him.  Would we be willing to drive out to his home in Stockbridge every couple of weeks and spend a day at a time going over our work?  Rather than short class meetings this would allow us to do intensive work together.  Bill said he’d feed us.

The University adjusted our schedules so we could spend that day in Stockbridge.  We took turns driving, so that no one had to put too much wear and tear on his car.  And we found the time together in the car built community, built trust.  The problem was that very few of us seemed to have a real passion for playwriting.  We loved to drive out to Stockbridge, we loved to hear Bill tell stories about Clifford Odets, who’d been his playwriting mentor, and Hank Fonda, and Anne Bancroft, and Arthur Penn and all the other characters in the drama of Bill’s writing career.

But somehow, very few of us produced scenes and plays.  In the first class we went over the plays we’d submitted for admission into the playwriting program.  And then we dried up.  For weeks nobody produced anything.  But after a few admonitory reminders, Bill didn’t worry about it.  He pulled out his Shakespeare and scene by scene, line by line walked us through the structure of the plays, pointing out that Shakespeare not only used the language wonderfully, but had mastered the intricacies of dramatic structure.  He showed us the conflict of each scene, and the choices the characters made, and the promise that was embedded in the implications of the character’s choices.  Scenes built into acts and acts were the architecture of the whole play.

I remember spending a long time on the first scene of “Hamlet.”  The guard is changing, it’s midnight, bitter cold on the battlements of Elsinor.  As he goes off duty, Bernardo admits to being ‘sick at heart.’ and we get that sense of foreboding, that all is not well.  But it is with the entrance of Horatio and Marcellus that we learn more.  Marcellus asks, ‘What, has this thing appear’d again tonight?’  As Bernardo and Marcellus talk it is clear that that they have seen a ghost, and they report their sightings to Horatio, who doesn’t believe them.  But then the ghost of the elder Hamlet, the late King, appears.  Horatio is shaken and he and the guards talk about what the appearance might mean.  And as they struggle with the meaning of this apparition they make the decision to tell young Hamlet, the Prince, so that he can make up his own mind.  And in the consequences of that choice, the action of the play is off.  As the play moves ahead, the Ghost tells Hamlet that he was murdered and Hamlet has to make decisions about whether to believe the ghost and how to take revenge for his father’s murder.  With Bill Gibson as a guide, the class followed Hamlet through his conflicts, both inner and outer, and his choices, and the consequences of those choices.  Each choice and its possible consequences makes promises to the audience of resolution and further complications down the line.

But I was still in love with experimental, environmental theater.  In that spirit I kept building plays and scenes around effects and ideas and ideologies.  I remember one play that I did bring to the class, one of these experimental sorts of plays.  And it wasn’t bad for what it was, but it wasn’t driven by the choices the characters made.  Bill never ridiculed the plays we presented, he just asked questions, questions that were based on his assumptions about what made a play and what made a play work.  “Alden, why does this character make this choice at this point in the play?”  “Well, Bill, I’m trying to make a statement about poverty and how people take advantage of the poor.”  “I understand your point, but why does the character do that particular thing at that particular time?”  And we went on like this at some length.  I got frustrated and angry.  I wanted Bill to honor and work with the style of play I wanted to write.  “But Alden, I only know one kind of play, and, for me, the best play makes its statements about life, about war and poverty and whatever, by the choices the characters make.  The characters in a play aren’t puppets, the characters are free people.”

It took me a long time to really understand and internalize what Bill was saying.  I understood the theory, but I didn’t get it in my bones, so to speak.  I finally realized that, in fact, I wanted to be the puppet master, I wanted to control my characters and situations and make them come out the way I wanted.  I didn’t like conflict, and didn’t want to let my characters go at it, so I didn’t get to see them exercise their freedom.  I did get it eventually.  And, in fact, understanding the way Bill saw the development of the plot of a play helped my understanding both of theology and ethics.  Bill’s approach to his characters was like the way God deals with us human beings, in freedom.  And we understand who we are, our character, our ethics, by looking at the choices we make.  Very Aristotle.

For several years after taking Bill’s class, he and I kept in touch.  I would drive out to Stockbridge occasionally and he and I would sit in the workroom he’d built behind the house, and he’d ask about theology, and about seminary, and about what I thought religion was all about.  Whether it was age or illness or or a new view of his own Catholic tradition, his lifelong skepticism, not to say atheism, was softening.  Bill had come into contact with the Jesuits at the nearby Cranwell school, and I think he was surprised at the intelligence and thoughtfulness of the members of the order he got to know.  I think he was also surprised at the respect they had for his doubts and his own journey.  In several plays of this period Bill did embroidery on Biblical themes.  In fact, I’m convinced that the thing that Brought Bill back to a relationship with his religious roots, a relationship not always comfortable, was storytelling.  This storyteller later in his life rediscovered the power of the Biblical stories.  He also discovered meditation.  One of his sons had gotten involved with the Maharishi and Bill and his whole family began practicing meditation.  There were many times when I visited the house in Stockbridge and would ring the bell and ring it, when they were simply sitting in mediative silence.  Bill’s book “A Season in Heaven,” is about Bill’s experiences with meditation and with the Maharishi in Spain.

I think back to those conversations with Bill and I think of how young and unformed I was.  I was unsure of my beliefs and it was hard simply to enjoy hearing about Bill’s experience.  This young seminarian and priest (me) had to argue.  I hope not too forcefully.  But Bill always listened to what I said and thought about it and then shared his own reactions.  He was a great teacher, with a gentle, powerful presence that taught more than any degree of conventional expertise.

I am addicted to Anthony Bourdain.  As I scroll through the offerings on the various cable channels, if I see a show of his listed on The Travel Channel or CNN, I immediately paddle out to meet the boat.  Sardonic, sarcastic, irreverent, proud of his druggy, hardscrabble, hedonistic existence, he lets us see from time to time that underneath the cynicism there are things he cares about, things he cares about passionately and deeply.  What’s clear is that this caring and passion, far from being a denial of of his scrappy hedonism, are the result, the outcome, of  that incredibly undisciplined, anarchic experience.

But it’s the voice, the who-gives-a-shit, hungover, make-a-joke-out-of-anything attitude that permeates the music and the rhythms of his voice that I just can’t get enough of.  “Short concrete descriptive phrase,” pause, “short concrete descriptive phrase,” another pause, maybe another such phrase, all beginning in the middle of his range and falling off.  And then, higher in his register, a comment, a generalization, that begins higher in his musical range, rises a bit, and then follows those phrases to the bottom of the scale.  Speak to me Tony  “Dog (bleep) on the doorstep… the smell of vomit in the mens room… but the best (bleeping) tacos, in the world”.

It’s also what he talks about, using that voice.  Not, I think, the exotic places he travels, although those are interesting, not his trenchant political views, more on view now on CNN, many of which I agree with, but which often seem forced or artificial, like CNN had told him to ramp up the commentary.  I love it when he visits and talks about the places he knows and loves, and when I also know and love them, it’s paradise.  As far as I’m concerned he could have done his entire series about the bars and restaurants and dives and attractions of the Lower East Side.  His snide comments about gentrification and the blind, upper middle easy romanticism of the newcomers, the nouveaux , the arrivistes who want to be identified with the ragged, hand to mouth realities of the LES in its heyday but want the doorman to insure their security.

When he visits a restaurant or bar I know, in whatever city, I feel like one of the in-crowd, one of Tony’s buddies who get swept out the front door with him at three or four in the morning.  When he visits a bar or restaurant I don’t know, I feel like he’s sharing his personal faves with me and his other buddies because he’s almost always with a friend.  He don’t just eat and drink, he eats and drinks with friends, or with people who will soon be his friends, or who he will soon decide he doesn’t want to be friends.  He is very much himself and doesn’t care (at least it seems this way) whether you like him or not, but those who share his love of food and his deep inner view of the world, these, it seems, he can’t do without.  Eating, complaining, telling lousy jokes, philosophizing, these are not solitary activities, but the fundamental connections of our humanity.

And he has a love for particular foods that’s like his love for particular places and people.  Here’s the perfect tube meat, a hot dog and sausage hole in the wall in whatever city he happens to be in that serves the tastiest, if perhaps a bit dubious, mystery meat swathed in pig intestine.  Here’s the best restaurant bourgeois, middle class family place that serves the best poutine, pho, bull’s testicles, or raw sheep’s eyeballs.  And in the next scene he’s in some unbelievably expensive, high end experimental restaurant that charges hundreds of dollars for a tiny piece of fish or beef or exotic pureed veg flash frozen or freeze dried or raw or seared with a blowtorch, with a squiggle of strangely varicolored mayo or oil on the side.  And he loves this too.

He walks on the wild side and seems genuinely happy to have us go along with him.  I guess people who are not fascinated by him don’t stay with him for long, and those who are grossed out don’t even begin.  But what fun, in the middle of the not always very exciting daily routine, to take a side trip with this aging, hip, idealistic cynic.

There’s snow on the old unused bird feeder that hangs off a branch of the maple in the front yard.  I can see it through the red and white curtains on the living room windows.  It’s a bright, almost blinding morning after six inches of snow yesterday; another foot predicted for Tuesday.  As the fronts move along the wind has picked up and the snow is blowing and swirling, so the pines, that this morning were wrapped in white, are again the naked green sentinels they always were.  Behind the house the barn is coming along.  Jeff is getting the siding on and the doors are next, so it will soon look properly rural, ready for Zip and Falki to come up and check out the neighborhood.  It was Jeff, or his son, who startled me into semi-consciousness around midnight as he made his passes up and down the driveway with the plow.

Thich Nhat Hanh helped me into wakefulness, if not mindfulness, this morning.  The radio side of Maine Public Broadcasting airs Krista Tippett’s show, “On Being,” at 7:00 AM on Sunday mornings, just like WBUR.  This morning she played part of an interview she’d done with Nhat Hanh.  He talked in that gentle, French-inflected Vietnamese accent about mindfulness and compassion.  We’ve been working on mindfulness at Brooks for the last couple of years.  What are the practices that can unite a diverse student and faculty population in an old Episcopal boarding school?  So we’ve been encouraging meditation and mindfulness as part of our shared spirituality, as part of our wellness programs.  As I listened to Nhat Hanh this morning he paired mindfulness with compassion in ways I hadn’t really focused on before.  Obvious once you think about it for thirty seconds, but being a bear of very little brain…  To be genuinely present to the person I’m speaking with means that I have to listen without judgment, without arguing.  It means allowing myself to inhabit that other person’s being, loves, hopes, fears.  It means letting go of any thoughts of what I might want from the other person or of what I’d like to do to the other person.  Just be present and understand as best I can.  So there is no mindfulness without compassion, shared feeling.  There’s a chapel talk there, and I’ll post it when it’s done.

It’s the long Winter Weekend, after the intensive and intense Winter Term at Brooks.  Spring Term begins Tuesday and it will be interesting to see how we manage our opening classes and opening chapel service with a foot or more of snow.  It will be interesting to see how many of us who don’t live on campus actually make it.  My drive down our long and winding hill can be treacherous in snowy and icy weather, but I sorta need to be there.  I’m looking forward to Spring Term classes.  This year I’m teaching the whole Sophomore Class the required Theology course.  Each semester I teach half the Sophomores, and the kids from the Fall Term were the guinea pigs.  I had to figure out how the course I’d developed actually worked in the classroom, how tenth graders did with the kind of abstract material I was working with.

I spent last summer designing the course so that it didn’t start with biases toward any particular religious tradition.  I stole the title of the course from a course I developed at St. Paul’s School’s Summer program, ‘Human Understanding and the Search for Meaning.’  Working on the idea that all religious language is metaphorical language and that metaphor is the way we come to understanding, I began the term with the kids reading William Gibson’s “The Miracle Worker” and then James Geary’s book on metaphor, “I is an Other.”  It worked well and did what I wanted it to do, but the kids just couldn’t absorb the material as fast as I wanted them to.  I had to slow the reading down and work intensively with them on what Geary was saying.  Thanks to the help of last term’s students I’m readier for this term’s.  It will be fun to see if I can, in fact, be more helpful to them in understanding the material.  But having large numbers of students miss the first class because of the snow will not be helpful.

So welcome, those of you who’ve found your way to this blog.  You’ll get thoughts about religion, diversity, books, movies, music; you’ll get chapel talks and sermons and other stuff.  You’ll get descriptions of day to day events.  I’m happy for responses if you’d like to comment.

For all the sun and wind, that cap of snow on the old bird feeder is still firmly in place.