Month: February 2019

It was an old farmhouse, probably from the early 19^th century, the road it was set upon then somewhat busier, yet still maintaining a relative quiet. It was there that I would visit one of our oldest church members.

We’d sit in his living room, its furnishings largely untouched for 50 years or so. There he’d talk about olden times, not in a breathless, impatient fashion, but thoughtfully and perceptively. All of life’s bumps and rough edges had been smoothed over by the ensuing years, replaced by perspective, the calm inscrutable wisdom born of time.

When my wife and I first met, we discovered we had something a bit unusual in common. We both were drawn to older people. When I was a kid, in fact, and at a social gathering, I’d invariably find myself talking to the older folk. Linda said she’d done the same thing as a child.

I’ve always thought this attraction is because older people are far less apt to play games. They have nothing to prove. They don’t need to show off or command anybody’s attention. They’ve seen life in all its varying forms. Nothing is wholly new. They are witness to the vast expanse of life. In essence, they’ve leaned to simply be.

Continue reading “The Future of Permanence”

Fresh with a mostly useless degree in American history and without a clue as to what to do with the rest of my life, I took a job in a gritty factory town just west of Chicago working at a sheltered workshop for retarded adults. Today we’d call them the developmentally challenged.

I was a supervisor for a small group of “clients,” maybe a dozen or so, whose job was to count out 10 plastic picks and bundle them with rubber bands. To this day I don’t know who these bundles were for and thus why we needed to bundle them, but that was what we did.

I learned a lot from the clients. They were like children except that they weren’t. They certainly had their challenges, ones we “normals” typically don’t have, but there was something truly compelling and, indeed, attractive about them.

For one thing, they were real.

Continue reading “The Scandal of the Particular”

It’s been a while, so the specifics are a bit vague, but I can tell you it was plush, believe you me.

I’m referring to the “classroom” where we met one fine day in the office of the “master” of one of Yale’s fourteen residential colleges. (“Master,” I’ll have you know, was recently changed to “head of college,” to accord with the current fashions of political correctness.)

Normally, the class was held up Prospect Hill, at the divinity school, but on this particular day we were treated to the master’s palatial digs. It was opulent in that understated, clubby way – stuffed chairs and muted academic tones, as if a Hollywood set. Cigars and snifters of brandy would not have been out of place.

The occasion was a lecture by an acquaintance of our professor’s, a gentlemanly psychiatrist hailing from Lima, Peru. For the full hour, we were granted entry into the appalling conditions found within the slums of Lima. It sounded truly horrific, and I have no doubt what he reported was accurate, if not insufficient in describing the human tragedy born of such degradation.

Continue reading “The Slums of Lima”