PART ONE

We start with the early years.

I was born July 28, 1925 in Springfield, Massachusetts. We were living in Englewood, New Jersey at the time, across the river from New York City. I believe my mother decided to go up to Springfield, because she had given birth, Caesarian style, to her first child in Wesson Memorial Hospital, Another possible reason was that my father’s mother lived not too far from Springfield. That doesn’t seem to be a sufficient reason, so it probably was to have another Caesarian delivery at the same hospital. I was her second and final child.

We were living in Englewood before there was a bridge across the Hudson River. The George Washington Bridge was built the year we left for Chicago in late 1932. Previously, my father commuted by ferry to lower Manhattan where he was working on Wall Street. He was an investment banker, and throughout my early my mother was worried that I would also end up being an investment banker. Actually, investment banking held no appeal to me. Anyway my father became very successful in his profession. He ended up being the Smith of Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith. He and I had a good relationship, which became much closer the last few years of his life. He was a kind man, a very bright man, a genuinely considerate man. He was liked and admired by very one in the firm, including secretaries.

In Englewood we lived at 287 Robin Road, which was a very small street, and I recall a few wake-up calls that were really quite striking. As a young boy, maybe four or five, a neighbor down the street, Walter Ruprecht by name, invited me to a picnic. After picking up several kids in the neighborhood in an old-fashioned station wagon, he swung by our house. I was the last one to get in the car. The tailgate was down and the benches inside were along the side. There was a space on one of the benches, but it was next to a little colored girl. I had never seen a colored person in my life. And exhibiting an early form of racism I sat on the tailgate. (Now, of course, I wish I had sat next to her). Well, Mr. Ruprecht didn’t realize I wasn’t completely inside the wagon so he went around the corner, not too fast but fast enough, I flipped out on my head. Since I was within half a block of home, I ran back screaming and bloody. My mother heard the scream and opening the door she said, ‘My God what happened to you?’ I blurted something out and she said, ‘you had it coming to you.’ Ah, that’s a different kind of mother, isn’t it? She called our doctor to stitch my head up. Anyway, that event and her remark were so vivid in my mind that I quickly realized I had done something that was clearly wrong, namely, my refusal to sit next to a young girl who happened to be black. My mother was always one to nip things in the bud, and racism was her bete noire. This was one indication out of many that she was determined to show me I was no better than any one else. These were painful lessons, and I learned them well. They stood me in good stead.

Related to all this, I’ll mention my mother’s family background. Her father, Samuel Leith Ingram [Leith is my middle name] was a poor farm boy coming to this country from Aberdeen, Scotland, in steerage the lowest part of the ship, when he was about 16. His mother was Elisabeth Leith; Sam, and all his brothers had Leith for their middle names. Eventually Sam came to Minnesota and went into the farm equipment business. He was here at the right time and struck it rich. During a couple depressions along the way in which he lost most of his money, but he worked hard again and made much more. One interesting thing about him that’s pertinent to the story I just told, is that he became somewhat close to Booker T. Washington. Booker T. Washington was deeply interested in agriculture and what it could do to help southern negroes succeed in farming their own land. Although Booker T. Washington wasn’t Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, he was a significant figure and was known worldwide. Sam was therefore the catalyst in helping us all understand that racism was totally unacceptable.

And so I grew up with a mother who at one point in her life said that she ‘was so pro-black she was almost anti-white.’ That wasn’t really true, but she did have a strong sense of social justice. There was a problem, however, in her being the daughter of Sam Ingram, namely, that she was an only child, and her father had wanted a boy. So Sam decided that she would excel in everything she did. This was a heavy assignment for a young girl. While a pretty impressive person, she could never meet her own sense of her father’s expectations for her. That led to decades of running from the person about whom she was very ambivalent. She had high respect for her father and yet she was at the same time disgruntled about being seen not for what she was but what she should have been. She ended up going through three unsuccessful marriages, in each trying to escape from Sam’s impact not only while he was alive but long after he died. This is scarcely a good reason to marry anybody.

Her first husband was a drunk, and he physically abused her. They called them “drunks” in those days, not alcoholics. They had one child, my half-brother Bill who himself ended up becoming an alcoholic at age 15 and did not gain his sobriety until six months before he died at age 48. My mother Gert after five years of this first marriage decided enough was enough; took her child, and got a divorce. A couple years later, she met my father. That was a good marriage, but as he was becoming a workaholic she started drinking. They stayed married about 14 years and in the last few years her drinking habits became serious. I could write about those years, but won’t because she has. I’ve got her book here, Cheridyn, which some day you might be interested in reading. Because of this book [THE LATE LIZ] and because she was becoming well-known, this led to frequent speaking engagements around the country. She had become a recovered alcoholic.

I won’t go into all the gory details about her drinking and the pain of those years. There was a Hollywood movie made out of THE LATE LIZ. The movie was terrible, but the book was wonderful. The book sold a lot, so she was asked to speak in prisons, junior leagues, Lutheran churches, Episcopal churches, Jewish synagogues, black churches, colleges, universities, high schools as well, etc. She spoke all over the country for about 11 months each year. She was an excellent speaker: very funny, very bright, very honest about herself and in the process of these experiences her life came together in powerful ways. This book represents an extraordinary testimony of why there was a need for change. In the first half of the book she talks graphically about herself. The second half discusses at length the beginning and evolution of this change--as if it were a small blade of grass emerging from unlikely soil, with no guarantees, and then how this tiny growth became stronger and stronger.

Toward the beginning of that period she had an interesting experience, which does relate to our subject. She had never gone to church except for weddings and funerals, never used “God” except as a swear word. She was not religious, nor was her father or her mother, as far as I know. This obviously affected my upbringing too. At one point in 1947 she was visiting a close friend in Darien, Connecticut, Helen Merrill (ex-wife of Charles Merrill, my father’s business partner) who gave a dinner party for her. My mother explains how ‘they were eating their dinner and I was drinking mine.’ She was talking about her life, bemoaning what she had been going through, and a person across the table from her said ‘Gert, you seem to have a burden that’s too heavy for you. Why don’t you try handing it over to God?’ Well, she was really surprised at that. She said, ‘you make God sound like a Red Cap and that I should give him my bag.’ He said ‘that’s not a bad image.’

A week later she drove back home to Libertyville, Illinois. There was a mailing in the post box from Tom and Blanche Page, the people across the table at the dinner party. In the mailing there was a brief letter saying how wonderful it was to see her and they wanted her to know that every morning at eight o’clock he and Blanche were praying for her. As far as she knew nobody had ever prayed for her in her entire life. Included in the package was a little magazine called Faith at Work that was put out by a group of affluent Episcopalians and Presbyterians. Rather plushy, upper-middle-upper-class alums from Yale and Princeton, but it was a nice little magazine. In that issue was an article by an Episcopal minister by the name of Sam Shoemaker who was the rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Gramercy Park, New York; the lower part of Manhattan. The title of Sam’s article was “It’s Never too Late to Start Again.” It seemed the piece was written for her.

Shortly after that, maybe even the same day, she found herself on her knees. sober for the first time in her life and saying, ‘I don’t know whether you exist or not, but I am ready to give my life to you, and I promise right now never to touch a drop of liquor in my life again.’ And she never did. As she said, “it doesn’t make sense for an addict to be on her knees, to make such a vow, and then get up and be sober for the rest of her life.” There must be more to the story.

She called a friend of hers next door by the name of Louise Willmarth, who was a Roman Catholic. They were good friends and Gert said, ‘Louise, something’s happened to me. I need to buy a Bible. Where can I get a Bible? I want to start going to church but I know nothing about the churches here.’ Louise asked, ‘do you want a go-getter or a man of God?’ My mother said, ‘I’ll take a man of God, thanks.’ So, Father Rogers in Libertyville in the Episcopal Church was no go-getter, but he was a man of God. My mother started to go to the 8 a.m. communion service, which very few people attended, every Sunday morning. As time went on, weeks and then months, people began to notice that something had happened to her. Her relationship with Bill Behanna, her husband, was changing too. But because her life was going one direction and Bill wanted nothing to do with her new-found religion, they finally split, and she went from strength to strength.

The second half of the book talks about how fragile a new life can be and how if one really gives one’s life to God and shares this experience with others, one learns a lot from others, gains from the support of others, and gives in return, She joined AA, not because she needed to achieve sobriety from it but because she was respectful of what AA was doing. She became, I would say, probably the best- known woman in AA in the United States during a period of maybe 15-20 years. Her book, THE LATE LIZ, took about seven years to write. The first two versions weren’t quite right. One of her close friends Adela Rogers St. Johns was a well-known writer of screen scripts for Hollywood films, long articles in Woman’s Home Companion, and other popular magazines, as well as several books. When she read Gert’s book she said, ‘well done, Gert, but it isn’t you.” My mother picked up the manuscript and walked over to the wastebasket and dropped it in. Shortly afterwards she began version number three and that was it, the final draft.

The book sold handsomely during the many years she was speaking. (At this point I would like to get it back in print as a good paperback edition.) Without question her experience had a major impact upon me. I had no religious upbringing at all although I had gone to an Episcopal school because it was a boarding school, not because it was Episcopal. All this will become clearer as we proceed. As I reflect now on the upbringing I have just hinted at, I see it to be crucial for my own development. I learned from her example how important it is to express oneself and one’s feelings openly and honestly. While it took a relatively long time for these qualities to develop in me, it seems clear now where the beginnings came from. Furthermore, I did learn and have never forgotten that I was no better than anyone else. This became an indissoluble lesson.

My mother and father were divorced in 1937 when I was just 12 years of age. I was sent away to Brooks School in North Andover, Mass. for three years. It was a small school with about 120 boys in what were called six “forms” or grades (7 th through 12 th). It was an Episcopal school and we all attended evensong every evening, and on Sunday there was communion when all boys wore blue suits and stiff collars. I rather liked the liturgy except for kneeling on hard wooden benches. In any case, I liked the school, which was nestled in beautifully rolling hills, and I had a lot of good friends. Two or three times every year I took the train by myself from Chicago to Boston, changed trains from South Station to North Station, and then on to Andover. After three years, my father told me he was taking me out of Brooks and sending me to Phillips Academy, Andover. I asked, ‘why? I love the school?’ He said, ‘Well I went to Andover and it’s a terrific school; I think you’ll love it… just be patient.’ He was right; it is a great school and it was very tough academically, more like a good college than a secondary school. I was there for three years (10 th 11 th and 12 th grades). While Brooks was a much smaller school, Andover had about 850 students when I was there. It has an incredible campus with strikingly handsome buildings. There is a building called George Washington Hall because George Washington literally visited the school. Phillips Academy was founded at almost exactly the same time as was our nation.

Since Andover is not far from Brooks in North Andover, I spent six years (1937-1943) in that part of the country. Andover had a huge and handsome chapel and a fine chaplain. We all went to church on Sundays. On weekdays except Saturday, there was a daily assembly in a large hall where we met for a brief service of prayer, hymns, and a talk by the headmaster or somebody else. Once in a while such programs were conducted by senior students. There was a required and respected year-long course in religion that all lower-middlers (10 th grade) took. The curriculum was basically a college-like course of study. It certainly was as tough as any college I ever knew. We had small classes in both Brooks and Andover. I took Latin, French, science, math, history, etc. My Latin teacher, Horace Poynter, had also taught my father the same course in 1910. We all worked hard, had a strong athletic program, and though I was no superstar I played on a couple varsity teams (soccer and baseball).

While neither Brooks nor Andover had much racial diversity in those days, there was diversity among the students at Andover in terms of religious background (Catholics, Protestants, and Jews) as well as having some economic diversity, which meant that a significant number were on scholarship aid and had work contracts assigments. Andover in particular seemed to honor these kinds of diversity and made no invidious distinctions. In other words, while it never proselytized, Phillips Academy sought to expose students to a variety of religious traditions and ideas. For me, it was the first time I came to know and have many Catholic and Jewish friends. Though I do not remember interreligious dialogues, the very fact of regular mingling widened my world considerably and made me opposed to all forms of religious taunting and prejudice.

Another important part of my heritage came from my grandmother on my father’s side. Her name was Evelyn Bardwell Smith, who was born in 1861 and died in 1969. That’s 108 full years! For over thirty of those years I was very close to her. After school every year I spent two or three weeks with her in her home in South Hadley Falls, Massachusetts. I was her first grandson and so she lavished attention on me. She was a devout but liberal-minded Congregationalist, and every Sunday went to church. And when I was there I went with her. She loved gardening and spent time in her sizable garden on her knees day after day throughout the summers, surrounded by her tulips and roses and pansies, a riot of beautiful colors. She was a bright and interesting person and had a dear sister named Lucy who lived with her, who was much quieter, and who never married. Aunt Lucy used to sit in one chair and my grandmother in another. both reading the newspaper and listening to a table-sized Philco radio. They were both very kind women. Lucy died when she was 95, slightly older than my grandmother was at the same time. Another sister Sarah lived to be over a hundred out in California. A brother Daniel Packer Bardwell, lived to be 93 and had two daughters Leila and Elsie Bardwell who also lived well into their 90s, They were maiden nieces of my grandmother and first cousins to my father. That made them my first cousins once-removed, which was the first time I knew what “once removed” meant. In thinking about my connection with these elderly relatives I am struck by how close I felt to so many of them and believe, as strange as it may seem to you, Cheridyn, in this study, I believe that this kind of closeness also made it more possible for me in subsequent years to crossover divides in religious affiliations. Seeing the value in such crossovers in one area enables one to value crossovers in other aspects of one’s life. Doesn’t that make sense?

All in all, I was especially close to the Bardwell side of the family. We were living in different parts of the country, and it’s interesting that when the family farm in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts had to be sold it was sold to Bill Cosby. who was getting his doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts 25 minutes away by car. Leila Bardwell especially was the one who befriended Bill Cosby’s mother and his wife and they became reasonably close. Every time at Christmas or on her birthday they would send flowers. She was very kind to them, and they to her. After selling the old family homestead where my grandmother was born and where at the age of four she heard that President Lincoln had been shot. After selling the family house, Leila moved into town and had an apartment with her sister until Elsie died. Anyway, I wrote a welcoming letter to Bill Cosby in which I said, ‘I hope that someday our paths may cross.’ I never heard from them, nor did I expect to.

On the whole, my grandparents on my mother’s side were not overly religious. I don’t know much about my grandmother in terms of her religion. Cora Campbell, also Scottish, grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, as a kind of a Scottish/Southern belle. My mother said she was very beautiful, but not very bright. I had no way of knowing, for she lived in Pasadena, CA and I rarely saw her. All I know is that my New England grandmother wrote me boxes of letters, while my California grandmother rarely wrote at all.

One thing about my mother is that when she became a Christian she realized she had to deal with her own anti-Semitic attitudes and those of her family. As we know, anti-Semitism was and can be virulent among Christians. In the mid-1950s I was an assistant minister in an Episcopal Church in Highland Park Illinois. While Highland Park was heavily Jewish, Jews could not belong to any regular country club, and at the time there was little intermarrying. Now the picture has changed a lot, But my mother had to deal with her own anti-Semitism, and deal with it she did. She began to realize that there would have been no Christianity whatsoever had it not been for the Jewish tradition. Not only were Jesus and most of the disciples Jewish. but the whole early code of biblical ethics was basically Jewish. Not that any religion is perfect, nor was Judaism, but she became very appreciative of that tradition. In a genuine sense hers was an interreligious experience in that she had to overcome a prejudice/fear/anger/and disrespect toward another whole point of view and the people who were part of it.

A fundamental part of my early years was what happened when I became eligible for the draft in World War II. After Andover, from which I graduated in June 1943, I went immediately to Yale when I was still 17. I was there for an intensive academic year (June through the following February), basically marking time until I was drafted. I played varsity baseball and dated for the first time in my life. Previously all my schooling since going to Brooks had been single-sex. Once in a while there were tea dances, but I never had any relationship. In fact, I never experienced co-education until I came to Carleton to teach in 1960. Yale College didn’t go co-ed until 1967. In the 1950s when I was at Yale Divinity School there were only a few women, maybe 10% at most. Now the proportion of women in Yale Divinity School is close to 60%.

When I went into the Marine Corps in April 1944 religion was not on my radar screen. I had one experience that did not seem religious at the time, but looking back I realized it opened my eyes to the kind of universe I had been totally blind to. It happened while I was on guard duty on a troop ship in the middle of the night. The ship was taking us from Hawaii to the island of Eniwetok. The skies were clear, the stars were vast, and the phosphorescence in the sea was extraordinary. The scene made me feel part of something so immense and so ongoing that it gave me a vast sense of time and space. I felt as if there was no separation between the vast and the infinitesimal, between the One and the Many, between me and I knew-not-what. I started much later to realize how deeply all things are related as I began to understand the interdependence between everything in the universe. Years later, Buddhist and Christian perspectives extended my horizons beyond what I or anyone else could ever imagine, let alone comprehend.

PART TWO

Earlier I mentioned my first year in New Haven, which was noteworthy in part because for the first time in my life I started dating. Visiting young women at Smith, Vassar, and Connecticut Colleges, as well as inviting young ladies to New Haven, leading to a few weekends of pleasure. And, in the process, I met my first real girlfriend.

After that I went into the Marine Corps, which was another mono-gender experience, at least for me After a year of training and weeks on troop ships I was in the Okinawa campaign (April 1 to June 23, 1945) attached to a radar wing of an antiaircraft battery that aimed at Japanese kamikaze pilots who were trying to sink American cruisers and destroyers in the harbor off Okinawa. Okinawa was the last big battle of the Pacific war. Being in that situation obviously had its impact upon one. But I would say, by comparison, that it did not influence me anywhere near as much as my time in China, which was from September 1945 to late July 1946.

In China we were basically doing two things. First, repatriating the Japanese who had been in Manchuria since 1931 as they began to expand their agricultural empire—known as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Besides military personnel there were grandparents, wives, and children, so it took six months to move them down to North China by train. They were then put on ships headed for Japan. This assignment went on week after week throughout the fall and into the winter. The second part of our duty in the 11 th Marine Regiment (First Marine Division), based in Tientsin (now Tianjin), was guarding war materiel captured from the Japanese and to some degree from the Chinese Communists since we were supporting Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang Party in their struggle with the Communist Party. The civil war between these two sides had been tabled during the years they were both fighting the Japanese, but after the war the civil war resumed. We sided with one part of that civil war and our task was to make sure arms materiel didn’t get into the hands of the Russians who were coming as fast as they could across Siberia. The USSR wanted to subdivide Japan as they did later with Korea, and it is believed by many analysts that one of the reasons for the atomic bomb was to end the war before Russians had gotten to northern Japan and subdivided that country into Soviet and American occupied zones. The larger debate justifying the use of the two atomic bombs continues still. I find it somewhat surprising that I never bore any ill toward the Japanese during the six-month period after the war in during which we were in daily contact with large numbers of them in Tianjin.

My experience of almost a year in China was extremely important to me for many reasons. The first factor was that I had never seen such poverty in my life, and it became an indelible memory. At the same time I came to have great respect for the 20 or so Chinese people whom I came to know well. The second reason why my time there was so life-transforming was because I saw repeated evidence of how badly many Marines and soldiers treated the ordinary Chinese. This bothered me enormously. There were constant beatings and arrogant talk about the so-called ‘gooks’ as if the Chinese had no culture. While I didn’t know much about Chinese history or culture, it was clear to me then and to anyone who cared to investigate it that Chinese history and culture were among the world’s most distinguished in all kinds of ways. The fact that so many of our troops behaved in irresponsible and often cruel ways was deeply offensive. I was profoundly moved and disgusted by what I saw. In a real sense it changed my life and I came for the first time to recognize how widespread was intolerance and how much I cared about issues of social justice, though at this point in my life my awareness of these matters had barely begun.

While an article I wrote on this subject was no prizewinner, it arose out of indignation over what I had witnessed and experienced. I sent this piece to my father and he tried to get it published in Life magazine, an important publication in those days. The answer was negative and it essentially said, ‘Look the boys are just coming home after four or five years of war, and we don’t want to publish any criticism of them.’ It finally did appear in Family Circle Magazine, which paradoxically had a larger circulation than either Time or Life. I’m sure without the efforts of Bob Magowan, who was Charlie Merrill’s son-in-law and CEO of Safeway Stores, it never would have seen the light of day.

And so this piece appeared all over the country! When I look at it now I am embarrassed by the quality of the writing. There was passion certainly, but rhetorically it deserved to be buried. Anyway, it was a fervent expression of outrage. Where does one put that “interreligiously”? I would say it was a kind of prophetic outrage at injustice. It was looking at something that was an important part of human experience and that connects with the ethics of every religious tradition (Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim), which at their best would be opposed to this kind of behavior. From a contemporary point of view it extends the scope of what we mean by “interreligious” though at the time I did not realize that. To me then it was simply cruel and unacceptable behavior

When I returned to civilian life I started thinking about what I wanted to focus on at Yale. I had actually flunked out of Yale earlier, for in my second semester of 1943-44 I wasn’t doing any work. I was dating; I was involved in athletics; and I was playing late night poker in our suite of rooms. Sloth plus a sybaritic life finally caught up with me. Dean Norman Buck (dean of the freshman year) called me in and said, ‘Mr. Smith, you didn’t do very well this year.’ I said, ‘no sir.’ He said, ‘I understand you’re going into the armed services.’ ‘Yes sir.’ ‘Well if you come back, [not when you come back, but if you come back!] and prove to be serious about your studies then we’ll take you back. You’ll have to repeat the second semester.’ ‘Yes sir.’ And so, three years later, when I came back I was eager to prove myself. Before Yale I had never been a great student, maybe a fair student but nothing more.

My academic record over the next three and a half years (1947-50) shows what determination plus some native ability can do. I repeated the second half of my freshman year with an 85 average in five courses. My sophomore year the average jumped to 92. Junior year’s average was 94, across-the-board, the whole year, all courses averaged. And the senior or final year the scale topped at 96 for both semesters. Dean William C. DeVane, Dean of Yale College, called me in and said ‘Mr. Smith, we have never had anybody in the history of Yale College (Yale began in 1701) who has gone from the bottom percentile of his class to the top percentile of his class. The Executive Committee wanted me to congratulate you and tell you that you have done a terrific job.’ Well, Yale does not bestow cum laude, magna cum laude, or summa cum laude upon its honor students, Instead, they have ‘orations’, ‘high orations’, and ‘philosophical orations’. Very few people got summa in those days; now lots of people do. In 1950 I graduated with ‘high orations’ or magna cum laude that included my miserable freshman year in 1943-44.

Clearly, it was a turnaround. Shifting from a pre-med focus, I majored in sociology/anthropology and in my senior year the faculty in that department wanted me to go into graduate work. Yale in the late 40s was bubbling with veterans. Practically everybody, well at least two-thirds of the students in the classes of ’47, ’48, ’49, were veterans and a large proportion of them were really serious about life. Many had been through hell and seen a lot of friends killed, so there was a level of maturity and a quest for meaning that were different from what had ever been the case before.

At this time there were also many interesting things going on of a spiritual and religious nature. For instance, each year there was a Yale University Christian Mission where notable figures from around the world would each come for a week. I don’t consider Billy Graham the greatest of these, but he was there for the better part of a week. Stephen Neill, who spent much of his career as Bishop of the Church of South India in the Anglican Communion, was another. Among the best speakers was Brian Greene, Canon of the Church of England’s Cathedral in Birmingham, England. People came in droves to hear figures of this kind and to meet with them in smaller groups during other parts of their time in New Haven.

I was involved in all this, and helped in planning for it during my senior year. One person whom we wanted to invite because she had recently become a Christian was the well-known movie actress Anne Baxter. I wrote to her and we were surprised when she accepted. Unfortunately, something came up and she was unable to come, but she wrote a gracious letter and sent her picture, which I still have! Ironically, it turned out that when my mother’s book was being made into a feature film Anne Baxter, a recovered alcoholic herself, was chosen to take the lead role as my mother. In the process of the filming she and Anne Baxter became good friends. Recently I learned that Anne was the granddaughter of Frank Lloyd Wright. Small world!

As said earlier, the movie was so terrible, though Anne Baxter was not the reason for its failure, Rather, the producer and director had no clue of how to put together sensitively a film on this kind in which there is not only drama but honest self-reflection, After the film’s premiere was shown in a huge theater in San Antonio my mother was asked to come to the front and give her reactions about the movie. Well, she did it to be a good sport and didn’t bad mouth the director, but the rest of us were slinking down in our seats when we saw what the director had done with the book. To be truthful, we were delighted when the film bombed and went out of circulation. When people now ask me about the movie I just say “don’t look it up”. I hope there are no copies anywhere.

Back to my college days when what was going on among undergraduates in the immediate post-war years was really very interesting. Among these was a widespread phenomenon known as “cell groups”, which were a kind of small Bible study group. In these groups people would talk about their own experiences and frequently the members of these groups stayed together as a cell group for two or three years, or more. The intent of these weekly meetings was not to convert people; rather, they provided a safe place in which to share one’s own experiences and to gain perspective on them through informal study of scripture.

When my Yale College experience was over in 1950, I enrolled in Yale Divinity School (YDS) just up the hill from Yale College. At the time YDS was clearly one of the two best divinity schools in the United States. The faculty at YDS and at Union Theological Seminary in New York City were incredible. Among them were the two Niebuhrs: Reinhold at Union and H. Richard at Yale. Other than these giants there were six to eight other faculty members at each school who were of exceptional stature. As was the case at Yale College during these days the students entering divinity schools tended to be older than the average had been previously and because of their military service they brought added maturity to their studies.

I didn’t think much about career choices until after my first year at Divinity School. About that time I decided to go into the field of teaching religion on the college or university level. I had no interest in going into the parish ministry, although I had done fieldwork during my first and second years and in the summers that included working in a parish as well as interning as a psychiatric social worker in a mental hospital. Another summer was spent involved in the Yale Plan Alcohol Clinic. For an entire school year (1951-52) on Wednesday afternoons I taught an hour-long course on world religions to junior high students in a released time program at the Presbyterian Church in Rye, New York. This was my first exposure to the field of religions other than Christianity. Here was I, a brand new Episcopalian with no diverse religious background up to this point.

The textbook we used in that course was Faith Men Live By authored by John Clark Archer, a retired professor at Yale Divinity School. At the time I had no special interest and certainly no expertise in Asian religions. Except for one course there was nothing offered at YDS in this field, but neither was there a demand for such courses. Later there was a full-time scholar in the Hindu tradition, but I took no courses with him when I was there. At any rate, I enjoyed working with the Presbyterian kids in Rye, New York, and because I was excited about the material they tended to be also. While I wasn’t a polished teacher, I made the stuff interesting, and it was at least a worthwhile experience for us all. For teacher and students alike it was a sign of things to come, namely, that Christians were waking up to the importance of knowing something about other religious traditions.

In the 1950s the world was beginning to be disconnected and reconstructed socially, politically and religiously. When I entered Yale Divinity School my intellectual and spiritual world was being both challenged and nurtured month by month, year after year. This was by far the most important educational experience of my life, up to this point. My field of study at YDS was essentially Christian ethics and social ethics. For me, the single most important book in this area of study was Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (1950). If I had to pick half a dozen books that influenced my thinking in a fundamental way during those years that book would certainly be among them. In looking at the history of Christianity Niebuhr saw five different types or ways of how inter-religious conversations and attitudes have manifested themselves over the centuries. This book provides a powerful intellectual model of how varied have been the historic encounters between religious points of view and the cultures in which they exist, While Niebuhr deals mainly with Christianity, it is always Christianity in dialogue or tension with other intellectual and religious positions, for Christianity is never a monolith. In my estimation, even though Christ and Culture focuses on intra-religious dialogue (among and between Christians) it sets the stage for interreligious communication between members of different religious traditions. Its value, therefore, could be highly instructive today as people seek to learn how to coexist interreligiously. No one needs persuading about the importance of open and respectful conversation between different Christian stances in contemporary society. There are similar needs within Islam, and to a certain degree within Hinduism and Judaism.

NIEBUHR’S CHRIST AND CULTURE

Niebuhr examines each of these five types at length. The first one discussed is “Christ Against Culture”, where the church’s basic position is opposition to culture. Because of culture’s corrupting influences there can be no genuine accommodation between the position of the church and the values of culture. He goes into great detail about prominent examples of this.

The second type is the “Christ of Culture” position in which the values of the culture are pretty much the values of the church and so the church becomes identified with culture. There is little separation between them; rather, accommodation with culture is to be desired. He terms this an accommodationist stance, in which the church loses its identity. While the first position is one that’s unwilling to entertain any positive influence of culture, the second lacks its own distinct identity apart from the culture.

Position three is “Christ Above Culture”. The prototype of this is Thomistic theology, the position of the medieval church. That is, culture serves a very important influence and is to be honored as far as it goes. An important subset of this position may be seen in the relationship between faith and reason. Reason is clearly of great importance, for God gave us minds to be used responsibly. However, reason takes one only so far, then faith becomes the means by which one sees further. Faith does not supersede reason, but faith incorporates reason and goes beyond it. Thomas Aquinas is the best examplar of the position Niebuhr calls “Christ Above Culture”.

The fourth is “Christ and Culture in Paradox” which is a dialectical and paradoxical relationship between church and culture. Important examples here are those of Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Luther. It tends toward being a dualistic position, though at best it remains a paradoxical relationship. The respective sides are always in tension. The tension is not necessarily bad, but it can lead to a stalemate. It is a position in which the culture is recognized as important and so is the church, but the church needs constantly to be on its guard. There are important elements of this position that can be appropriated into other positions, including the final one,

The final or fifth position is the one with which Niebuhr himself most closely identifies, as do I. This one he calls “Christ the Transformer of Culture”. Culture is always with us. It is not entirely culture’s fault that it often goes astray. Culture needs to be challenged and purified. The church in relationship to culture acts as a catalyst in which it does not see itself as superior but sees that both it and culture are in need of transformation. It is a position of realistic openness. It honors self-criticism, but its fundamental transformation comes from outside itself, from the power of the Holy Spirit, which gives the church its identity. This helps culture become more than it would be otherwise, and helps the church to be open to regular transformation.

All of these are continuing forms of interreligious life and experience. In this book Niebuhr helps one to look anew at 2000 years of history and at many different forms of how church and culture exist in their evolving interrelationships. In the process of wrestling with these phenomena I became intrigued with how interreligious relations are fundamentally crucial for what it means to be a Christian or a Jew or a Buddhist. In one sense, every part of one’s religious understanding is potentially interreligious. There is no way in which the absence of dialogue or active relationship between persons of different religious traditions could be considered a value.

At this early point in my intellectual and spiritual evolution, as I was reading Christ and Culture for the first time, I had not realized what implications it had for the study and practice of interreligious dialogue among and between members of the many forms of world religions. I was in no way ready for that notion. Only in retrospect could I see that I was somehow being influenced by what Niebuhr’s book implied, for in fact it was a radically new form of seeing “religion” and, beyond my realization, it was an natural move into another dimension.

PART THREE

I mentioned earlier that I had begun to be interested in spending time in various monastic settings. My openness to this kind of experience probably began when I was doing field research for my dissertation in England and Scotland in the summer of 1959. My doctoral dissertation was focused on the ‘Christendom Movement’ that was among the more important socially concerned religious movements between World War I and II. At this time the church was seeking to relate responsibly to a rapidly changing social order that included not only an extended World Depression but also the foreshadowing of another war.

Some people regarded the Christendom Movement as a nostalgic attempt to return to the values, if not the exact forms of a long-gone era (that is, medieval Christianity). But some of the movement’s ideals had their appeal to church people in the British Isles who were actively engaged in the social problems of the 1920s, 30s 40s and 50s. There were others more influenced by Neo-Orthodox Protestant theology, but they lacked a particular form by which society might be imaged or modeled. These two positions were under the same umbrella in recognizing that the church seemed to be fading into insignificance and was becoming increasingly fragmented. And yet each position represented a highly critical view of both church and society.

Interested in these same issues were a number of prominent monastic figures within the Anglican Church. When one mentions monastic traditions, one thinks first of the Roman Catholic Church, when actually even in the United States there are Episcopalians and others who are part of a monastic tradition, and are closer to the Anglo-Catholics just mentioned. During that summer of 1959, I spent the entire time interviewing people within the Christendom Movement and among its active members were several people who were part of the Anglican monastic tradition. Unlike their counterparts in the Catholic Church they did not regard the Pope as their ultimate human authority, but they were responsive to the Church at large and to its rich liturgical traditions as well as to the authority of scripture.

MONASTIC EXPERIENCE

One such monastic group was located outside of Cambridge and had some historic roots and connections with Cambridge University. I spent several days there, principally with a person by the name of Brother George Every. In a variety of ways he opened my eyes to the richness of monastic life and to how it could be regarded as an important ingredient not only of the Christendom Movement but as one that added vitality to conversations about the nature of genuine social order. In this experience I began to understand such a community as representative of a third lifestyle—distinguishable from other Anglo-Catholics who might be part of the university and church hierarchy, as well as from the traditional prophetic and priestly voices in the Church of England, not to mention from ordinary lay life within the secular world. Persons like Brother Every, while not ordained to the priesthood, were monks living the celibate life yet whose perspective upon the social order added a deep richness. This third lifestyle was utterly new to me.

Not that I was drawn to the monastic lifestyle for myself; rather, I was drawn to think about the emphasis given to rich liturgy and artistic expression, the value put upon the interior life, and the discovery of what can happen as one listens not only to others but to oneself. While I could not have articulated this clearly at the time, it was the call of the interior life and one’s engagement in the social order -- in combination -- that began to intrigue me and that has remained a principal thread in my life. In Brother George Every I found a person who was as actively involved in social justice issues as anybody, but who brought to the wider social conversation what he found by paying attention to the spirit within himself. It enabled him to listen to others, whether they were in the same situation or not. I was moved by that connection, the connection between one’s inner and one’s outer life. It is a connection that one keeps rediscovering because it is a path, not a destination. It is not a thread that one seizes once and always finds the same. I had begun to see it as something one needs to find ways of practicing. No one can do it for another, but as one listens to others one learns to listen not only to others but to oneself. As one practices listening to oneself (by emptying oneself of one’s ego as much as possible) one discovers new perspectives, new ways of looking, new forms of relating, and new kinds of listening. This becomes a key metaphor for how one keeps rediscovering one’s own inner self and learns to see its interdependence with other parts of the universe. By practicing this “inner conversation” one learns to participate more thoughtfully in whatever forms of interreligious communication one may discover.

LISTENING TO ONESELF

There is no limit to what one can find as one practices listening to oneself and to others. I believe that is why so many people are attracted to Parker Palmer. Not that listening to oneself is easy; in fact, Parker has gone through several bouts of depression, about which he writes candidly. This suggests the possibility of a healthy form of listening to oneself, especially when one has grave doubts about oneself. One is not always going to hear good news, as the Hebrew prophets like Jeremiah discovered. God spoke to him and he didn’t want to listen. He did not want to run around telling people that things were out of order and that they needed to repent. He was pushed into it, but he kept listening to that voice. Whatever it was that was speaking to him he was hearing it.

When Joan of Arc was taunted by some prosecutor, ‘Oh, so you hear God speaking to you, and he speaks in French, does he?’ She says, ‘Well, I hear him in French.’ That is very profound. She hears whatever it is that was speaking to her — whether it was her life experience or God, she hears him in the only voice that she can understand. That is wisdom. If one doesn’t listen, one won’t hear, so listening becomes crucial.

The interior life in a monastic setting -- whether in England or at the Benedictine Abbey at St. John’s in Collegeville, Minnesota – I have valued my initial exposure to the importance of listening. For the most part, these were in the context of liturgy. I listened — though even the chanting was not something that I was initially attuned to. I was exposed to something that had ancient roots. It was lovely to listen to the back and forth rhythms of the liturgy. One can read the liturgy, but one does not get the same resonance as in listening actively to Gregorian chanting. It’s a kind of meditative presence. There are also visual, aesthetic components to this lovely setting--not ostentatious one, just quite lovely. The architecture, the altar cloths, the various instruments or parts of the service — whether these be the chalice or the censer, it was all quite lovely and restful. Manifestly, there is considerable history and tradition behind it. There is a life of extensive practice behind it, which gives it roots. The emphasis on the early life of these traditions was new and appealing. Maybe I was recalling subconsciously the rudiments of this twenty years before at Brooks School in the daily occasions of evensong, or in the celebration of the Eucharist on Sundays. The entire school went into this small chapel and the headmaster, a wonderful person, conducted the service. Evensong was chanted in a lovely service, and it helped to put one’s life into another mode, a larger framework. It has been experiences of such lovely simplicity that have fed my spirit, unknowingly, that helped me welcome the chances in later years to engage in inter-religious circles across boundaries that were never exclusive. They were instead porous; they tended to celebrate differences, welcoming them unafraid,

PLANTED SEEDS

It is interesting to me now that I had no idea that such seeds were being planted then, some of which took root in different forms during that summer of 1959. I was relating to the life of George Every and was quite unaware of what this might lead to. I was convinced even then that this was becoming an important ingredient in my life. In succeeding years (particularly in the 1960s) Charlotte went with me to an Anglican monastic retreat on the Hudson River. It was a church of the Holy Cross and it was Anglican in heritage. On the West Coast also there was another Anglican retreat center where we spent a week each in our own/separate rooms. There was worship, meditation, and individual reading. And there was walking in the lovely hills of central California. The sense one has in experiences of this kind is one of wholeness; the fragments of life are allowed to fit together. Indeed, one gives oneself permission to let the pieces of one’s life come together. Again, I believe this helps one become open to, more welcoming of exchanges across religious or social or generational “divides”. In the process these divides become bridges, and the crossings begin to seem natural. They do not need to be forced.

Eventually one feels the need for more such crossings. In fact, I also believe that recognition of such need is an entirely healthy thing. When I was quite sick in the late 70s and early 80s due to a nasty allergy that nobody was able to diagnose, I lost lots of weight, was in considerable pain, and was looking gray. Finally, I was informed about a more thorough approach to diagnosis that required being in the hospital for three weeks. It was during this time that I came to the realization of my own spiritual hunger, not stimulated primarily by the fact that I was physically ill, but even more by having three weeks of relatively empty time and space, as it were. In retrospect, I saw this as a healthy recognition. It is this type of hunger that we easily dismiss, or seek to cover up But, if this happens, one fails to pay attention to the deeper currents within oneself, and one fails to grow in ways that are needed.

LOOKING

Paradoxically, it was during several of my monastic experiences that I realized I was not sure what I was looking for. That kind of realization is hardly unusual. One may also find something one wasn’t looking for, let’s say, as one comes upon a person with whom one feels an unexpected sense of kinship. This may be a totally unplanned experience. But discovering such kinship makes all the difference in the relationship. It has been my experience that this happens frequently in relating to people whose religious roots and practices are in other traditions. It may always have an element of surprise to it, but when it happens frequently one is no longer surprised, but deeply pleased. If one is open to such connections across religious lines, one begins to wonder whether it’s only one’s inattentiveness when it fails to occur. It may be that lack of curiosity keeps one from discovering such possibilities for connection. This can happen in group experiences, as well as in a one-on-one relationships.

For instance, in student discussion groups if one has no expectation, or if one has a too specific expectation as to where the discussion ought to go, one finds that such an approach tends to backfire. In this manner one would not be open to discovery of the unanticipated. When I first began leading discussions forty years ago in Carleton classes, I realized that at the end of a two-hour discussion I was getting headaches. Why? It was because I was too much in control. Good conversation is not something that can be controlled. This doesn’t mean it can’t or should not be directed in certain respects. A good discussion can be gently steered but not controlled. After realizing what I was doing, I saw how ridiculous it was. I was not allowing the conversation to move in unplanned directions, and the students and I were both aware of this. When I learned to participate in the discussion, then we all learned. And, in the process, I learned to pay attention to what they were saying. In turn, this helped them pay attention to each other. For instance, as I became more skilled at weaving into the discussion what someone else had said earlier but which nobody else had picked up, I became adept at not getting in the way. Rather than steering, I listened and entered into the conversation but did not dominate. I elaborate on this in my brief essay in the recent collection that was a tribute to Parker Palmer.

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

One more thing I’d like to mention about the monastic life relates to how I experienced this in the Buddhist tradition. When I began writing and teaching about Buddhism in particular, I discovered that there were monastic settings or meditation centers to which lay people had regular access. I wanted my students to have experience in those settings, and not just through readings about monastic life or Buddhist mediation. So frequently in courses I made it possible for us to go to the Zen Meditation Center in Minneapolis. We used to arrive in the mid to late afternoon on Fridays, spend the night and stay until noon on Saturday — eating meals in Zen style (a form of elegant simplicity), sleeping in the meditation center, doing meditation, listening to the Zen Master’s talk, and performing a modest amount of work at the center before returning to Northfield. Each of these students had read quite a bit about forms of thinking in the Zen tradition, but they had never experienced being part of a meditation center, however briefly. In this, they were beginning to observe not just what Buddhists thought but what they practiced.

Dainin Katagiri, the Zen Master at that center for over twenty years, and I came to have a genuinely close relationship. I came to realize as the years went on how much I was being influenced by his life. In a real sense I was learning to practice the inseparability of the so-called inner life and life in its communal forms. On my part, this was the beginning of a much clearer intentional life of the spirit. Later, as he was preparing for death and for his own memorial service, I discovered that I was the only person not technically a Buddhist whom he designated to take part in that memorial service. For me, that was an enormous honor. It showed that we had come to have a great love, affection and respect for each other. Was that the consequence of interreligious communication, or was it rather a relationship of many years in which separateness had dissolved and oneness allowed to flourish?

Over the years I had invited Katagiri roshi to come to Carleton both to lead meditation for an hour on a daily basis in the early mornings Monday through Friday. At other times, he taught a course in which meditation was one part but not the only part. And a third way in which he related to Carleton students and to me was when he and I jointly taught a course on the great 13 th century Soto Zen figure Dogen Zenji, the founder of this school in Japan. I will never forget Katagiri’s strikingly simple declaration to a Carleton class that “it’s not so much that life comes from thought . . .” as one would tend to think happens in academic study, for in academic settings one is here to study, to use our minds, and to think clearly. All of this is true, but he was putting this in a more inclusive framework by saying that it is “not so much that life comes from thought, it’s that thought comes from life.” It is by the quality of our lives that we are conditioned to think more openly, more creatively, more respectfully. It is through the integrated quality of one’s life that one is enabled to explore issues in a deeper vein, so when our thinking process is somehow harnessed to a more integrated life one is enabled to think in a more disciplined fashion, to be more balanced and more open to the life and thinking of other people. This is no denigration of thought; instead, it is more a proper balance between the two. When I first heard that, a light of sorts went on. It seems self-evident once one hears it, but I had never thought of it before.

Katagiri’s statement struck me as similar to what the Rinzai Zen Japanese Buddhist philosopher Masao Abe had said in another Carleton classroom. Actually, it was in the same classroom but several years earlier. Masao had taught at Carleton for a couple terms in the early 1970s and toward the end of his stay he asked whether his daughter Chisato could live with us for a year. She had finished college in Japan, but her spoken English was a bit shaky. And so, she did live with us for that year and our whole family developed a close bond with her. Anyway, in class one day Masao made a statement that was striking in its simplicity and clarity, the kind that transforms one’s whole perspective and makes one wonder why one had not thought of it before. He said, “it’s not as though we have a body; we are a body”. If we say we have a body, it’s almost as if the body is an object, that it belongs to us or is given to us, and that it’s something that is subordinate to who we are. To the contrary, the body is inseparable from who we are. What we call the spirit is always in relationship to what we call the body. Neither is higher, neither is lower — they are inseparable. They are part of an entity called the self, and this self is interdependently related to all else that exists.

SOCIAL ETHIC

If one pays attention to such a truth, it has implications for a responsible social ethic, for the bodily needs of persons become inseparable from everything else that constitutes human community and kinship. Clearly, it has implications for how we relate respectfully to each other in all contexts of interreligious dialogue. This furthers one’s sense of integration and interrelationship. Much in the natural world are examples of how this is true. Breathing is one such example. Breathing in and breathing out, as are the diastolic and systolic beats of the heart. All these are part of a larger rhythmic relationship. If one goes too far one direction or the other, we get out of sync, out of balance. This is easier to recognize when it proves to be ruinous to one’s body, but it’s equally true in all aspects of one’s personal and communal life wherein harmony, rhythm, and balance are vital but are often ignored.

At this point I’d like to discuss what happened academically at Carleton when we began to enlarge the curriculum to include world cultures that had been virtually ignored until the mid-1960s when Asian studies began to emerge. I see this to be vital to your project, Cheridyn, about interreligious relationships because such an institutional decision began to open up faculty and student awareness of cultural, social and religious differences that extended the horizons of what “inter-“ might entail. In other words, the religious definition of world cultures could no longer be defined by catholic, protestant, and jew. The grist for the mill of inter-religious dialogue would never again be the same. And this is as true for dialogue with persons of different religious persuasions as it is for academic study of these differences.

CARLETON COLLEGE

At this point in time Carleton had as its president John Nason who came with considerable experience and contacts in the wider educational and foundation worlds. For example, in the 1960s the Ford Foundation was beginning to give sizable grants to help liberal arts colleges develop programs of study dealing with various key areas of the world. When President Nason appointed a committee of faculty to look into this matter, he did not specify which area Carleton should chose but said instead, ‘I want you to talk about what area(s) in the world you think would help our curriculum become richer by having such a program.’ African studies was a possibility, as were Middle Eastern studies and Latin American studies. For several months the committee wrestled with this issue, exhibiting a kind of openness that was amazing. While most of us on the committee favored Asian studies we did not prejudice the case and those who were Latin American specialists felt that their area had also been given serious consideration. Gradually we recognized for a number of reasons that Asia made the most sense: its many cultures with their long history; its extensive written history; its changing features but long-sustained forms of culture; and its significant modern phenomena not just in religion but in art, political systems, economic ways of organizing the common life that might be significantly different from Western models in all these and other areas.

We finally agreed that our focus would be on Asia, but we found it impossible to choose between South Asia and East Asia because there are three distinctly different but major forms of Asian cultures, having significant influence on other parts of Asia as well as on the West: that is, India, China, and Japan. These three civilizations, being different from each other, not only have long historical traditions but also play an important role in the modern world. With Ford Foundation and other funds we were able to begin the process of hiring specialists in one form of Asian studies or another, plus utilizing other funds to help interested faculty become retooled, as they say, in their own field in order to bring Asian components into what they were already teaching. Asian specialists were beginning to be more common in the American academic scene and thus were now more available to colleges as well as universities. After a couple decades of building this program Carleton’s Asian studies faculty by the early 1980s represented approximately 15% of the whole faculty. It was the consensus of us all that four years of Japanese and Chinese language were essential to a strong program.

The next step, beyond securing Asian specialists and developing an enriched curriculum, was the creation of overseas programs in Asia. I was very much involved in this process. Our first program of this sort was based in India. I was asked by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM), of which Carleton and St. Olaf are members, to set up a program connected with the University of Pune in the State of Maharashtra. My wife and I went to Pune in the fall of 1968 and had many talks with faculty and administrators. It was clear that they were as interested as we in having a group of American students each year for a period of six months, for it meant that some of their faculty would have the opportunity of teaching American undergraduates who were serious about the study of India. Upon returning I recommended to the presidents and deans of the ACM that we establish this program and it commenced in the summer of 1970. Because we had hired the year before (1969) Eleanor Zelliot, a specialist in Maharashtrian history and who was well-known in that part of India, Carleton became the principal location for the annual spring term orientation program, sharing this from time to time with Lawrence University in Wisconsin. The purpose of the spring term orientation was to prepare students academically and socially for their six months in Pune, beginning in mid-June each year.

It was our conviction that students should study Marathi, the language of the state and should also do coursework in English on various aspects of the history, culture and modern society of this part of India. The literature of the Marathi people goes back as far as French literature, a thousand years of significant literature dealing with history. social life, religion, art and philosophy. We decided that students in the program should begin learning the language during the orientation term and continue this study during their six months in Pune. Speaking interreligiously, listening requires the commitment to gain competency in each other’s language! This means that for each orientation term a teacher with expertise in modern Marathi would be in residence and would teach an intensive course in the language. And, for each student’s other two courses there were offerings in religion, political science, literature, art history, and sociology/anthropology.

For the Pune portion an ACM faculty member would accompany the students to India as resident director, as I did in 1977, and would remain there for the summer months. After that, during the fall, a member of the University of Pune faculty would serve as director. Throughout this six-month time in India each student lived with an Indian family. In virtually all cases the family spoke English, which is not uncommon among educated people in India, and might come from a Hindu background, or Muslim, Buddhist or Christian. Customarily, the home-stay experience was one of the best features of the program, allowing students to continue their study of spoken Marathi and to be part of a local family, an experience that in the majority of instances led to a lifelong friendship. The combination of language and culture was central to this opportunity. After such a full academic year a number of students went into Indian studies on the graduate level and ended up teaching on the college or university level, even though this was never intended to be a career-oriented program.

Similar programs were created in Kyoto (1972) at the University of Doshisha, in Sri Lanka (1983) at the University of Peradeniya, and in Tianjin, China (1992) at Nankai University. The patterns were basically the same: (1) in all cases a consortium of interested colleges formed the core group from which we enrolled students and drew faculty; (2) intensive language study was always the primary focus; (3) home-stay experience was required in all cases; (4) other courses in English on the history and culture of the host country were made available: (5) faculty with appropriate expertise in various areas of study were recruited both locally and from the United States; and (6) considerable effort was made to use a field-study approach within the discipline to the topics being explored. It was my direct personal experience in three of these programs (India, Japan, and Sri Lanka) that there were innumerable opportunities to engage in intercultural and interreligious study, research, communication and dialogue. This was, in fact, central to our efforts as a way of learning about the culture and peoples with whom we had daily contact.

When I was Director of the Associated Kyoto Program (AKP) during 1983-84, I took 34 students and 10 faculty and staff on a 15-day walking pilgrimage in the fall of 1983. Nobody had done that before in any of our programs. It was a great experience, and we all felt it was probably the most significant experience of the entire year, for it combined studying about and participating directly in the culture. We dressed as pilgrims (henro) because the pilgrim path here and there might go through a rice field, whose owner had previously granted permission to all pilgrims, whereas if one were dressed in normal garb one might not have been welcomed. In relation to pilgrims, however, local people expressed real appreciation, maybe especially to foreigners who were doing the pilgrimage as it had been done for a thousand years. By walking this path we were doing it as few contemporary Japanese do. Combining studying and participating in a culture is a more intensive and respectful way. This is an active form of listening to those who are part of that culture, and it is a means of letting the culture and its people speak for themselves.

One learns to honor what people say about themselves, rather than projecting one’s own ideas upon them. One becomes a subject in relationship to other subjects. This is what Martin Buber talks about in his classic essay titled I and Thou. To Buber, personal dialogue seeks I-Thou relationships in contrast to I-It ones that tend to objectify and disrespect others. To me, Cheridyn, and I’m trying to express this in several different ways, this is the epitome of what genuine interreligious engagement is all about.

Another way in which I have engaged others and been engaged was by being a consultant to perhaps 30 colleges and universities with regard to their Asian studies or Asian religions program. I have valued that because it gave me a broad basis for comparison, because I always learn from seeing different forms of teaching about cultures and religions, and because I was able to help them develop their strengths without urging them to take the same approach as other institutions. These sorts of connections are what engaged life is all about. Joseph Oldham, a great figure in the early ecumenical movement of the church, made the observation back in 1910 that essentially all life is relationship. And, obviously, there is no relationship unless both parties are open to and respectful of each other, While his statement may seem simplistic, Oldham was the General Secretary of the 1910 Ecumenical Conference in Edinburgh, which was actually the start of ecumenical or worldwide inter-church relationship, was regarded as the personification of what he and others were striving to accomplish.

PERSONAL CHALLENGE : Am I a Christian or a Buddhist, or both, or neither?

I try to look for possibilities rather than being skeptical from the start. I don’t get discouraged easily. I know that things don’t always go well; there is a lot of tragedy in human life, and endless examples of people mistreating other people in all societies. That realization makes one more realistic, but it need not stop one from seeing possibilities. I don’t know where that sense of hope comes in anyone’s life. It’s a mystery to me, but I like to be involved in conversations with people or committees or departments in which people working together seek to discover new options, finding something that is better than anybody might have accomplished individually. The difficulties come when you have to deal with people who are dead sure they are right. Trying to find ways of working together is the crux of the matter. It is not easy to do deal with one’s own authority or power in a situation, and it’s really difficult to deal with another when that other is not willing to listen.

What happens when a Christian becomes influenced by another religion ?

INFLUENCED BY ANOTHER

Where does one start? It’s important for anyone to have forms of continuity in their life, but this goal should not become absolutized. In my case I decided that I would not stop being a Christian, but my calling perhaps was to be a different kind of Christian than I might have been had Buddhism not influenced me. This is certainly true with regard to my interest and practice of meditation. I did not grow up in a community that placed any value on meditation. There were cell groups, discussions of biblical texts and things like that, but these were not the same thing. I decided that I have been so influenced by this other tradition (Buddhism) that I had begin to understand Christianity in new ways. Two things are of note. One is Buddhism’s teaching that we each have the Buddha nature. What does that mean? The word Buddha comes from the Sanskrit root “budh=” which means “awake”; the Buddha is awake, awake to himself. Our true nature is our capacity to be awakened to who we really are. The process by which one awakens to oneself plus the fact that everybody has this nature, means that we are able to communicate with each other from this common core, This core is similar to the biblical “image of God” that dwells within each person, but Christians don’t seem to take that sense of being born in the image of God as seriously as Buddhists do about the awakened self, the Buddha nature. Also, these two concepts are not the same, but they do represent something that is seen to be common to each person.

Everybody has this same potential. It is not something that we earn, nor is it something we have to obtain. It is what we already are but need to realize/actualize/discover/polish and to practice living this reality. Moreover, this is not something that just happens. It is a process that never ends. It is better to be awakened and mindful than to be unaware and oblivious. While I believe that this is absolutely true, I know there is no one form of it. Who can say they know every thing there is to know? That would be ridiculous. In fact, why would one want to know everything? One could not stand this. If you’ve read the Bhagavad Gita you know that Arjuna asked Krishna, ‘give me your whole, your cosmic self’, and then in the central portion of that text Krishna pours out his divine nature. And to Arjuna this becomes overwhelming; he was staggered by it. In the next chapter he asks Krishna to ‘give me back your dear familiar self again’. Krishna obliges by shrinking himself down to what Arjuna can take. Sometimes we think we want to know everything, but the good news is that we don’t have to. But what we can cope with is the process of knowing ourselves. And, as we practice that, things happen in relationship to others And that is when we and others know there are many options for being engaged with each other.

INTERDEPENDENCE

The second thing that is so powerful about Buddhist teaching is its belief in the reality of interdependence. From what I’ve said before, you know that I see interdependence as a fact, not a theory. Now, of course, it’s a neutral fact. There can obviously be harmful forms of interdependence. We see this in ecological disasters, in situations of continuing violence, in many forms of co-dependency. Healthy forms of interdependency exist in relationships in which we have as much to receive as to give, to give as to receive. To me, it’s just as important to receive as to give. Having the graciousness to receive means that we realize we are not self-sufficient. And the ability to give comes from knowing how much we have received. To cite one of the most important examples, it has become crystal clear to most of us that we are all dependent upon the need to honor and take care of the ecosystem.

Another somewhat surprising form of interdependency to many people comes with the realization that it is only as one enters into personal contact with adherents of another religion, however similar or different from one’s own, that one is able to see one’s own values and beliefs with greater insight and appreciation. In other words we learn to see more clearly what we thought we already knew. Hence the oft-quoted, but not all that frequently practiced motto of the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions, namely, that “when you only know one religion you don’t know any” .

At this point Cheridyn asked me whether I’d ever been labeled a “syncretist” for having a strong interest in two religions?

SYNCRETIST?

1, Well, I recall vividly my first experience in Sri Lanka in 1965. I didn’t know much in detail about Sri Lankan Buddhism then and was just beginning to read about it. A friend of mine at Colgate University gave me an introduction to a bright Sri Lankan Buddhist woman who was on the Supreme Court. I don’t know why she took this tack, but she kept attacking me as an example of Western Christian culture whose missionaries had undermined, ridiculed, and failed to honor the ancient Buddhist traditions in Sri Lanka. Now obviously I was not a missionary. But if one reads about the long colonial history of Sri Lanka one knows that the Portuguese were there from 1505 to 1658 when they were superceded by the Dutch, as they were by the British in the late 18 th century. The colonial presence extended for 450 years until Independence in 1948. It is true there were many Christian missionaries who made light of Buddhism and who tried to lure their young people away from Buddhist schools in an effort to convert them to Christianity. This woman’s accusations had some merit to them, but why were they aimed at me? I was taken off guard; I just listened and didn’t know quite what to say.

Years later I would have been able to listen to her more actively and probably we would have had a good conversation. By the late 1970s and early 80s I could easily have expressed how much I had learned about and been influenced by Buddhism, not only Sri Lankan or Theravada forms, The question becomes ‘Is respect for other traditions a form of syncretism?’ I don’t think so. She might have thought that it was I, ironically, who had been converted, and that it was I the Christian who was open to the strengths and diversity of Buddhist thought and practice! Maybe she would have smirked -- turnabouts are fair play. Anyway, while bright, she was an angry person and probably was not ready for interreligious exchange. Neither was I then. Too bad we never met again.

CONSERVATIVE

2. I suppose there might have been religiously conservative Christian students at Carleton who didn’t take courses from me because they thought that my teaching of Asian religions must have made me a pretty watered-down Christian. I have no way of knowing, While technically an Episcopalian, my family and I joined the local UCC Church decades ago, because the Episcopal Church in Northfield is much weaker by comparison. Anyway, more fundamentalist oriented students at Carleton might have thought ‘here’s a person who actually believes some things about Buddhism, so how could he be a Christian? ‘ If they thought so, they would have been jumping to conclusions. About the subject of syncretism, one knows if one looks carefully at the history of the Christian church, one realizes how diverse are its forms over centuries and how much has been woven into Christian doctrine and practice from other cultures, including other religious currents. This has been true right from the earliest beginnings of the Christian community. From that standpoint every strand of the church is to a considerable degree syncretist in form if not by intent. In any case, the word “syncretism” is terribly ambiguous and while there are examples of intentional syncretism the word is frequently misapplied.

To look at all this from a positive point of view, there are many wonderful examples of cultural evolution and development in Christian doctrine and practice. It is equally the case in the Buddhist tradition. When a young Jewish person became interested in either Christianity or Buddhism and came to see me, for example, I never tried to lure him or her away from Judaism. I might say what do you find in your own tradition that you either have problems with or things that you don’t like? I might try to invite that person to entertain what it is that they want to move away from or toward, but I never tried to drive them away from where they started. I believe it’s an offense to impose one’s own view on anybody. Besides, it doesn’t work.

Another feature of conversations with others about their religious position is the willingness to admit one does not know when that is the case. That is the stance of being agnostic (not-knowing) about whatever it is that one honestly does not know. If one’s mind remains open, then being agnostic is a perfectly legitimate position. There is no need for clarity about some of one’s beliefs to be incompatible with being agnostic about other parts? There can be healthy ingredients of agnosticism in everybody’s religious position and that being agnostic is being able to tolerate healthy doubt as well as ambiguity. It is the Achilles heel of literal-minded religious positions that they have no or little tolerance for ambiguity and almost none for agnosticism. In a similar way, it makes sense to keep one’s own doubts in suspension, so they too are open to reexamination. Suspension of disbelief is a nice phrase, for it honors provisional points of view in contrast to absolutist ones. Suspension of disbelief is quite compatible with forms of commitment and affirmation. Then again, it must allow for entertaining new points of view.

H, Richard Niebuhr was a magnificent lecturer; it was a kind of sacred experience to hear him talk in class. In his annually given two-term course in Christian ethics he explored three basic kinds of ethics within which there were many sub-types. The first kind was teleological in nature, asking the question of what is the basic telos or goal, end or purpose in life? Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas are the primary exponents of this position. The second type is known as the deontological position, wherein the question deals with one’s duties in life, one’s obligations (deon). What ought one to do, a question that is both personal and social, arising out of specific situations and needs to be contextualized? Immanuel Kant represents the major form of this position. Type three is one he terms kathecontological, an ethic of responding sensitively to the situation, not necessarily asking what is my obligation in general. Niebuhr saw this third position somewhat in aesthetic terms, almost as if he were talking about the art of interrelating to each other in society. As we noted with Joseph Oldham, all life is relationship, so Niebuhr believed that one needs to be continually open to new forms of discovering what relationship means in each situation. As the old hymn goes, ‘new occasions teach new duties’, but Niebuhr’s approach is more subtle and far more reflective. As with all forms of art, what is required is the cultivation of one’s inner ability to relate to one’s fellow man, the forms of which can be very creative. Fundamentally, this ability is spiritual in quality as well as having ethical value. A provisional example of this to Niebuhr was the 18 th century British philosopher Lord Thomas Shaftesbury. It was my perception that this third type was the one with which Niebuhr truly identified, but that this position was never fully developed by him.

In any case, this third type made him look again at the word ‘responsibility’ with an emphasis upon the second part of that word, namely, ‘ability’ and I believe that this emphasis is original with him. Thus, instead of examining the word ‘responsibility’ as found in the deontological sense, he underscored the importance of our ability to respond. When one nominalizes the word responsibility, it can become static as an object, while Niebuhr’s sense was closer to that of a verb than a noun, more a process of responding than a specific obligation. Later when I studied at some depth the Confucian ethic I found it to be similar. Here the question always was ‘how can I respond, given my relationship with parents, children, friends, spouse, etc. to the various and changing situations in life?’ There is no dictum that clearly tells me what my duty is, no particular thing that can be guaranteed as my responsibility. One’s responses to others cannot be nominalized, but we can cultivate our ability to discern how I am to respond within my changing world to the various relationships that are inherent in my circumstances, And this capacity to respond is very much a part of what it means to be human.

As you know, Cheridyn, I enjoy talking about these things, for they are a part of the larger interdependent world without which we would not exist. Ending up at this place (Carleton College and Northfield) was for me nothing but heaven’s grace. As have been the opportunities to be exposed to so many of these religious traditions. When I started way back in my college days, I had no idea that these worlds of time and space were out there. Nor could I have imagined that I might have any interest in studying about them. Or that studying about them would take me and our family again and again to places like Japan, China, India, Sri Lanka and Britain. Or exposed me to so many other colleges that are part of the consortia of which Carleton is a member. Or involved me with so many of the faculty and some of the students at those colleges. All this has been a continual extending and enriching of my world. It has been a process of receiving and giving, and learning and teaching, for when one becomes a learner together with one’s fellow students of whatever age there’s a form of teaching and learning that is communal and personal at the same time. If I had felt that teaching was conveying information or even just providing perspectives to other people, I would have ended up with no joy in my profession or no sense of camaraderie with my colleagues. As you know, I see cultivating and enjoying Japanese gardens as a symbol of what I’ve been talking about and thus I end with this extended metaphor.

JAPANESE GARDEN

The creation of a Japanese garden may strike one a s totally dissimilar and even non-academic, but for more than twenty-eight years it has not seemed so to me. Having promoted the creation of a Japanese garden at Carleton, having seen that it was properly designed, created and maintained, and having frequently given talks at this garden, I came to recognize over the years the significant impact it was having upon students, faculty, staff, returning alumni, as well as the Northfield community. In part, because we resisted attributing to the garden any specific meaning or saying what it symbolized, those who came to enjoy the garden’s quiet beauty discovered qualities within themselves that were stimulated by their own experience in relating to this space.

Especially with a work of art, the whole point is the work itself. Even when symbols are visually elegant, they tend to impose a meaning upon the garden. In the process the viewer may refrain from reflecting on what the garden means to him or her. Gardens which speak powerfully are those that invite one to look and to listen, knowing that the next time one visits this garden it will be different. The best kind of symbol invites personal response; it does not explain how one should feel or what the garden means.

In its most artful form, a Japanese garden is an "invitation to contemplation". It seeks not to provide meaning but to animate inner reflection. In this sense, the garden becomes an arena of quiet listening, listening to one's own inner spirit. As a friend's haiku put it: "In the early morn/ shadows dance upon the wall, inviting quiet." This quality of invited contemplation is lucidly expressed by Eliot Deutsch who writes that in a rich aesthetic experience it is we as viewers who are transformed. We are taught nothing; we are called into being in ways we could not have anticipated. We end up being surprised, which is often the ‘content’ of joy. Call the experience ‘aesthetic’ or ‘religious’; it is more than these. We see a bit more clearly our connections with the rest of existence. No label suffices.

The garden thus serves as gentle iconoclasm. It lessens one's thirst for beliefs upon which to cling. Prominent among the properties of Japanese gardens is the aesthetic quality of yûgen, the suggestion of deeper levels of mystery. As one experiences a garden's quiet beauty, its elegant simplicity, the indefinable connections between sound and silence become more pronounced. The loveliness of a ‘well-executed’ garden inspires; it does not need to explain. Explanation limits what one derives from cumulative experience. By imposing ‘meaning’ upon the garden, one detracts from its deeper significance, which cannot be put in words. One's own words, or those of another, tend to interrupt the fullness of meaning that arises when we sense the power of intrinsic harmony. It is to be discovered, again and again.

A Japanese garden is an evolving and unfolding creative process. Maintenance is not simply following the original design. Instead, it is a creative response to the many changes that occur within the garden and its immediate environs over the years. A garden evolves in relationship to its natural and human environments. A creation of "high-quality" does not draw attention only to itself. Instead, it helps the viewer and notably the gardener to experience the seamlessness among all elements of an eco-system. While intrinsically beautiful, such a garden awakens a deeper sense of harmony beyond itself.

DEEP SENSE OF CARING

The highest quality one discovers in a priceless garden lies in its ability to evoke a deeper sense of caring, amounting to a sense of love, as one learns to practice the art of garden maintenance. As one becomes more attentive to the garden's needs one is also fed in the process. The richer the quality of the garden, the more it speaks to what is deepest in oneself. A garden retains its potential for nurturing quietude. It is the testimony of many, and it is my own experience, that this is most deeply felt when one is by oneself taking care of the garden, whether raking gravel, pulling weeds from moss, or engaged in the act of pruning. In this sense, taking care of a garden is like taking care of a child. enabling one to listen with more acuity to the sounds of the outward world, or the whirrings of one's own mind.

For these many reasons, the Carleton Japanese garden, created in 1976, was not named until it became clear how it was being used and received by those who visited it. Following a gestation period of fifteen years its name, the Garden of Quiet Listening ( Joryo-en), came naturally to mind. As one student put it: “The Japanese garden is a peaceful and unique aspect of the Carleton campus. It is a beautiful, secluded spot on campus—perfect for sitting and thinking and gradually slipping away from the hectic Carleton pace for a few minutes.” Opportunities of this kind serve to create a deeper harmony between the feelings of one’s heart and the thoughts of one’s mind. In such indirect ways, the garden has been to many a source of education in its most generic sense. It has helped lead people out of themselves to experience their own interconnection with the many worlds around them. It has had a deeply ‘humanizing’ influence. It is another form in which learning occurs.

Or, to quote a former mentor of mine, the well-known literary critic Austin Warren, “I want, in a sense, to teach something which I have not yet learned . . . .We begin, always . . . .Everything outer must become inner. Only everything is enough.” There is much wisdom in these words.