Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste.... Its panelled front was in the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's fiddle-headed beak.
What could be more full of meaning? -- for the pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds. Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow. -- Herman Melville, *Moby Dick*
***
Once upon a time, more years ago now than I care to recount, my sweetheart and soulmate of the moment said to me: "Jensen, sometimes I wish you were a book, so that I could enjoy your companionship whenever I liked, and then put you back on the shelf when I'd had enough." I'm not sure it was really meant as a compliment, but for some reason her words have stuck with me all these years. Decades later, she also told me that she has saved every letter I had ever written her in the too-brief time we were an "item," in the expectation that someday I would become a famous writer and those letters would be valuable. That hasn't happened either, of course; but the real irony is that I have saved all of her letters as well, and have carried them with me from Seattle to New England and back, and then down to Texas, back to Portland Oregon and now here to New England again. I'm not really certain why, except that perhaps they are a talisman and a touchstone of a more innocent time in my life, when I truly believed in love at first sight, and that love can conquer all.
But you won't be reading any of those letters in this BLOG. At least not any time soon....
Rather, I'm starting this BLOG because in less than a month I will observe the twenty-fifth anniversary of my graduation from the Harvard Divinity School, and my subsequent ordination to the Unitarian Universalist ministry at the First and Second Church in Boston. And then on October 22nd (God willing) I plan to celebrate my 50th birthday: a nice "round" birthday (as they say in Denmark), marking the conclusion of my first half-century on the planet, and an important milestone in my lifelong pilgrimage to a wise and sagacious maturity. Of course, the fact that I still haven't really figured out what I want to do (or is it be?) when I grow up remains a bit of a problem, especially since I have already done (and been) so much in the process of trying to figure it out. But what the hell -- we're all just "acting our age" anyway. Young at heart yet wise beyond my years...that's always been pretty much all that I've aspired to. To be "intimate with the moment." To stay hungry and foolish. To count my riches in proportion to the number of things I can afford to let alone.
And then there's the Book: the diary (I hesitate to glorify it with the name "Journal") I've kept semi-religiously since I was a sophomore in High School, and Dr. Donald Cummings assigned it as a requirement for my English class. (Oh Dr Cummings, if only you knew the demon you'd unleashed!) It's a manuscript I've scribbled on almost every day of my life since I was 14 years old, but have never had the nerve to share with another soul, and only rarely found the courage to read again myself. "My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it" a former resident of this neighborhood once wrote (probably first in his own journal). But in many ways my life has been just the opposite -- so much of it devoted to putting it down on paper that perhaps I haven't lived quite as much of it as I might have otherwise. I know there's no going back. But because I have taken so many notes, at least I'm in a position to give it a good going over. Edit. Revise. Rewrite. It's no way to live. But the reason Truth is stranger than fiction is that someone is responsible for fiction.
And finally, a Word about God. I don't really think of myself as much of a theologian. I share the opinion of the American philosopher Charles Saunders Pierce, who once observed that "metaphysics is a subject more curious than useful, the knowledge of which, like that of a sunken reef, serves chiefly to enable us to avoid it." And yet, in my current line of work, I often have occasion to speculate about the Ground of Being and matters of "ultimate concern." It is sometimes said that Unitarians pray "to whom it may concern." Personally, I still aspire to "pray without ceasing" -- to transform my life into something worthy of God's faith in me, as a humble act of gratitude for the undeserved and arbitrary gift of life itself. It's true: none of us asked to be born. But thank God that we were, and now enjoy the privilege and the opportunity of wondering what in the world it all may mean, and how we best fit in: a (small) part of the whole, and yet whole within ourselves, connected to everything that was and is and is to be, yet alone in the solitude of our own self-consciousness until we take the profound step of reaching out to others in a relationship of intimacy and trust. And there you have it: the Gospel According to Me. Or at least a first draft....
Here is the place where I now work.
The First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Founded in 1758. Universalist & Unitarian since 1829.
No comments:
Post a Comment