I’VE BEEN THINKING

Mel died in January.

We met as new students at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1963 when he and Martha moved into a rural cottage down the street from ours. Soon we were walking down the dirt road to one another’s homes for drinks and dinner and the conversations Marty and Becky called a halt to when we started talking about eschatology and apocalyptic themes in the New Testament book of Revelation. They both had jobs while we studied most of the day, but on weekends Becky and Marty would shop together, share stories about the anguish of being married to men who worked for God, and knitted themselves into being best friends.

Becky and I went to a church gathering on Saturday night. There were perhaps two hundred and fifty people there who are members of our congregation. It was a fundraiser for our ministry to the homeless in Pasadena, and we were there because Becky is deeply involved in that work. She spends half of every Monday distributing clothes and food and helping to supervise breakfast, showers, and haircuts. This was a dress-up celebration; the meal was good. I knew perhaps ten percent of the people in the room, and Becky knew everybody there.

In the first pages of Allen Levi’s novel Theo of Golden, Theo, an 86-year-old man moves alone into the small Georgia town of Golden. For dozens of brief early chapters we find him engaged with every level of the small town’s citizenry: an injured and hospitalized little girl and her widowed father; a homeless women who roams the pages on her bicycle and insists on bringing it with her, even into church for a memorial service; a wealthy, worldly business consultant from whom Theo rents a lavish apartment; an ambitious cello student and a famous painter; an impoverished and self-pitying book seller and a young couple who’ve opened the coffee shop around which many of the stories revolve.

Even though I read Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences when it was published in 1983, I’d never actually done a survey of myself across his nine categories. The process has been very illuminating. I see myself now in particular ways, not just as an undifferentiated self who is smart (or not). It’s a relief to acknowledge where I’m not very smart - it’s a form of self-knowledge I’ve been reluctant to own because I didn’t want to look too closely at my limitations. It’s been equally satisfying to acknowledge the categories of intelligence where I am strong and claim them as gifts I can share.

In 1983, Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor of education, published Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which I read at the time. Gardner challenges the notion that intelligence can be adequately measured by our skills in language and math, which is what we test for in the SATs (Scholastic Aptitude Test) and a host of other standardized tests.

The longer I live – and I’m now almost halfway through my ninth decade – the more I see the wisdom in the first of the four great truths of Buddhism: The Truth of Suffering. For me, this does not mean that life is all, or even mostly, darkness and pain; it is rather an honest recognition of how hard life can be.

For about a minute at the breakfast table on Sunday, January 4th, I had trouble catching my breath. The problem recurred whenever I climbed the stairs, and more often on Monday. I should have called my doctor but didn’t. By Tuesday it reached the point that I got worried that something was wrong and should have dialed 911, but convinced myself that I could deal with it, hoping it would just disappear. By Wednesday afternoon I couldn’t breathe, thought I was going to die, and finally got to my doctor’s office; the first thing he did was call 911. I wound up in the emergency room of our local hospital with a severe case of Pulmonary Embolism, blood clots in both of my lungs. Once I got home from the hospital, I wrote in detail about the four days of increasing danger and my foolishness in not getting help.

As mass killings in schools, shopping centers, a Las Vegas concert, synagogues, and elsewhere have proliferated, we hear the now-routine response, “our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families,” a phrase that has become an ugly social profanity. If the only thing we taught a newcomer to our country is that gun violence is now the leading killer of our children and teenagers, they would think with good reason that we are insane.

Our older grandson is a student at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. On Saturday, December 13th we got a text from his parents assuring us that he was safe during the shooting in a science building there. Two students were killed, nine others injured, but he was safely locked down with his roommates, as was his girlfriend with hers.

Fiction and non-fiction, new publications and older ones - here's what I read and loved in 2025.

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes —

Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,