Masters and Their Dherents

M and I spent yesterday AM listening to a series of memorial lectures on the 20 th anniversary of a very wise old man's death. Moving speeches by his now 80 year old daughter, herself a near retired professor of religious history, and her son a middle aged religious leader in his own right. At one point a tape was played of the old man speaking to a small group of people gathered to celebrate the first month of a child's life. I had known the speaker since I waa a child ... a connection between him and my grandfather, another religious thinker. I'm certain that I had pestered both old men in the manner youngsters do. I cared deeply for them both. In this talk (I had heard many that this man gave in the 50's and early 60's ... this was mid 1970's and he must have been in his Last Quarter). He spoke of going into classrooms full of sadness and feeling very old about to confront college aged and graduate school aged seminarian types. 'An old man facing a group of perhaps naive but wide-eyed and bright youngsters.' As the lecture progressed, he said that he felt other religious thinkers join him ... his grandfather, scholars from the 12th and 13th Centuries and beyond .... and, he added, "from antiquity." By the end og his 3-4 hour seminars, he would feel, apparently, like one in the middle of an unbroken chain of people ... some who agreed with each other and others who disagreed maybe even with themselves, from time to time. As he recognized himself as a part of this chain, his sadness would lift and he would experience -- if I caught his drift, as the kids used to say -- being a part of .... a droplet in a flowing river .... a piece of the whole. If he was sad and tired going in, he said, and in some pain from keeping his aging bory together as he was leaving, during the Seminar he felt no such discomfort ... On one of the discussion boards in which I participate, I've been duplicating either these recent postings or modified versions of them. As I've experienced in similar situations, they were not accepted by everyone as ... what to call them .... 'shared but unfinished ideas' of someone Playing in the Last Quarter. Some see them as pretentious or provocative. At moments such as those, I feel some of the Old Man's sadness (which old man I am referencing?) I am not typically angered by such thoughts ... what do they, betimes in offensive language, say about everyone being entitled to their own thinking. Another person reported being disturbed by the tension, as if there was a need for 'the flowing river' to be without waves ... without perturbations on the surface or below. I had a sufficiency of brilliant teachers, not only in what they knew but in how they 'met' the world in sharing what they had. I think I was 15 and approached the old guy with a question about his religion's attitude towards spaying my promiscuous dog. He could've shooed me away or shewed me the door. Instead, he sat down for, as I recall, 6 hours or more ... it was dark before we finished in the library and he had pulled from the shelf many of his ancient texts. It was all, by the way, obiter dicta ... those comments that judges write after their decisions, comments about their thinking. There was either no decision or, else, the youngster finally came to realize that it didn't matter. I told my grandfather about my meeting with the Old Man. He laughed ... and then laughed some more. Blessed is the one who makes opportunities for the young to meet Masters.