Pastors’ Column

During our summertime travels, my family teases me because I talk to strangers. They think it’s quirky, but I consider striking up a conversation with someone unknown a proven strategy. Why not ask a local for his favorite restaurant within walking distance? A willingness to admit you’re a visitor passing through can lead you to an amazing meal, down a trail to an extraordinary vista, or to a historic place of significance you would never have found on your own. Last month, a simple inquiry about finding a good cheese shop in Vermont had our GPS send us down a dirt road along a lovely, wooded creek bed for ten miles! Admittedly, eight miles in, I was beginning to doubt the recommendation, but we arrived to discover both a charming town and the 2023 1^st place winner of the American Cheese Society.

One of the great analysts of human behavior was named Theodor Geisel. Some of you know the name by which he is primarily known—a hint: his middle name was Seuss. Yes, Dr. Seuss, that writer of children’s books, demonstrated great insight and communicated it in wonderfully humorous ways. In one of my favorites, which is 70 years old this year, Horton Hears a Who, there is an elephant named Horton. Of course, elephants have large ears, so Horton can hear that which others could not, which in this case were the cries of distress from microscopic beings who lived on a speck of dust. Once the large elephant discovers the existence of these tiny Whos, he shows he also has a large heart and takes responsibility for their well-being, placing the speck on which all of Whoville exists on a soft clover. 

One of the great delights of moving back from a faraway place is reconnecting with old friends and discovering that they’re even better than I remember. High on that list for me are some dear friends who serve as the Presbyterian chaplains at Princeton University. While visiting a local bakery, they shared some difficult stories of the spring semester, fraught with campus protests, and about their desire as chaplains to live up to their students. “Huh,” I thought and returned to my cannoli cronut, thinking mainly of how good it was to return to a land of reliably good bougie pastries. 

It is practically sacrosanct and probably bordering on sacrilegious, but every August, I have a lemming-like need to walk the school supply aisles. Stacks of composition books speak to stories yet to be written. Planners promise an organized and efficient year ahead. Boxes of crayons and colored pencils are brimming with possibility. I even appreciate the calculators, protractors, and graph paper that tell me any problem can be solved. Walking the aisles, I see families pouring over lists, arguing over decisions, and digging through piles to find the last green college rule spiral ring notebook. I know that within a few hours of the first school bell, the best-laid plans will start to change. Planners will be filled and overfilled. Crayons will be lost and broken in the process of creating art. Calculators will prove frustrating and protractors dangerous. And those composition books? They will be filled with notes and essays and maybe even a few stories that need to be told. The year will be messy, complicated, and beautiful because people are all those things.

As we launched a search to find an Interim Associate Pastor for Youth and their Families, dare I say that when we became aware that the Reverend Andy Greenhow was moving back to the area, it felt providential.

Recording a CD of favorite hymns and anthems has been a conversation Pastor Rachel and I had been in discussion about a year or two before the pandemic, and our Wednesdays Together program was slowly working its way toward having the numbers and confidence to make it happen.