Late in life, I have had childlike fantasies about reconnecting in some future world with people whom I have often thought of as my mentors, just to say – thank you. I want to try to do that here, in brief compass. I hope that this celebration of gratitude will also encourage others who are now mentoring to keep up that good work.
The best mentor I ever had in grammar school was in the sixth grade, at School 13, in semi-rural Eggertsville, New York, just outside of Buffalo: Ms. Westerfeld. She challenged me to search out sharp themes in my reading and to talk about them pointedly, in class. (I thought that she called on me much too often.) Perhaps most poignantly, she once told me privately that I didn’t have to be part of every discussion in class: now and again, she said, it was okay for me to stare out the window.
The single most important teacher at any level I ever had was Mr. Gilbert in Social Studies in the eleventh grade. Some of his students made fun of him, due to his limp, the result of childhood polio. He relentlessly challenged me to think things through in terms of people’s prejudices, focusing especially on historical and political issues. He also installed me as the editor of the weekly school newspaper, the Tattler, and encouraged me to write headstrong editorials about national politics and about in-school issues such as the obsessive attention given to athletics at that time, by teachers as well as by students (never mind that I was a record-setting school swimmer and the goal-keeper on the soccer team), in contrast to a shameful (so I said in more than one editorial) school-wide disinterest in national politics (I was an enthusiastic Republican back then).
Three figures then shaped my undergraduate academic experience at Harvard College more than any others. I still can picture each one in my mind and hear the resonances of their voices. George Buttrick was Preacher to the University at that time. Providentially, I never dropped out of the religious life, as undergraduates tended to do in those days. Rather, early on I found my way to Memorial Church, where Buttrick was wowing a packed congregation every Sunday. I decided, already as a first-year student who had resolved to become a pastor, that one day, I would have to preach like Buttrick.
Providentially, when I was going through some typical adolescent stresses and strains during my sophomore year, it was Buttrick who referred me to a psychiatrist at the college health services, Graham Blaine, who was to go on to a nationally recognized career of his own. Dr. Blaine (I later found out that he was a devout Episcopalian) was of enormous help to me for a couple of years. Many years later, as a fairly good pastoral counselor myself, I sometimes could hear Dr. Blaine’s voice in my own when I was talking with students and others in crisis.
Intellectually, during my sophomore year, my mind was shaped deeply, in ways that I never fully appreciated at the time, by my one-on-one conversations with my history tutor, George Nadel, who later went on to edit several thick volumes of his own about the philosophy of history. He insisted that I closely read – and work to understand – writings by the likes of G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Oswald Spengler, even though that experience was sometimes a blur for me. I can still hear his voice, on occasion, when I’m struggling to grasp some obscure theological text: “Just think now. Don’t give up. You can do it.” Was it an accident three decades later, then, when I immodestly accepted the challenge to publish a single-volume history of the whole history of Christian thought about nature!? I could do it, I thought.
In the very year of that one-on-one undergraduate history tutorial, I took my first course with the then recently arrived theologian of international renown, Paul Tillich, his theology of culture. I eventually took courses with him for six years, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student, including his lectures on his own Systematic Theology; and his graduate seminar, when we read that work intensely and posed countless questions to the great man himself. More particularly, Tillich’s essay on the theology of nature was probably the single most important work of its kind that I ever read. As with all my mentors, I still can hear Tillich’s voice, often, when I grapple with theological issues, large or small.
Later, my life as an aspiring pastor, college teacher, public theologian, and occasional public activist was also profoundly enriched by three other disparate figures. During a year’s study at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, I persuaded that institution’s systematic theologian, Martin Heinecken, to offer me a double-credit individual tutorial on the works of Soren Kierkegaard, a figure whose thought Heinecken knew very well and from whom I believe that I have derived much of my own theological spunkiness.
Then it was on to Harvard Divinity School, whose Dean at that time was the Swedish New Testament scholar, Krister Stendahl, who became a kind of theological giant for me, due both to his scholarship and to his faithful presiding at 8 a.m. Wednesday Eucharists at University Lutheran Church, Cambridge. I was one of a number of Lutheran theology students whom Stendahl took under his wing. In those very years, moreover, my theological life was also richly enhanced by the example of the then pastor at University Lutheran, Henry Horn, whose ritual praxis had been deeply shaped by the Movement for Liturgical Renewal that flourished, especially in Europe, during the first half of the twentieth century.
The final two mentors whom I want to salute here were, in addition to everything else, close friends. Roger Johnson completed his doctoral work at Harvard Divinity School on the theology of Rudolf Bultmann a few years before I finished my own doctoral work at HDS on Karl Barth. Roger encouraged me to apply for the position of Chaplain and Lecturer in Religion at Wellesley College, where he taught, and also was a personal confidant during my thirteen years at that institution.
Later, after I had moved on from college chaplaincy and teaching to an inner- city congregation in Hartford, CT., then the fourth poorest city in the U.S., I was immediately befriended by the pastor of a large neighboring UCC congregation, James Kidd. For more than a dozen years, Jim and I were then members of the same six-member clergy group, which met weekly, for breakfast and for prayer, for mutual support, theological discussions, and gossip. I learned much about preaching and pastoral care and public ministry from Jim. He helped me through more than one pastoral crisis, as well.
Can good mentors be a lifetime’s blessing? For me, that question answers itself. I am most grateful.