The Meaning of These Days
Memoir of a Philosophical Pastor
Kenneth D. Stephens
THE MEANING OF THESE DAYS
Memoir of a Philosophical Pastor
Copyright © 2013 Kenneth D. Stephens. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
ISBN 13: 978-1-62032-814-9
EISBN 13: 978-1-62189-781-1
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
In memory of my father,
the Rev. Daniel K. Stephens
Preface
This book started as a tract in philosophical theology after I left my profession as an academic philosopher and began my work as a pastor. Soon it turned into this memoir, in which I was able to write how philosophy and religion interacted in the joys and travails of my personal and pastoral life. In this form the book gathered a certain literary significance and a novelistic appeal for seekers, pilgrims, and lost souls on diverse paths and no-paths.
Indeed the book, having been written intermittently over the last thirty years of my ministry, came of age trying to come to grips with the two extremes of the contemporary spiritual quandary. The one side was expressed by Jane Kramer recently, writing in The New Yorker, that we live in fierce theological times. She was referring to Islamic radicalism, its reproach of Western decadence and secularism, and its espousal of its own religious absolutism and exclusivism. She said this surely knowing that Christian fundamentalism thrives on the same critique and narrowmindedness. The other side is the assault we are witnessing on religion itself by some of its cultured despisers, a term used early in the twentieth century by the great liberal theologian Friederich Schleiermacher.
Among the many friends to whom I owe thanks for help and encouragement in the writing of my manuscript are John Cobb, Jr. and Gilchrist McLaren. Cobb is the world-renowned process theologian in Claremont, California. He became my seminary teacher in 1961 and has been my friend ever since. McLaren has been my friend since my college days in India. I found the suggestions of Judy Rollins, a superb writer in her own right, very helpful indeed. Thanks to her and to Connie Kimos for editing this work in such a perceptive, thoughtful, and sensitive way. She was also kind in her personal remarks, generously given along the way.
I have changed some names and details in order to protect people from what might be taken as aspersions on their character, though no such slights are ever intended.
KDS
Prologue
From Henry Van Dyke’s Classic Story of The Other Wise Man
In the days when Augustus Caesar was master of many kings and Herod reigned in Jerusalem, there lived in the city of Ecbatana, among the mountains of Persia, a certain man named Artaban, the Median. His house stood close to the outermost of the seven walls which encircled the royal treasury. From his house he could look over the rising battlements of black and white and crimson and blue and red and silver and gold, to the hill where the summer palace of the Parthian emperors glittered like a jewel in a sevenfold crown.
Around the dwelling of Artaban spread a fair garden, a tangle of flowers and fruit trees, watered by a score of streams descending from the slopes of Mount Orontes, and made musical by innumerable birds. But all color was lost in the soft and odorous darkness of the late September night, and all sounds were hushed in the deep charm of its silence, save the plashing of the water, like a voice half-sobbing and half-laughing under the shadows. High above the trees a dim glow of light shone through the curtained arches of the upper chamber, where the master of the house was holding council with his friends.
He stood by the doorway to greet his guests—a tall, dark man of about forty years, with brilliant eyes set near together under his broad brow, and firm lines graven around his fine, thin lips; the brow of a dreamer and the mouth of a soldier, a man of sensitive feeling but inflexible will—one of those who, in whatever age they may live, are born for inward conflict and a life of quest.
1 | Connaught Place
It was plain I was good for only one thing, religion
She was a pretty Japanese woman looking at me with a faint smile. It was in a small café, and I was probably drinking chai, tea with cream and sugar, I do not remember. She was standing at an entrance to the back rooms, and from my angle of vision I could see only what may have looked like a booth for the café’s customers. She was about my age, twenty. There had been other waitresses just a while ago, but now in a glass darkly I see just her and me. Together they may have decided that she was the right one. No word was spoken.
It was at the port of Tokyo, and the year was 1957. The President Cleveland was waiting in the Harbor. I had flown Pan American from Calcutta to Hong Kong, and had boarded the ship there. Here we were given a few hours. I had time.
The temptation was real but I actually had no intention of yielding. There could be danger in the back rooms, or the maze of back rooms. A man could appear and hover over me with a knife. He would demand my money, or worse, my papers. He would see a hapless, innocent, boyish man sitting on the bed with the pretty woman, but that would not soften him.
There was yet another reason why I said No to the temptation, and I write this with my younger pilgrim readers especially in mind. The act would be an impossible burden for a young person in mid-voyage to carry. The wages of sin is death, says Paul in Romans, and I heard Albrecht Durer’s horsemen Sin and Death, already prowling, come up from behind. Sin strikes first, injecting the victim with the venom. Then the purple twilight descends, frightening the victim. Here I was on the threshold of a new dispensation, an opportunity to go to America to find a foothold on life and flourish. This act would put me instead in the ring with Death.
I do not remember what happened next, except that I abstained. Through the mist of time hazily I see me climbing the white stairs up the side of the immense ship and showing my papers to the men in white uniforms. I was safe.
Pilgrim, you should know a bit about my background before you star trek with me to explore unknown worlds, discover new ways of being, and go where no one has ever gone before. Since I was seven I was sent away to English, American, and Anglo-Indian missionary boarding schools in the Himalayan first range, which by trains with their coolies and crowded platforms and compartments, and by buses with their sherpas in their mountain terminals, may as well have been thousands of miles away from my home in the Punjab, and where in time my behavior became rebellious and I became a transgressor. The narrow-gauge train up to Simla and the buses to Mussoorie took sharp curves, went through tunnels and changes of vegetation and climate, and looked down steeply on worlds left behind. The landscape changed rapidly and grew awesome and frightening as we ascended, a foreshadowing of things to come. Every spring it was numbingly traumatic, both the long tear-suppressed ride up with my beloved Aunt Ta, whose silent sadness seemed bottomless, and her dreaded departure when the boy clung to his aunt’s sari.
The structure in the schools and the friendships I formed in class and on the playground went a long way to sustain me. A conversion experience brought comfort, stability, and meaning to my life. The missionaries from all over the world would bring their Bibles to the services in Kellogg Church on top of