Читать книгу The Meaning of These Days - Kenneth Daniel Stephens - Страница 14

The courage to be in the face of nonbeing

I was forever in dire need of some kind of help to make the next move, the next advance of my life. If it was not for the special letter of recommendation from my philosophy professor Dr. Williams, I would not have been accepted at the Claremont School of Theology. I look back fondly and gratefully on him just as I look back in the same way on the Reverend Woodruff, the Yosemite chaplain. Both built bridges of transcendence to yonder shore for a person they knew had a spotty record and a tenuous existence in this country. They saw the fog of uncertainty enshrouding the young man’s life, but they also witnessed the fire of life in his zesty public campground ministry in the one case and the assiduousness of his class work in the other. They had faith, they must have had, that the young man would in turn someday build bridges for others.

Claremont is a town on the Eastern edge of Los Angeles County. It is the home of a consortium of colleges and graduate school, all private, and of the seminary to which I was admitted. This seminary did not feel cloistered to me. It had just recently opened its doors in that location, and consequently the student body was small and the buildings new and sparse. The architecture and landscaping bespoke cactus and open desert. Mount Baldy loomed to the north as Mount Tamalpais had done in San Anselmo to the west, but the former was dry, rocky, and gulchy.