The Meaning of These Days: Memoir of a Philosophical Pastor

By Kenneth Daniel Stephens

Here is the true story of a man from India who comes to the United States to go to seminary, which he finds to be both a demanding social environment and a vigorous philosophical and theological world. After four years of seminary he gets married and completes a doctorate in philosophy. Soon he finds himself in a profound spiritual crisis teaching philosophy in an ivory tower. He hears protests in the streets for civil rights, peace, and environmental integrity. Events conspire to produce a critical turning point in his story. He finally goes into the ministry but is now forced to face the terrors of his own emotional immaturity. The lessons are hard to learn and the road is steep that leads to personal and intellectual adulthood.

The energy that drives The Meaning of These Days is the quest for personal, spiritual, and philosophical integrity in a world of suffering beings, both human and nonhuman. The author identifies with the magi, in W. B.Yeats' well-known poem of 1914, who search for "the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor." Religious leaders of many backgrounds and all informed seekers after Truth in today's busy marketplace of ideas will welcome a book that combines philosophy and world theology with the spiritual life in such an engaging, poetic, and novel way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781621897811

Kenneth Daniel Stephens

Kenneth Stephens is the author of The Meaning of These Days: Memoir of a Philosophical Pastor, which is intended for all persons, regardless of ethnic or religious background, on a spiritual journey of quest. His journey has been a broadly liberating one, one that allows oneself an infinitely expanding horizon. His website themeaningofthesedays.com includes the first seven chapters of the book. Stephens is currently working on a new book-length poetic meditation.

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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 Landour mountain. From there we could see both the eternal snows to the north and the sweltering plains to the south far below. On that sacred site at the age of eleven I knew what I too was good for.

But I failed my BA exams at St. Stephens College in Delhi. I was on my own in New Delhi on Parliament Street and ill-prepared for this new life and brand of education in the big city. My personal life had lost whatever grounding and skeleton it had had in the boarding schools with their dormitory life, their joint study and dining, their sports team and camaraderie with teachers and friends. My father lived with me, but he was himself a solitary figure, frequently gone. Pilgrim, I do not do well when I am alone.

One day my father and I were bicycling back from a meal at my Aunt Dorothy’s small apartment in Gol Market, where my mother and younger brother and some in-laws also lived. At the entrance to a bazaar he told me his side of the back story with my mother. Amid the bustle of bicycle and motor rickshaws and taxis and pedestrians, a shameful family secret was told. It was the lightning flash that brought everything into focus. My father was giving me the key to the world. It was painful for him to share it, and it was impossible for me to hear it. By then I had learned to live with the order that had emerged without asking questions.

On all accounts New Delhi was the place to be at midcentury soon after independence. I experienced those Jawaharlal Nehru days, however, as a disjointed figure gawking from outside the gate. The new 1956 Thunderbird was showcased in a window at Connaught Place, part of the elegant British buildings designed by Edwin Lutgens and Herbert Baker in the early 20th century. The jazz combos from Portuguese Goa, featured by some of the night spots, were as good at the standards as any I have ever heard since then. I listened standing at the door, my mind body become a finely tuned instrument vibrating to the romance and rhythm of Someone to Watch Over Me. Then and there I was an American GI, handsome and tall and unbeatable like Tab Hunter.

To advertise the movie, the bridge over the river Kwai swung physically across the street to the Regal Cinema. No postmodern disillusion here, but a modernistic private sector optimism about the bridges that can be built, the waters that can be crossed. New winds from the West were sweeping the land. People were talking. The private buzz everywhere was about owning a telephone, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stereo set. Television was on its way, and cars with the sleek, flashy designs of the brave new world were about to arrive. Cinerama was already here, just around the corner from The Bridge on the River Kwai.

The reading room at St. Stephens College was packed every morning, not a spare newspaper or magazine in sight. I watched with admiration and no small envy those wellborn young men with strong families and roots, sons of prominent politicians and successful merchants, who knew exactly what information they needed, where to look for it, and how it could be used to advance their life. The wide-eyed ebullient history professor lectured conversationally, without notes, often looking out the window at the Anglican architecture and grassy courtyard as the great Mughal thrones of Babur, Akbar, Jehangir, and Shah Jahan passed by. Nonetheless I had no background or inclination for the subjects I studied, nor did I know how to study them.

Emotionally I was quite close to Aunt Dorothy, who taught at a Christian school close to Gol Market. Sometimes I accompanied her when she went shopping for fabrics and saris in historic Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi, not far from the equally historic Red Fort. Slums and tall dark-looking apartment buildings with brothels extended on both sides of the ancient bazaar. As a family we were socially marginal, though we were deeply religious. Next to the St. Stephens students, however, I felt culturally derelict and psychically uninhabited.

Oh, I tried to put on an upscale front, pleasing to the cultured eye, but it was plain I was good for only one thing, religion. I felt airy, rootless in this big city, and religion was the key to my consolation, the doorway to my survival. Life had been hard enough in the boarding schools. Here anxiety found no harbor, desire could not be patient for the right match, hope scrabbled in vain for a future. Love was unhinged and jealous from the start.

The young woman who waited for me on Parliament Street down below was radiant, vibrant. Love like a vulture reached deep into the core of me, pulling at my bowels. Torrential waves of wanting and jealousy tortured me. I was sinking into a quicksand in an emotional jungle that I did not know. What was happening to me? Was I uncommonly and incorrigibly shy? Was I hobbled by the Himalayan scale of my insecurity? Did I have no maturity or inner strength? Did I mistrust women that profoundly? Was I torn between heart and mind? Did I know intuitively and instinctively the slow simmering secret of love?

I dropped to my knees. It was the re-conversion that calmed the tumultuous sea, just like the first time up at Kellogg Church in Landour. It reconnected me on the inside, gave me a sense of freedom, of strength. It made it easier to navigate the choppy waters of my personal life. With the discipline of prayer and Bible study I was something of a fuller being with more of my faculties in place. An important and innate part of me, whoever or whatever I was, had been missing.

And it was good that I attended the Christian ashram of E. Stanley Jones in the Himalayan foothills with my newfound college friends Gilchrist and Mohit in the summers. The seventy-year-old missionary, writer, and silver-tongued preacher and lecturer, dressed in white kameez and dhoti, emboldened me as to what I myself could do and be. His eloquence, conviction, and the transcendent force of his character and message opened up possibilities that I had not imagined.

Back in New Delhi I handed out in Connaught Place the individual Gospels in the form of attractive little booklets. I prayed on the rooftop about the woman I was mad about. My emotions were yet raw. Suddenly I was still a boy standing scared at the edge of the deep country well outside the Railway Hospital in my home town Ferozepore, and I could see the black water far down. I could not understand this bottomless new madness that afflicted me. I took refuge from the abyss in my Bible, marking up the assurances and promises and comforts as Brother Stanley did with his.

In the meantime my father was writing letters, making connections, his eye on the raging sea.

2 | Mount Tamalpais

Listening to the night sounds of San Francisco in Montgomery Hall

In Tokyo the foreign student population of the ship got much larger, and on the ocean the diet of soup with noodles got tiresome. To my surprise, none other than Norman Vincent Peale addressed us on Sunday. I had heard of him and other New York City preachers like Harry Emerson Fosdick and George Buttrick in my mid-teens from my father. He had some of their books in his small library when we were living in Ambala, and I think I remember seeing The Power of Positive Thinking in that cabinet. I do not remember what Norman Vincent Peale said to the foreign students on the open seas, but it does not matter. I sat riveted. He was a red rubber ball of vitality and inspiration.

I also remember trying to read Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization and Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, both of which I found in that cabinet. During World War Two my father had done graduate work at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, where he had taken classes with Niebuhr. He would talk frequently about Niebuhr, how knowledgeable he was, and filled with ideas, how effervescent he was in his seminars. And also about New York City, how tall were the skyscrapers and colossal the department stores, where you could buy anything from a safety pin to a battleship.

My father’s name was Daniel Khazan Singh then. During the partition of the country and the horrific religious riots, when he was called back quickly, he and the whole family after him changed our last name to Stephens to distinguish ourselves as Christians. Stephen was my grandfather’s first name. It was he that was converted by missionaries.

No, Pilgrim, the books by Mumford and Niebuhr were beyond me. I did read E. Stanley Jones’ daily devotional books, the most popular among them being Abundant Life. I also became engrossed in the Captain Marvel, Superman, and Batman comics which I bought from the English language bookstore. Since I was under age, I tipped the quiet and aloof one-eyed cleaning person to bring me the Scandinavian nudist magazine I had just seen in the shop and keep quiet about it. I gave him a brown paper bag to bring it in.

Ambala had an air force base and an English language movie theater, where I fell in love with Doris Day and waited patiently for movies with Gary Cooper, Montgomery Clift, and Elizabeth Taylor, glossy advertisement photographs and posters of whom were on display in the lobby. Here I saw An American in Paris, A Place in the Sun, the Tarzan movies, and westerns such as The Streets of Laredo, the original one with that title starring William Holden, Macdonald Carey, Mona Freeman, and William Bendix. After sixty years those names come easily to my tongue. The song from Laredo lives now only in my head and is heard only in my car. I was just rambling through/ On the streets of Laredo./ I was just a stranger that day/ On the road to anywhere. The verse I’ve made up goes something like this: She cried when we woke in manana. She knew that soon we’d be parting. She murmured You go Santa Ana, and I to Ol’ Mexico.

It is impossible to explain the depth and expanse of the power that these movies had on me. I began to think differently and see myself differently. They made me cry, they made me laugh out loud, they made me sing. They made me a lone and brave warrior. I was a blank tablet for them. My imagination was ablaze. Would I ever grow up out of Hollywood’s World War Two dramas and musical comedies?

One day during my winter break my father and I were coming through the gate after a walk, and out of curiosity he reached into my back pocket and pulled out the paperback western The Valley of Dry Bones by Arthur Henry Gooden. As we talked he gave me the gut-wrenching news, which I had no choice but to accept: I would not be going back to the American boarding school where I had studied for five years. Instead I would be going to one of the Anglo-Indian schools across the valley, one of the schools against which we competed in sports. They do not want you back, he said, and I cannot afford to send you there anyway.

Strong bonds of friendships had formed at the American