ニューイングランドの母校のチャプレンから、美しく深みのある冬の便り

Will there really be a "Morning"?
Is there such a thing as "Day"?
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they?
Has it feet like Water lilies?
Has it feathers like a Bird?
Does it come from famous places
Of which I have never heard?
Oh some Scholar! Oh some Sailor!
Oh some Wise Man from the skies!
Please do tell this little Pilgrim
Where the place called "Morning" lies!

Emily Dickinson

Dear Takeo,

A hauntingly beautiful musical setting of this plaintive poem by Emily Dickinson filled the air in Andover Chapel at this year's annual Seasons of Light celebration on November 29, 2016. Recorded by HDS's late musical director Harry Lyn Huff and Tom Bogdan, the song gave melodic voice to our communal grief and rudderless angst twenty-six days after our beloved Harry's sudden death and twenty-one days after an election that left many of us feeling profoundly anxious about the future.

Hope demands ferocious spiritual and intellectual discipline. Practiced as a spiritual virtue, it can develop the soul's resilience; when assailed by trauma, something like healing may emerge, or when assailed by guilt, something like repentance may occur. Practiced as an intellectual commitment, hope can develop the mind's rigorous resistance; when confronted by propaganda, something like truth may break out, or when confronted by evil something like holiness may erupt. At Harvard Divinity School, we strive daily---even if with as much failure as success---to honor and to exercise the habits of mind and heart that might produce a hope stronger than despair, a love stronger than death. The current issue of the School's journal ConSpiracies provides a glimpse of those habits refracted through several writings, prayers, and sermons offered this semester by a few members of the HDS community.

"Will there really be a morning?" We sing this forlorn question into the night together as we grapple with our shadow side, which always produces the mayhem we summon, knowing that we're all interconnected, we're all implicated. In a time when we as a nation seem so deeply divided---so unwilling to reach across our differences with respectful minds and souls---we are striving to remember that, like all liberal arts institutions, HDS is uniquely called to be in the mind and soul business. Each of us. All of us.

May we be helped by all we call Holy to live into and up to that calling.
Sincerely,
Kerry Maloney
HDS Chaplain
Director of Religious and Spiritual Life