Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from August, 2014

O Captain, my Captain!

August 17, 2014 Genesis 45:1-15   In the wake of the news about Robin Williams’ death, Holden and I re-watched Dead Poets’ Society this weekend.   I loved the movie as a teenager when I watched it in the theater.   I was the same age as those young men in the movie, struggling with the same age-old questions of what and who to be, how to be in relationship with my parents and my peers.   Right along with the teenagers on the screen I was not only riveted by the poetry I heard recited with such fervor, but also convinced that I too could seize the day ( carpe diem!) and maybe one day even “contribute a verse to the powerful play,” as Robin Williams’ character, Professor Keating, puts it.   And again this time around, now closer to Robin Williams’ age in the movie, I was spellbound as he looked into the eyes of his students and saw not their stubbornness or meekness or mundaneness or ego, but the uniqueness and possibility teeming within them.   He gently chided the boy who w