It is so good to see you and so good to be part of this group. I thank you so much for having me on, and so good to see you.

I don't know if people know this, but I first met Hitendra at a Columbia Business School continuing education class that he taught. I just admired, loved, and respected his work from the very beginning. I brought him to Trinity to do something for my staff. We just stayed friends. Your friendship has been such a source of blessing and richness for me, Hitendra. Thank you for inviting me.

The Episcopal Church is a Protestant denomination within the larger Christian body. We were started when Henry VIII broke off from the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century. The Episcopal Church, United States is the American branch of what's called the Worldwide Anglican Communion. We're an autonomous branch. We don't have a Pope. We have a presiding Bishop, Bishop Michael Curry. Some of you may remember him because he famously preached at the royal wedding and did such a beautiful job preaching about love.

Can we start with just a moment of silence to settle ourselves and then we'll go from there. I'd like to sort of welcome everyone and ask you to just settle in for just a minute. Since we are speaking of matters of the spirit, let's ask the Holy Spirit to be present with all of us, wherever we are. Come, Holy Spirit, come. Be present in the hearts of your faithful people. Amen.

Trinity is one of the oldest Episcopal churches and one of the oldest churches in the United States. We actually predate the United States of America. We were founded in 1697 in New York, and we are in the same place that we have been, not in the same church. We are actually in our 3rd church now. We have been in Lower Manhattan ever since 1697. My role as Priest in Charge is, the best way to put it, I oversee all aspects of life at Trinity Church.

Lots of people don't know, but Trinity Church founded The Kings College. I think it was in 1752. The Kings College, after the Revolutionary War, had to change its name because the young country was no longer expressing an allegiance to the King of England. They changed the name to Columbia College. So, Columbia, where you teach, I'd like to say, we founded you, buddy.

I grew up in Chicago. My father was a dentist and my mother a homemaker. In my household, we really did not go to church at all. In my house, growing up, for my parents, education and success in education was the highest value. My older brother went off to Harvard and I went off to Amherst, and my little brother went off to Williams. My older brother is a cardiologist now. My younger brother is a Judge in California.

From a very early age, I wanted to be a lawyer and I wanted to be a trial lawyer. I wanted to be a really good and successful trial lawyer. That was very important to me. I sort of arranged my life around that goal.

I ended up going to Amherst, majored in history, graduated with honors, and did the next step up the ladder and moved down Highway 91, I guess it is down to New Haven to go to Yale. The funny thing is, even though this had been this great path that I was on and this great goal that I had, I just wondered if it was the right path for me. I don't know how else to say it, but something inside of me felt a little bit of a disconnect. Because I did not grow up with any sort of overt faith or faith teaching, I really didn't have language for it. I didn't have any way to express or to describe or to talk about that inner sort of disjunction that I had. All I had was the path. I just stayed on that path. Many of the people have probably been on that path as well in their lives.

That's where it got interesting. After I graduated from law school, instead of going back to Chicago, which is what I was supposed to do, I on a whim, moved out to Honolulu. My first job there was selling golf clubs to Japanese tourists. I did that for 2 weeks and realized that maybe if I wanted to stay in Honolulu, which I really loved, I should probably find a more lucrative job. I ended up getting a job as an associate attorney at a wonderful small boutique law firm in downtown Honolulu. Took the bar exam, passed it, started practicing for these guys, and really loved it at first. After a couple of years, I began to feel that what I was doing was not what I wanted to do forever. I don't know how to put that. I don't want to put any fancy language on it. I didn't have any fancy language at the time. I just kept asking myself, is this what I'm going to do for the rest of my life? By this point, I'm 27 years old. I had spent 27 years getting to this thing. I will use a little bit of language that I wouldn't have used then. My life felt at the time, like it would not be fulfilling. I wouldn't have used that language at the time. That is what I will say now.

I'm practicing law. I'm in my late 20s and feeling like, how am I going to do this for the next 50 years? How are we going to do this? Out of the blue, truly out of the blue, some voice inside of me said, Phil, you should go to church. Mind you, I never went to church. This is in the late 80s/early 90s, pre-Internet. I looked in the Yellow Pages under church to try to find something that might look interesting. I found a Unitarian Church that I went to that was near my house and went there one Sunday. The following week, I was driving back from the University of Hawaii, where I had some legal work that I did. This thing is sort of inside of me. I'm not talking about an auditory voice, but something inside of me said, "No, go there." I looked around and to my left, there was this church and it had this sign that said St Clement's Episcopal Church, and it said Holy Eucharist Sunday at 10:00 a.m. The only thing I knew on that sign was Sunday, 10:00 a.m. That was the only thing that made any sense to me at the time. I went the next Sunday.

The best way to put it is that from the very first opening of that service, I felt like I was home. I felt like I was with my family. I felt like my family was speaking a language that I had never heard spoken, but apparently had always known.

I would like to say that God used 2 x 4 upside my head to get my attention on this thing. What happened was that I started going to church every week. After a little while, the priest came up to me and said, "Who the heck are you? Come talk to me. Tell me what's going on?" We became friends and there was a family that kind of adopted me because I was a young guy and they would give me things to read. One day, I was reading a chapter of a book that the father of this family gave me. It was a chapter on what's called the Atonement, the doctrine of the Atonement in Christianity, which is that Jesus died for our sins. I read this chapter, and this was on a Saturday. I lived up in the mountains above Honolulu, and I went out and took a hike. As I was taking that hike, I don't know how else to explain it, but for about 10 minutes, God actually showed me that Atonement was true and that Jesus died for my sins. At that moment, I was totally by myself, with no one around. I don't know what prompted me, but I said, Lord, I give you my life, and I will go wherever you want me to go. Just right there, that was my conversion experience. I was a knuckleheaded, 27-year-old. There was no great background in this. When God speaks and I believe that God speaks to all of us, every single one of us. It's hard not to listen. Our world makes it very easy to not listen. But, when you hear God's voice, it's profound. It was a real blessing. It turned my life on an axis.

Maybe what happened was I allowed myself to hear it. I sometimes think that's true for all of us at one time. We know God's out here speaking. We distract ourselves, but we have got to wait.

Exactly. It's like God saying, "Are you done yet? Are you done talking yet? Are you done? Because I got something I'd like to say, but will wait till you're done and then I'll say something."

One thing I would like to say about that next chapter in my life, going to seminary and becoming a priest. I had been on that achievement track for so long. One of the things about the achievement track is that you end up living most of your life right up in your head. We develop this very robust sort of thinking system and our ability to use our brains and believe that we can think our way through anything or through any problems. We have this muscle builder kind of head, if we could see what it looks like spiritually. Frequently, what happens is that our soul is not fed and developed in the same way when we're on that track.

What I learned in those first several years is that I had to move out of the head and move down into the heart and into my soul. I needed to spend as much time. I think this is true for all humanity. We have to spend as much time developing our spirit, our soul, whatever you want to call it, as we do our heads. We prioritize the head and the intellect, which is a good thing. I love air conditioning right now. Glad we have it. But, we don't spend as much time on our souls. We end up mostly feeding our souls with the soul equivalent of junk food, the soul equivalent of McDonald's. In the high achievement world that many of us live in or lived in or were shaped by, it largely pretends that the soul doesn't really exist to be a whole person. You can go do that on the side. The thing that I find most challenging about liberal arts education, which I love, even though it's purportedly interested in the whole person, it spends almost no time on the development of that thing, which will turn out to be the most important thing about us, which is our soul.

I love young people and seeing them develop and grow. What I've noticed, since I've been on the Board of Trustees and I get to spend more time on campus, is that young people are smarter than we were. They work harder. They do more interesting things. My only thing is I just worry again about this question of are they just doing the next thing to do the next thing, or are they really thinking about what purpose is in life or the reasons why they're doing these things?

This book that I mentioned to you is called The Meritocracy Trap, which I recommend to anyone. It is a great book. Its point is that we're sort of cranking out generations that work hard and have to jump through these hoops, and yet the meaning for these hoops other than getting the next right thing, the right kindergarten gets you into the right grammar school, which gets you into the right high school that gets you into the right college and then the professional school to the right job. At the end of that cycle or at the end of that path, what worries me is that we're going to end up with people who say, why did I do all that? What was the purpose of that?

At Amherst, I just love seeing the kids and talking to them because they are thinking about this stuff. They are smart, they get it. I think one of the things at the pandemic time and the racial injustice protests and whatnot that are going, is they're engaging in things of the heart, of the soul. They're given an opportunity to really see things in ways that might alter the approach to that meritocracy trap. It's a rich time we're in right now. If we take advantage of it, it's a really rich time.

If you don't mind, to answer the question, can I put it into a little larger framework that helps me understand what the issues involved are. I call that the cure of the soul and the two halves of life. I'm stealing this unabashedly from a good friend of mine, the author, Father Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, and a friar, and just all-around wise man. He talks about the two halves of life.

The first half, he calls the path of ascent, it's going up. We could also call that the achievement path. It's where we're largely taking things on and building ourselves. We're going to school, we're getting a job, we're getting married, perhaps, and starting a family. In that first half of life, we're mostly concerned with the questions of the ego. Those questions are questions like what kind of job am I going to have? How do people look at me? How do they treat me? Do I get the respect that I deserve? Those kinds of questions are questions of the ego and the first half of life. They're the appropriate questions for the first half of life.

What Richard Rohr says is that sometimes, this is not a clockwork kind of thing, between the ages of 40 and 60, it could be earlier or later, we hit what he calls a crisis of limitations. That is a loss of some kind. That's a loss, perhaps a job or a relationship or of health or loss of someone close to us; a death. Something in this period we hit up against and shows us that life is actually limited in some way. Rohr says that this crisis of limitations is God's way of inviting us into the second half of life, which he calls the path of descent, or going down. In that path, which he also calls the path of the soul, our soul starts asking its questions, which are entirely different questions than the questions of the first half of life.

When we get to the second half of life, we start asking ourselves questions like have I loved well? Has my work been meaningful and with purpose? What happens when I die? Who is God and what does it mean to have faith? Those are the types of questions that we start to ask ourselves when we get into that second half of life. Those are what he calls the questions of the soul. The secret of the path of descent, this is where practice can come in, is instead of taking things on to oneself, is to begin to give oneself away. You could start this now, even if you're not in the second half of life, with some practice. If you're a person who feels a longing, begin giving yourself away. Go volunteer for something, mentor young people, work for a service organization in your spare time if you can, but begin to give away the self.

Because, what Rohr says, and I have found this to be universally true, is that the purpose of the second half of life, the descent, the giving of ourselves away, is to begin to prepare ourselves for death, which is the great giving away of oneself. The giving away of oneself and the aspect of life that we are most uncomfortable in the West talking about. It's a preparation for death. How would you like to approach death? Would you rather approach death afraid and terrorized by it? Ready to give it away, to give that last ounce of this life, would we be ready to give that away in gratitude and happiness at the end of our lives. How would you like to approach that?

The biggest thing we can begin to do is to give ourselves away to others in service of others. That's number one. That's what the big ticket secret is, is to give yourself away.

Sure, I'm always happy to talk about Thomas Merton, who I consider, even though he died in 1968, a living spiritual father of mine. Merton was a Roman Catholic Trappist monk who lived at the Abbey of Gethsemani, outside of Louisville, Kentucky, for 27 years. He went into the monastery late and stayed the rest of his life. Even though he went in for solitude, he would eventually become an international figure known all over the world for his spirituality and his openness.

I think the story I'd like to reference, if I can, about Thomas Merton is memorialized in the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, because it was a pivotal experience in Merton's spiritual life and one that I can resonate with on many different levels.

In February 1958, he had been in the monastery for about 17 years at that point. They were about an hour away from Louisville, and he had to go into town for something. He finds himself at rush hour, standing on the corner of Fourth and Walnut, and all of a sudden, he said he had the awareness that, as he writes, "I loved all of these people. I see them all shining like the sun," and in all of them, he saw the radiance of God, in all of us. He had what is a remarkable mystical experience, one which across faith traditions is an authentic experience of God, because it is unitive. That is in Merton's experience, an experience that I have had, others who I know, people I've read from a thousand years ago, from across tradition, the experience of God is one of unity, that we are all, not just us humans, but all of creation, all of everything, all of soul, all of being, is one. It's unitive. The most anti-God thing we can do is to break ourselves off into individual chunks, is to individualize ourselves and to think that we are outside of the unity of God's being. Merton taught me that deeply. From that moment in his life, like a car wheel screeching off in a different direction, Merton then got interested in world faiths, became interested in Islam, Buddhism, Daoism. He went way into exploring faiths around the world. He ended up dying in Bangkok at a retreat that he was helping lead on the intersection between monasticism in the Buddhist tradition and the Christian tradition and exploring that with Buddhist monks. He was tragically electrocuted. It was a freak accident in 1968. It was interesting that this unitive experience he had on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville changed his life onto a different trajectory.

If I can say something else about practice for people that are interested in something like this. Abbey of Gethsemani is a place I go to every year on retreat for 5 days. This year I had the opportunity to bring some of my staff from Trinity on retreat. It's a silent monastery. You're not really allowed to talk. They pray eight times a day. The first service is at 3.15 a.m. The monks are very rigorous in their discipline. Of course, you can do whatever you want there and go to whatever the services you want.

I brought this group from New York City to the countryside outside of Louisville, Kentucky. Before we all went, people were asking me questions, I don't know if I'll be able to do this, I don't know if I'll be able to be quiet. I tell you, within a day and a half, we were all saying, "Oh my gosh, can we come back next year?"

One of the things that we can all do, beginning now, because now is a good time, is to encourage a little silence in your life, a little solitude. Turn off Netflix. Because a lot of that is junk food for the soul, too. Take some time to meditate, to practice silence, to practice solitude. It's all good things.

This is the graveyard at Gethsemani. Thomas Merton was their most famous monk. He wrote all these books and he was famous all over the world. When I first went there, I was this big Merton groupie. I went there and when the brother Monk was checking me in, I said, "Sir, can you tell me where Merton's grave is? Because I wanted to go see it." I assumed that it was going to be this granite monument of Thomas Merton, and probably a statue or something. He goes, "You see that tree out there? Go down towards the tree. It's the one second row from the left." Merton's marker is, and I love this reflection on death, just like everyone else's. Isn't that true about death.

Not sure as much. There is a Center at Bellarmine University, which is outside Louisville. But, it's our age, right? I don't get the sense that he is when I go there every year. I have been going for 14 years. He certainly is for me.

Several years ago, when she was canonized, I was invited to be the Episcopal Church representative in New York City to the canonization mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral with Cardinal Dolan. I went and it was remarkable. It was lovely. The truly lovely thing was afterwards I got to go to a reception where her sisters, who live in New York, were all there. These women just radiated joy. I mean, not happy, but joy, authentic joy. That was just breathtaking to be around. I don't know how else to put it, but it was such an honor and a blessing of my life to even get to meet some of them and to be around them. You said she's done a documentary.

Like you said, Hitendra, since we date Trinity to 1697, we are deeply implicated in everything that would become the United States. If you stand at the door of Trinity Church and look down straight down Wall Street, you can see the spot where the African slave market stood at the corner of Water Street and Wall. There's a plaque. Our current church, which was finished in 1846. Just think about that year I gave you 1846. In 1846, in New York City, you would have seen slaves, black slaves walking up and down the streets. You would have seen slaves working, probably helping build Trinity Church. I like to say also that in 1838/1839, when Frederick Douglass broke to his freedom and came North, he crossed over on a boat from the New Jersey side to Manhattan, you can actually see the spot where he landed, and it was about a 10-minute walk from the spot where he landed to St. Paul's Chapel, which is one of our churches. We need to know this stuff. We need to know and remember that New York was based on the slave trade. That's where its money came from. It was deeply implicated. Don't forget, New York was very ambivalent about the civil war and being in the North.

At the same time, this is what we were talking about the other day, when we approach history these days, and I was a history major in college and still read fairly widely in history, we have to remember to approach history with a fair amount of humility. Now there's a lot of movements to tear things down and get rid of the excising things from historical memory. I get the impulse. I caution us. This is where humility comes in. I ask people, in 200 years, what do you think they're going to say about us? I can tell you some things they're going to say about us. They're going to say they knew about global warming. They knew that if they kept living like that, if they kept their reliance upon fossil fuels, if they kept living the lifestyles that they wanted to live, they knew that it was having harmful effects on the world that they would pass off. Shame on them. You know, we will be judged for things like that. We will be judged, too. If we think that somehow we have reached the apotheosis of historical morality, guess again. I think it's imperative that we learn about our history. I think we should also approach it with a little humility.

All that being said, the Confederate monuments tear them down. That is the losing side. Tear them down. Get them out of there.

I think that we do have to approach history with humility. These are people like us living in times like us. I wonder what people will say in 50 years, like why wouldn't they wear masks? They knew that wearing a mask would cut down on the transmission of this thing. What was so hard about wearing a mask? And yet people don't.

Exactly, that's a great way to put it. That's a beautiful way to put it. Add more bricks to the path.

To remember that everything we do has the potential for adding to the sum total of good in this world. Have the courage to add it. Because it could take courage to add to the sum total of good in this world. But do it. We all can do it and have it to do. That's what I would say.

Let's take just a moment. I want to thank the spirit for being with my friend Hitendra and with his community that is here with us today. I want to thank you all. Your hearts can be felt all the way here to New York. Your love for this world. Your love for the work and the passion that you do. Your concern for humanity. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to bind us all together and show us that we are one, a unity, in all of creation. Amen!