[Applause] so there's a story that my children love to hear and want hear over and over again about my childhood when they were little and we called it the gaggy and the snake story gaggy was my grandfather the Reverend Calvin titus Perkins everyone called him Ct and the memory I had was of somites why he was a he was a roving evangelist he was a preacher but he never had a big church for any period of time he he pastored tiny little country churches and he would kind of bring them back to life and move
on and this story was a memory I had of a day I believe it was a Saturday when my grandfather I followed him to the little country church of the moment he was mowing the lawn and I was poking around in the building and in a shed out in the yard and I was looking at something and I looked down beside me and there was this enormous snake coiled and just looking up at me so I raced out of the shed I my grandfather hears me he comes to rescue me in my memory the snake
follows me out of the shed rears up it's taller than my grandfather he has a hoe which he swings and in one fell swoop he kills the snake he has vanquished evil he's vanquished the serpent and that is a perfect story to capture my grandfather faith for him was a battleground the world was a treacherous place it was full of dangers it was full of temptations to sin he was an expert on sin and the result of that was a list of don'ts of rules to avoid sinning I didn't have to follow all his rules
my mother had but it was very clear to us that he would prefer that if we would you weren't supposed to drink or smoke or play cards or dance or go to movies or even go swimming because if you went swimming you might have to wear bathing suit and you might tempt someone to think about sex and the older I grew the more I was sure that all of these rules really came back to trying to avoid having us think about sex I went far far away to college and that whole religious world of my
childhood this really ceased to make sense I also as I felt was grew very smart and learned things that I hadn't known before I learned in a history class that this why Southern Baptists were Southern Baptists it wasn't anything I've ever wondered about it it wasn't a question I never asked and the reason was that Southern Baptists or the ones who wanted to keep their slaves I had learned that Southern Baptists were the only ones going to heaven I mean Methodists didn't even have a fighting chance so I went home for Christmas that year I
didn't confront my grandfather that's not how I would approach him I I asked him gaggy why why the southern and Southern Baptists and he hesitated I don't think he knew the answer and then he finally said well Jesus was born in the south of Galilee and you know I I was furious and I I think I was disgusted whether whether he was being deceptive whether it was willful ignorance whether he wasn't brave enough to say I don't know I was done with his religion and I became a very political person I ended up in my
20s and in divided Berlin I ended up on this great geopolitical canvas where we're good and evil was being acted out again and it was very easy to do that in a grand way in that cold war world of the 1980s but in that place to those clear crisp distinctions really left me wanting I knew people on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall who had nothing and who created lives of dignity and beauty and poetry and intimacy and meaning and I knew people on the western side of that wall who had everything by any
definition and whose inner lives were impoverished and none of that was dependent on politics and so I found myself asking questions which I very reluctantly realized were spiritual and religious questions questions of why are we here and what makes for a worthy life what are we to each other I resolved that I couldn't possibly take religion and myself or in the world seriously if it couldn't be very different from that world of my childhood of my grandfather I had to be able to apply my mind I I had to know that it could it could
be relevant and reconciled with all the complexity that I had experienced in the world I ended up taking myself to the British Isles and and there I discovered this world of the great mystic writings people like Julian of Norwich brother Lawrence the Cloud of Unknowing I listen to the BBC and I I discovered this quantum physicist John Polkinghorne who taught who had also become a theologian later in life and who talked about how he could take what he was learning about the cosmos as a quantum physicist in chaos theory and he could he could find
echoes in that with with that could infuse his sense of the nature of God and what happened when he prayed and and what happens when we die I I gained this ever-larger sense that mystery that both reality and mystery are much larger than we can possibly imagine and that mystery is absolutely rooted in physicality and rooted in both the mess and the beauty of human life and I found this described most explicitly in the Bible itself I was also very drawn to a Celtic idea of thin places thin places thin times the idea that that
there are places where we can experience that the veil between heaven and earth is is worn thin where the temporal and the transcendent seem to touch and I had experiences like that and I remember standing on the west coast of Scotland which is one of these places which is physically both bleak and gorgeous at the same time and feeling like here I can breathe God and so I followed that feeling I am I went to Divinity School I studied theology and the funny thing is all of that took me straight back to my grandfather if
I was thinking about my sense of who God is or what it means to be religious it was all infused with him but what I realized it wasn't infused with his rules it was infused with his physicality with the fullness of him which is was full of contradictions he was strict and he was also one of the funniest people I knew he was playful he once broke his ankle around the house after he retired from preaching he he bought a farm and he planted vegetables and he had pecan trees and he built he built bird
houses in fact he was one of the earth East people I knew as well I even I even you know had experienced enough of the world to be smarter than I was as a sophomore in college and I realized I realized that even his rules had some incensed had some sense to them they had some intelligence behind them only a couple of generations ago things like drinking in gambling addictions alcoholism before a a before the 12 steps these were these were death sentences they were things that devastated lives and families and and so in another
time did getting pregnant under the wrong circumstances and I remembered and cherished the fact that my grandfather actually had a very interesting mind he had a second-grade education but you could throw a mathematical problem at him and he would be able to calculate this thing in his head in instance in an instant and you could you could pull out a calculator and you could check it and it was very strange he didn't know what to make of it we didn't know what to make of it it was kind of a party trick but I think
that it was something it was it was something that he held in tension and not a creative tension he held it off to one side of this other so important part of of who he was in the world I I don't believe he had ever felt that his mind was invited into his faith I came through all of this and ended up creating a radio show where I take up these animating questions behind religion and spirituality this question of what it means to be human and look at how that runs through 21st century lives and
all the disciplines were engaged in in the 21st century and I have kind of ki kind of came to feel early on that I was you know that I was doing this I was doing theology and I was leading this life of conversation asking these questions for my grandfather with my grandfather when fifteen years after I heard John Polkinghorne on the radio in England I had him on my show I was talking about quantum physics and theology somehow with gaggy and mind asking questions he he couldn't have asked but I always I you know I
was also in this 21st century world not just talking to Baptists and the occasional Methodist but Buddhists and Jews and Muslims atheists and I really could not imagine that that would ever be something that he would be comfortable with that he would give his blessing to and and that's that was a real source of sadness for me when I wrote my first book which was a kind of spiritual memoir I ended up having to write a lot about him and I wrote this whimsical passage which was edited out of a very early draft where I
imagined that after all of this somehow wherever my grandfather was beyond space and time he was cheering me on and I imagined my grandfather who was a teetotaler all of his 90 years raising a glass of champagne and my honor and as I say I edited that out very early on because it wasn't serious enough and might might erode my credibility but later in the process of writing I took myself again back to that magical those magical British Isles said the time to the west coast of ireland and i was there with a bunch of
writers and a lot of these other writers were taking a pilgrimage to the local lady who read stones and this is the last kind of thing that I would ever take seriously or consider doing but everyone else came back and they would tell these stories at breakfast every morning about how she had seen inside their souls she had told them about things that she couldn't possibly have known she talked about their past and their present their future of people who were living and who are dead so I finally thought okay fine I'll try it I'll
do it I find myself then about a day later sitting with this absolutely beautiful view over something like the Bay of makes-- with this woman named Mary Madison who has the most beautiful ageless wizard-like face my feet are bare in a bowl full of stones from the Irish coast and she is in fact telling me things she can't possibly know she she knew nothing about me she doesn't even ask your name or what you do she told me about my work she told me about myself she described my children children exquisitely and then she started
describing this gentleman she was seeing and clearly it was my grandfather and here's what she said she said he's proud of you she said he's not as serious as he looks she said I think he was pretty Stern in his lifetime he must have had a lot of rules she said he realizes now that he was even too strict with himself that he denied himself some things and she said he realizes now that we can become close-minded when we could be investigating I don't know what happened in Mary Madison's house that day I don't know
what she taps into it's in that realm of mystery for me which I honor I do know that since that day I oh I have felt that that I have my grandfather's blessing and I forgot the best part when she finished describing him to me she said he's raising a glass to you he's toasting you maybe he's toasting all of us right now I knew on that day that I had his blessing and he has mine thank you [Applause]
