Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Fear - Yom Kippur reflections by Joshua Boettiger

My son Joshua Boettiger is rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Bennington, Vermont. He offered these thoughts as a Yom Kippur sermon in the fall of 2006. Some of Joshua's other reflections are in The Rabbi's Blog on the congregation's website. As he notes below, he and I have talked often over the years about the themes he discusses here.

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There’s a Hasidic story where a holy rebbe went on a journey and failed to lock the door of his house. While he was away, a crowd of demons entered and took over his dwelling. When the rebbe returned and opened his door, the demons rushed at him, ready to devour him. The rebbe slammed the door shut and prayed. Then he took a deep breath and opened the door again. At once, the demons pounced but as they reached for the man, he bowed low and acknowledged their presence. An amazing thing happened. Half the demons disappeared but the biggest and strongest were left, and they leapt at the rebbe. He reached out to them and offered them hospitality. Could he give them drink? Cook them a meal? At this, the rest of the demons disappeared – all but one who was the chief. This demon was huge and very fierce. It was not going to be deterred. It opened its jaws, showing the sharpest of teeth, and as it came close, the rebbe put his head right inside the demon’s mouth. At this point, the chief demon also disappeared and the rebbe had his house back.

Listening to NPR the other morning, I heard Arianna Huffington talking about her latest book, which is about fearlessness and how we can all achieve a state of living without fear. I thought of how in so much self-help terminology, fear is talked about as an emotion to overcome, something that keeps us from realizing our true potential. Judaism is counter-cultural in this respect. Yirat HaShem, translated as ‘fear’ or ‘awe’ of God, is a traditional Jewish value, understood as a necessary ingredient in one’s spiritual life, particularly at this time of year. So I wanted to look more closely at Yirat HaShem, what exactly is holy fear? Put differently, what is the role of fear in our lives? Is there such a thing as good fear and bad fear?

At first, fear is a gift given to us. We need it for survival. As Joy Cowley writes, “fear might be an uncomfortable emotion but it is the gift connected to our survival…As new infants we blink at strong light, flinch at loud noise, cry when we experience hunger and discomfort. In early childhood it is our fear that helps keep us safe.” And yet children have an instinctive sense as well for when to confront their fears, when a particular fear is perhaps no longer useful. Cowley is a Catholic thinker who also writes children’s books, one of which is about a farmer who discovers a giant weta in his bed (I don’t know what a weta is either). A mother wrote to Cowley, complaining that her four-year old insisted that his six-year old brother read him the story each night before bed, but then would later wake up screaming that there was a giant weta in his bed. Cowley points out that even though it was terrifying, the four-year old was insisting upon hearing it every night, and was somehow actively dealing with his fear.

Fear is obviously a reality for adults, too, it’s one of our core human experiences. So the question for most of us is not whether or not fear is a good or a bad thing, but rather, how to be in relationship to fear. Arguably, much of our lives and our decisions are affected by our relationship to fear. And it was the same for our biblical ancestors. God tells Abraham, Al tira, Avram. Don’t be afraid. Which, as Torah scholar Aviva Zornberg points out, is a clue that fear was present, that is signifyingthat Abraham was afraid. It’s like Bob Dylan singing, “Don’t think twice it’s alright.” There it is – you’ve just thought twice. You don’t tell someone to not be afraid unless they are feeling afraid. Moses, Rachel and Sarah – all ancestors living with fear. One of God’s names is Pachad Yitzhak, the fear of Isaac. In our sacred stories, fear is one of the ways that we come to know God. In fact, along with love, fear is probably one of two chief paths we have to God.

In our own family narratives, we can probably name the fears that were lifelong companions for our parents and grandparents, our siblings. Entire generations share certain fears. For the one that grew up during the Great Depression, for instance, it is the fear of not having enough. Some of our family’s fears we’ll never know because of how closely many of us guard our fears. And we guard for good reason: in our society, fear is likely to be viewed as a weakness, not to be aired in public. Some fears are related to the stories of our lives. My father lost his father at an early age, and because of this experience, he would probably say that the fear of abandonment has been a companion for him ever since.

When I was little, like almost every child, I was terrified of the dark. There was a crack on the ceiling above my bed that haunted me. Wanting to help, my mother put a band-aid over it, and I subsequently became afraid of the band-aid. My persistent dream was of a man coming down the chimney with a sack to put me in and take me away (maybe this dark and thinly veiled Santa Claus imagery accounts for why I chose Judaism as my path and not Christianity). But as I got older, my fear of the night stayed with me, unabated, and when I was eleven, my parents found a psychologist to whom I could talk to about my fears. In an effort to make me comfortable, he spoke about movies and such, but he kept going on until I was aware that the hour was almost up, and so I worked up my courage and blurted out, “I came here because I was afraid of the dark!” In some ways, even today this fear is just as strong, though it has transformed. I have made some amount of peace with the actual nighttime, but the fear of the dark grows with me and finds new things to attach onto. Fear of the night is fear of what we can’t see. I think in my braver moments, personally and professionally, I am able to step forward towards the fear, and blurt out, “I came here because I’m afraid of the dark!”

In many ways, we are a society driven by fear. At the Interfaith Council meeting last week, one of the ministers who has been in town for years bemoaned the fact that we haven’t been able to get the Bennington Banner to cover events like the interfaith prayer service, or volunteer projects where teens help the elderly. Instead, what sells papers are the grizzly car accidents, the abductions, and the untimely deaths. This was one of the central messages in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 – how our media routinely keeps us terrified. So each day on the news we read of violence, loss, destruction, and tragedy. How are we supposed to process those stories? Vanessa and I were talking about this over breakfast at the Blue Benn, and she said that a natural reaction to what we read every day in the newspapers would be grief – but how can we feel that much grief? So instead we respond with fear, with slowly building up a wall of fear to distance ourselves from those terrible events. We practice a fear that leads to distance, rather than a compassion that leads to closeness.

On a hike a few years ago, I asked my father – who is making a lot of appearances over this Yom Kippur - if he considered fear to be a useful emotion. He said he thought it was, because in his thinking, fear is relational – it is something real that invites us into relationship with whatever or whoever it is that we’re afraid of. And where there is the potential for relationship, there is the potential for real work and transformation. Anxiety on the other hand, he said, was less useful – because with anxiety, there is no relationship. In anxiety, one is just spinning round in one’s own head.

I want to turn to the notion of what our tradition might mean when it speaks of yirat hashem / fear of God. For those of us who do not find resonance with the idea of a rewarding and punishing deity, we probably relate less to yirat hashem as fear of getting smitten from above by a well-placed thunderbolt. But let’s take that anthropomorphic image away and see where we’re left. What is the role of fear in our spiritual lives? And when I say spiritual lives, I’m talking about our daily lives, because the daily regular stuff that life is made of is where Judaism has always said spirituality plays itself out.

Art Green has said that we don’t know what yirat hashem could be: it’s usually death or suffering that we fear – and that’s not the same as fear of God. But what if fear of God could be understood as fear of change? If change is the only constant in our universe, what if God could be defined as change? I think of one of Yehuda Amichai’s – whose yahrzeit was last week - final poems called “Jewish travel: change is God and death is his prophet.” I think of the fall: driving on Kellystand Road a few days ago - blue sky, wind and sun, leaves falling, the mountain positively on fire with color – thinking there is absolutely nothing here I can hold onto. This fall, this season we’re in right now, is about nothing if not change. I don’t even know what to say I love because it’s changing so fast. I felt love and fear. Was this a moment of yirat hashem?

If we’re conscious about it, perhaps the fear of change doesn’t go away, but we learn to see it as a companion, or as a houseguest. Sometimes we slam the door on it and pray, sometimes we bow to it and fix it dinner, sometimes we even stick our head in its jaws. If we’re conscious of our fear, perhaps we don’t act out in unhealthy ways when we feel afraid. Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks about the trop in the movie, “Beautiful Mind” – where the mentally ill protagonist’s voices are embodied and each is a figure in his life. When he is sick, he thinks they are real – and it brings him great suffering. As he gets well, he knows they are not real, but they are still there, hanging out with him, almost like old friends or old companions. He sees them, but does not react to them unconsciously. By the end of “Beautiful Mind,” the protagonist still sees his collection of characters, but he has befriended them. He has brought them into the light where he can see them better. Which is one thing we can do when we are afraid of the dark.

How do we know when we’re in healthy relationship to fear? Cowley says that simple awareness is usually enough. We can ask, “What is it within us that feels tight and restrictive? What thoughts harden our lovely soft hearts? What ideas do we hold in a tight fist? What takes us forward on our sacred journey and what holds us back? Where is the clutter in our lives and how do we name it? How do we fill that inner emptiness that was created for God?”

The commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, and your might comes after the sentence, “What does the Lord your God want of you except that you fear the Lord your God, and walk in his ways.” (Deut. 10:12) Green says that “Judaism has always insisted on the proper balance of love and fear as ideal for maintaining the religious life.” There is a kabbalistic kavannah, or intention, that someone praying begins his prayers with: L’shem yichud kudsha brich hu, uschinte bidchilu ur’chimu l’yached shem yud hey b’vav-hei b’yichuda shelim b’shem kol Israel. For the sake of the unification of the Blessed Holy One’s name, in love and fear, in the name of all who wrestle with God. In love and fear. God’s name is shorthand for how God is manifest in the world. It is our task to make sure that God’s name is unified on this earth, meaning that God’s presence is real to us. And we experience God in moments of love and moments of fear.

The Australian cartoonist, poet and mystic Michael Leunig writes: There are only two feelings. Love and fear. There are only two languages. Love and fear. There are only two activities. Love and fear. There are only two motives, two procedures, two frameworks, two results. Love and fear. Love and fear.

There is a famous rabbinic saying, reshit chochma yirat hashem: the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God. This has always been difficult for me to understand: I couldn’t relate to fear of God as a phrase or emotion. I tried translating fear as ‘awe’ for a while – but that didn’t feel quite right either. Norman Fischer, one of my meditation teachers, has helped me understand this: The ancient rabbis wanted us to be afraid, he says. We spend most of our lives resisting fear – that what we call fear is not actually the direct experience of fear, but the feeling of resisting fear, of trying to keep it at arm’s length. He says the goal is to let ourselves be afraid when we feel afraid, to actually experience the fear. To say, fear is happening – and to not fight it off.

My dad and I have had a chavruta around fear for years. And after sending him a draft of this he wrote back with these thoughts: “So yes, perhaps there is such a thing as good fear and bad fear. Good fear is fear expressed, unleashed, felt, embraced, shared, drawn into relationship, in the light. Bad fear is fear resisted, contained, held at bay, or tightly inside, rejected, in the dark.”

On Yom Kippur, we come forward and put our heads into the jaws of our fears. We acknowledge our habitual avoidance of that which makes us afraid – and we see the connection between the avoidance of fear and hurting other people and ourselves. On Yom Kippur, fear is infused into the liturgy, we call God by the name of fear, we feel our fragility and the change swirling around us. May we be willing. May there be mercy.

"Losing My Religion" - by Joshua Boettiger

My son Joshua Boettiger is rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Bennington, Vermont. He offered these thoughts as a Rosh Hashana sermon in the fall of 2006. Beth El is a Reconstructionist congregation now nearly 100 years old. Some of Joshua's other reflections are in The Rabbi's Blog on the congregation's website.

Religion has a bad name these days. That's not really a news flash, I know. At a time when stakes have probably never been higher on this little planet that we live on, religion is seen, by and large, as part of the problem, perhaps the central part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

These days, religion is more typically characterized as something that is divisive at root, and leads to violence - at a time when we desperately need to come together to collectively tackle global issues. Whether we are speaking about the conflicts in Israel, Iraq, Iran, and Darfur, or ecological issues like global climate change - religion is usually portrayed as, if not the firestarter, then at least that which adds gasoline to the flames. The religious people who grab the headlines tend to be the Mel Gibsons, or the Sheikh Nasrallahs.

Those of us who are not fundamentalists are left wondering about the relationship between fundamentals and fundamentalism. Are the fundamentals of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – their basic tenets - so full of intolerance and hatred that fundamentalism would translate into this? And if not, what's wrong with all of our religious traditions that their fundamentals could be so easily misappropriated? Is what we offer, as a non-fundamentalist, progressive faith community only a watered-down version of 'the real thing,' where we selectively edit, hold up the high points of our tradition and duck its darker, more violent side?

In Reconstructionism, we talk about reconstructing words and imbuing them with new meaning, kind of like a new wine in old wineskins sort of thing. I've been thinking about what it might mean to reconstruct this word, 'religion.' First of all, religion is not going away, and America is one of the more religious societies there is. Religion pervades our lives. The wonderful and erudite contemporary Christian thinker Jim Wallis writes, "The real question is not whether religious faith should influence a society and its politics, but rather, how: what form of influence would be most consistent with our faith and provide the best opportunity to positively impact our culture?" Some of us may feel all right about this, some of us may feel profoundly uncomfortable. But regardless - I feel that we need to offer alternate clear, persuasive and humane models of what a religious person is or can be, and what a religious path could look like.

I want to make a case for what I will call progressive religion: what we are doing here, and what other progressive faith communities around town are doing. I want to make a case for our activism being Jewish activism– whether we are Democrats or Republicans or neither. Abraham Joshua Heschel said that prayer must be subversive, that it must challenge the status quo, that it must be daring and imaginative. Rather than being part of the problem, religion can be the fertile ground from which we might prospect for solutions.

On a political level, faith is a term that has been misused. Headline religion talks about faith as that which we know, that which we are sure of. "Our faith tells us this." Faith, to me, refers to my relationship to that which is completely mysterious, that which I cannot know but that occasionally winks at me. When I am in authentic relationship to the mystery, I am in relationship to faith. Faith is not about knowing. Faith is about not knowing. Rather than convey surety and give one a dogma to rally around and shout down others, faith can teach humility - a humility in relationship to both what we know and what we can and cannot control. A religious practice can make us humble. In some conflict resolution training, the first rule is to say 'I don't know.' Because we don't know, we are able to listen deeply to the other, to ourselves, and to the mystery. This model of faith, by definition, makes room for dialogue.

As a progressive Jewish community, in our case as Reconstructionists, we are used to picking and choosing from what we understand as the greater Jewish tradition. We are grounded in Jewish tradition, but we are also informed by democratic, pluralistic values – and we are used to weighing options and making choices. But here's the thing: fundamentalists also pick and choose. There is a series of choices involved in someone's decision to thump his Bible and talk about the overthrow of the infidel, the sinfulness of gays and lesbians, or the coming apocolypse. One could thump one's Bible just as heartily, if not more heartily, and talk about health care for all, the obligation to treat the stranger with compassion and respect, worker's rights, and the fact that the earth does not belong to us, that we are among its caretakers.

Dr. Laura is a nationally syndicated radio host – maybe some of you are her fans, and I can even say that I think at times, she dispenses sage advice. A little judgmental, but sage nonetheless. There is a very funny internet bit where someone plays off of a Dr. Laura quotation in which she says that homosexuality is wrong – plain and simple. Read your Bible and follow it, she admonished a caller. Well, this web author wrote, the shamed caller could have written back to her and asked, "When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. How should I deal with this?" or "I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?"

Fundamentalism – simple two-dimensional literalism - does not hold up. Reading scripture literally is a destructive way to be in relationship to the Bible. You can't read the Torah that way - the Torah is multi-dimensional. The Torah is a book of paradoxes and poetry: rich imagery, narrative, metaphor and ambiguity. It is disturbing and violent and beautiful. It is full of ethical mandates and human folly, cruelty and compassion. It is our world today. A reason to still be religious is that Torah is a source of life for us. It asks that we engage it, as we engage our world; it asks, in the words of the poet Stanley Kunitz, that we live in the layers.

Judaism has always taught that there are many ways to read a text. It asks us to study the text together. Where two people study Torah, there God is present – a famous saying goes. Not one person who makes a truth up and clings to it, but two people debating, two people in relationship, two people in tension, in common attention and devotion. There is religion.

Religion doesn't need progressive as an adjective. Religion is progressive when practiced deeply, with whole and open heart. There is a Jewish teaching that we are iconoclasts, that a Jewish faith is that which is affirmed, broken, affirmed, broken, affirmed, and broken again. Moses smashing the first set of tablets teaches us this. The second commandment prohibiting idolatry tells us that we cannot hold or concretize the truth. Rabbi Irwin Kula says in our world, we can only know 'moment truths…In Heaven there is Truth, on earth there are truths.'

Rabbi Kula relays an ancient parable where God consults the angels before creating humans. Some angels argue: human beings will lie and kill in pursuit of the Truth. Other angels say, yes, but they will also engage in wonderful acts of love in their search for truth. And so God decides in the end to create humans, but God casts down Truth from heaven to earth, where it shatters into innumerable fragments. 'Absolute truth cannot exist for any human being.' Adam, the first human, is created from that dust, from the shards. "From now on," Kula writes, "there will be only partial, multiple, and contradictory truths…Each person, each culture, each religion has part of the truth; none has it all." If we don't have it all, then it is imperative that we listen to others at the table.

There is a fascinating discussion taking shape about the role of religion in the public sphere. We are used to cringing when we hear that conversation begin, as it used to be equated with issues like school prayer, and other areas where Jews get squeezed or forgotten in a majority Christian country. But there are a growing number of progressive voices – again not necessarily Democratic or Republican – that are calling us to look again at the role faith and religion can play in the global crisis today. Jim Wallis compares human politics with what he calls 'God's politics,' and says that while human politics tend to be ideological – we are drawn to sweeping ideas and beliefs – God's politics are always on a case by case basis, and deal with actual human beings in need, not with ideas. Family values has become a vague ideological term, when it should be about the day to day work of protecting families, working to ensure a living wage, working to feed the hungry. Family values are about human beings, not ideologies.

We are used to faith, ostensibly a private matter, being made public in distasteful ways. But faith – that which teaches humility, idol-smashing, hope - is a public matter to the degree that we are all in the same fragile boat on a planet that is in dramatic peril. Illinois Senator Barak Obama gave an address this past summer, in which he talks about why religion is dangerous to democracy and why it is also essential. He argues that, as non-fundamentalists we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse: "when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations towards one another; others will fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends. Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their 'personal morality' into public policy debates is a practical absurdity." Faith needs to be in the public debate, but we need a kaleidoscope of faiths, a kaleidoscope of possibilities. Obama also says, "democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific values." As Reconstructionists, committed to Judaism and democracy, this is refreshingly familiar language.

Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard asks, "What would it mean to seize the opportunity to promote pluralist spiritual expression in the public square as a way of re-engaging us, to make room for new language that welcomes spiritual/religious expression in matters of public policy w/o compromising real separation between church and state?"

Obviously this is a large conversation, one that I hope in the months and years to come we can engage in as a community. I wanted today to begin to imagine a third way: between fundamentalism and anti-religion - a way that takes a committed faithful stance in our community, learning from the root Jewish concepts of humility, mystery, relationship, inclusivity, and iconoclasm.

In Proverbs it says, "Without vision, the people perish." (Mishlei 29:18) It is time to do the work of developing an alternate vision to the current religious one of triumphalism, destruction and exclusivity. As humans, we need faith. Faith opens us up, it does not close us down. It brings us toward the other. It offers hope, new visions. A progressive vision might say that faith is grounded in authentic struggle and humility, not absolutism – and that this is a holy struggle that we pray for the strength to do together.

Modum Bad: A Resource for Healing and Renewal

Modum Bad - A Resource for Healing and Renewal

(This paper was published in May 2007, and may be downloaded in its original format at http://www.modum-bad.no/FullArticle.aspx?m=3&amid=9405.)

Modum Bad is an internationally recognized center for residential psychotherapy, education and research, set among the forests and farm fields of southeastern Norway, 60 miles west of Oslo. I first visited for six weeks in 2005, then returned to consult for three months in the winter and spring of 2007. Between us, my fiancée Leigh McCullough and I had long professional experience in a variety of mental health settings in the United States, as well as familiarity with residential centers and communities devoted to personal and professional growth, meditation and the arts. None of that quite prepared us for the richness of our time at Modum Bad.  

Introduction

As we drove from the nearby village of Vikersund onto Modum Bad’s land, tall pines and birch lining the narrow road, we could see evidence of a gentle evolution. A 350-acre estate had for a hundred years been one of Europe’s well-known spas—Modum Bad means “the baths at Modum”—before becoming a residential clinic and learning center in 1957. The cold, iron-rich water of St Olavs Kilde – St. Olav’s Spring – was long considered to have medicinal qualities.

 

Legend has it that Olav, 11th century king and patron saint of Norway, stopped for a Mosaic moment to rest with his men at Modum. The king’s horse grew restless; when he struck the ground with his hooves, the clear water of the spring poured forth. Summer guests at the spa were urged to drink up to five liters a day (through a glass straw, so the iron would not discolor or erode their teeth). Although the main spa building burned in 1940 – on the same day Nazi Germany invaded Norway – Olavs Kilde continues to flow, literally and symbolically.

 

Henrich Arnold Thaulow, physician, patron of the arts and entrepreneur, founded the Modum Bad spa in 1857, and it soon became known throughout Europe and beyond as a haven for rest, recovery and renewal. Physicians confirmed the medical value of the spa’s treatments and entrusted their patients to Modum Bad’s care. Dr. Thaulow was a member of a well-known family of artists; his attention to the role of music, painting and other arts in the healing of souls established a valued tradition still honored in the community’s life.  Artists, writers and musicians, among them Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Munch, were among the spa’s guests. The present Norwegian King Harald’s grandfather, Prince Carl, came to Modum Bad to improve his health during the summer of 1890.  Families often came together; there is a real sense in which Modum Bad’s distinctive tradition of residential family therapy has been more than a century in the making.

 

“Taking the waters,” stimulating social companionship, ample opportunities to rest, reflect and recreate in peaceful natural surroundings: Modum Bad’s foremost legacy for the past century and a half is a thoroughgoing commitment to holistic health.

 

The spa survived Thaulow’s death in 1894 as well as the collective European trauma of World War I. The Norwegian Red Cross purchased it in 1939. Plans for the development of a Red Cross hospital were not realized in the wake of World War II. Renewal and transformation came with the opening of a distinctive psychiatric clinic and learning center – the current Modum Bad – in December 1957, a century to the year after Dr. Thaulow founded the spa.

 

It would be another era for Modum Bad, with nourishing roots in earlier history – and another era, as well, for Norwegian psychotherapy and the inpatient treatment of mental illness. 

 

Gordon Johnson was a widely-known and respected Norwegian psychiatrist and devout Christian with the inspiration and the manifold leadership skills to bring life to the new enterprise. He was not yet a psychiatrist in 1935, when he took the first steps on the long road to creating a new kind of mental hospital, and he labored tirelessly on behalf of that calling for 22 years before Modum Bad became a reality. Johnson’s vivid public presence, his conviction that Christian values offered a humane and hitherto unrealized potential for shaping holistic residential treatment of human suffering, and his intensely personal devotion to the well-being of his patients continued to direct the growth of Modum Bad for another two decades – until his retirement in 1976.

 

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In the weeks after our arrival in the autumn of 2005 we came to know Modum Bad’s woods, fields and narrow lanes. Most of the buildings are gathered on a plateau, sloping to the west into the valley of Turi Fjord, melding elsewhere into the patchwork of forest and small hill farms characteristic of southern Norway.  Dark brown loam mixes with red sandy soil. In the woods one can still find pits from which, more than a thousand years ago, iron ore was dug to fashion tools.

 

Some of the original 19th century houses have been renovated and are still in daily use. The clinic’s main buildings date from the 1950s and 1960s but have been tastefully remodeled to blend with the older Swiss style. There are residences for staff and for families in therapy, gardens, an apple orchard, and paths for walking and cross-country skiing in winter.  On an early exploratory walk we came upon a lovely small pond with wooden bridges, gazebo and benches along its banks, and way stations marked by framed copies of well-chosen Norwegian poems. Stopping by one of those poetry markers late one winter afternoon in the fading light, we watched a young boy playing with his dog on the ice of the pond. Snow was falling gently around us, and lines of a favorite poet came to my mind:

 

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.[1] 

 

Leigh had for sixteen years directed an international research program in psychotherapy, with its home at Harvard Medical School but most of its ongoing activity in Norway – primarily at the universities in Trondheim and Bergen. In 2005 she was invited to return to Modum Bad as a consultant, to introduce and assess the value of her model of short-term dynamic psychotherapy in an inpatient setting. She had first come to Modum Bad in the fall of 2004 to give a presentation of her therapeutic model and show videotapes of her practice to Modum Bad staff. The following year she was eager to return and probe more thoroughly her intuitive sense of good match and congenial collegiality.

 

My own role during that first visit was less defined and more informal. I had no assigned task and was free to explore. The six weeks were an introduction to a remarkable way of integrating residential psychotherapeutic treatment, professional education and clinical research in a “village-like inclusive community.”[2] I looked forward, when we arrived, to learning about the life of that community. My own professional experience had spanned several realms, but repeatedly returned to two primary themes: the character and significance of the stories we tell about our lives, and the intersection and mutual enrichment of religious and psychological perspectives on human development through the whole of life. I had ongoing reading and writing to do, and I anticipated the pleasure of long walks in the woods. I did not know in those first days that I would become as thoroughly and intriguingly engaged in the life of Modum Bad as Leigh.

[1] The first lines of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

[2] “Modum Bad: A centre for therapy and research, training and counseling,” Modum Bad brochure (2005).