Dates matter to me. The 10th of December is the Feast Day of Karl Barth and Thomas Merton. They both died in 1968. Barth was a theologian and Merton, a Trappist monk. When I arrived at The General Theological Seminary in September of 1969, I did not know anything about either of these two men. However, during my years at Seminary they both became important to me in my own spiritual growth…even though it has taken many years of living beyond those years for me to come close to understanding why that would be so. My fleeting memory of anything about Barth comes from a professor at GTS who, commenting on something I had written for his class, wrote in a comment that my thoughts were “Barthian.” Unfortunately, Dr. Carpenter who wrote that note did not elaborate and, more unfortunately, since I was not a very good student, I had…
