I don’t know if there are any college professors who get to teach classes in the history of philosophy any more. Certainly university philosophy departments have been decimated. There are a few colleges around that offer some courses in philosophy, but it is hardly a major field of study in many modern universities. I was lucky that way. I was a student at the end of an era - actually I was a student at the end of several eras.

I got to study Latin in high school. It was a regular class offered in our school - two years of study: Latin I and Latin II. They retired the textbooks, and the teacher, not long after I was able to complete both courses. It took a bit longer for them to retire the typing teacher and get rid of the classroom full of typewriters, but you won’t find either in a contemporary high school.

And yet, while there are many things that I studied in high school that I don’t use in my everyday life, Latin and typing and the history of philosophy are all things that have been constant companions on my life’s journey. They have been useful in ways that I could not have imagined when I was a student. In a career that is now in its fifth decade, I have had secretaries and office administrators and administrative colleagues, but I have never had a fellow staff member of any congregation I have served who could type faster or more accurately than I.

My faith, teaching, and preaching have been shaped by my limited knowledge of Latin. Because Latin was the language of theology and of the church for a millennia - roughly half of the history of the Christian Church - that language shaped how we read the bible and how we think about God. The first bibles available in common languages were not translated from the original Greek and Hebrew, but from Latin bibles. Many of the historic prayers of the church were originally offered in Latin. Being able to recognize how a language that is not currently spoken has shaped the language we do speak has been essential in my understanding of our faith. It has also informed the way I think about ideas as being the product of generations of thinking and not just individuals.

I can still remember how Dr. Murphy opened my eyes to the realization that ideas take a long time to form. He used to say things like, “One idea that we got form Plato that he got from Socrates . . .” Ideas don’t always emerge in a single generation. Big and important ideas need to be mulled for a long time - often longer than the span of a lifetime. Ideas that we take for granted - like there being one God over the entire universe - took many generations to be formed and to take hold. The first humans to grasp that concept, did not grasp a fully expressed theology of the nature of God. It took time and experience and telling stories for generations for an idea that we take for granted to fully emerge.

One of those multi-generational ideas is one that came to us from Plato, and is an idea that he got from Socrates: “Wonder is the beginning of philosophy.” And that idea, originally expressed in Greek and later in Latin before becoming a quote memorized by generations of students of philosophy, continues to shape how I think about this world.

The things that cause me to go silent with wonder are all around. I am filled with wonder when I watch the sunset over the ocean, and when I watch a sunrise from my canoe on a quiet lake. It is the same feeling that overwhelmed me the first time I saw a blue morpho butterfly. It is the feeling that sometimes floods my senses when I look up at the night sky and see familiar stars in a field of stars so vast and numerous that I couldn’t begin to count them. It is the feeling I have each time I am blessed to hold a newborn child.

I felt wonder yesterday. For months we have shared the time with children in our church from a distance. For many months we worshiped online only and we told our children’s stories to an audience that we could not see. We had to imagine the children who were watching from their homes with their families on computer screens land televisions. I would look into the camera, but it wasn’t the same thing as telling stories to children. Then we had some brief weeks when we could tell the story, but weren’t allowed to invite the children to come forward. Covid protocols demanded that the children and we keep our distance. I would talk to them from across the room and try to have visual clues that they could see from a long ways off. Yesterday, however, I took out a picture that is over 100 years old - a picture of the grandparents of Susan’s father - and all of a sudden the children who were in the room came rushing up to look at the picture. Somehow the protocols of the church and the parents of the children didn’t prevent them from coming to have a look. I had to blink away the tears from my eyes. The sense of gratitude and wonder that swept over me as the children came forward was incredible and sweet.

The prophet Isaiah described what a world at peace would be like during a time of military conquest and the defeat and exile of the people of Israel. He spoke of the wolf living with the lamb, and the leopard with the kid, and the lion and the falling together. And then he said, “and a little child shall lead them.” It has been true for as long as we can remember: our children lead us out of the dark moments of life. And now, in a time when we cannot ignore the tragedy of war and we feel the pain of loss and are filled with fear by pandemic, once again our children are leading us.

My philosophy is that we can trust the leadership of our children. It is born of genuine wonder. Plato learned the lesson of his teacher Socrates well. We would do well to learn the lessons of our teachers.

So I will leave you with another bit of philosophy. This bit came from a sign in a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream store: “Ice cream is a force for good in a morally ambiguous world.” Consider that truth as well.