I use images to tell my stories. And the images carry the memories that are the personal claims, my living and human identity cards, to the years of life I seek to describe here. And during these years I have - by surprise - been offered entrance into working and living in new social situations that have proven personally demanding, but also enriching beyond any initial expectation. Each of them put me to work as a writer. But their contexts made much of both verbal and descriptive clarity. That is also the style of good journalism. And this all proved to be quite supportive during the much harder, on-going work of trying to figure out and describe what was going on.

r allows me to take for granted. I have been lucky enough to part of the life in communities out here in the Berkeley Area here during years when we believed that our efforts and our choices could help make life - our own lives and our public life - more widely humane.

This page has a personal focus, the personal focus of an old man who has lived a very interesting and privileged life. In that life I have seen myself as an outsider. Looking back that began when I young. The start of WW II when I was eight caused the rapid departure of my four older and active brothers into the military and with it the change in our family life from up-beat, youthful chaos to fearful and silent emptiness and stress. This was no one’s fault. But, in hindsight, it was isolating.

Living with our issues usually seems to go before our understanding of them. What I present here are images of that understanding. And what I picture here seem to be the views of an outsider. And I mention this at the start - possibly out of an imagined sense of honesty.

I am an outsider, but a very lucky one. have lived much of my adult life adapting to calls that have come upon me by surprise. Where I have been is the result of choosing to respond to opportunities beyond the centers of life and work common among clergy. I see my views not as a critique of life in the center, but rather as coming from a sense of feeling at home often well beyond it.

And there is more to it than the personal mobility of not having a family to care for. I have had the mobility to respond to requests for my help often at a distance. In adjusting to human realities that were beyond my world of familiar people and daily patterns I had my eyes opened to the tough worlds that are the life of so many people. This was inevitable. I have been recruited, asked to go to places where, I was told, people lived in trouble every day. Today’s example of course is Ukraine. But unlike Ukraine the places I describe here were far from the world that tourists see, and are still outside the the interest, even awareness, of most people and even the news.

The story that follows is here to serve as an example of one of those worlds, and how my it reshaped my life.y\\\ life there became.

Back in 1999 I responded to a request from the head of the Dominican Order to think about going to Tallinn, in Estonia, to help the small and newly re-established Dominican community cope with the challenges of post-Soviet life. Like the other Baltic states, Lithuania and Latvia, their freedom had been written off by the Hitler-Stalin Pact off 1939, dividing much of Eastern Europe between them. The Baltics were given to Stalin. And a few days later, on September 1, Hitler’s invasion of Poland started World War II. So during the next seventy five years our Dominican communities there lived under Soviet occupation and terror. Little by way of religious life was tolerated, only enough to allow Stalin to point to them and say that religious freedom was real in the USSR.

So with the fall of the Soviets it became possible to re-establish a Dominican community in Tallinn, the Estonian capital. The first community had been established around 1240. And the substantial ruins of their house, the monastery of St. Catherine, are honored today as the heart of Tallinn’s historic medieval center. My work, as described when I responded to the request of the English head of the Order, would have been with the university; in ministry to the growing diplomatic community; and engaging with the other religious groups in the capital city- a very sketchy view of what they hoped could come about. To me it sounded a lot like the ministry I had as pastor in Berkeley. So in 1999 I flew to Vilnius, in Lithuania, the largest of the Baltic states, and the city where our larger Dominican community was well on its way to re-establishing life after the Russian occupation. Not the first, actually In the 1880s the Czarist government had hanged a few of them from the trees growing outside.

The superior of the community was an American. He had gone to Lithuania to look into his own family’s recent roots. But when he got there the community prevailed on him to stay. They were all young, except for one, very impressive old man. When the Soviets arrived many clergy fled the country. But this man, well known in the city, stayed behind and survived. He had studied at the Dominican center of studies in Belgium, which was set up when in 1888 the French government expelled all religious orders from France. So the Paris Dominicans went to a city in belgium, Saulchoir, where they set up what became a noted center of studies. Now this old man went from the Saulchoir back to Lithuania where, after a few years, the Soviet government effectively expelled religious orders from the Baltics. But this tough old man survived. I think his impressive background along with his years learning the art of survival, helped in convincing the younger American to accept the role of superior. To my surprise he came not only well recommended, but recommended close up. He had taught a niece of mine at Harvard, and she thought the world of him.

It wasn’t long before he started convincing me that where I was most needed was with the community in Vilnius. “In Tallinn, they have a bishop, a papal nuncio, two priests, and about 4,000 Catholics in the whole country. That’s a better priest-Catholic ratio than in the U.S. Lithuania is a large, Catholic country and we have so few priests.”

It wasn’t a hard sell “Stan,” I said, “Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia - like I know anything about any of them. I am here to help.” So I began looking forward to living and working in Vilnius. And even with all the destruction carried out by the Soviets, much of it clearly mean spirited, it was even then still a lovely city. And just as I was approaching 70 years old, and starting to spend more time writing, it held out the promise of a real adventure in effectively an unknown but historic part of Europe and the church. And that promise of adventure has been lived out to an extent I never anticipated. Walking past the defaced fronts of once elegant buildings, the partial ruins of historic ones, and hard work going on just to wash away years of dirt and neglect, teaches very quickly the power of intentional neglect to dehumanize people. But I had my own response. I took out my watercolors and painted the ruins, and in the process discovering the beauty still real and visible in what was still there.

Later on, as I learned about the Nazi and Soviet governments, I realized that no information about the Baltics became public in the West that was not the product of either the Nazi or Soviet propaganda systems. Each one was masterful in their ability to maniuplate Western audiences. They did not only create ad spread their own views of history, but - perhaps more important - they were expert in creating self-serving histories designed to appealed to the social and religious prejudices of different American audiences.

A final word for starting out. These few pages are intentionally introductory. From this point on I will shift. I will be telling stories, stories from different times and different places in my life. And more important I tell stores with images. Images of life that stand, each, in its own place and time.

I don’t think of this the way I think of writing a book. In writing my books I started out with some sense of where I hoped to go. They were, each, purposeful in themselves. Four of them, each with its own purpose, were published in a series on linguistics that, itself, had its own purpose and rationale. But what I am doing here this very different. What I am describing here are stories from my life. And I may have spent as much time recording the Russian violations of the city with my watercolors, which often caught the details more finely than my words could.

I use the words humanist and catholic in my title.  I choose these words for a reason. My years have taught me that life is about images, and images are about contexts, the contexts in which we have found ourselves. Contexts are dynamic with human creativity, human passions, and the losses and distress that continue to make up so much of life. And here I will be talking about my life -the only one I know from the inside. I suspect that from the start I have always been an observer. When you are the youngest and smallest member of a large and hard driving clan as I was survival requires living on the watch. In living in and on what in some personal way strikes you as someone else’s territory, observing becomes like a natural gift.

But observing is not an equal gift. And it is not always a gift. Sitting along with someone you love, relaxing in the pleasure of the moment and simultaneously working to figure them out, does seem to water the roots of isolation.

I have lived on the move, both by choice and coercion. From my move to France as a young man, to my life in a religious community in California, to a bad heart attack at 50 that moved me into a world with limits, to an offer to edit a magazine in the chaotic life of New York ten years later; to the a request to help rebuild the church in the post Soviet Baltics mentioned above, I have learned to see the wonders that our common humanity underwrites. They are worth writing about, and I end up doing it most easily with personal stories.

MY BALTIC ADVENTURES

I arrived in Eastern Europe in 1999. This was five years after the Soviet tanks finally left Lithuania, and the scars of their half-century occupation of the Baltics were still so evident. Living in a physically secure world, which for the most part was how I grew up, did not prepare me for the reality of bombed buildings and emotionally battered men that I came to see when I went to live in Europe.

And I followed it a few years later - with the production of a documentary about the KGB terror in the Baltics, where I was working. My partner is a gifted moviemaker. I was a writer focused on words -my words - not images. He taught me both to look, and how to look. With it came a shift from my well-honed world of ideas into a life carried by images. And the newly liberated, post Soviet land where I was living was a startling world of cruel and painful images. As I write this, these images which I had begun to think of as past have all come before my eyes again, brought to my eyes by the press coverage of the war in Ukraine. And no small part of this is the fact that the Soviet terror I came to know so concretely through my years in the Baltics took place under their rule by Vladimir Putin -the same cruel and bizarre Putin who is now making war against Ukraine. Neither the memoir nor the documentary, I should add, were planned. Each came in response to singular experiences that were part of my entrance into the truly unknown world and culture that was the daily life of people in the the Soviet Union.

So my focus here is on the ir role as supports as I try to make sense of the human contexts where I live. Since these contexts that were there long before I was, and felt the shaping hands of other’s long before I came upon them, that ‘making sense’ has become a life of wonderful adventure.

inviting opportunities and opportunitiesI have spent many years on the road. Most recently, as I noted, it was in the Baltics, where I went well over twenty years ago. And with that as my intro, I will go into my stories.  Most of them, it turns out, are related to places and their contexts, and of course to the lives as they are lived in those contexts.