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Morning Reflection
June 30, 2026
“the dearest freshness deep down things”
“The Christian life is a life-long improvisation in the attitude of thankfulness.”
Paul Holmer: Thinking the Faith with Passion
Reflection by Peter Vanderveen
The first Broadway play I ever saw was “I’m not Rappaport.” It was almost entirely a conversation between two octogenarians who every day sit together on a bench in Central Park. They talk about the passing of time and the difficulties of growing older. That’s about it. Very little happens on stage. The only world that really exists is kept in the memories of these men as they tell their stories.
I had a seat in the front row. On stage, there was only one park bench, situated only a few feet from the audience – which made for a very intimate experience. In the Playbill, the actors, Cleavon Little and Hal Linden, spoke about the demands of keeping their lengthy conversation lively when it must be repeated day after day for all the months of the show’s run. Such recitation can be lulling, for the actors and the audience alike. In the attempt to avoid this, both men often, and rather abruptly, would leap off script, unannounced. In different ways almost every night, they’d launch themselves into the unknown, mutually going off on a tangent, staying in character, and, eventually, they’d make their way back to the play as it was written. Both actors said this kept them on their toes. I thought it would be a terrifying experience, completely of the moment and obviously unrehearsed. But this worked because they knew their characters so well, and they could draw things up from out of their deep understanding – their inhabitation – of who they were on stage. Their improvisations sparkled and made the play better.
Improvisation requires both complete investment and the ability to throw caution to the wind in order to creatively expand on a theme. It’s a magnificent art. In the looming age of Artificial Intelligence, it may mark one of the key differences between being human and being a machine. There’s more to improvisation than algorithms alone.
Paul Holmer was one of my professors in graduate school. He distinguished himself by exemplifying the very thing he stated. For him, thankfulness wasn’t contingent or banal; it arises, rather, from a serious and humble and diligent examination of life and faith. And there is no bottom to it. Our opportunity in our time is to reach into hidden places in order to give witness to a thankfulness that sparkles with improvisational vitality. Dr. Holmer considered this an expression of true faith and a great joy. He’d have been a marvelous conversationalist for anyone who joined him on a park bench.
Imagine Christianity perceived and lived through such a lens.
God’s Grandeur - Gerard Manley Hopkins
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
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