September 2025

In this issue we reflect on the paths we trod.

I was born a stone’s throw from water, in Spohn Hospital near Corpus Christi Bay which opens into the Gulf of Mexico and then meets the Atlantic Ocean. I learned to swim about the time I learned to walk. I waterskied miles and miles around the nearby bays and lakes. It was only last year that I sold my cottage on Copano Bay near Rockport, TX. I am drawn to water, to both its beauty and its power. The path I trod seemed to lead me toward water.

It was the power of water as seen in Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches that impressed me. The swirls, the tensions, the strength to move buildings and take lives. He wrote, “Water is the driving force of all nature.”

Historians say Leonardo was obsessed with water. Maybe not obsessed, but definitely, I’ve been fascinated with water especially since the late 1980’s, when my friend, Betty, and I drove to see the Da Vinci traveling exhibit including water sketches at the Houston Museum of Fine Art.

Besides the very ontology of water and its relationships to elements Earth, Air, Fire, and Aether, I am fascinated by the mystical properties of water. In Scripture, water can be turned into wine. Other senses of biblical manifestations of water cannot be fully understood, especially that of cleansing, like the waters of baptism.

There are over 700 references to water in scripture. My favorite is when Jesus is speaking with the Samaritan woman, referring to himself as “living water” in which she will find cleansing, transformation, and spiritual nourishment (John 4:10).* 

Perhaps where and how I grew up really did influence my paths more than I fully understand. I still remember the words for the sprinkling of water in the old Latin mass ritual: “Asperges me” – translated, “Thou shalt sprinkle me, O Lord, with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed; Thou shalt wash me, and I shall become whiter than snow.”

I take it to heart when I sing Psalm 23:2, “He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters.” 

--Jan

*Photo above: statue of Jesus and the woman at the well,

on University of Notre Dame campus

“But you, O Lord, know my path” (Psalm 142:3, Grail Psalms).

I grew up on farms in eastern and central Oregon. I never lived inside the city limits of any town until I was in graduate school. I am a product of wide-open spaces, of distant vistas with mountains on the horizon.

Late last month, I traveled to Oregon for a family reunion. I stayed several additional days, but other than the time with my family, I visited places, not people. I slept three nights no more than 200 yards from the house where I lived when I was in high school. From there, I could look down the hill to the potato field where I moved irrigation pipe for my first paying job.

I drove out, twenty-one miles from town – partly through open fields, partly winding through sagebrush, junipers, and outcroppings of lava rock – to Alfalfa Grade School (pictured above), the two-room country schoolhouse where I attended fourth through eighth grades. On other days, I hiked through rocky desert canyons and alongside forested streams.

In Ivan Doig’s novel, The Eleventh Man, the main character muses about his heritage: “He knew there was no denying the influence of bloodline,” but recognized also that the rural area where he grew up “served as a kind of parentage, too. Whatever he amounted to, this was where it came from.”*

I hold a doctorate from Princeton. I am a published author. I have lived in Europe and just outside New York City. But whatever I have amounted to, it somehow came from that two-room country school, from the hayfields where I sweated under the summer sun, and from the snow-clad mountains beckoning on the horizon.

My path through life has been a wandering one, both geographically and professionally. Still, I proceed in faith, confident that a loving God knows my path.

-- Bill

* Ivan Doig, The Eleventh Man (Harcourt, 2008), p. 23.

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