HDS faculty and friends remembered Professor Anne E. Monius during a memorial service on October 11, 2019. Monius, Professor of South Asian Religions at Harvard Divinity School, passed away on August 3, 2019.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
[INDIAN MUSIC PLAYING]
Good afternoon, everyone. It's good to be among friends today. As dean of Harvard Divinity School, it's my somber privilege to welcome you to this memorial gathering and to our celebration of the life and work of our dear colleague, Professor Anne Elizabeth Monius, who passed away very suddenly in early August of this year. And her loss is very deeply felt by all of us who are gathered here and beyond.
One thing Anne always did for any event is that she sent wonderful thank you notes and expressed her appreciation and gratitude, and I was the recipient of many of those thank you notes after faculty receptions. She was always the first in and always the most fulsome in her gratitude. Therefore, I would like to start my remarks with a thank you to the family and brother, Peter, and his wife, Melissa, are here with us today. But Anne's parents are unable to be with us due to ill health, and we send our very best wishes to them for speedy recoveries.
And I want to thank also today's speakers and participants for coming from near and far to honor their former student, assistant, colleague, friend, mentor, guide and advisor, Anne Monius. Furthermore, I want to convey my deep gratitude to Professor Stephanie Paulsell, the Office of Academic Affairs, the Dean's Office, and the Office of Communications at HDS for preparing today's memorial gathering with so much care and respect in order to honor a faculty member who was not only valued and honored among our colleagues and students, but is also very much missed by our colleagues on the staff.
Another sincere thank you to the South Asian Music Association of Harvard and the three college students who will play for us live today. The students offered to play for this event to honor their teacher and advisor, Anne Monius. We are very grateful that they will grace this important event with music. Anne would have loved that for sure.
Anne Monius, a proud native of New Hampshire, was educated at Harvard University, with an A/B summa cum laude in 1987 from Harvard College and a PhD from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1997. Anne said that she came to Harvard to study astrophysics, but after hearing Diana Eck lecture on India and after receiving a travel grant to go to India, her future plans were set to study Hinduism and India.
After earning her doctorate, she went on to teach as assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. In 2002, Anne started as a junior member of the Harvard Divinity School faculty. She was granted tenure in 2004 and taught altogether for 17 years at Harvard Divinity School, as well as for the Committee on the Study of Religion and for the college.
In her scholarly work, Anne specialized in the religious traditions of India. Her research examined practices of literary culture and its products to reconstruct the history of religions in South Asia. It's indeed difficult and painful to imagine HDS without Anne Monius going forward. I know she was planning to be on leave this fall, and she was very much looking forward to her research, travel, and various projects.
We miss her infectious laughter, unforgettable laughter, her sage advice, her calm presence at meetings, and her always student-focused contributions to all our efforts and future plans. Anne's zest for life, her steadfast reliability, her very high scholarly standards, and her stalwart courage in the face of any adversity were not only inspirational to me as her dean, but also to everyone around her, especially to her colleagues and students, past and present, near or far.
I cannot tell you how many grieving messages we received after her passing. And each and every one of those had a message of gratitude for what Anne had done for them and what she had meant to them, but also the steadfast hope of carrying her message of can-do further into the world. Anne never gave up hope, and she also never gave up. She was remarkably resilient.
As dean, I know that the HDS community misses Anne in so many ways and much more than words can convey. We will not forget her values, nor her profound impact on our lives, on our school, and on our students. We are gathered here today to celebrate the life and work of an extraordinary scholar, teacher, colleague, mentor, and friend.
Everyone participating and offering their thoughts and words today is part of a much larger group of people who had the good fortune to know Anne and work with her in the short time she was with us. Anne will be missed and never forgotten. Let's remember her immense contribution and celebrate a life well lived. Thank you.
Good afternoon. My name's Peter. I'm Anne's brother. I just want to welcome you, say a few words on behalf of Anne's family. As the dean said, my parents are not able to be here. My dad's been in the hospital with pneumonia for the last 10 days. He may be getting out today, which would be a good thing. And I hope they're happy to watch the video at some point. To hear-- they're anxious to hear all about what goes on here today.
We're a small nuclear family, a small extended family. My wife, Melissa, is here. She's been with me every step of this hard journey. And I feel like whatever sanity I have left, I owe to her. My daughter, Hannah, is here, who would tell you that Anne is the best aunt imaginable, particularly around the holidays or birthdays. It's also true that no college entrance exam of any sort was considered complete until it went across Anne's desk.
She gave them the same even-handed but no excuses criticism that I'm sure some of you have also enjoyed. My son, Sam, is not here. He's in LA at Occidental College, just having declared his intention to major in religious studies. I'm not sure. I think Anne knew that, but I'm not--
[LAUGHTER]
No, but I mean it's a recent decision. And so he also-- he wants to sort of emphasize social justice issues in a state of religion, so it's a lost opportunity to have some lively debates at the dinner table.
But you know, it's gratifying to me that somebody named a Monius will still be working, just beginning, but working in the field. My cousin, Kathy, and her husband, Bobby, are here. They came from Nashua, New Hampshire. Kathy's known Anne her whole life. In fact, I remember you babysat for us when we were very, very small, so I'm really glad that you're here. And I'm hoping that you can help convey to my parents, when you see them, what went on here today, some of the sentiments that were said here today.
It's-- you know, my parents didn't have a decision to make, because they're-- my dad's ill. But they were very much on the fence about coming to this, and I think one of the things that stood in the way of just letting themselves come was the idea of, well, what would we even say? And I could say I certainly empathize with that sentiment at this moment, but I think it never hurts to start a conversation with the words, "thank you."
So to everyone who organized this event, I know some of you. There are many others, I'm sure. I very much appreciate us being included and us being made to feel welcome here. I want to thank all of you, many of you who aren't even here, who sent such thoughtful and eloquent letters of condolence. I do have to admit you all were reading from the same Cliff notes. I mean the message is just so incredibly consistent-- Anne's dedication to her students, her academic rigor, her participation in the community at large.
And for me, you know, I wasn't a colleague. I wasn't a student of Anne's. She wasn't my mentor. She's my little sister. And I used to worry about her a lot. By the middle to the end of every semester, she was exhausted, completely depleted.
And you know, whenever I would say, maybe you can have a few less office hours, maybe you can teach one less graduate seminar, her response was always the same-- I'm doing my job. And it's very much a source of comfort for me to know that all that effort was so universally appreciated, acknowledged, and impactful. So thank you all for the kind words that we've received.
Lastly, I want to-- I mean the whole gist of this is to talk about what Anne brought to everyone here, to the institution. And I'd just like to turn the tables a little bit and say, I want to thank Harvard for what I think it brought-- meant to Anne. She spent her whole adult life here. We can all excuse her brief dalliance at UVA.
But she-- I mean she-- she could have gone anywhere. But this was home to her, and it was always going to be home to her. And I think that, you know-- Melissa and I were at her office about a month ago sort of preparing for the distributing of her books and stuff. And it was weird. Instead of just leaving, because it was very sad to be there, we found ourselves just sitting outside of her office, that we closed the door, and we were just out in the hallway sort of thinking about how fortunate she was to have found a community that so thoroughly embraced her.
I don't think-- you can't give to the extent that you all say that she gave to you without getting it back. You can't give that much love without being loved in return. And so I just think, thank you for-- you know, she gave a lot. That's true. Some of you have mentioned her near constant need to question authority, and having been the recipient of that it was not always roses, and her need to engage to make the deepest dive on, even in your all context, the most obscure and out there material and have its relevance be embraced so wholeheartedly.
So that's kind of all I have. Anne, I love you. I'm going to miss you. And when I catch up to you, wherever it is you've ended up, you'd best be saving a place in line for me at the next Grateful Dead show we're going to. Thank you all.
[APPLAUSE]
[INDIAN MUSIC PLAYING]
I wish I could channel Anne's voice, because if she was here, this is what she would say to each one of her students. "To a Young Poet" by Valery Bryusov-- "Pale youth with burning gaze, I give you three commandments now. Follow the first. Don't live by the present.
Second, remember, feel for no one. Love yourself without bounds. Safeguard the third-- worship art, art alone without thought or goal. Pale youth with embarrassed gaze, if you follow my three commandments, I'll die in peace, a defeated warrior, knowing I leave a poet behind."
Anne Monius loved the great epics of India, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and she had a special love for Kamban's Tamil version of the Ramayana. Anne was preparing a translation of the Yuddha Kanda of Kamban's Ramayana for the Murty Classical Library of India. The passage that I'm about to read is about the departure of Rama, his wife, Sita, and his brother, Lakshmana, from the city of Ayodhya, to go into exile. And it was selected and translated for this occasion by David Shulman, who, like Anne, has a special love for Kamban's Ramayana and who is the editor of the Murty Library's translation of the Kamban.
When David sent this election, he wrote in his email about Anne that quote, "She had a close connection to Kamban, and I loved reading Kamban verses with her."
A reading from Kamban, Ayodhya Kanda, chapter 4, Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana leave the city. "The bells tied to horses necks fell silent. The great drums fell silent. Streets that were always roaring like thunder fell silent. Even rivers ceased to murmur with clear rushing waves. No drums sounded on the royal wave-- on the royal way. No Venus sounded its strings. No festival cries to the gods could be heard. In fact, nothing was heard, except gasp of grief.
Anklets went muted in golden houses, muted the rustle of jeweled belts. Birds were mute in the water. Forest groves were mute. Bees fell silent in the flowers, and elephants made no sound. Fields forgot the taste of water. The hands of red-lipped women forgot to hold newborn babies. Fires forgot the goodness of butter. Wise men forgot that they had bodies, and the Vedas forgot they had sound.
Those who once danced together were weeping. Those who sang the seven sweet notes were weeping. Women who once tore off garlands in rage at their lovers were now weeping. And women who made up after quarrels and made love also wept.
Elephants didn't stretch out their trunks to drink water. Horses took no fodder to their mouths. Birds brought no food for their chicks. Cows gave no milk to newborn calves, for all were languishing in sorrow. Cast off were the silver on elephants' foreheads, the jewels on a woman's head, the banners that graced the great ramparts of gold. Even male doves turned away from the soft beauty of their mates.
Most people wait in dread for the fruit of bad deeds and can't wait for the fruit of good actions. In both cases, what's the point? Yet great yogis who see pain and joy as the same were now practicing grief. In short, the great city of Ayodhya, like Dasharatha, was barely breathing, its body shaking, its ancient beauty in ruins, its five senses spinning, unstable, sunk in misery, as if life were soon to depart."
In the last chapter of her wonderful Imagining a Place for Buddhism, Anne begins the chapter by quoting UV Caminataiyar, the great scholar who had retrieved and brought back to life a whole library of lost Tamil works. He says, "I used to quote verses I had come across in other Tamil works as the occasion arose. One of these is a lament of those who were near the Lord Buddha on his entering the parinirvana." It is quoted as an illustration by the commentator on the Virocoliyam, an 11th century grammar.
And this is the quote. "Since we can never more see before us the same to destroy darkness with great enlightenment, what shall we do? What shall we do? Since we can never more hear the Dharma expounded by him with compassion and saintly words, what shall we do? What shall we do? Since we shall never more see the prince whose pendants led him straight to the truth, what shall we do? What shall we do?"
Dr. Caminataiyar goes on to say, "When I myself read this poem, I could not read on. My tongue faltered. Rangacharya, who was sitting there with me, was fully overcome by its pathos. He forgot his self in a feeling of tender sympathy."
After the quote, Anne continues herself, "Caminataiyar's deeply felted response to the poetic content of the Virocoliyam commentary reveals something of the depth and complexity of the text of its literary elegance and moving poetic qualities. Far from simply providing dry explication, the commentary constitutes a literary work in its own right, an anthology of verse with its own particular vision.
Central to that vision is a conception of community, rooted in technology of literary culture, but embodied and enacted through the products of that culture. The commentary, in other words, envisions community through the gathering together of a significant body of poetic literature composed in Tamil, even if most of it no longer exists. This is the language of a poetic corpus of praise and devotion to the Buddha, of ethical reflection on the nature of compassion, and concern for the welfare of others."
Thus far, Anne reading Caminataiyar reading the commentary, quoting older sources. I close by a bit of commentary on my own. Since we ourselves here today will never more see Anne, never more hear Anne, never more walk with her, never more work with her, then, as the poet said, what then shall we do? What then shall we do?
Our tongues, too, begin to falter. But Anne's own word shows us the way. We, too, can study and teach and mentor in order to build a learned community of scholars, who are friends as well. Like Caminataiyar evolved and now, too, Anne, we, too, can aim to retrieve and pass along ancient knowledge, restoring to the light what had seemed lost, giving it new life in the learning and writing of new readers, writers, and teachers of the next generation.
We, too, can build a community now embodied and enacted through the products of our own literary cultures. We, too, can guide our teaching, research, and writing by attentiveness to the nature of compassion and by concern for the welfare of others. And finally, we, too, can form a community of professors and students, but we can even go further. We can devote ourselves to scholarship that is alive, scholarship that learns how to create community.
[INDIAN MUSIC PLAYING]
Thank you, Pranati Sumit Shiva, for this music today. Very wonderful to have you. I'm here to talk about the early Anne. I had the privilege of knowing Anne from the very beginning of her days at Harvard as a freshman in Harvard College straight from New Hampshire in 1982. Having come to Harvard with astrophysics in mind, she tells this story over and over, I think, that she decides to plunge into the study of religion to look mainly at the religious traditions of India.
She had taken my course on the sources of Indian civilization and eventually took courses with me on ritual in the religious life and the life and thought of Gandhi. We did sophomore and junior tutorials together. I made her rewrite papers in junior tutorials, and eventually, she did a senior thesis on the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society in America.
All this was more than 35 years ago. As some of you know, Dorothy and I have moved recently, and there is no activity that forces one to come more directly face to face with all that we have collected and filed over the years, so many files meticulously labeled with courses and names, et cetera. But one good thing about this is that it has now enabled me to revisit Anne's undergraduate world, complete with her tutorial papers, her graduate papers, her thesis prospectus, her grant applications, her job applications, her tenure review, and all the letters I myself have written over the years about Anne's accomplishments and her hopes for the future.
And it is this spectacular early history of a young scholar presaging the magnificent scholar and writer and mentor she became that brings so many of you here today. Anne made her own way intellectually at a time when there weren't very many of us in South Asian studies at Harvard-- John Carman, myself, a few people in Sanskrit and Indian studies, a few in Buddhist studies, and she studied Sanskrit as much as she could, Pali as well, and anything else on India.
And while she easily could have gone straight on to graduate school-- and I admit I did try to nudge her in that direction-- she felt the need to experience something of the culture she had studied from afar for four years. And of course, that was necessary. This Harvard pioneer from New Hampshire had scarcely been out of New England, and so she won the coveted Michael Rockefeller Fellowship to give her a year of travel. And she went to India and a bit to Nepal as well.
Not surprisingly, she went straight to Calcutta, where she went to the first home of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society at the Ramakrishna Mission there. She lived in Bengal, plunged into the study of Bengali, worked with Mother Teresa at the Home for the Dying Destitute, became fascinated with a Bengali woman poet and the literary traditions of Bengali. And all in all, it was a simply transformative year as she looks back on it, and when she wrote about this year in her statement for a Mellon Fellowship that would hopefully support her work in graduate school, she said this.
"This wonderful opportunity confirmed and strengthened my commitment to continuing my studies at the graduate level. Particularly exciting was my stay in Calcutta, where I lived five months, volunteered for Mother Teresa, began to study the Bengali language with a tutor, and became thoroughly engrossed in the project of a friend, the first translation of modern Bengali women's poetry into English.
The content, cadence, rhythms, moods, and ideas of this poetry from the women of Calcutta, familiar in some ways, yet so different than its Western English language counterpart, seemed to echo, to be intimately bound to the daily chanting of the prayers at Kaligat, the songs and images paraded through the streets during Durga Puja, the music and stories of Bengal's bold singers, and it is this resonance, this relationship that I wish to explore."
And so when she came to Harvard, she did. But she began her work at Harvard not in Bengali-- well, we didn't teach much Bengali at all, nor did we teach Tamil. There was some. But she pursued her interest in literary studies in the study of Tamil.
And luckily, George and Kausalya Hart from Berkeley were at Harvard that summer in 1990, and Anne took full advantage of the opportunity to study Tamil intensively with them. And since we didn't teach much of Tamil, she created her own Tamil study group after that. And this was just typical of Anne's independence of mind and determination to pursue her newfound interest.
As a graduate student in a course, for example, with Professor Masatoshi Nagatomi in Buddhist studies, she wrote along major paper on the Manimekalai, probably the first paper she had written on this that was to become, literally, one of the anchors of her later intellectual work. And in another course with Professor John Carman, she wrote a substantial paper on the [? Tutavachakan ?] and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Why do I have these term papers in my files across the street? Well, probably they were in preparation for her general exams, which she took that very year. And as she prepared to move toward a thesis, she took time away, again, to go to Berkeley and study with the Harts. And her work on classical Tamil literature was off and running.
As she formulated her thesis project, these are the questions she asked. And again, I'm quoting her. "What accounts for the long history of Buddhism in the Tamil region? And what were the circumstances surrounding its eventual disappearance? What sort of Buddhism flourished there in terms of doctrine, practice, and values? What interactions, if any, took place among Buddhist communities and those of the Hindu bhaktas of South India."
She noted that scholars of Indian Buddhism rarely included Tamil Buddhism in their work, and even fewer historians of South India took seriously the presence of Buddhist monks and monasteries on Tamil soil," end quote.
Those of us who followed this work through the years realized that it was about much more than Tamil Buddhism, but also about the very nature of religions. Her thesis and eventually her book, Imagining a Place for Buddhism, was one in which Monius revised scholarly understandings of both the Buddhist tradition in South Asia and the complex religious history of South India. She raised important questions about the interrelation of communities at a time when the so-called boundaries of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Shiva, Vaishnava were dotted lines at best.
And through careful analysis of the literary culture of sixth century Manimekalai and the 11th century Virocoliyam, she brings to life what was evidently and obviously a Buddhist audience and began her teaching-- well, having produced this remarkable thesis, and then a book called Imagining a Place for Buddhism, because this is a difficult piece of investigative and imaginative scholarship. And it speaks, actually, to Anne's intellectual genius that she was able to complete this masterful piece of work as her first book.
And it was reviewed by the most senior scholars in Tamil and South Indian studies as a work of erudition and scholarship groundbreaking in its significance. Anne then began her teaching career at the University of Virginia in 1997, and several of her colleagues from there are here today, I'm delighted to know.
And yet, though her future there was undoubtedly bright, she wanted to be in a place with a wider and interdisciplinary approach to South Asian studies and to religion. And she came to Harvard Divinity School in 2002 and was promoted to full professor in 2004, barely two years after being at Harvard, an extraordinary vote of confidence in her accomplishments and potential, but also, I might add, an extraordinary signal of Anne's own confidence in her work, which she also believed merited tenure at that point.
Beyond her scholarship, the most remarkable accolades in her distinguished career were still yet to come-- the precious legacy that is embodied in those of you who are here today or many of you with the care and the love with which she mentored scores of students. I think of her constantly at that table in her office reading texts with students, guiding them in exams and theses. Although she was awarded this prestigious Everett Mendelsohn Award for the guiding and mentoring of graduate students in the faculty of Arts and Sciences, she guided lots of students who weren't even at Harvard and part of her official teaching schedule.
And this is a story that many of you also have to tell. And Sohini Pillai is here from Berkeley today, and she wrote, "Anne met with me for three hours every week to read Villiputhur's 15th century Tamil texts, when Sohini came back to Harvard for a semester, and to discuss recent scholarship in Tamil literature for my qualifying exams when I returned to Berkeley and continued to Skype with me for an hour every week. In May of 2018, she flew out to Berkeley from Cambridge for less than 48 hours, just so she could physically be in the room for my qualifying exams."
Now this kind of dedication is very rare in academia. And today, we celebrate the broad and insightful genius that attracted so many students to her table and the love and unfailing generosity that enabled them to flourish. Dearest Anne, now rest in peace.
Remembering Anne-- how do you remember a life? How do you remember a friend? When I got the news that our beloved Anne had passed away, after making a bit of a spectacle of myself in the coffee shop where I was reading, I began almost immediately to try to remember all the times we've shared, all the talks, all the walks, all the dinners, everything. I wanted to remember everything completely-- complete experiences and complete sentences.
But I found that I couldn't do that. Anne and I go way back, back to 2000, a time when we were both junior professors at the University of Virginia. So we have a long history together and many shared experiences.
Certainly, I could reconstruct one experience in total, but that isn't always the way we remember even those we dearly love, is it? Our memories are often impressionistic and dreamlike. We remember moods and glimpses and impressions and murmurs and sights and sounds, scattered moments across spans of time that often have little to do with one another. But together, they make up the memory of a life.
The first of those glimpses for me came when I arrived at UVA. I don't remember the details of how Anne and I met, but I will never forget how I felt at that first encounter. It was instant friendship, instant connection. I had a Dostoyevsky moment. Dostoyevsky said, "We sometimes encountered people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly all at once before a word has been spoken."
That is how our friendship began and where it flourished with walks and talks on campus and the occasional drive outside of Charlottesville to feel as if we had gotten away or escaped. And there is where she gave me the first of many great gifts. I noticed that Anne didn't seem to worry about tenure like many of the other junior professors. She exuded a confidence that I came to understand.
You see, Anne was very good at what she did. And she knew it. The high intellectual skills she brought to her work was equally matched by her passion for it. I got the distinct impression that she thought that if tenure didn't happen, that it would be a decision made by the institution, not about something she hadn't done, some shortcoming on her part.
So when a few years later, she was the first person-- I believe this is true-- the first person in a few years to be tenured up from the junior ranks at HDS, I was not surprised. None of us were. She was that good.
I'd like to think that I followed Anne to Harvard. It didn't exactly work that way, but within a few years, we were both here. She took an appointment at NHDS, and me to a fellowship at the Dubois Institute. It worked out that we would drive up together at some point. Incidentally, I don't remember a word we said during that long drive, but I remember we talked the entire time.
During my fellowship year, to my great amazement, I was invited to give a job talk at HDS for a position in African-American religion. Nervous and unsure about this, I sought out Anne for advice. And it was during this time, fall of 2002, I believe it was, that she gave me another great gift. We went for a long walk along the trawls, and, again, talked for hours.
She offered such characteristic encouragement and conveyed the confidence I couldn't feel at that moment. And at last, this word of advice, so precise, so keen, so on point, so Anne-- Wallace, she said, just don't drool.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I didn't drool, and I got the position and spent five more years here basking in Anne's friendship, benefiting from her wise counsel, and marveling at her breathtakingly high level of commitment to her work, the field at large, to HDS, and most importantly, to her students. Even though I had left in 2007, our friendship remained strong. And in one crucial moment, she stepped in again to help me, this time with a puzzle, in my work on the poet, Langston Hughes.
Hughes had mentioned Gandhi disparagingly in one of his poems in the 1930s, which puzzled me and everyone else who read the poem. It just didn't fit. Gandhi was a saint, right? Anne was not puzzled by this, and after reading the poem, knew exactly what Hughes meant when he dismissed Gandhi along with a number of known religious charlatans in the poem.
She told me that not everyone at the time viewed Gandhi's actions as entirely selfless, politically expedient, or economically viable, reminding me of that famous quip, it costs a lot to keep Gandhi poor. Gandhi the saint, she said, was a creation of history. He became the saint that he had not been during his lifetime. It was a mighty breakthrough, puzzle solved, understanding gained, all thanks to Anne.
So in remembering Anne, I can't say I remember whole conversations, whole episodes, everything about a particular event or an adventure-- and we had many adventures. I remember the many bits and pieces that make up the whole, like how incredibly cool she looked in sunglasses.
[LAUGHTER]
That wonderful laugh, a laugh that made you think, at this moment, all is right with the world. And the musicality and conviction in the way she said the word, "students," a word she said a lot. So I am sad today. My dear friend is gone from this world, but I believe she will live on in the glimpses, the moods, the impressions, the bits and pieces of my memory. That has to be at least part of what we mean by eternal life. And if it is, Anne's life has not ended. It has merely changed. It will be, it must be, is eternal.
Langston Hughes knew this when he penned the poem-- his poem, "Dear Lovely Death." "Dear lovely death that taketh all things under wing, never to kill, only to change into some other thing. This suffering flesh, to make it either more or less, but not again the same. Dear lovely death, change is thy other name."
They have tissue up here, which is very much like Anne's office, so that feels comforting. I'm here today to talk about my mentor, Anne Monius. Unlike some of her other current and former students, who you will hear from today, I did not have the privilege of formally studying with Anne during my PhD. Rather, Anne was a sort of advisor during my master's-- well, actually, she was my advisor during my master's of theological studies at Harvard Divinity School, and she continued to be a sort of advisor to me long after.
So I am here today, talking to all about the most important person, the best thing that Harvard ever gave to me, and the thing that makes those student loans all worth it. I think that Anne would laugh and think it appropriate that I start off today by connecting her with Harvard, because we all know those stories-- the little 8-year-old girl who told her mother she was going to go to Harvard after getting lost in the school's Museum of Comparative Zoology, the fact that she not only completed her AB here, but her MA and PhD as well, and her wild experience of ending up as a professor in the Center for the Study of World Religions with an office in the very same space in which she had formerly lived as a graduate student.
Anne publicly joked that she would pull back her academic battle regalia, AKA her robes, to reveal a Harvard shirt underneath. But in private, she would tell a dry and somewhat morbid joke that her casket would also bear the Harvard arms. And at the time, I laughed at her institutional boundedness. But now I think, veritas, truth, how beautiful and perfectly Anne.
Anne's felt presence for students at Harvard runs deep and courses through the undergrad, master's and PhD students. In some ways, however, the most fleeting relationship that Anne could have made were with master's students. We are, after all, here for only two or three years. Even with that being the case, Anne has been a formative force in so many MTS and MDiv students' lives. Our collective allegiance to her and to her classes bound us more tightly into a cohort than we already were.
The most beautiful thing about being an academic, to me at least, is learning a shared language, and Anne was the person who taught us to speak and to connect to each other. Even when I went off to do my PhD elsewhere, Anne remained the single most influential and impactful scholar on my intellectual career, and my experience is in no way unique.
Anne had no institutional obligation to me, and so I have a hard time explaining why she continued to be there for me, why she continued to show up for me, except that was just Anne. She came to Philadelphia every single year I was in residence during my PhD. She never missed an academic milestone, but it wasn't just the big stuff.
She was there in the trenches with me, Skyping with me every month for years as I conducted research and was writing. She read draft after draft of my dissertation. I pity her for that. When I think about finishing my PhD, the best image that I have to describe it is of Anne Monius carrying me over the finish line on her back. And as much as Anne got me to the finish by sheer force of will, she also was never easy on me.
When I was writing my dissertation, I would submit a chapter to her, which, for anyone who's ever done such a thing, feels a little bit like sending off this most precious, vulnerable part of yourself. And the chapter would come back to me, usually within 24 hours, completely covered in red. And I would barely make it a few words without some edit or comment from her. It looked like she had made the pages bleed.
And I would literally weep every time this happened. I felt so bad taking up her time on something so worthless. After about three chapters and the same experience each time, my partner delicately suggested that perhaps I should talk to her and tell her that kind of emotional response that I was having to her feedback.
So when one of our monthly Skype sessions, I broached the topic delicately with her and explained that I was finding it hard to take, and I felt like I was wasting her time. And she looked at me quite taken aback and said, Sarah, I think you know I work with a lot of students, so I don't have much time. And I only put that much effort into your work, because I think it's worth it.
And now that I'm on the other side of the table as a professor, I know how incredible it is to have someone not only line edit your work, but to conceptually engage so deeply. I know it was an honor, and I know that it is rare. It meant so much to me to know that she thought my work was worth it and that she believed in me.
In fact, I know that Anne believed in the best possible version of me and the very best possible version of my work. [CRYING] I will spend the rest of my career trying to fulfill the potential that she saw in me. Since Anne passed away in August, I have been rocked by her loss as I know so many of you have as well. I'm now 36 and somehow a professor, but I haven't had a thought since I was 23 that I haven't talked through with her. I have not made a professional decision without her consult, and that's largely true for my personal decisions as well.
I actually don't fully know who I am without her, and yet in losing her, I've had to ask myself, who was she to me? Who was she, period? I, like many of Anne's students, have struggled to name her, to know what she was and who she was to us.
Fellow students of Anne have described her to me as a friend, a mother figure, a therapist, an intellectual anchor, and she was all of those things, but none of them actually capture the essence of who she was for us. In our somewhat bankrupt imaginary of the academy, I think the word that we struggle to enflesh with meaning is "mentor." Anne was my mentor.
And this is a relationship that is inherently uneven. The dynamic meant that Anne was always going to know more about me than I knew about her, compounded by the fact that she was a notoriously private person. As I thought-- as I have thought endlessly about her, I realized that I knew more about her than I realized and that I scrolled away each little detail into the depths of my mind. We bonded over rural backgrounds and all that that entails. We toasted over wine when she paid off her student loans. She loved fine scotch, but she also liked trashy fried fish.
Unlike so many people in the academy, she had no pretensions and unabashedly loved television, and particularly the show, Lost. But she actually may have liked the show, Fringe, even better, because it allowed her to think back to her original interest in physics, and after a few scotches, she had a lot to say about that. She loved nature, and when I was leaving Cambridge without seeing Walden Pond, she couldn't find a time to take me, so she insisted that I borrow her car.
She loved cats, but became allergic after living in India. She had loved deeply and lost, and so held on to her friendships fiercely, talking on the phone to her long distance best friend, Rebecca Manring, nearly every day, and relished kayaking with those who were close by. She rarely said no to her graduate students, except when they intruded onto sacred family time. Peter, she talked about you as if she were-- as if she were your assistant in writing this book about Bob Marley and the pleasure that that gave to her.
But I think-- when I think about the time that was the most invaluable, were the time with her-- was the time with her niece and nephew, Sam and Hannah. They always came first, along with the Red Sox. And so when we debated the finer points of the Sanskrit Jain poet, Jinasena, she was Anne Monius, professor of South Asian religions at Harvard Divinity School. But she was always just a person, too.
The best way I can think of to bring together Anne, the Harvard professor, and Anne, the person, is to talk about her literary convictions. First, she believed that literature has intended or imagined audiences that inherently created communities around texts. Second, she believed that literature has a transformative capacity to work on the reader, aesthetically-- ethically, aesthetically, conceptually. Anne trained several generations of students on how to read, and now those students are training more students in how to read. So even if you don't buy what Anne believed about literature, know that she created communities, and we, as members of her community, were transformed.
Thank you to everyone who generously worked so hard to organize this event. I feel a great discomfort being up here today. In the weeks since Anne's passing, the outpouring of grief was extended and widespread. Many great scholars have passed away before, but I had never before witnessed a response from the academic community quite like this. So many individuals expressed their grief, and the messages and fond memories kept pouring in for weeks, including up till now.
I was frankly astounded. I thought I knew Anne quite well, but I had no idea of the sheer number of individuals whose lives she had touched so deeply. Even more remarkable was the great diversity of scholars to whom Anne meant so much. These messages weren't coming only from students of Tamil or even Jaspati but from an astounding variety of scholars of all sorts of profiles. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. I am myself something of a case in point-- the predominantly Islam, North India, Arabic, and Persian philosophy scholar, who strangely finds himself deeply indebted to this remarkable scholar of Tamil, literature, South India, and just about every Indian religion other than Islam.
I thought maybe I was unique in being an advisee of Anne's, though such a terrible fit with her on paper. But clearly for Anne, such relationships were unusually commonplace. And not just passing relationships, mind you, but deep ones, as we all take stock of the difficult to fathom frequency with which she served on dissertation committees, offered speedy and incisive feedback on innumerable chapter drafts, and provided perhaps daily shoulders to cry on within her well-trodden office in the CSWR, whose walls keep who knows how many secrets.
And so who am I to be speaking up here today, when so many other voices, too, should be heard? In the end, you all must forgive me as I can only speak of my own particular experience learning and being trained under Anne. As with so many others, she seemed to have cultivated Krishna's powers in the Rasa lila, multiplying herself for each of us gopis and gopas, giving us such attention and energy as to convince us that somehow we were her only students, when, in fact, she was doing the same for so many across the globe.
Anne, I hope you will forgive the reference to the Rasa lila. It's a geographically North Indian event. But numerous south Indian connections, if not origins, so I think she would allow it. It was either that or a Harry Potter reference to that time charm.
Anyhow, I don't often remember. My unreliable memory doesn't often remember the first time I met someone, but I vividly recall the first meeting with Professor Anne Monius. I was just a sophomore undergraduate in the spring semester of Anne's first year here at Harvard, attending a religious studies event just across the way in the Barker Center. Myself, a recent convert from the hard sciences to South Asian studies, I hit it off immediately with Anne as we chatted and had a good laugh over, well, my recent conversion from the hard sciences to South Asian studies, much as Anne once underwent herself. For both of us, perhaps not so incidentally, it was, of course, with Professor Diana Eck. My TA, Neelama, is in the back. Thank you both. You're to blame for all of this.
To encapsulate in a nutshell and impact through just a single conversation, the next academic year, I enrolled in, quite literally, every class I could-- four Anne Monius courses in the next two semesters, perhaps 10 term papers. I-- this is 10 papers, excuse me. I hadn't yet sniffed out the independent studies. I could have taken even more classes.
That, of course, was only the beginning of a relationship that would last throughout my remaining undergraduate years, through my graduate studies at Harvard, and up until our last communications in June, as Anne remained ever the advisor she always was to me, full of sage and detailed advice on all matters academic, practical, and personal.
In those final communications, we were furiously comparing schedules, making sure to see each other at two back to back events in Toronto and here in Cambridge before her planned sabbatical travels to India later this year. How could I or anyone know that those two events would end up taking place in Anne's absence? And now how can I process finding myself in Cambridge for a third event in honor of her memory now, shockingly, in the past tense.
I've been fumbling to find my thoughts over these past few weeks, and I don't think I've really succeeded in finding them in the end. But one encouraging thought has recurred to me as I work in the University of Virginia, her brief dalliance before Harvard. And it's simply the observation that of all the myriad ways, small and large, that I've noticed Anne living on, in the present tense, in ways that I had never really appreciated before, not fully, I notice her presence living on in my daily interactions with graduate students, the feeling that one really should prioritize an independent study with them, the pang of guilt I feel when I haven't responded to their emails quickly enough. With Anne, it was usually within six hours, astoundingly-- or that I haven't gotten back to them with proper feedback on that essay they wrote.
What was even more remarkable to me is that Anne never told me that a teacher or anyone should do X, Y, or Z. That's not where this feeling is coming from. Rather, she was simply the embodiment of a most impressive way of being a scholar, a teacher, a mentor, and a friend. The examples are manifold-- I'll try to stay under time-- such as when Anne, completely unprompted, offered her help to me when applying to graduate school programs while I was spending a year in India.
Now this is in the Stone Age, when a program still expected paper applications, and the signed recommendation letters had to come in with the rest of the application. I'm South Asian enough, I wouldn't have dreamed of asking a professor to help with this. Anne, completely under her own offer, volunteered a suggestion over email. Shankar, send your documents.
Mail them them to me for all the programs for which you're applying. I will sort them. I'll walk over to Professor Patil's office, get his letter, to Professor Asani's office for his letter. I'll collate all the applications and mail them out myself to all of the relevant schools and programs. This is for an undergrad she did this.
If I were trying to-- if I were to try to sum up, in a word, the common thread through all of this, at the great risk of cliche but in this instance, it's so very genuine, everything that ended and was so deeply and impressively human. How else could one describe the very last time I got to spend extended time with her, when I introduced Anne to my little toddler, who was just on the brink of figuring out the business of walking? My daughter stumbled around Anne's office, leaning upon the bookshelves for balance, which, of course, promptly evolved into pulling down each and every book on the bottom two shelves.
I was mortified. I sprung up immediately to put my daughter on a leash and insisted upon letting my daughter mangle her precious books. As Anne quipped, there's a reason those books are on the bottom two shelves.
[LAUGHTER]
They haven't received this kind of attention in years. Of course, knowing Anne's erudition, I fully did not believe her. And so without prescription, but just by being her impressive self, Anne became, for so many of us, a most impressive model of humanity. It was Anne who modeled for me that the pre-modern texts I studied were so much more than just repositories of historical data or philosophical arguments, but even more were instances of individual life worlds, interconnected cultures and civilizations. It was Anne who modeled for me a way of teaching, a way of being with students that included but went so far beyond just the straightforward acquisition of research skills, the churning out of publications, et cetera.
No, Anne always gave so much more of herself, attending to her students with such eminent humanity, so attentive to their flourishing in ways inclusive of but going so far beyond just the job. My last thought-- what's also so painfully obvious in these reflections of mine over these past several weeks, however, is how utterly-- is how I utterly failed to live up to the exemplar that Anne modeled.
I still cannot fathom how she managed to unfailingly do all that she did for so many people for so many years. I can only speak for myself, but it seems so clear that I, at least, simply cannot live up to the example of my prior generation. Such I suppose is the course of the Kali Yuga, and as we grieve on this rainy Cambridge afternoon for our dearly departed teacher, Anne Monius, I am also grateful to all of you that we can all be here together in the attempt to come to grips with this reality. Thank you.
First, let me extend my thanks to Karin Grundler-Whitacre and Stephanie Paulsell and everyone who's worked so hard for organizing this amazing program and allowing all of us the space to come together and celebrate Anne's life. It's, I wouldn't say heartening, but it is comforting to be here with so many others who loved Anne.
I also do want to recognize, though briefly, just how unfair it is, how grave a cosmic injustice it is that we've been called together to celebrate the life of a woman who, through her scholarship and, in particular for me, through her teaching and her guidance, helped so many but was taken from us much too soon.
I try not to dwell on this injustice, because it makes me angry, and Anne would not and oftentimes did not allow me or us to wallow in our anger. In the days and weeks since Anne's passing, I've found comfort in the many tributes composed by those whom Anne's life touched, and I received the sage advice from a number of wise people that I, too, should try to write about Anne.
As many others have commented, I've largely failed at this. The pain has been too fresh and all-encompassing to overcome, even for only a little while, to sit and try to explain or to narrativize how Anne shaped me and why she meant so much to me. This is still the case, but at times when you cannot explain how and you can't explain why, I think it's enough, or at least a good start, to simply tell what you know.
And so these are some things that I know about Anne. I know that Anne influenced me, molded me in ways that I don't fully understand and cannot completely articulate. To seriously engage with Anne, whether over coffee for an hour or for seven years as a student, was to open yourself up to being transformed.
Anne influenced not just what I study or even how I study it. She informed the way I teach, how I interact with my colleagues and my students, and at a most basic level, how I think, how I speak, and how I comport myself on a day-to-day basis.
I know that Anne also taught me what to value in the world of the academy. Anne possessed a fierce and formidable intellect, one she used in the spirit of incomparable selfless generosity. Anne valued in her students and in her peers passion, hard work, curiosity, and authenticity. She had no time for pretense and very little patience for ego.
Anne cared about me and about all of her students holistically. She cooked for us. I received an animated birthday card in my email inbox every year. Anne taught me that it was OK to prioritize my own happiness, that wearing the identity of a sullen graduate student like a badge of honor was fruitless and counterproductive.
I know that Anne was tough. Her criticism was precise and incisive, and her praise was meaningful and well earned. I know that this toughness stemmed not from a fixation on her students' weaknesses, though I certainly did more than my fair share of parading those weaknesses before her, but from an unbridled confidence in our strengths, our abilities, and our potential, qualities which were oftentimes unseen by us in the moment.
I remember one email in particular I got from Anne. It was in response to my sending her what I thought was going to be the first chapter of my dissertation.
[LAUGHTER]
Exactly. You all know where this is going. I had written incredibly poorly a literature review that I was so proud of, this first piece of real dissertation writing that I'd finished. Anne wrote in her response to this, to my sending this email to her, something along the lines of, Dear Greg, I'm extremely glad you did this.
Clearly, it's helped you organize your thoughts. However, all of this will eventually become a footnote in the introduction to your actual dissertation. Stop focusing on other people's work, and start wallowing in your own stuff.
When I recovered from the immediate devastation, I felt oddly comforted. I was ready, Anne had just confirmed, to really start the work of a scholar. And she was encouraging me to take that step with confidence.
I know that every interaction I had with Anne-- after every interaction I had with Anne, I felt better. I felt more confident. And how many people can you really say that about? Anne oftentimes remarked that her favorite part of the week was the time she spent with her students, and I know that that was also true for all of us. I look forward to every meeting I had scheduled with Anne, because I knew that after emerging from Anne's office, I would have learned something new. I would have gotten good advice.
On more than one occasion, and always with the slyest of smiles, Anne informed me or reminded me that there were very few problems in life that couldn't be fixed by a six pack and a joint. And she was right. And I knew that I would also laugh in those times as well.
Of course, many people have commented about Anne's legendary mirthful laugh. What I remember about it most was how easily it filled her office, how it reverberated from the books, the icons, and the trinkets that she kept. Anne's laugh was the foundation of the warmth that I felt every time I entered that space.
Lastly, I know that the sharp and sometimes overwhelming grief that we all feel is itself a testament to the privilege it was to having known Anne, to have learned from and to have been shaped by her. The pain of losing Anne will sit for a long time, but my hope is that all of us, and in particular, my generation of scholars, my peers, can take this pain and transform it into motivation to take what we've learned from and what we know about Anne and enact it in our own lives going forward.
Anne always knew that we could do more than we thought we could, and it's time to prove her right. Thank you.
I speak today on behalf of some of Anne's current students who worked together to write this piece, weaving together our shared memories of her. That we are devastated by the loss of Anne is a profound understatement. To her students, she was an advisor, role model, fierce advocate and guide, but perhaps, most importantly, a beloved friend. She played this expansive role for so many, which has become clear in the days and weeks since her passing.
As her students and advises, we would like to share with you some of the contours of the work she did with and for us as her dedication to advising and mentoring was unparalleled and should not go uncelebrated. Anne's efforts for her students were Herculean. On top of teaching and administrative duties, she sat on numerous dissertation committees in and outside of Harvard, wrote countless recommendation letters each year, and conducted independent studies with up to a dozen students each semester.
Given that so many of her students from outside her area flocked to her, Anne read widely in order to best support us all, quickly mastering enough Greek to read the tragedies, diving into Calvin's institutes, learning Persian for an incoming doctoral advisee. These feats were quotidian for Anne. She set aside one-hour blocks from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM, and tirelessly showed up for us, even offering to share her lunch, if you had the 12:00 PM slot.
Each of us marveled at how our one hour with Anne was the most challenging and productive of the week. These meetings are now cherished memories. To take a class with Anne was to enter into a space of rigorous learning. In lecture, she could deftly cover a vast amount of material in less than an hour, whether summarizing the entire plot of the Ramayana or laying out the state of a scholarly field. Her lectures were so thorough, articulate, and concise that one didn't even need to do the readings. But--
[LAUGHTER]
--her love for the material, her framing and delivery made us want to do the readings and to fall in love with them ourselves. Though her lectures were always artfully crafted, it was in her seminars where Anne came alive and where we learned to do the work of true scholarship. It was difficult to leave those two hours of discussion without feeling like you had finished an intense workout. Indeed, that's what Anne's seminars were, an opportunity for us to be pushed to our limits and to grapple with the arguments and assumptions of whatever text was in front of us, ultimately imagining how we might build upon it in our own work.
In her courses, each of us learned how to read carefully, how to ask compelling questions, and how to, as she would say, put our arguments into language our mothers could understand. Anne was just as present, committed, and engaged outside of class. Many of us recall how she would turn a paper draft around within 24 hours, sometimes with apologies for the delay, complete with meticulous, incisive track changes throughout and provocative summation at the end.
Read through her eyes, our work had potential. Her interlocution improved everything it engaged. Beyond that, it made the work exciting. It made being a young scholar exciting. The horizon was always expanding in Anne's eyes, and there was endless possibility for doing and saying something better than what had been done and said before. Anne often referred to herself as a full service advisor. It was her own joke about her willingness to do whatever we needed, from giving us rides home at the end of an event to reading all manner of documents.
She once offered to crawl under a table to help plug in a student's laptop. Even more than the practical help, the gravity of the emotional labor that Anne performed for us as a full service advisor cannot be adequately conveyed. That navigating extra academic concerns often comprised the bulk of our time together says something significant. She recognized us as whole human beings first, individuals whose academic identities were always bound up in a delicate web of self-doubt, financial precarity, family responsibilities, future concerns, and, of course, a deep love for our materials.
Without ever prying, she made it clear that we could share our struggles with her, no matter the subject. Being a whole person with Anne meant that we didn't have to be whole self-serious people to be taken seriously. This is a rare thing. To be cared for by Anne was a privilege.
No doubt because of this care and her encouragement of community, her advisees are an unusually tight group. Many happy evenings were spent at her home, where she would spend several days preparing delicious South Indian meals and amazing brownies, giving us an opportunity to break bread together, unwind, enjoy life beyond the monotonous push of academic responsibilities. Since her passing, we have found strength in each other, and this can only be taken as a credit to her.
There was an attitude amongst us whenever anything went wrong that Anne would know what to do and Anne could fix it. Both of these statements were always true, and it is difficult to imagine moving forward without her, steadfast at the helm, infinitely prepared for anything, knowing what to do. In some ways, we can take comfort in knowing that she brought us together and trained us well.
Every day, Anne enacted a vision of the university characterized by her dedication to her students, her intellectual rigor, and her service to the larger community. Her dedication to academia was not concerned with the production of good scholars alone, but with training the next generation of human beings, capable of engaging audiences far beyond their disciplinary boundaries and committed citizens, who thought deeply about the broader significance of their work.
In reading texts, she taught us to be attentive to the ways in which they not only described the world around them, but actively shaped it. And she made it clear that this applied to our work as well. At Harvard, Anne was known as an excellent reader of theory. Whether it was Foucault, Gadamer, Latour, her take always brought these thinkers vividly into the present and helped us to imagine how they might become useful conversation partners for our own work. Anne particularly loved the work of Paul Ricoeur, and she taught him to so many of us that it only seems appropriate to mention him here.
In one of his later works, Ricoeur discusses the concept of human selfhood, a concept that centers on a fundamental question-- who am I? For Ricoeur, and for Anne, too, this question could only be answered by imagining one's life as a narrative and tracking how that narrative changes over time. Having a narrative sense of selfhood also means that we could never see ourselves in isolation from others. The stories of our lives inevitably connect with the stories of others' lives, and, indeed, it is impossible to construct a narrative of Anne's life without seeing her as connected to the lives of the countless people she touched.
How do we know if a life has been good? For Ricoeur, the answer is found by reading it as if it were a narrative. The good life is a life worthy of being recounted. Just as literary narratives need readers to bring them closure, in the same way, the narrative of a person's life needs others to tell it, and in doing so, bring some closure to it. By telling the stories of our lives and the role that Anne played in them, we might bring some closure to the story of Anne's life and some closure to ourselves as people who remain deeply inspired and moved by Anne.
We can never know how and might have narrated the story of her own life if she were with us today, but we can know one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt-- Anne's was a good life, lived with and for others. And it is a life worthy of being recounted.
We've heard a lot of stories today about Anne's generosity, how she never said no when you asked her to talk through an idea for a paper or respond to a draft of a statement of purpose or read a dissertation chapter. But a little known fact about Anne, I believe, is that she also never said no when asked to preach.
When Sarah Coakley asked her to preach at the Friday morning Eucharist at HDS, Anne always said yes. And when Dorothy Austin and, later, Jonathan Walton asked her to preach at morning prayers in the Memorial Church, she said yes. If there was a text from the Bible assigned for the occasion, Anne would listen carefully for some resonance with a text from the South Asian traditions she loved, and she would help those of us lucky enough to be listening to her to hear that resonance too and to feel its claim on us.
Anne preached when asked to, because she loved what she studied. And she believed that sharing the rich deposit from our human inheritance that she had spent her life studying, teaching it, even preaching it, mattered to the life of the world. How do I justify devoting my life to the work of poets cremated more than 1,000 years ago, she asked in her 2007 convocation talk. Because the more we come to understand about those who live outside our particular orbits, she said, the less likely we are to fear them, loathe them, or kill them.
That's what was at stake for Anne in her scholarship, her teaching, and even her preaching-- life and death. And so she encouraged her students and all of us to train our imaginations through the detailed and careful study of history of languages, of literature, of religion, not just for ourselves, but for each other and in what now seems like a massive understatement, what she called our radically impoverished public square.
I can already feel in myself a reluctance to leave this room, to leave the company of those who have brought Anne back for a moment with their wonderful stories and memories and music. But we will have to leave, and when we do, I hope we'll go remembering what Anne believed was at stake in doing the work we love, whatever that is. I hope we leave committed to doing it well, as Anne did hers, and also doing it for others, as she also did.
Anne was a light on the path for many in this room and beyond this room. So in the spirit of the guidance Anne offered to so many, I'd like to offer for our closing a blessing for pilgrims as they head out on their journeys. As you know, Anne mistrusted the turn toward the contemporary as if only things in the present are relevant, and like Peter, I will miss knowing about those arguments she would have with Sam over the dinner table.
So I have chosen an old blessing. This is a blessing that has been prayed over pilgrims since the 11th century, and I offer it because now that we can't look to Anne to do a lot of the things she used to do for us, we are going to have to look to each other.
May god be for us, and we for one another, a defense in emergency, a harbor in a shipwreck, a refuge in the journey, shade in the heat, light in the storm, a staff on the slippery slope, joy amidst suffering, consolation in sadness, safety in adversity, caution in prosperity, so that we may safely arrive where we are boldly going. Amen.
Thank you for coming today. Please join us for a reception just across the hall.