Phil Zaeder

Thursdays, March 8 - April 5 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. 5 sessions
Prescott House, 55 Beacon Street

Across the years the works or “meditations” below have touched my life, some arriving by strange passage, as Jonah through Moby Dick and Wild Strawberries at New Haven’s Lincoln Theatre; Avirov’s Immaterial Witness, simply appeared in a divinity school bulletin. Does the word meditations fit? What, can we imagine, are the springs leading to such creations? Together we will follow ways in these makings: understanding in mercy, “the astonishment of living”, laughter and tears, “the wings of the morning,” the abiding presence of spirit.

1. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Gerard Manley Hopkins ‘Pied Beauty’
Poems by Bishop, Dickinson, Frost. Psalm 139
{…’more beauty than our eyes can bear’ Gilead

2. The Chalk Garden by Enid Bagnold; essay by Madeleine Avirov: Immaterial Witness (Harvard Divinity bulletin). Hopkins “Thou art indeed just” Poems by Ciardi, Hayden, Rich.
{ …’they in whom mercy is understanding’…Ciardi

3. Wild Strawberries (l957) Ingmar Bergman. Hopkins “Spring and Fall” Poems by Childress, Donne, Eliot, and Rosetti.
‘through a glass darkly'…I Corinthians

4. Rembrandt Bathsheba; Jesus: Self-Portraits (late);Simeon. II Samuel Hopkins “The Windhover” Poems by Jane Cooper, Herbert, Stevens.
{ ..'thou art the man'…II Samuel

5. Jonah, Isaiah 41-42, John 1-2. Hopkins “God’s Grandeur” Poems by Blake, Margaret Gibson, James Wright
{.. ‘It is finished in beauty'…Navajo chant

Seminar books: Robinson’s Gilead (2005); Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden (1955) (Samuel French edition 1984). And if you wish: Rembrandt’s Nose Michael Taylor (2007) or Rembrandt’s Journey, MFA.

Phil Zaeder

Philip Zaeder, an English teacher and chaplain for forty years, worked at the Taft School, Yale University in the l970s, and Phillips Academy in Andover until 2000. Living in Milton, NH with his wife Sylvia Thayer, he is an advisor to nearby Shortridge Academy and a builder of stonewalls.