Insight and encouragement - Spiritual Mentors - Column

Christian Century, April 14, 1993 by Harvey Gallagher Cox

I stopped by to see James Luther Adams recently to see his advice and blessing as I got ready to deliver some lectures. And why not? JLA, going on 92, has been my mentor for 35 years, since I first showed up at Harvard in 1958 to start my doctoral work.

A widower for nearly two decades now, he welcomes me as he always does, from behind a sloping Everest of monographs, journals and books. There is a suspicious scent of cigarette smoke in the air, though no butts are visible. He lives with a housekeeper in a little house on Francis Avenue in Cambridge only 200 yards from the Divinity School. A stream of students, ex-students, friends, overseas guests, visiting scholars and faculty members from other parts of the university flows through the haphazardly furnished bungalow. Visitors pick their way through stacks of documents, file cabinets and newspapers. But it is always worth it. I never leave his rumpled salon without a new insight and a word of encouragement.

When I was his student, it was widely rumored that JLA suffered from insomnia and slept only three hours a night, going to bed well after midnight and waking at four to read canon law (a curious taste for a Unitarian), grade papers and scrutinize dissertations in progress, mine included. I never crept over to the Adams's residence in the chilly New England predawn hours to check on the rumor, but I rather believe it was true. How else could you hand in a chapter of your thesis on Tuesday and get it back with comments and suggestions amply penned in the margins by Friday morning? I knew other doctoral students who fumed and raged that their advisers often took weeks to return their work, and even then it often showed little evidence of having been read carefully. Not JLA. He once returned a draft I'd written on the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel with the accents graves scrupulously turned into accents aigues where appropriate. Sometimes people are surprised to find out how quickly I finished my doctoral dissertation (once I actually got started on it), but the fact is I had to keep churning it out just to keep up with JLA. Yet he never once pushed. He just made me feel that what I was doing was important.

He expected a lot from his students. I once went to his office to get his help in preparing for my presentation in his Troeltsch seminar. He enthusiastically handed me a lengthy, review article on my topic that he had just found in a journal. "Be sure to read this," he said, "before the class." My heart sank. The article was in Dutch. Embarrassed, I confessed to him that I could not read Dutch. He smiled cheerily and stamped out his cigarette. "Well," he said, "I'm sure there's a dictionary in the library."

When I returned to Harvard to teach a couple years after my graduation, Jim became my mentor again, this time in a new way. He was the older bear helping the cub find his way through a forest filled with traps and pitfalls. At first I tried to emulate him, to be a walking bibliography, a slam-bang lecturer, a matchless raconteur, a broad scholar with little regard for academic boundaries and - above all - a superb mentor to my diverse students. But it wasn't working. He could do it, but for me it was too much. And he noticed it. So one day he reminded me of an aphorism by Emerson: "Imitation is suicide." The mentors are the ones who can tell you when to lay off.

Three decades ago when I first started studying with JLA some of my fellow students joked somberly that we should get our dissertations finished as soon as possible because he might die any day. Insomnia, hyperactivity, too many cigarettes, rumors about a heart murmur - we could all be left as academic orphans. But over 30 years later JLA is still around and still producing. During one visit last year he pointed to a shelf of books and had me pull down one that a remark of mine had called to his encyclopedic mind. "About . . . there," he said, pointing from his perch at the desk to the towering bookcase, and there it was, just where he knew it would be. I thought painfully of my helter-skelter study at home and was about to resolve to straighten it up when I remembered, "Imitation is suicide."

How long can a mentor go on mentoring? By now not only have I mentored a generation of students myself, but my former students are doing lots of their own mentoring. I'm sure it's a lot like parenting: We mentor best either if we've been well mentored ourselves, or if we were not and we are determined that we will not impose the same intellectual neglect on others. I'm lucky to have been in the first group. I was - and am still - mentored by one of the best, a scholar whose list of publications is a little shorter than some others because he loved and enjoyed his students, and still does.

In any case, it is wonderful beyond words to have one's original mentor around for so long. Most people don't have that privilege. I've never properly learned Dutch, but I do know where the dictionaries are, and isn't that what it's all about? And I also know that when you've latched on to a world-class mentor you should hang on for dear life.