One of the dividends of the ministry is coming to know and enjoy different people - all ages and all human conditions. Often there are surprises.

One came for me on a fall afternoon in the 1960s when some members of my Lexington congregation and I visited a Trappist monastery to see what life is like as a monk. Coming out of the Reformed tradition which has no such orders, I never thought of life behind the walls as anything involving me personally. The silences. Rising at 2 a.m. to pray (after having gone to bed with the sun). A seeming disengagement from social suffering. Celibacy. For most of us, especially for non-Catholics, a strange world.

Which is why we went. To see how those disciples could attract and apply to anyone healthy and fascinated by life's stunning variety. But on the tour bus that day (the 40 of us had been invited to look around and stay for dinner) one began to feel a mysterious, secret attraction.

The inward journey. The career of the soul. Discoveries about God that lie deeper than attending services. Anything that could call up lifelong, life-separating commitment. It was the mystery that prompted Thomas Merton to write The Seven-Story Mountain, a book that had so charmed me a dozen years before.

The bus circled in front of the retreat house. We disembarked in the rain and were met by a greeter who also would show us where we could buy cheeses made by the brothers. Wide-smiling, and for the moment out from under his vow of silence, he outlined what we would be doing during the next three or four hours. He then turned us over to Father Louis who would be our guide. He would show us the library, the simple padded sleeping cells, a tool house where farm implements were kept, then to the chapel quickly being absorbed in shadows for one of the last prayer services of the day. Then the common meal with its fascinating hand signals that meant "please pass the bread."

It was an unforgettable experience, and I still find myself thinking about a place called "Gethsemani," a dozen miles or so down a country road east of Bardstown, Kentucky.

Then a stunning discovery: Father Louis was Thomas Merton - "Louis" being the religious name he took when he joined the Order. When we got ready to leave about 7:30, I spoke for a few moments with Father Louis, asking if I might some day return and have time to talk to him. Thus began a cherished friendship. The subsequent visit, about a month later, resulted in this original verse:

Meeting With Thomas Merton

Two long rows of September trees, like mower teeth
Clipped the lawn of sky. We sat
Beneath them, on folding chairs (ugly invention),
To pass through our eye-fingers the miracle
Of knowing each other.

I would have studied the roughness and the
Purpose of his leather belt.
But his face was
Too interesting for that diversion. Thus, I chose
Excursion into his monkish heart.
That's why I came to Gethsemani.

"Man's God's trophy," he said. The rest I've mostly
Forgotten. That's quite enough for fourteen lifetimes
To think about. God's trophy.
Polished, proud. But I remembered that sometimes trophies get dropped
And golden heads get broken off.

The private quest - the search through solitariness for immediate communion with God is as old as the Bible itself. It is a road paved with autobiographies of wonder, experimentation, and advice to those who seek that quality in their lives that Paul Tillich called "depth." He once described it as the "missing dimension" in our complex efforts to theologize our way to and through the gates of heaven.

The literature of the Puritans is a large vault of social history. And, while it seems to have lost most of its meaning for these times, "piety" is making a comeback as ceremonial religion is more and more replaced by individuals searching for an Eternal Now that begins to transform life at its center.

It's a little startling to eavesdrop on today's "intentional" communities and hear Protestants speak about spiritual directors, spiritual formation, fasting, journal keeping. Iona and Taizé have been around a long time now. But something new is happening, and the United Church of Christ and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have established national offices to develop programs to provide support for this growing interest in a spirituality that seeks some middle ground between a separateness - the solitary pathway of the heart - and the Life Together, which Dietrich Bonhoeffer eloquently described, and which Paul appears to make basic to his portrait of Christian behavior in 1 Corinthians 12.

The Church (note the word is singular) does not regard this as an alien movement. But, so far as I can tell, this rediscovery is being carried on with little reference to the preaching event, or where kerygma fits into our hunger for Brother Lawrence's kitchen.

Is it because the path is so private - where finding a way to make oneself accountable for the stewardship of such a mystic potential becomes achievable only when applied to one other person? Where most pain and the gain involves lonely struggle or individual ecstasy? Where meditation risks getting separated from the prayers of the people, and the sacramental character of the commonplace is forfeited in the pursuit of the discipline for discipline's sake?

That sounds hostile. And shouldn't be - after my own spirit-shaping experiences of reading (in addition to Seven-Story Mountain), Thomas Kelly's Testament Of Devotion, John Woolman's Journal, Luther's A Simple Way To Pray, The Ladder Of Devotion by Caspar Calvor, the writings of John Watson, the Scriptures themselves. My inner life has been made indescribably rich by encounters with God in places other than a room full of pews.

Yet there is a connectionalism here that makes me want to come to the defense of the sermon, keeping preaching tightly bound up with the assignment to hear and do the will of God.

Biblical models for true spirituality come alive through preaching.

Preaching furnishes the vision of community without which the inward quest is distorted. And there is a need for contemporaneity which informed preaching supplies and which is missing if we try to make the journey alone.

Preaching is validation when God is experienced both through knowledge and through action.

Culture needs the influence both of itineraries by those who have experienced God through prayer and by those who have known God and God's support in the struggle for greater justice on Earth.

The Royalty Of The Pulpit was the title of a book written earlier in the century about who had been leading preachers of the times. I never owned the book. Neither have I forgotten that title.

Royalty suggests superior status of some sort - pomp and circumstance, recognition, sovereignty. Pulpit "royalty" suggests that "these were among the best." Such a roll call of heroes will be forever changing and, to some degree, indexed to culture (if popularity is the yardstick). Yet it will also transcend the fickleness of the moment in ways that have us remembering their gifts to persons like me in whom their wisdom, vision, and greatness lives on.

There are the classical preachers whose reputations were established between pre-Reformation times and the Reformation. An impressive nineteenth century list of those who made Scotland synonymous with the power of preaching to help set the nation's character or, in the New World, determine the outcome of its civil war. Then, somewhere in the first third of the present century, other changes came along such as the science versus religion debate and the widened acceptance of textual criticism. The resurgence of topical (vs. textual) preaching, with the free church, yoked ecstasy to activism, the Niebuhrian approach to ethics, and new understandings of what faithful living is all about.

Among some of my own best models, beginning with the year I was born, 1920, have been G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Leslie Weatherhead, E. Stanley Jones, Ralph Sockman, George Buttrick, Peter Marshall, Donald Baillie, James Stewart, and Arthur John Gossip.

To allow myself the luxury of a second decalogue, I also name Louis Evans, Carlyle Marney, James Pike, Ted Loder, Wallace Hamilton, Gerald Kennedy, Eugene Carson Blake, Liston Pope, Elton Trueblood, and Richard Raines.

Plus the following, whose writing informed my mind and added muscle and music to my faith: Loren Eiseley, Thomas Merton, Halford Luccock, Reinhold Niebuhr, Frederick Buechner, Walter Brueggemann, C. S. Lewis, Robert McAfee Brown, Ernest Fremont Tittle, John Sutherland Bonnell, Henri J. M. Nouwen, Howard Thurman, Samuel Miller, David H. C. Read, Joseph Ford Newton, Ernest Campbell, William Sloane Coffin, John Henry Jouette, Ernest Gordon, and Abraham Heschel.

I wish these lists included the Afro-American preachers (whom we know are among the best preachers in the world), women clergy (they are already proving that the future will be theirs!), Hispanic minds and voices (leading the revival of preaching in the Southern hemisphere), Native American and Asian servants of the word (like Kagawa).

I can't change that. I can only hope for some balance by the willingness to share what has flowed into my inner world from so many sources - their passion, hallowed imaginations, knowledge of the world, their books, their poetry, their ability to move life forward, to teach and to care, to finish in their own way the prayer "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace."

Preachers, of course, do not preach to be honored or even remembered. And even to suggest such a "Royalty of the Pulpit" sounds silly, and at odds with the humility of the One whose life, death, and resurrection we are called to proclaim.

Yet the heart keeps a scrapbook.

And there is gratitude to those who have opened our eyes, been our teachers and guides and, having received the torch of hope from someone else who handed it on, evoked in us an inevitable remembrance, and resistance to forgetting.

The day of the "big steeple" preachers seems to be over. As over as solemn sabbaths and worship centers in our homes. Occasionally a sermon makes the news, but that occurs when ecclesiastical authority is threatened, the sermon is connected with scandal, or immorality is condemned as unacceptable in this society.

And preaching, from what I have been able to tell in my limited visits, is nearly over in Europe.

In an American city on Sunday morning, suburbia may present another kind of evidence.

Where we are most apt to find preaching "thriving" is in the new mega-congregations on the edge of the larger metropolitan areas where belief structures are mostly left undefined, but sprawling parking lots, abundant child care, and family support services have made these congregations the "right" place to be - congregations where preachers have little in common with what this chapter is about.

Trouble within monarchies has given royalty a bad name of late, but "royal" still sets up within us bright colors, majestic songs, beauty, life understood as pageantry. This too is what preaching is about, as through the life of Jesus, Thomas Merton, and some of the rest of us, new worlds await their realization. Faith in a Spirit that combines power with love, and love with power, makes the future look more promising than we may have thought.