RIP: One of my longest surviving friends

 Sam Smith - One of my longest surviving friends, Weld Henshaw, passed away a few days ago. We met during a Maine summer over 75 years ago and at the age of 9 or 10 he had made it clear that our friendship would not be simple. I then was called by my middle name, Houston,  but Weld started calling me Huseless. Fortunately my first name was Sam – named after my granddad whose father had been a cousin of the Texas Sam Houston.  So thanks to Weld, I changed my name to Sam.

In our teen years we did a lot of sailing and then both applied to Harvard as our college. I graduated magna cum probation and Weld found it just as difficult. As he wrote about it:

I have read the remarks of others of their first days at Harvard with both interest and anxiety. There is no time in my life about which I have more regrets and overwhelming feelings of chagrin… I knew I was not ready for college, any college, and certainly not Harvard. My desire to take a year off before starting fell on Dad's deaf ears and, in those days, my sympathetic Mom felt estopped to take issue with the pater familias. Many years later, when my youngest son gained admission, I was thrilled when he did take a year off and travelled alone around the world.

To this day, I remain certain that there was no close rival to me in the callowness department …. At boarding school all the rules and regulations had been so pervasive, I couldn't help attending classes, doing assignments and showing up on time. Once set loose in Cambridge, I skipped almost all classes, slept through breakfast and led a totally juvenile, aimless existence. I managed to rally at exam time, not always enough to avoid probation, but fending off rustication until the middle of my junior year….

I was not to gain the maturity expected of a college student until I returned from the army in February of 1959. In the time since then, I have learned to love learning. When I think back to the fall of 1955, my toes curl up in my shoes in shame and mortification.

Struggles in college was not our only common ground.  Here is from a sermon he gave at a Unitarian Church in Brunswick, Maine in 2008:

I am an atheist. . . I thought it daring to begin my brief sermon with these words, these four words. Brief - the sine qua non of any summer sermon. But I can’t just stop after four words. First, that sentence is not fully honest. Second, I should explain this derives from a real sermon by a real preacher at The Old Ship Meeting House in Hingham twenty-odd years ago. Freshly called to Old Ship, Ken Read-Brown started with, “I am an agnostic.”…

So, if I have doubts about the atheist bit, why did I use it? The answer lies in a point, made clear by celebrated evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. . .”Let us guess that in the sentient population, something like twenty per cent are true blue ‘I know my God is real’ types (and ‘He walks with me and he talks with me …’) Then there is, say, another group who believe in God with an unsteady faith, a belief something short of certainty, but who self describe as believers.”

I read recently that a majority of Americans have only a ‘weak” belief in an afterlife. So down our this slippery slope we have another category, folks who somewhat vaguely believe in God but give it little thought and are conscious of passing clouds, ideations of agnosticism. Next to them are frank agnostics, who think it’s all beyond our ken. Some of them, I for example, do not really believe in God and see no arguments that lead to faith in a real God. We could be called super-agnostics or non-assertive atheists…

Finally, there are true blue flat-out atheists who know no god exists. These tough minded folk, tiny in number; hold an assertive no-doubts atheism to me flawed by a certainty where certainty does not obtain. Not even Dawkins identifies with these deniers; I’m with Dawkins on this. It just doesn’t make sense to have leaps of non-faith. So this puts me as a leftist agnostic and something close to a functional atheist. I am unaware of any miracle or answered prayer in all human history. To me, the greatest miracle ever was Bill Mazeroski’s home run in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the 1960 World Series, an event ignored by all theologians save a few from my home town, Pittsburgh. . .

As a seventh day agnostic who also had to struggle to get through Harvard, I shared with Weld an unapproved acceptance of the unknown. And since the truth was still out there missing, there was plenty of time to laugh, drink and talk about other things.