
It is not exactly logical, “Mystery is that which gives meaning,” but it does free the mind.
Somewhere in the mid-sixties the nine of us piled into the family station wagon and drove south to Mt. Savior Monastery in Elmira. I assume my father had made some sort of arrangement before we stopped in, I was just going along for the ride and probably would rather have stayed home with my friends. I remember the grounds, the barn, the small church and I remember meeting Brother David. My father was greatly influenced by this mystic monk. This glimpse of monastic life was certainly mysterious to me. On the way home we would stopped at Annis Dairy for ice cream.
In his “Underground Designers Handbook,”Leo Dodd says he attended a lecture series by Brother David and was exposed to “the beauty and clarity of his thought, how common religious terms like awareness, encounter and commitment, in David’s hands, took on a special arrangement with stunning impact. Without this exposure, to how these terms interplay with God, man and mystery this handbook would not exist.”
Brother David Steindl-Rast is a Benedictine monk, author, and interfaith scholar best known for his teachings on gratefulness. He was born in Austria in 1926. He was greatly influenced by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s book, “The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk,” and the two protested the Viet Nam war together. 98 years old now, he is still a prominent voice bridging contemplative Christian traditions with Buddhism. He has a Ted Talk.
My father was 41 in 1968 when he created his “Underground Designers Handbook.” My parents were unhappy with the conservative tenants of Catholicism and along with a former priest and a small group of like-minded liberals they went about forming their own church, not a physical building but a community. In the formative stages the group would meet at our house and conversation mixed with cigarette smoke wafted upstairs to our bedrooms.

Leo’s artwork, in colored pencils and ink, is a joy to look at. Trained as a mechanical engineer he worked as a design engineer for Eastman Kodak. He was able to reduce concepts to graphic symbols. And if it got complicated he would create a matrix. He used to to say he couldn’t talk without a pencil. I don’t think he could think without one. He retired early but continued working as a consultant. I was lucky to have been on jobs with Leo while creating slideshows for high-tech companies under insane deadlines. This was fun for him. The concepts expressed in his Underground Designers Handbook remain mysterious to me but mystery is that which gives meaning.
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