Shareware Overload/ShartewareOverload.cdr/games/fireside.zip/FLECK

Text File | 1986-08-25 | 6KB | 156 lines

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                                                               REVISED 8/25/86
          Peter Fleck:
          Investments in the Heart


          It has been a long and peculiar trip for
          Peter Fleck, and those who know him
          in one guise are slack-jawed when they
          learn about the rest.

          A banker and a preacher, you say?  The
          mind whirls.  Jesus invites the
          moneychangers back into the temple, and
          apologizes for the error.  The banks of
          the Jordan.  Prophet and loss.  Fiscal
          mystic.

          The contradiction is the key, the Rev. Dr.
          G. Peter Fleck, minister associate for the
          First Unitarian-Universalist Parish in
          Brewster, Mass., retired president/founder
          of the Amsterdam Overseas Corp., and
          author of The Mask of Religion, a stunning
          collection of sermon-essays on faith and
          reason, would say.  Contradictions are
          what it is all about.  They are our
          greatest source of grace.

          Fleck knows what it is like to go from
          something to nothing and to keep going
          from there.  A native of Holland, of
          Jewish ancestry, he and his wife Ruth
          fled from the Nazis in 1941, leaving
          everything behind.  For all he knew, he
          would wind up selling frankfurters
          somewhere in the Wild West.

          Had he done so, he might today be retired
          hotdog magnate instead of banker.  As it
          happened, his few contacts in New York
          restablished him in the business he knew,
          investment banking.  He worked through the
          war years guarding the American
          interests of the French Rothschild family.
          After the war, their support, plus that of
          the British Rothschilds, helped him
          establish the international investment
          bank, Amsterdam Overseas Corp.(since
          renamed Rothschild, Inc.), a firm
          combining corporate finance, capital
          management, and investment advice.  Fleck
          remains honorary director of the bank (and
          director of many other institutions) to
          this day.

          A worldly man.  But comes the
          contradiction: Peter Fleck all his life
          had a fascination for what his rationalist
          parents denied -- the end of reason, and
          the onset of faith.  In Holland he had
          felt at home with the Remonstrant
          Fellowship, the same group which harbored
          the Puritans in the 17th Century (who
          would make their own way west in time, and
          disembark a few dozen kilometers from
          Brewster).  The Remonstrants were children
          of Puritanism and the Enlightenment.
          Their closest analog in America, of
          course, was Unitarianism.

          Fleck joined the First Unitarian Society
          in Plainfield, N.J., and soon, owing to
          his active involvement there, and his
          understanding of how the world worked, was
          elected to the AUA board, and later on the
          UUA board as well.  It was his good
          fortune to serve under Dr. Dana McLean
          Greeley -- they would become friends for
          life, and Greeley would officiate at his
          ordination, many, many years later, when
          they both had grown old.

          Fleck's lay ministry began in 1953 in
          Plainfield, the result of a Lupercalian
          tradition in some churches, the "Layman's
          Sunday," where for one day the laity are
          given the opportunity to take over
          ministerial functions.  Fleck nearly had
          to be pried from the pulpit -- at
          precisely the right moment, when the
          fellowship movement was attaining its
          grand momentum, and the need for cogent
          lay preaching was greatest, Peter Fleck
          stumbled upon a second career.

          He was a blur to many, preaching here,
          preaching there, like the circuit riders
          of another day.  And his words were
          attended with something like open-mouthed
          awe.  I am not a theologian, he said a
          thousand times -- I have no system.  But I
          am open -- to discovery, to observation,
          to surprise.

          The best sermons, some compiled in essay
          form in The Mask of Religion (Prometheus,
          1981), or in his recently completed
          manuscript, The Blessing of Imperfection,
          seem less concerned with consistency with
          the rest of his work than with its own
          discoveries.  Each is like a stone picked
          up and examined, a random object held up
          to scrutiny, in search of another, inner
          light.

          I believe that something has happened,
          that we living in unique times, he says.
          The old beliefs, in view of what we have
          seen, are no longer tenable.  We can only
          speak of the Ultimate from behind the mask
          of symbol, myth, and metaphor.

          Bankers make bad mystics.  Refugees make
          poor fools.  But Peter Fleck has gazed
          upon the face of suffering and not
          flinched.  He has seen horror, and
          glimpsed hope.

          It was never supposed to be easy to be
          human, he says.  We have to believe, as
          scientists do, that the worthy problems
          are the ones that lead us to other,
          greater problems.

          He is a living treasure of our church,
          because he tells the truth, in all its
          contradictions.

          And that, as they say on Wall Street, is
          the bottom line.

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