I have long defined myself as a morning person. The story I tell is that when I was a young boy, my father used to occasionally take me with him to work at the airport. In the summer, he left for work between 4 and 4:30 am. He would come up the stairs and ask me if I wanted to go along. In my memory, I always did. The thing was, that when he came up to invite me, he was already dressed. I had the amount of time it took him to put on his boots and head out the door to get up, get to the bathroom and get dressed. Most of the time I could make it.

Whether or not that is the reason, I find it early to rouse myself from slumber and get out of bed. When I was working, I almost always the first to arrive at the church. I liked having the building to myself for a while before people started to arrive. I would run through my sermon to an empty sanctuary, catch up on correspondence, have time for prayers and get in a bit of reading in the quiet building. My style of ministry involved frequent calls in the middle of the night with an accompanying need to get up and respond to some crisis or another. For many years I was on call for suicide response in our community at night, because it was difficult for me to take call during the day when I had responsibilities for work.

I feel like I am most productive in the morning. When I have a big job to tackle, it works best for me to get an early start. I usually get more work done in the morning than in the afternoon.

I am, what Daniel Kahneman calls “pathologically punctual.” I don’t like being late. I dislike the feeling so much that I arrive at most appointments way too early. My somewhat more sensible wife has gotten used to arriving in the parking lot and having time to sit and talk as we wait for the next event because I planned to arrive 15 minutes early. Just a couple of weeks ago, I got hung up in traffic and called the dentist to report that I might be a few minutes late for an appointment. The receptionist reminded me of the phone call when I actually arrived 5 minutes early.

Despite my penchant for mornings, I’m in a profession that isn’t exactly known for being the domain of early risers. Most of my professional colleagues consider a 9 am meeting to be early in the morning. Many of them are still at the church at 9 pm, cleaning up after an evening meeting. I remember my days in seminary, when I had some ability to stretch my day both directions. I would rise early to catch up on my reading or to work on writing papers and I would stay up late to discuss theology and enjoy the company of my colleagues. Theological education was different in those days. It was considered to be important that students be full-time and that they reside on campus. This put us into social relationships with other students and colleagues. One of our professors once commented, “No one should read Karl Barth alone.” The understanding was that we needed to discuss our classwork and assigned reading with other students to develop common understandings.

What I remember about those frequent late night conversations is that we were allowed to change our minds. We might begin the evening debating and end the evening agreeing. I might argue one point of view not because I was passionately committed to it, but rather to explore what direction that kind of thinking would lead me. When I found the logic to be falling apart, I could admit the errors in my thinking and start over with a new position. We expected each other to be growing and changing and we allowed ourselves and our colleagues to change our minds.

Life is quite different now. Much of graduate theological education is completed online. Students earn degrees without changing their residence. People prepare for the pastoral ministry by studying alone, in their homes. Discussion of reading materials is limited to Zoom meetings that start and end on time. I think this results in students who are much less practiced in debate and argument and less likely to listen carefully to what others are saying. There is a lot of research these days that is simply reinforcing existing ideas and notions rather than seeking something new.

While it does no good to bemoan the change that comes with the passing of time, I do miss many of the elements of the ways we engaged in teaching and learning as graduate students. I miss the late night conversations. I miss the interplay of mind upon mind that was designed into residential graduate theological education.

I admit, however, that I have grown much older. I no longer have the stamina for late night conversations. I fear I might nod off if I tried to pursue a rational argument after 9 pm or so. I also have lived long enough to know that human beings aren’t consistently rational. We develop our quirks and ways of thinking that defy logic. Despite our perception that we are behaving in response to a well thought out system of beliefs, most of the time we are actually acting out of habit and can’t explain our behavior. I know that arriving early for every appointment wastes time and is not necessary. I know that professional offices such as dentists plan for tardy patients. They have waiting rooms designed into their practices for a reason. They know that the office flows more smoothly when patients are required to wait for dentists rather than the other way around.

Retirement is an invitation to re-think my sense of time. I am no longer on call in the middle of the night. I don’t wake to an alarm clock these days. I rise in the middle of the night and read or write for a while and then go back to bed. And, on those days when I do rise at 4 am, there isn’t much going on.

I still tell people that I am a morning person and if you make a plan to meet me at 7 am, I’m likely to arrive early. But at least I am now able to confess that my behavior isn’t exactly rational and others, who are different, may be as logical and sensible as I.