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Twenty-five years ago in Baltimore, I heard Pete Seeger play the five-string banjo. I was seized with the conviction that I must do it too. I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins University at the time and had little money, but poverty was no deterrent in the rush of such urgencies: I went to the pawn shops on East Baltimore Street the next morning and bought a banjo for 11 dollars.

I found an instruction manual in a used-book store for 50 cents. I was on my way. I applied myself to strumming and three-finger picking. I had neither the time nor the money for formal instruction, but in odd moments between seminars and papers, I worked at making the sounds and singing the songs Seeger had introduced into my life.

In the years following, the impetus of the first enthusiasm slackened. I repeated myself a lot. From time to time I would pick up another instruction book, another songbook.

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Occasionally someone would be in our home who played the banjo, and I would pick up a new technique. At such moments I became fleetingly aware of a great pool of lore that banjo players took for granted. I recognized some of the items from the footnotes and appendixes in my instruction books. Eventually I realized if I was going to advance, I would have to get a teacher. It wasn't that I lacked knowledge—my stack of instruction books was now quite high. It wasn't that I lacked material—there were already far more songs in my books than I could ever learn well. But I didn't seem to be able to get the hang of some things just by reading about them.

I have not yet gotten a teacher. It was never the right time. I procrastinated. I am still picking and singing the same songs I learned in the first few years. My crisp, glittering banjo sound that used to set feet tapping and laughter rippling now bores my wife and children to tears. I am not a little bored myself. I still intend to find a teacher.

A desire for prayer was kindled in my early life. When the embers cooled, as they did from time to time, I applied the bellows of a lecture or a book or a workshop or a conference. The evangelical movement, in which I grew up, gave frequent exhortations to pray. I was told in many and various ways that prayer was urgent. There was also a great quantity of didactic material on prayer, most of it in books. I responded to the exhortations and read the books. But useful as these resources were to get me started and established, there came a time when I felt the need for something else—something more personal, more intimate.

But what? As I groped for clarity, I found out what I did not want. I didn't want a counselor or therapist. I was not conscious of any incapacitating neurosis that needed fixing. I did not want information; I already knew far more than I practiced. It was not for lack of knowledge that I was unsettled. And it wasn't exactly a friend I wanted, a person with whom I could unburden my inner hopes and fears when I felt like it.

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