It was a hot summer day twelve years ago. We were in Central Park at the Conservatory Water. My six-year-old daughter Gillian was sitting on my shoulders. Standing next to us was a mother whose son was piloting a remote-controlled sailboat. The mother looked up at Gillian and said, “My, aren’t you tall!” A diffident Gillian leaned over and as if she were telling a secret whispered to her, “This isn’t all me.”

Dei Sub Numine Viget (Princeton), In Deo Speramus (Brown), Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae (Harvard), Lux et Veritas (Yale). I don’t know when Harvard dumbed down their motto to Veritas, leaving Christ and the Church out of it, but the mottos of Ivy League schools are part of a long-ago history the colleges washed their hands of for reasons having to do with expedience. It wasn’t the first time. One thinks of a middle-management bureaucrat asking Jesus, “Quid est veritas?” If you’ve the eyes to see Pilate in the best possible light your heart almost breaks for the guy. Almost.

In contrast, Wheaton’s motto is in plain English; For Christ and His Kingdom. One of my great teachers during my graduate studies at Wheaton, Frederick Buechner, in his memoir Telling Secrets wrote of his experiences teaching at Harvard and Wheaton. The latter he compares favorably to the former. “What made it different from any [college] I have known can perhaps best be suggested by the college motto, which is more in evidence there than such mottos usually are… . [I]t seemed to me that insofar as their resounding motto can be true of any institution, it was true of Wheaton.”

One of the more memorable prayers I ever heard was one of Gillian’s. We were living in Scarsdale at the time. It was 17 July 1995. We’d asked her to say grace. This is what she said.

“Dear God, thank you for this Sloppy Joe; but I am not going to thank you for these carrots and I am not going to thank you for this salad. Amen.”

No pretense. No pulled punches. One thinks of Edgar and the penultimate lines of King Lear:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

The Book of Genesis wherein Jacob’s story is told begins with the refrain “And it was evening and it was morning, the first day… . And it was evening and it was morning, the second day… .” and so on the refrain continues in what was for your Creator a pretty good week of work. That refrain is peculiar, and characteristic of the Bible: it means to make us question how we normally think. We think a day begins with the morning and ends with the evening.

God does his best work at night. And here we have this story of Jacob, this beautiful and astonishing dream he’s given in his sleep, the angels descending and ascending and the promise given to him who deserved it not at all, “I will be with you wherever you go.” In the middle of the night fifteen years ago my wife woke and rolled over to hear our daughter Gillian who was as fast asleep as Jacob was. We would tuck the Gillian girl into her bed at night and usually she would end up in ours. Victoria rolled over to hear Gillian, sound asleep, singing “Kum ba ya ma da” as if she were frisking with fairies.

George MacDonald, a great writer greatly neglected, wrote, “I believe that if there be a living conscious love at the heart of the universe, the mind in the quiescence of its consciousness in sleep, comes into a less disturbed contact with the heart of the creation. The cessation of labor affords but the necessary occasion, makes it possible as it were for the occupant of an outlying station in the wilderness to return to its Father’s house for fresh supplies.”

I have three sons. They used to say to me whilst at the supper table, “Dad,” they’d say, “you spoil Gillian.” I don’t hear those words much any more. I miss them. Evan has married. Gabriel is away at school. Aaron will make an occasional attempt, but his heart’s not in it. He’s alone, Ionian. The lyric’s choral.

What other fathers do when their sons tell them they’re spoiling the daughter, I don’t know. I know what I did. ”Thank you,” I said without fail. “I need every assurance I can get. I worry I’ve not been doing that.”

Gillian would smile. Her mother would smile. Her brothers would smile. It became a ritual as regular if not as frequent as saying grace. What can I say? We’re Episcopalians.

She came home from high school for the last time today.