Richard J. Lambert, of Newtown, died October 28, thirteen days shy of his birthday. He was 94 years old.

Dr Lambert enjoyed an early career in management consulting before moving to banking. He taught philosophy on a fellowship with Mercy College and Fordham University, but soon switched to business. He started as a systems analyst for the Continental Can Company, traveling to clients throughout the United States. He also worked at RCA as a Manager of Education Programs. He finished with Manufacturers Hanover Trust in New York City (later acquired by Chemical Bank), where he served as assistant vice president and director of productivity. His many roles during his career included management consultant, equipment engineer, systems analyst, adjunct professor, and futurist. After working at the bank for 15 years, he retired in 1990 and launched Productivity Breakthrough, where he began a second career writing and speaking.

His first book, Celebrate Life! Realize, Renew, and Release Trapped Energy (1996), features 50 short autobiographical essays blending his signature style of thoughtful reflection, philosophical rumination, and personal insight. He often said with a twinkle and smile that “the archeological dig of the 21st century would be rediscovering the person.” His second book is Living Right Side Up in an Up-Side-Down World: Drawing Upon Five Proven Stages of Change, Development, and Growth (2000). Borrowing these stages from Bernard Lonergan’s monumental Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Dr Lambert introduces another 50 somewhat longer essays to better explore the daily miracles of ordinary experience and ignite our passions for living. “The reader is invited to a deeper plunge into the Great Lake of your lived experience where you feast in present-moment awareness.” His third book, Reinvent Yourself: Commit to a Great Work (2002), envelops the human story within a larger ecological perspective where our relationship to Earth is the ultimate narrative for our time. “I am the Earth become conscious of itself.” In many ways, it both reconsiders our world and reinvents our lives by reimagining prelapsarian time, as if ordinary experience were just another day in the Garden before the fall. In his fourth and final book, New ABCs of Longevity Living: Evoking Mutually Supportive Human/Earth Relationship (2010), he recognizes that many people now live into their 80s and 90s. “What will people do with a second full adult lifetime?” Taken together, his four books explore his abiding concerns — for waking up to life, the richness of lived experience, for human potential, for deeper dialogue, for love as the slow education of heart, for profound and available sanity, for putting on a new imagination, for breakthrough thinking, for the Earth as our primary corporation, for daily meditation and prayer, the indwelling of human spirit, for endless ways of communing with God.

Dr Lambert also relished talking to audiences about his various passions. In fact, he became a featured speaker on many cruise ships, traveling to the Caribbean, Nova Scotia, South America, Alaska, Europe, Scandinavia, and the Middle East, to name just a few. He and his wife enjoyed their first cruise aboard the Crystal Harmony in 1991, and returned from Hawaii aboard Holland America in 2004, completing 32 cruises worldwide before retiring a second time. In his final years, he considered cruise lecturing among his “peak experiences.”

Richard Justin Lambert was born in New Haven, Connecticut, November 10, 1925, the oldest of three children born to Albert Justin and Lillian (Cage Purmont) Lambert. His younger sister was Patricia “Pat” and his brother was Robert “Bob.” His father moved the family to The Bronx to start a job as a funeral director when he was five. He remembers his father — who had lost half a lung to mustard gas at the battle of Chateau Thierry in France during World War I and subsequently was awarded the Purple Heart — breathing hard while climbing stairs to their third-floor apartment. He attended Public School 86 and St Nicholas of Tolentine middle school where he earned a partial scholarship to Fordham Prep. And the Jesuits — a Roman Catholic order of priests known for lifelong spiritual and intellectual growth — would forever change his life. Soon he studied half a dozen hours a day and joined many extracurricular activities.

After graduating high school, Dr Lambert was drafted into the army for World War II on his birthday in 1944. He started basic training at Camp Wolters, Texas, the largest infantry training center in the United States at the time. His mother died from cancer six weeks later on Christmas morning. After the funeral he returned to Texas, finished 18 weeks of training and departed San Francisco for Japan. He often told the story of struggling to carry his olive canvas barracks bag up the gangplank to the ship, because it contained so many books on philosophy and literature. After steaming to Tokyo Bay aboard Liberty, his cargo ship was rerouted first to Osaka, Japan, then to the 38th parallel in Korea, and finally a month later to the southern tip of the peninsula. For six months he was stationed at an air force base abandoned by kamikaze pilots, reading books by a black pot-bellied stove, sleeping under twelve blankets at night, and riding half-tracks into mountains with snowcaps during the day to help install military governments in little villages for 150,000 people impoverished by Japanese occupation. He loved to count things — with the rank of corporal, he served one year, five months, and five days.

After returning home, Dr Lambert attended Fordham University on the GI Bill. He earned a bachelor’s of philosophy in 1952, his master’s in sociology in ’56, and was awarded a doctorate in sociology in ’86. He also earned an MBA from Manhattan College in 1981. His doctoral thesis is entitled, Sociology’s View of the Individual in the Modern Social Order: What Does it Say for the Management Consultant Today? It endeavors to understand the emergence of modern consciousness in the Western world by examining four giants of 20th century thought: Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud. His thesis advisor keenly observed how the student was “trying to operationalize happiness.”

During his senior year in college, a friend who Dr Lambert had tutored invited him to a dance and social in Manhattan. Dorothy Jean Doyle was a freshman at Marymount Manhattan College who was singing in the choir at the event. Three things happened that night. First, Richard walked Dorothy to the train at Grand Central Station (despite the wishes of her parents to drive her home). Second, he had the audacity to ask if “she could learn to love him.” And third, as Dorothy boarded the train, he called out from the platform, “Hey, what’s your telephone number?” They married three years later on Flag Day, June 14, 1952.

Finally, Dad embodied a deep and abiding faith in God. What kindled in his youth as an altar boy inflamed as a young man pursuing postsecondary education at the oldest Catholic and Jesuit University in the northeast. He was an active parishioner at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Scarsdale where he both served as Lecturer and Eucharistic Minister as well as pursued his Deaconship. When he retired, he attended Saint Rose of Lima Church in Newtown, Connecticut. He and his wife reveled in getting away to ecumenical conferences and retreats every year. One of his sons remembers driving with his parents to Spencer, Massachusetts, for a silent weekend retreat, spending their days in meditation and reflection at Mary House, and listening to liturgies and chants at various hours by Trappist monks in the nearby Cistercian Abbey — Prime at daybreak, Vespers at sunset, Compline end of day. Dad talked often about the “breadbasket of blessings” in his life by quoting the Gospels: “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.’” (Matthew 6:33, NAB). And the faith that infused his life fully inspired his work. Now may it be said by Jesus: “Well done, good and faithful servant.’” (Matthew 25:23).

He is survived by his wife of 68 years, Dorothy, and their six children and spouses: Richard J. Lambert, Jr, (and Evalyn) of Wyckoff, N.J.; Jeanne Monti (and Dr Richard Monti) of Johns Creek, Ga.; Stephen Lambert (and Ava) of Scarsdale, N.Y.; Dorothy Mear (and David) of Whitby, Ontario; Kathleen Murphy (and Brendan) of Tampa, Fla.; and Gerard Lambert (and Luz) of Olney, Md. He is also survived by 11 grandchildren: Alexander Lambert (and Lily Warnke) and Emily Lambert; Dr Richard Monti, Jr, (and Carolyn); Michael and Christine Lambert; Christopher Mear and Alannah Jackson (and Kevin); Brendan Jr and Kelly Murphy; Sebastian and Iliana Lambert. And he lived to experience two great-grandchildren: Sophia Monti born 2019 and Dallas Jackson born 2020.

In Celebrate Life! he writes: “When I think of my own death, what would I prefer in place of mounds of dying flowers? I would like my mourners to wake up to life, to take a walk in park or lane or garden, and celebrate living flowers. Make the time an unhurried pause in the pulse of life, a time when eyes linger lovingly over beauty, a rare moment of total attention. Out of years of living how many seconds can we boast that we responded to life with total attention?”