The Unclad Soul

Emerson, the brilliant essayist, philosopher, and poet, started his long and productive career initially as an ordained minister. When his young wife died of tuberculosis he was devastated. He questioned his faith and the simple beliefs he thought as a minister should be accepted unconditionally and believed by everyone. He left the ministry, went to Europe, met with towering people in literature like William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. When he returned to America he was transformed and began a series of lectures on spirituality and ethical living.  In one of his many books, he wrote, “Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.” It is a beautiful and profound statement and one I fully embrace. And it is a part of a personal religious search I started years ago. As a young minister I struggled with biblical texts that I could not make sense of, thing...

This beautiful land of ours. The old cities. The towns and neighborhoods. All once so incredible with their highways and their landmarks, their lakes and parks, their schools and churches, their giant buildings and small country stores. There were good jobs with fair pay and opportunities for promotion and advancement. Most of that is vanishing under the weight of high tech jobs, computerized gadgets and mind consuming e-toys, expensive big vehicles, high rise condos, billion dollar sports stadiums, interconnecting gyrations of freeways with vast concrete loops, and relentless urban sprawl. It’s all gobbling us up in a net of human indifference, aloofness, rage, and ill will toward one another. What we once accomplished astounds the imagination. Across our creative history other nations have envied our freedoms, have marveled at our productivity and ingenuity, have seen as sacred our humanity and compassion. There are reasons why people all over the world have wanted to li...

"I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart." ~ Mary Oliver, Poet/Essayist