The Unclad Soul

We are the land of liberty whose Statue’s flame never dims. We crossed the mapless ocean to escape the oppression of Church and government. We wrote a magnificent Constitution. We established laws, instituted a court system, and decreed all men free. We created communities, towns, and cities. We built schools and hospitals and churches. We fought foreign enemies. Helped defeat Nazis, dictators and tyrants. We made the world safer. We have not always been true to our ideals, but we learned and changed and became better. We are Lincoln, Babe Ruth, Martin Luther King, Jr. We are Harriet Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Maya Angelou. Compassion runs through our veins. We are helpers and healers, and goodness has always been our highest trait. We believe in free and excellent public education, in equal rights, in the value of every person. Though we have not always honored these values, they remain a central part of our identity and we have always strived to fulfill them. ...

Oh, America Oh, America. You lay wounded in the blood of your democracy. Beaten by the hands of your own government. Choked by the lawlessness of those sworn to protect your dignity and your existence. Sirens wail in the streets. The emergency is real. The time is critical. But no one comes to carry you to healing. Nothing is done to repair your injuries.  Your citizens. Your people. They cry out. They weep. They protest. They walk in the hot sun holding handmade signs for your support. But their protectors, the men and women with badges, they wield clubs, they unload tear gas and shoot rubber bullets. They push citizens back. They shove them to the ground. They walk over them, left unattended as rubbish in the streets. Justice is trampled with them.  Judges, Administration officials, Congressmen, even the President, talk endlessly about the crisis. They pretend to care. They hold up the Bible. They say we are all in their prayers. They stand beside the Fl...

There is a classic scene in Season One of HBO’s epic series, Game of Thrones. Queen Cersei Baratheon of the House of Lannister connives to have her young, impertinent son become King of the Iron Throne, a position of high power over the Seven Kingdoms on the continent of Westeros. When her son lies about a confrontation with a daughter of the House of Stark, the Queen assures him there is nothing wrong with that. In the pursuit of power, she tells him lying is necessary. “Someday you will sit on the throne,” she says, “and the truth will be what you make it.” The series is based on the novel by George R.R. Martin, which was written long before Donald Trump became president. And yet, it mirrors a ruthlessness of those seeking power in our own day, including President Trump. In fact, the scene I have quoted above, describes perfectly the mindset and political game plan of Mr. Trump. From the beginning of his presidency, we have seen that for him and his operatives, truth is...

There is a wonderful native American tale told in the Ken Burns series, The West. Seven siblings are playing. Six girls and one boy. The boy pretends he’s a bear chasing the girls and they pretend to be afraid. Then the boy actually becomes a bear and the girls are then actually frightened. They run past a tree, and the tree tells them to climb up, that it will keep them safe. The girls climb into the tree. The bear claws all the bark off the base of the tree. But the tree only rises higher carrying the girls into the sky until they become stars in the Big Dipper. The greatest lessons in life always bring us back to nature, to the land and the sky, to the place of our origin. What happens when our peers, our protectors, turn against us? We run to the safety of what we instinctively know to be good and right. We go into the arms of nature, to what we can see and feel. And, we also go into the mystery of the spirit world, into what we know deep inside us is of authentic value....

Franklin D. Roosevelt once said in one of his Fireside Chats, “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.” President John Kennedy said, “For only the President represents the national interest. Upon him alone converge all the needs and aspirations of all parts of the country and all nations of the world.” President Lyndon Johnson once referred to the White House as “that house of decisions.” Moral leadership. The interest of the nation and the world. Critical decision making. Those are some of the most important responsibilities of the president of the United States. The presidency is not about brand; it’s not about endless rallies of off the cuff speeches filled with jokes and taunts. It was never intended to be a place of chaos, disorganized strategies, or useless press conferences where a spokesperson and not the preside...

Let me see if I can say this another way. HELP!! I’m trying. I’m trying like crazy to be reasonable about our country. What am I missing? What is it about our nasty national mood that seems okay with so many people? Can we agree that it’s not a good way to live if we hate others? Can we say it’s alright to try and get along with people of another race, another religion than ours, a different sexual orientation, people from other countries and cultures? Isn’t that the smart thing to do? Or, if you like this better, the Christian thing to do? Why is hate thought to be such a formidable force and love is considered weakness? What is it that makes us want to be macho, keep our guns close, to be seen as invincible, to be the badass in the crowd; while being a person of integrity, a man of character, a gentle person with compassion is seen as some kind of wimp, a pantywaist to be dismissed as a coward? I can’t get that Old Testament verse out of my head, the one where th...

The New Year begins with some startling statistics. In a recent article on Counterpunch, Dr. Lawrence Wittner, Professor of History emeritus at the State University of New York, offered a shocking list of dismal statistics regarding the state of America. We are first in the world’s military spending. In August of 2018, the president and Congress passed a gargantuan military budget of $717 billion. Can you imagine what that amount of money could do for American infrastructure, public education, health care, social services, and immigration reform? According to Demos, a public policy organization out of New York City, it would take approximately $175 billion to eliminate poverty in America. Eliminate it! Think about that. And yet, our war spending continues to climb. The Program for International Student Assessment of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently gave its latest report. In testing 540,000 students from 72 nations, American studen...

In this Season of Advent, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, candles, food and festivities, giving and cheer, I keep thinking of Bob Marley’s beautiful music, especially his, “Redemption Song.” “Old pirates, yes, they rob me Sold me to the merchant ships Minutes after they took me From the bottomless pit But my hand was made strong By the hand of the Almighty We forward in this generation Triumphantly Won't you help to sing These songs of freedom? Redemption songs …” That is the message of this Season, whatever tradition you follow. Pirates still exist. People are still being sold in sex trafficking and sold out in politics. There are minorities and the elderly, the homeless and the disabled, who remain in the bottomless pit. Won’t you help to sing the songs of freedom? The Statue of Liberty is firmly anchored in New York Harbor, her light still beaming. But freedom escapes many beneath her lamp. People caught in poverty, in opioid addiction, in low w...

We are a battle-weary people. At least I am a battle-weary person. We battle traffic, rude store clerks and customers, arrogant cops, cable companies, cell phone agents. We battle the incompetence of politicians, the hypocrisy of the religious, the indifference of employers, the jealousy of co-workers, the betrayal of lovers, the insolence of students. These battles wear us down, exhaust us, make us cynical and bad-tempered. We lose something of ourselves in every battle we wage or endure. Sometimes it’s something irretrievable. Humility. Understanding. A part of our soul. A slice of our heart. A function of our thinking that keeps us human. The battles, the wars, our American military are involved in across the world are often forgotten and ignored by most of us. We don’t really follow them. But we are part of those battles, too. As Americans, we are represented in those wars. And there is something terribly diminishing about them for all of us, whether we acknowledge...

I have started watching Season 6 of the Netflix series, House of Cards. President Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) is dead, and his wife Claire (Robin Wright) is the new president. She takes charge with ferocious scheming using all of her wily skills, which are sometimes frightening, to make sure people know she will not be denied. Anything. This series closely identifies our own emotionally and spiritually bankrupt political system, although in HOC things are, well, dramatically excessive. The characters in the Claire Underwood (which she changes to her maiden name, Clair Hale) administration are about as corrupt as a gang of Capone criminals in the 1920s. Like those guys, they’re all in nice suits with clean looks, but underneath the urbane clothes beat hearts of stone. The tortured and deranged Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly) returns from prison and ruin and God knows what else, to pick up his old expertise in doing relentless damage to those Claire Hale finds in the way...

One of the ancient mystics wrote, “Into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.” I need that journey. It is time, in this tumult of meanness, to absorb the beauty of autumn. I must leave the hollow vulgarity of politics and get lost in the trees with their tumbling treasures of color. Across this vast country, through open grasslands and the upland passes, over deeply textured mountains and along stone path streams, there lies before us nature’s unbiased beauty. There is something spiritual about nature, something wise and instructive. Yes, it has its turbulent side, which is simply a part of the mystery of the universe. But even with its blasts of snow and desert heat, even with the ferocity of hurricanes and the damaging winds of tornados, the pounding of hail and lightning’s deadly strikes, the earth is still filled with a luminous glow that stirs our deepest longings and leaves us motionless, breathless, awed. There are experiences waiting for us far...

You were once a proud country of people united around simple but durable truths: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You honored yourselves by championing freedom for all people, by advocating for diversity, civil rights, and human rights. You grew into a nation the world envied, admired, and wanted to live in. People across all lands and regions, from remote communities and desert places, came here in search of a better life for them and their families. Over the years millions have come here to flee tyranny, to escape the violent evil oppression of soulless dictators. They came to America to be safe, to raise their children without the threat of seeing them slaughtered in the streets by brutal military forces or carried off into vicious exploitation by drug lords and pimps. They came to participate in an economy that welcomed demanding work, ingenuity, and a chance to build something of their own for them and their families. And in the process, this nation gr...

It is easy to exaggerate our current gloom. Especially when it plays out in front of us each day across the myriad of media outlets. Things are bad, yes. Our culture is fraught with disdain, disregard, and the dismissal of rules, standards, and traditions. We are a spoiled society, for the most part, lost in our feelings of entitlement and selfishness, our stubborn beliefs and our unwillingness to revere all humanity, even our own. That, of course, is not the whole story. We do have our better moments, our acts of heroism, our generosity, our compassion, our love. There are vast places across this bleeding nation that are filled with decency, neighborliness, kind words, and good deeds. Not everyone is a bully or a liar, a manipulator or abuser. The country is populated with, yes, saints and angels, people of spiritual and emotional depth, thinking people, noble people who lift, who inspire, who instruct the rest of us in a way of life that doesn’t dominate but cultivates. ...

I am still bewildered by the actions of both Judge Brett Kavanaugh and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last Thursday. The anger, no, the rage in them was shocking. But it was their blatant partisanship that ended any respect I might have for either of them. Yes, Judge Kavanaugh was facing a humiliating time before the Senate Judiciary Committee, having to deny the allegations of sexual assault as a high school teenager. And of course, he would be angry about having his good name, his integrity questioned. After what, as far as we know, has been an exemplary life and an impressive career, it is natural he would be flustered by having all of that ignored because of things he may or may not have done in high school and college. And yet, as a nominee for the highest court in the nation, a position that requires, even demands, an even temperament and the ability to remain politically and religiously impartial and non-partisan, he ...

I had an enjoyable conversation with my nephew, David, the other night. In the midst of talking about other things he mentioned a recent essay I posted here. He reads all of them and though he doesn’t always agree with them he makes a point to keep up with what I’m thinking about. That makes his uncle enormously grateful. He has mentioned before that he would like to see more positive pieces and less negative ones. What I wrote about The Handmaid’s Tale was especially dark for him. “Why write about such horrible stuff, Uncle Tim,” he asked. “I never see that side of you when I’m with you. Write about the good stuff,” he said. I took it to heart. I have admitted here before that I know I have a streak of cynicism that runs through me at times. I don’t want to be cynical, or negative. And yet, I don’t know how to hold in my feelings of alarm, fear, and often anger at the seemingly endless injustices in our nation. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, though a merci...

And now, the struggle for authenticity beckons. The fight for what is real in our world, in our nation, and in ourselves, that fight exists whether we participate in it or not. War is real. Syria is real. Children dying, their small bodies broken in pieces, blood running from their frail faces. That is real. Iraq is real. Afghanistan. Yemen. The horror that stalks the days there, the screams heard through the nights. The innocent brutalized. The cities decimated. Those are all real. We ignore it. We pretend those things are far away from here, that we are not a part of it, that we have no responsibility for it. We close our eyes, our minds, our hearts to it. I can’t turn away, can you? And here, in dear old America, our flag sags under the weight of our mutual shame. Reagan’s tired description of us, “a shining city on a hill,” rings discordant, empty, false. We do not shine; we are tarnished with the stains of our selfishness, our shallow cravings, our racism and ...