The Unclad Soul

I did not grow up being challenged to think for myself, about other races, about other religions, about anything that was different from or opposite of the ideas, beliefs, and values of my parents. My parents were loving and sincere, but fear guided their beliefs and their behavior. Fear of God’s punishment, fear of wrongdoing before the church, fear of what others thought about them, and so on. And that fear was communicated to me and my siblings. And it shaped, as is the case in most homes, how I viewed myself and the world. It was a confining and strict influence that often filled me with fears as well. This kind of parenting was common in my day, though I did have friends whose parents were much more lenient, open-minded, not fearful of others or new ideas, but willing to think through things and see a different perspective. I readily noticed that in those friends and their parents. Publicly, I spoke against them, saying they were liberal, or not real Christians, ...

And into the world are born those spirits, those souls, those persons, who light the way for us out of whatever darkness we are in. These can be mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, teachers and ministers, coaches and mentors. They can be the neighbor or the employer, the elderly or the young, the broken or the mended, the friend or the lover. These are people who do not do things for us, they show us how to do things for ourselves. They model. They instruct. They affirm and nurture. They live and love before us in ways that influence us to be our better selves. They are not always successful, well established, or even well known. They may be on the cleaning staff at the office, or the clerk at the grocery store. They may be the stranger we pass that smiles broadly and shares a sense of warmth as we walk by them. They may be the cop that pulls us over, gives us a calm warning, and sends us on our way. There is something in these people ...

The human catastrophe in Yemen is entirely man made. The politics of it are messy and complicated and the various factions behind this horror, the U.S. among them, are difficult to keep up with. But the bottom line is this: government leaders started the war there, they have continued it, and they are doing precious little to avoid civilian casualties and deaths, and, they are impeding the flow of medical care and food for the millions of suffering people there. Cholera is now an epidemic in the country and thousands of displaced families and individuals are dying from a disease that afflicts the most primitive environments of refuse, squalor, and starvation. According to a report on NPR this morning some families have lived in cardboard tents for three years, their children out of school for that time, and endless neighborhoods of people without food or water or hope. For what? For greed. Power. Control. Here we are in the 21 st century and the world wobbles in the i...

At the age of 66, novelist and poet May Sarton, was diagnosed with breast cancer, went through a mastectomy, ended a long time relationship, and suffered from depression. Out of that she wrote one of her best books, Recovering: A Journal . She was obviously hurt and angry about all that had happened to her. But she was determined to understand what it meant and how she should respond. She struggled through every raw emotion in an attempt to remain human. “We cannot withdraw love without damaging ourselves,” she wrote. “Rage,” she continued, “is the deprived infant in me but there is also a compassionate mother in me and she will come back with her healing powers in time.”  It is a message of hope for the country. There is so much cold anger today; so much unacknowledged hurt and pain. You see it everywhere. You feel it from people in traffic, at store counters, and certainly on social media platforms, especially Twitter and Facebook. Some things there are vicious a...

Here’s a spoiler alert: we all make mistakes. That had to be said just in case someone thinks because they have cleaned up their life or because they’ve never had an affair or never abused alcohol or because they believe in God or because they go to church or because they have money or because they’ve never failed badly that they are just fine. Maybe. But I would be cautious. Chances are they’re about to mess up sometime soon; because that’s just part of being a normal human being. There is a character in Barbara Kingsolver’s terrific novel, The Poisonwood Bible, who laments: “I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.”  That has it about right for most of us. A friend of mine recently went through a tough patch of self humiliation. The details are not necessary, just that he’d had a long day of good food and beer (mostly beer) and had over indulged. The situatio...