The Unclad Soul

Indulge me if you will to be a little revealing and vulnerable with you. It’s a big world out there and sometimes it seems to be getting away from me. As I age I cannot help but wonder what it all has meant and means and where I might have taken different steps along the way. When I was a boy I wanted to be a doctor. I thought it would be the neatest thing ever to be able to walk into a room wearing a starched white lab coat and look into someone’s throat or ears or listen to their heart with a stethoscope and say, I know what’s wrong. And then I’d help them get well. It was a boyhood dream I suppose but as I moved through school I didn’t think I had the brains to do all of the science and math and physiology and chemistry that was required. And I didn’t really have anyone to convince me otherwise. I had other dreams: becoming a professional baseball player running the bases in Yankee Stadium; a lawyer successfully defending the innocent wrongly accused; a teacher fill...

“To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim.” – The Mystic Writers

“Respond to every call  that excites your spirit.”  ~ Rumi, Persian Poet

There is a call upon us today.  It comes from the forces of good within us and from outside us in the universe.  You can say it’s God if you want to.  Or you can say it is a force inside our human spirit, the stuff we were made of at our creation, which all the sacred texts of every religion say was, at our origin, good. It is a call to basic decency, to common sense, to getting our heads out of the muck and breathing some fresh air and getting in touch with our goodness again. We are stuck in the dirt, stuck down to our souls, filthy inside and out, stained with our own fears and prejudices and anger and hate.  We have given in to our meanness and it has made us a nation of moral pygmies.  Our wrath, our fuming oaths, our senseless petty fury—all of that is mountainous, a huge growing thing within us and it has left us with pint-sized virtues that are being more and more diminished by the day. We are greedy and tacky and mean, nasty and spiteful a...