The Unclad Soul

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. There it is plain and clear: the earth ultimately belongs to the meek. Which doesn’t mean the pushover, or the timid, or the spineless; the coward or the weak-kneed. Jesus cared about those frightened souls but here he’s talking about the humble, the tolerant, the thoughtful; about people who think before they act; people with a gentle spirit and a kind heart; people of intellect, soul, and substance. The earth is theirs. They know how to care for it, how to cherish and appreciate it, and how to live responsibly in it. Carl Sandburg, the remarkable poet, philosopher and biographer of Abraham Lincoln, described the 16 th president in these words: “Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is hard as a rock and soft as a drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect.” That’s the meekness Jesus was talking abo...

In Cormac McCarthy’s pulverizing novel, “The Road,” we enter the final years perhaps months or days of civilization. The world is a burned out place of depressing despair, the result of climate change ignored, the waste of precious resources, the rape of the land and its beauty, the viciousness of marauding wars, and the cruel cold inhumanity of people, the end result of human beings diminished to their most primitive drives—violent, savage, diabolical. A father and his young son are on “the road” to basically nowhere. They are just trying to survive and to hold on to the slightest thread of humanity left in them. Everything is dead. The waters of the ocean are black. Plants and flowers are all gone. Animals lay decomposed in their bleached skeletons everywhere. Ashes cover the earth. The sky is a dismal grey haze, a withering glare of menace. It is cold. Dirty snow falls. And the man, unnamed, perhaps in his 40s, stops at one point to reflect on what once was. He looks around at ...