The Unclad Soul

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. ...

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...