The Unclad Soul

The remarkable Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, once wrote, “This hasn’t been the age for the righteous and the decent.  I know what it means to beget monsters  And to recognize in them myself.”  It is an appropriate indictment of our own day and of our own selves. I keep telling myself that what we are experiencing in our country is just a phase, something we have gone through before, where people who turn loathsome and violent, enormously greedy and arrogant, will change. That these dark clouds of hostility hovering over us will pass and the sunlight of decent behavior will shine again. But there is something alarmingly stubborn about the indignity, prejudice, violence, division and hatred among us. We seem stuck in a continuous atmosphere of rancor and bitter estrangement. And it is disturbing and frightening that our leaders seem incapable or not interested in changing the nation’s oppressive mood. Our media, in all of its forms, is clearly geared t...

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it. ~ Wendell Berry, American Poet ...

In the musical movie, “Oliver,” a crowd of orphaned boys march into the workhouse mess hall of the grimy orphanage they live in, singing: “ Is it worth the waiting for? If we live 'til eighty four All we ever get is gruel! Every day we say our prayer -- Will they change the bill of fare? Still we get the same old gruel! There's not a crust, not a crumb can we find, Can we beg, can we borrow, or cadge, But there's nothing to stop us from getting a thrill When we all close our eyes and imagine Food, glorious food! The boys march in line one by one and are each given a bowl of grey mush. They orderly seat themselves at a heavy wooden table. A grim-faced burly man dressed smartly in a colorful Napoleon outfit steps forward and prays, “May what you receive make you truly thankful!” After Oliver gulps the gruel he’s still starving. He dares to walk to the front to ask for more food. The burly man screams and Oliver is chased about the room by old skinny grey h...