The Unclad Soul

In my innocence I grew up believing in the goodness of people and all things. My parents and grandparents modeled this in front of me. I saw in them patience. Joy. Human warmth. Integrity. I felt their love and affection. I observed and absorbed their goodness.  I grew up extremely sheltered because of this. My world was small, provincial, full of church life.  I had great school friends. As a teen my buddies were not necessarily honor roll, but they were smart, athletic, and fun to be around. My girlfriends were cute, clever, flirtatious and, yes, honor roll.    Aren’t most girls? In college I wanted to be a broadcast journalist. I loved my speech and radio and TV production classes. But then, after an emotional church service I attended, I believed, as it was described then, that I was being “called into the ministry.” It wasn’t until I had my first rural church as a single, young, naive minister, barely out of college, that I began to understand t...

There is innocence in life that exists not simply within the confines of childhood. It is a spirit within all of us, an impelling urge for something that rings so true within us and within life, something exemplary and authentic, something that feels like goodness, something fragile and tender and loving that we long for it, often and sincerely, and sometimes desperately. The world can be hard and harsh with its obsessive competitiveness and its isolating values that pit people against one another.  This is done in politics and in religion, in school and in work, in neighborhoods and in suburbs everywhere. And what happens is we lose our innocence because we tell ourselves we have to fight to survive.  We have to slug it out and push our way through and not care.  We have to play games of cruel prejudice and of disengaging from those different from us, those not in our social status, those not of our faith, those of a race not our own. Our dislikes begin...