The Unclad Soul

There is a poignant scene in the British crime-drama, Broadchurch, where Cath, a woman in a dying marriage, confides in a friend. Cath has just discovered that her husband, Jim, had a brief affair with her best friend, Trish. It was Trish who told Cath about the affair. She explained that her long separation from her husband had left her terribly lonely, that she felt unattractive, and missed affection and intimacy, and that in a moment of vulnerability, she violated her best friend’s trust. Cath was furious about the betrayal, and then profoundly saddened by it. It was then that she told her boss and friend, Ed, about the whole thing. In a moment of reflection, she said, “I just thought my life would be, that I’d love someone, and they’d love me back, and it would last my whole life. Why is that so much to ask?” That comment describes the frustration and sorrow in so many marriages today. Society, the Church, our parents, do not prepare us for the difficulties of a lifel...

The movie Bohemian Rhapsody looks at the 70s rock band Queen and its lead singer, Freddie Mercury, played brilliantly by actor Rami Malek. The critics panned the movie saying it played too safe with the complex real-life story of Mercury, his flamboyant life as a gay man, his long relationship with Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), his Parsi or Persian family, and his death from AIDS. I thought the film provided an important portrayal of Mercury and Queen. It showed the human side of the band members and their struggle with success, with sharing the limelight, and with Mercury’s moods and genius. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s, the Hippy Movement, and the rise of heavy metal music, rock, funk, and disco were all transformative. Janis Joplin, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Queen, and of course the Beatles all shaped not just the music scene, but society, in extraordinary ways. Queen, though, had Freddie Mercury and that made them unique. I found a distinct sadne...

In the wild and violent HBO series, Deadwood, the Reverend H.W. Smith (Raymond McKinnon) seems oddly out of place. In the midst of Gold Rush outlaws and moral misfits, he is a tall, gentle man, with a kind heart. Deadwood is a savagely unmanageable town in the Black Hills of South Dakota. And Reverend Smith, an upright mystic, and a man of the Bible, struggles to extend the goodness of God to the ruthless and the wicked. A smallpox plague strikes the town and “Preacher” Smith works tirelessly to aid the sick and the dying ignoring the risks of contagion. He somehow escapes the plague but then is afflicted with epilepsy and eventually insanity. In his illness, he finds comfort in the piano playing at the Gem Saloon and Brothel. He is seen there hugging his weathered Bible, his eyes glassy and bleak, smiling broadly with his head raised to heaven and his body weaving to the music. The bar owner, the incorrigible Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), tells the preacher he can’t be...

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom: absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken."  ~ Anaïs Nin, Author and memoirist born to Cuban parents in France

“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” ~ Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize winning Poet

“Perhaps we just need little reminders from time to time that we are already dignified, deserving, worthy. Sometimes we don't feel that way because of the wounds and the scars we carry from the past or because of the uncertainty of the future. It is doubtful that we came to feel undeserving on our own. We were helped to feel unworthy. We were taught it in a thousand ways when we were little, and we learned our lessons well.”   ―   Jon Kabat-Zinn, Physician/Author

"There is a loveliness to life that does not fade. Even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency toward grace that does not fail." ~ Robert Goolrick, Novelist

My friend Andy invited me to a Toastmaster's Christmas party last night in the home of one of the members of a Toastmaster's group he belongs to. Andy is a big teddy bear of a man, 40 years old, never married, who has a form of autism that makes social settings difficult for him. It's not that he is shy or that he doesn't want to be around people. The difficulty is that his autism leaves him without the social skills to read how other people are responding to him in a conversation or with their body language or through other physical expressions that most of us are able to clearly interpret. Andy has a brilliant, encyclopedic mind. He loves to share the endless facts in his head, and believe me, he knows something about every single subject you could ever bring up. But since he has a hard time reading people he often does not know when to pause in a conversation, when to listen and respond to their points, when to let others have their say. He is working on...