The Unclad Soul

The 2019 movie, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, is a stunning representation of deprived destiny and lost love. Centered around a wondrous coastal landscape in Brittiany in the late 1700s, the story centers on two young French women—Marianne, an artist and painter, and Heloise, recently cloistered in a convent and brought home to enter an arranged marriage. Her sister, who was supposed to marry the man, had killed herself by jumping off a cliff into the sea. Heloise is to take her place. Heloise, however, has no interest in the marriage and is angry that her mother has placed her in the arrangement. As was the custom then, a portrait was to be made of the bride-to-be and sent to the groom to approve of his future wife. But Heloise refused to sit for a portrait and had already chased off a painter frustrated by the experience. Enter Marianne. Brought in as simply a companion for Heloise until the marriage was finalized, her real purpose was to get to know Heloise and from snip...

Dear God, Jesus, and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Help us in the hour of our need. The lessons you taught us about kindness, tolerance, and acceptance of others, have lost their value in our day. The love you demonstrated has been ignored and replaced with political power, religious hypocrisy, and a spirit of meanness and self-righteous arrogance. We are not, as your followers or as good Americans, guided by the Beatitudes, but by branding forces of money and greed. We ignore the lesson of the Good Samaritan and, like the priest and the Levite who simply walked on by not wanting to get involved with the wounded victim, we too, are self-absorbed and blasphemous in our indifference to the hurting of others. You taught us to love the little children, to care for the poor and forgotten, to stand up to evil, especially when it is disguised as Christianity, as God’s Will, as faith, and yes, as patriotism. I know you cannot make us do what is right and honorable. To believe in you i...

I keep dipping in and out of the Showtime series, “Billions.” It fascinates me. It depresses me. It wildly entertains me. It intrigues me. It infuriates me. It pushes boundaries that disturb me. It portrays people that I wonder if really exist out there, and if so, man, is society screwed. The episodes are based on the moral and ethical conflicts between billionaire financier Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) and U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhodes (Paul Giamatti). Axe, as he is called, is a cunning hedge fund genius with sociopathic tendencies. Rhodes has convinced himself he is the good guy, that he's a man of principle and virtue, even though he crawls around in loathsome behavior. He sees himself as a better person than Axe, and yet he likes S&M experiences with the straps and the gags and the whips and a scantily black leather clad dominating female to humiliate him into a sexual frenzy. That’s his mild side. As U.S. Attorney for New York, the guy is insanely ruthless in his ob...

There is a brokenness in our society, a pervasive moral collapse, a reckless disregard for community, neighborliness, courtesy, and compassion. Our government leads by this example. Both parties are incompetent to guide us into a more responsible living, into a serviceable structure of humanity. Our leaders are dominated by greedy oligarchs who don’t just want more, they want everything, even if it costs our society its dignity, its soul, even its future. What is on display here daily is a wretched lack of self-esteem. The loss now influences all of us. We’re all affected in ways that keep us shamed by our actions. When we feel powerless, aimless, without any higher goals than the accumulation of things and the momentary thrill, we then mute our intelligence. We live by raw emotions—anger, appetite, urges. We don’t think, we don’t consider, we merely react. We push. We disregard. We threaten. We act out. And we fail. Self-esteem is a learned process. It builds on gen...

The human catastrophe in Yemen is entirely man made. The politics of it are messy and complicated and the various factions behind this horror, the U.S. among them, are difficult to keep up with. But the bottom line is this: government leaders started the war there, they have continued it, and they are doing precious little to avoid civilian casualties and deaths, and, they are impeding the flow of medical care and food for the millions of suffering people there. Cholera is now an epidemic in the country and thousands of displaced families and individuals are dying from a disease that afflicts the most primitive environments of refuse, squalor, and starvation. According to a report on NPR this morning some families have lived in cardboard tents for three years, their children out of school for that time, and endless neighborhoods of people without food or water or hope. For what? For greed. Power. Control. Here we are in the 21 st century and the world wobbles in the i...

I attended the funeral of an old friend this week. He owned the funeral home in the last town where I was a minister for the 14 years I was there. Several years ago he retired. I so admired him. He knew how to comfort people caught in some horrible grief. He had a calming presence. He was professional in every way. He chewed on these great dark cigars and one day I asked for one. He smiled and gave me three and from then on anytime I wanted one he handed them over. On the way back from cemeteries we often talked about God and death and the people we loved. He was an amazing father and grandfather. He taught me to listen, to observe, to not be so concerned with comments or answers for hurting people, but to just be a presence for them. He was my friend. I was not close to my father. He was a good, moral man. He provided for our family. But he was often indifferent to his children. I knew he loved us, but he seemed incapable or not interested in really knowing any of us. He shared s...

The politics of our day is a deadening force. The angry divisiveness, the arrogant partisanship of it all, the refusal to cooperate with others, the obsession of winning at all costs even if it costs the nation its dignity and its worth, is a bitter reality. I’m unclear as to what brought us here. Why our politicians failed to evolve and became instead a crowd of petty, juvenile, angry, warped and one-sided tyrants is debatable but it discredits all of us. It is impossible to move the country forward if our chief lawmakers have no interest in anything but their own political careers; if they care about nothing but holding onto their elected offices even if it requires them to compromise themselves into some form of prostitution, the selling of themselves to corporate giants and the czars of finance. Which many if not most have already done. Our current presidential campaign is a humiliating display of defective candidates. The Republicans have paraded before us a crowd of ...

Here’s a spoiler alert: we all make mistakes. That had to be said just in case someone thinks because they have cleaned up their life or because they’ve never had an affair or never abused alcohol or because they believe in God or because they go to church or because they have money or because they’ve never failed badly that they are just fine. Maybe. But I would be cautious. Chances are they’re about to mess up sometime soon; because that’s just part of being a normal human being. There is a character in Barbara Kingsolver’s terrific novel, The Poisonwood Bible, who laments: “I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.”  That has it about right for most of us. A friend of mine recently went through a tough patch of self humiliation. The details are not necessary, just that he’d had a long day of good food and beer (mostly beer) and had over indulged. The situatio...