The Unclad Soul

Oh, America Oh, America. You lay wounded in the blood of your democracy. Beaten by the hands of your own government. Choked by the lawlessness of those sworn to protect your dignity and your existence. Sirens wail in the streets. The emergency is real. The time is critical. But no one comes to carry you to healing. Nothing is done to repair your injuries.  Your citizens. Your people. They cry out. They weep. They protest. They walk in the hot sun holding handmade signs for your support. But their protectors, the men and women with badges, they wield clubs, they unload tear gas and shoot rubber bullets. They push citizens back. They shove them to the ground. They walk over them, left unattended as rubbish in the streets. Justice is trampled with them.  Judges, Administration officials, Congressmen, even the President, talk endlessly about the crisis. They pretend to care. They hold up the Bible. They say we are all in their prayers. They stand beside the Fl...

I did not grow up being challenged to think for myself, about other races, about other religions, about anything that was different from or opposite of the ideas, beliefs, and values of my parents. My parents were loving and sincere, but fear guided their beliefs and their behavior. Fear of God’s punishment, fear of wrongdoing before the church, fear of what others thought about them, and so on. And that fear was communicated to me and my siblings. And it shaped, as is the case in most homes, how I viewed myself and the world. It was a confining and strict influence that often filled me with fears as well. This kind of parenting was common in my day, though I did have friends whose parents were much more lenient, open-minded, not fearful of others or new ideas, but willing to think through things and see a different perspective. I readily noticed that in those friends and their parents. Publicly, I spoke against them, saying they were liberal, or not real Christians, ...

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...

Franklin D. Roosevelt once said in one of his Fireside Chats, “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.” President John Kennedy said, “For only the President represents the national interest. Upon him alone converge all the needs and aspirations of all parts of the country and all nations of the world.” President Lyndon Johnson once referred to the White House as “that house of decisions.” Moral leadership. The interest of the nation and the world. Critical decision making. Those are some of the most important responsibilities of the president of the United States. The presidency is not about brand; it’s not about endless rallies of off the cuff speeches filled with jokes and taunts. It was never intended to be a place of chaos, disorganized strategies, or useless press conferences where a spokesperson and not the preside...

Let me see if I can say this another way. HELP!! I’m trying. I’m trying like crazy to be reasonable about our country. What am I missing? What is it about our nasty national mood that seems okay with so many people? Can we agree that it’s not a good way to live if we hate others? Can we say it’s alright to try and get along with people of another race, another religion than ours, a different sexual orientation, people from other countries and cultures? Isn’t that the smart thing to do? Or, if you like this better, the Christian thing to do? Why is hate thought to be such a formidable force and love is considered weakness? What is it that makes us want to be macho, keep our guns close, to be seen as invincible, to be the badass in the crowd; while being a person of integrity, a man of character, a gentle person with compassion is seen as some kind of wimp, a pantywaist to be dismissed as a coward? I can’t get that Old Testament verse out of my head, the one where th...

And what is it that stirs your soul in these maddening days? What melts your heart? What enlivens you? What makes you want to run flat out full speed until out of breath you stop and hold your arms out to the sky? What motivates you to smile, to laugh out loud, to relish the moment with delight? What creates deep inside you, feelings of warmth, of affection, of love? Is it music? Listening to a beautiful song, being moved by the music and the lyrics? Is it reading a captivating book, following some story whether in a novel or some historical setting, that keeps you turning the page? Is it a movie, whether sitting in a theater or watching at home on live streaming TV, a movie that holds you in its spell until the credits run at the end? Is it attending a play, perhaps a musical, like Hamilton, Les Miserables, the Lion King, or some other fantastic performance that soars and enlightens and sends you home emotionally spent, or tingling inside, or singing all t...

We are a battle-weary people. At least I am a battle-weary person. We battle traffic, rude store clerks and customers, arrogant cops, cable companies, cell phone agents. We battle the incompetence of politicians, the hypocrisy of the religious, the indifference of employers, the jealousy of co-workers, the betrayal of lovers, the insolence of students. These battles wear us down, exhaust us, make us cynical and bad-tempered. We lose something of ourselves in every battle we wage or endure. Sometimes it’s something irretrievable. Humility. Understanding. A part of our soul. A slice of our heart. A function of our thinking that keeps us human. The battles, the wars, our American military are involved in across the world are often forgotten and ignored by most of us. We don’t really follow them. But we are part of those battles, too. As Americans, we are represented in those wars. And there is something terribly diminishing about them for all of us, whether we acknowledge...

I have started watching Season 6 of the Netflix series, House of Cards. President Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) is dead, and his wife Claire (Robin Wright) is the new president. She takes charge with ferocious scheming using all of her wily skills, which are sometimes frightening, to make sure people know she will not be denied. Anything. This series closely identifies our own emotionally and spiritually bankrupt political system, although in HOC things are, well, dramatically excessive. The characters in the Claire Underwood (which she changes to her maiden name, Clair Hale) administration are about as corrupt as a gang of Capone criminals in the 1920s. Like those guys, they’re all in nice suits with clean looks, but underneath the urbane clothes beat hearts of stone. The tortured and deranged Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly) returns from prison and ruin and God knows what else, to pick up his old expertise in doing relentless damage to those Claire Hale finds in the way...

One of the ancient mystics wrote, “Into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.” I need that journey. It is time, in this tumult of meanness, to absorb the beauty of autumn. I must leave the hollow vulgarity of politics and get lost in the trees with their tumbling treasures of color. Across this vast country, through open grasslands and the upland passes, over deeply textured mountains and along stone path streams, there lies before us nature’s unbiased beauty. There is something spiritual about nature, something wise and instructive. Yes, it has its turbulent side, which is simply a part of the mystery of the universe. But even with its blasts of snow and desert heat, even with the ferocity of hurricanes and the damaging winds of tornados, the pounding of hail and lightning’s deadly strikes, the earth is still filled with a luminous glow that stirs our deepest longings and leaves us motionless, breathless, awed. There are experiences waiting for us far...

(Note: This may be hard to take, but I think it's necessary. - TM) President Trump took his road show to Houston, Texas this week. He was there to support the Senate candidacy of Ted Cruz. However, he barely mentioned Cruz. Most of the speech was about, as usual, himself. One of the most disturbing things he said was a threat to send the military to the border to stop what he calls “the caravan” of refugees from Honduras and Guatemala from entering the U.S. First of all, he cannot legally do that. There is an Act that prohibits the military from engaging in civilian law enforcement outside of military bases (The Posse Comitatus Act). And secondly, really? Just ignore these desperate people? Without the slightest proof and with a desire to continue to scare his base, he claimed gangs, murderers, rapists, and terrorists are basically the people in the caravan. “We don’t want them,” he yelled to the crowd, who of course cheered and applauded. I don’t care to go on ab...

I am still bewildered by the actions of both Judge Brett Kavanaugh and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last Thursday. The anger, no, the rage in them was shocking. But it was their blatant partisanship that ended any respect I might have for either of them. Yes, Judge Kavanaugh was facing a humiliating time before the Senate Judiciary Committee, having to deny the allegations of sexual assault as a high school teenager. And of course, he would be angry about having his good name, his integrity questioned. After what, as far as we know, has been an exemplary life and an impressive career, it is natural he would be flustered by having all of that ignored because of things he may or may not have done in high school and college. And yet, as a nominee for the highest court in the nation, a position that requires, even demands, an even temperament and the ability to remain politically and religiously impartial and non-partisan, he ...

And now, the struggle for authenticity beckons. The fight for what is real in our world, in our nation, and in ourselves, that fight exists whether we participate in it or not. War is real. Syria is real. Children dying, their small bodies broken in pieces, blood running from their frail faces. That is real. Iraq is real. Afghanistan. Yemen. The horror that stalks the days there, the screams heard through the nights. The innocent brutalized. The cities decimated. Those are all real. We ignore it. We pretend those things are far away from here, that we are not a part of it, that we have no responsibility for it. We close our eyes, our minds, our hearts to it. I can’t turn away, can you? And here, in dear old America, our flag sags under the weight of our mutual shame. Reagan’s tired description of us, “a shining city on a hill,” rings discordant, empty, false. We do not shine; we are tarnished with the stains of our selfishness, our shallow cravings, our racism and ...

José Rizal, a physician, writer, and a peace advocate during the Spanish-American War wrote: “There can be no tyrants where there are no slaves.” Merriam-Webster defines a tyrant as “an absolute ruler unrestrained by law or constitution…an oppressive ruler in the harsh use of authority or power.” We normally think of tyrants as madmen, vicious and violent dictators who brutalize their people, often with beatings, imprisonment, and death. And there have been and still are leaders of countries with those characteristics. But tyrants can also be less than that. They can simply be those who lead by manipulation, deceit, and mocking rhetoric, who, as Merriam-Webster put it, rule “unrestrained by law or constitution.” But whatever stripe of tyrant one may be, they cannot stay in power, as Rizal said, “without slaves.” What does that mean? It means those who do as they are told. Those who follow without consideration of their own best interests or the interests of others....

On NPR (National Public Radio) this morning they played a recording of a typical scene now where the Border Patrol is separating children from their parents.  I was in my car on my way to work. I heard babies crying, children screaming in tears. A Border officer is heard saying in Spanish, "We have an orchestra." It was a pathetic attempt to settle the distraught children terrified of being taken from their parents. The Trump administration is trying, unconvincingly, to dress the scene in quiet calm with children getting food and medicine, shelter and games. But let’s be honest. These are no substitutes for a child being taken from their parents. You can sit them in front of a circus of dancing elephants and they will still cry for their mother and father. The president is cynically blaming Democrats, or saying he’s protecting the country from the drug cartel, or whatever sort of baloney he wants to embellish, but the truth is, and please, everyone can see this, the pre...