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...

There is a wonderful native American tale told in the Ken Burns series, The West. Seven siblings are playing. Six girls and one boy. The boy pretends he’s a bear chasing the girls and they pretend to be afraid. Then the boy actually becomes a bear and the girls are then actually frightened. They run past a tree, and the tree tells them to climb up, that it will keep them safe. The girls climb into the tree. The bear claws all the bark off the base of the tree. But the tree only rises higher carrying the girls into the sky until they become stars in the Big Dipper. The greatest lessons in life always bring us back to nature, to the land and the sky, to the place of our origin. What happens when our peers, our protectors, turn against us? We run to the safety of what we instinctively know to be good and right. We go into the arms of nature, to what we can see and feel. And, we also go into the mystery of the spirit world, into what we know deep inside us is of authentic value....

A fundamental truth in the teachings of Jesus was that the wicked are not as dangerous as those who pretend to be righteous. In fact, the only group that Jesus ever publically rebuked, and he did it more than once, was the Pharisees. Their self-righteousness and religious intolerance of anyone breaking their rules angered Jesus because he saw it as a mockery of the love God had sent him to live and share. The recent vote at the global United Methodist Church conference, which affirmed and tightened its ban on same-sex marriage and gay and lesbian clergy, is, in my opinion, a sad continuation of the Pharisees of old who used their faith to exclude and judge others. Let’s not forget that Roman emperor Constantine, who converted to Christianity and hailed himself as bringing it to Rome, was a more than compromised leader. He had his own son killed and boiled his wife in hot water. And yet he remains in history an icon of Christianity. The Crusades, which lasted 200 years,...

I want to stand under a wild sky at night and hear the ancient stories the stars tell. I want to get lost in the wonder of trees lining a country lane and welcome the breeze that refreshes and soothes. I want to swim in the ocean and feel the soft weight of the water hold me in the rhythm of its support. I want to watch children play and relish the freedom in their laughter and remember again what innocence is. I want to make friends with a lonely dog and walk with it along the beach and rest in the grass with its head on my chest. I want to stand in a garden of flowers and disappear in their color and drink in their fragrance. I want to be with people of character and depth and withdraw into the intimacy of affection and know again the worth of my humanity. I want to experience the fundamental powers that define me and believe in my own dignity and authenticity. I want to examine the truths that are pillared in my soul and honor the stability of their influence. I want to...

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...

The religious theme, if you can actually call it that, running through this ongoing presidential campaign, is revealing a worrisome truth. And that is that we have a lot of misguided thinking in this country about religion. Many of our very religious sounding politicians today keep telling us what a dangerous threat Iran is to us. But what seems to be completely lost on them is that the government of Iran is a theocracy led by religious leaders who have made their sacred teachings the law of the land. And any violation of those teachings is strictly punishable by brutal and sometimes fatal consequences. There is a cruel and shameful trail of abuse and horror throughout history when religion has attempted to control the lives of all people. Catholics, Christians, Muslims, and Jews have all contributed to those grim periods in history when people were victimized by obsessive and extremist religious beliefs and the leaders who demanded faithfulness to them. The distinguished Sup...

Ingrid and I were strolling through Macy’s on our way to the food court in NorthPark mall. We walked by the men’s cologne section and I decided to stop to see if there was anything new on the shelves. I sniffed around a few things and finally sprayed on a little True Religion. It’s been around for awhile but I liked the scent. The rest of the afternoon whenever I would get a whiff of the cologne I kept thinking about the whole idea of true religion. I spent a lot of years studying religion, talking and writing about it, trying to figure out its mysteries and contradictions, its deep thoughts and arbitrary rules, its beautiful ideas and ugly prejudices. I am a Christian by family tradition, by parental influence, by focused exposure, by environmental coincidence, and as an adult, by choice. Had I grown up in India or Iran, Africa or China, Russia or Israel, I’m sure I would be something else. I do not believe any of us are destined or foreordained to be a Christian or to fo...