The Unclad Soul

 "It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it." ~ Oriah Mountain Dreamer, Writer/Mystic

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s tragic death has stayed with me. I have both puzzled over it and mourned it for days now. Famously gifted, endlessly busy with wonderful acting projects, the father of three sweet children, rewarded with plenty of financial resources—and yet, a deep need or perhaps craving, allowed him to test a dark path of self destruction. Even the most talented of us, those seemingly delighted with their well-earned success, people beaming with what appears to be the things we all want, can still have a profound inner restlessness that desperately eclipses achievements, awards, blessings, and all good things. I saw a Facebook post where a minister was reflecting about Hoffman. It was an attempt to deal with his death in some sort of religious terms. Someone commented on the piece by stating, insensitively in my opinion, that Hoffman's life ended the way it did because "he didn't have Jesus in his life.” I find myself exhausted by such banality; as...

I come to this moment to remember the children and their teachers who were so brutally and senselessly killed last week at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I come seeking, with you, consolation, because the enormity of this fiendish act challenges the capacity of either human or divine comfort. Novelist David Gemmell has disturbingly said, "If there is one sound that follows the march of humanity, it is the scream." We feel that truth today.  And all of us hear that scream.  It is the scream of terrified children helplessly vulnerable to a deranged killer.  It is the scream of heroic teachers giving up their lives in the ultimate act of protecting their students.  It is the scream of parents and spouses and other children and family members engulfed in tears and broken with grief.  It is the scream of a community and a town embittered and angry by an unthinkable violation of all of their values and dreams and efforts at cre...