The Unclad Soul

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...

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....

Clergyman, author, and professor of Homiletics at Yale Divinity School, Halford Luccock, used to tell the story of a father who took his young son camping. At one point the father handed his son binoculars so he could better see the beauty of a mountain range. But the boy took the binoculars and looked through them from the wrong end. He complained that everything seemed so small, that he couldn’t make anything out. His father turned them around and said, “Now, you can see things as they are.” I read that story years ago and have never forgotten it. It seems an appropriate example of the error of our day. We seem, as a society, to be looking through the wrong end of the binoculars. Everything is small, insignificant, trite, unclear. We have no grand vision, no breathtaking sense of the beauty of our world and its people. We have lost our perspective. The gifted historian and novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was a voice of courage and truth against the old Soviet Union. Hi...

The news photo of a defenseless 92-year old Mexican man who was recently beaten with a brick by a woman and kicked by men, haunts and torments me. The woman, whose toddler daughter watched the whole thing, told the bleeding and battered old man to “Go back to Mexico.” He was visiting his family and was simply taking a walk near the house when the woman assaulted him. 92 years old. I watched a lengthy video on Facebook last week by a young Latina woman at a Chicago park who was verbally taunted by a drunk white man who kept getting in her face while a white police officer stood by and watched, doing nothing, even though she kept asking the officer to intervene. She and her family had rented a space at the park for a birthday party. But the drunk man and another white man were sitting in their space and wouldn’t leave. He then began harassing her because she was wearing a shirt that read, Puerto Rico on it. Eventually, several other police officers arrived but they let the drunk man ...

I am fighting pessimism. I do not want to be sour and gloomy and see only all that is wrong in our country and the world. I am trying to not believe we are at the edge of the abyss staring into the darkness. The poet Mary Oliver has written, “My concern for the world is a sorrowful business.” I have that concern as well. I struggle to breathe easier, to lessen the stresses, to find a place beyond the hard realities of this current debacle that is our nation and its defective government. My Facebook friend, Shelley Henderson, shared an astonishing poem from the brilliant Kate Tempest, titled, “Brand New Ancients.” In it, she writes, “In the old days, the myths were the stories we used to explain ourselves But how can we explain the way we hate ourselves? The things we’ve made ourselves into, the way we break ourselves in two, the way we overcomplicate ourselves? We are still permanently trapped somewhere between the heroic and the pitiful.” ...

Dear Conservative Friends, I’m torn. Some of you I have known for years. Some of you are close friends, people I love and admire and care about. So it makes it difficult for me to understand your politics sometimes and your devotion to president Trump, your tolerance of his divisive partisanship, your silence regarding his often hurtful comments, and your acceptance of his merry clan of White House associates and Congressional chums many of whom are clearly corrupt and many others who seem hell bent on making America one race (white of course), one religion (Fundamentalist Christian), one economy (for the wealthy), one issue (the 2 nd Amendment), and one truth (theirs). Now, I’m sure you can turn that all around and say something similar to me about Democrats or liberals or others you strenuously disagree with or dislike. Understood. But I’m honestly concerned about the way things seem to be going in the country. Yes, liberals and moderates have often been lousy at govern...

There is this from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” Mad Hatter: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” (There is a long pause.) “Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again. “No, I give up,” Alice replied: “What’s the answer?” “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter . And so, there you have it. My dilemma. I’m trying to figure out what happened to us as a nation. It’s a riddle I can’t answer. I haven’t the slightest idea. There are possible answers, I suppose. We got too big. We overachieved. We mixed religion with politics and politics took over religion. We became insanely selfish. We forgot our neighbors. We learned to hate more than we learned to love. We confined ourselves to our own kind and decided “others” were our enemies. We stopped thinking. We stopped caring. We stopped growing. The list is pretty much endless. So here we are. A nation in crisis. We’re surrounded by the greatest gadgets and devices and pla...

Playwright and screenwriter, Robert Ardrey, once wrote, “We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.” Which is to say, our acts of benevolence, kindness, love and generosity transcend our acts of terror, barbarity, murder, and mayhem. The unimaginable carnage, cowardly and beyond any possible reason, carried out Sunday by Devin Kelley, takes us to our knees. We collapse under the weight of such a beastly crime. How does anyone human carry out such an inhuman atrocity? Details are murky. The answers we need and want, and what will finally be revealed, if any at all, will not be sufficient. Whatever the motive or mental defect may have been, all we will be left with is that the depths of our individual capacity for evil and harm know no limits. Monstrous crimes are not new. But what seems to be dramatically different these days is the frequency of them, so that they are becoming not an aberration but a common reality. There is without question a poiso...

It saddens and frustrates me to see how religion and patriotism in America have created so much confusion and division in the last many years. The late 1970s brought us the Moral Majority, a loosely held crowd of extremely conservative believers led mainly by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the wealthy and powerful fundamentalist minister reigning then in Lynchburg, Virginia. He became the voice of the Moral Majority and he masterminded the idea that conservative Christians should take over the government in all aspects of its leadership and influence. From the president and his cabinet to all of Congress, to state governors and state legislatures, all the way down to local school boards and polling captains. It took years, but it worked. Today, our government—national, state, and local—is heavily influenced by far-right, powerful politicians and other leaders who use highly conservative, in some instances, incendiary, religious propaganda in order to convince voters and donors to bot...

“The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” ~ James Baldwin, Playwright/Poet/Novelist

I am a liberal in politics and religion. All of my friends know this. I am a seeker. They know this, too. I have never been comfortable with easy answers, with the accepted truth of the majority, with well-meaning but trite words of comfort. I want to find some deeper meaning to it all. I want to know there is a meaning. Beyond the shallowness of our current day there has to be more. More than the acrimony and alienation between so many of us. More than the shameless meanness of our leaders. More than the materialistic gluttony, the voracious urge for empty consumption of so many of us. We’re all appetite and no provision. Something has turned us sour, spoiled our sense of humanity, and left us rotting inside our vacant rituals. The election of a president in this country is now a tawdry spectacle of infantile behavior. The candidates preen and harangue and offer us not examples of capable leadership or even decent human conduct. Instead, they divide us with caus...

"Scientists have discovered that the small brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy."  – Natalie Angier, Science Journalist and Writer

“Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn't matter which color does the hating. It's just plain wrong.” ~ Muhammad Ali 

“Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants.” -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

We live in a divided and divisive country. In spite of the many advances that minorities have gained in America, racism is still a vicious and unyielding presence among us. Our political system wobbles feebly almost uselessly from the influences of corruption, bullheadedness, favoritism, malaise, haughtiness and indifference. Churches and the religious community once such a force for good and spiritual guidance are now often caught up in partisan political campaigning, serving politicians and clearly ignoring Jesus, not to mention the dispossessed, the sick, the young and the old, the hurting, the addicted, and the lonely. All across the country there hovers in the air a spirit of nastiness, wrangling, antagonism, and bitter discord and discourse. The story is told of a father and son sitting outside their house one summer evening talking and sipping iced tea. The night sky was a bit hazy but brilliant with stars and the son suddenly commented how beautiful the moons were abo...

I was watching these beautiful young people from Greece being interviewed on the news the other night. They were so bright and articulate and attractive, so full of life in the midst of the harsh austerity measures and turmoil going on in their country. They seemed caught in looks of not exactly fear but of hesitation, of simply not being sure what will be next for them. The world is going through a turbulent time of change and transition. So much of Europe is caught in furious winds of upheaval. The economies of Greece, Germany, England, Italy, and others are, like our own, shaky and unpredictable at the moment. We’re all facing enormous challenges. People in countries like Egypt, Syria, Russia, and Libya are demanding a new way of life. The past for them is obsolete, intolerable. They want more freedom, a fairer economy, cultural renewal, and a political system that is open and without the domination of cruel and corrupt dictators and demagogues. Africa, in spite of smal...