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...

Sociologist Theodor Adorno once wrote that “Triviality is evil.” That might very well be an appropriate epitaph for our nation. We may actually see the end to a great experiment in freedom, creativity, ingenuity, genius, and a once civil society known as America. And it won’t be from a terrorist bomb. Triviality certainly fits our current political climate. It describes much of religion in America today. It explains our economy and the shredding of fairness in the workplace, in the giant corporate arena, and in the wild untamed monkeyshine behavior of Wall Street and its gang of banks. The problems we face, the challenges ever in front of us, are enormous and daunting. But we don’t confront them intelligently. Instead we are seized, haunted, gripped by fear. Our media apparatus is a daily around the clock unfolding of fear inducing hype, gossip, distortion, lies, and propaganda. A tragedy occurs like the San Bernardino shootings and CNN airs the chase, capture and killing of t...

Let us give action to our finest impulses, people of this great free land… Let us be superior to our fears, to the easy prejudices, to the ugly urge to hate, to the poison of arrogance, to the quick judgment, to the coward’s tactic of bullying, to the stubbornness of always being right, and to all things that demean, and discredit, that hurt and ruin, that drag all of us away from our giant selves so capable of love… Let us lift our voices in praise of life, in celebration of the human spirit that wants, that craves, that needs goodness… Let us fall on our knees in awe of children, of the wise, of the brave, of the undaunted… Let us clap our hands and stand in honor of soldiers and teachers, of librarians and therapists, of gardeners and wait staff, of flight attendants and firemen, of street vendors and retail clerks, of nursing aids and grill cooks, of bartenders and stay at home moms… Let us speak up for the u...