The Unclad Soul

The New Year begins with some startling statistics. In a recent article on Counterpunch, Dr. Lawrence Wittner, Professor of History emeritus at the State University of New York, offered a shocking list of dismal statistics regarding the state of America. We are first in the world’s military spending. In August of 2018, the president and Congress passed a gargantuan military budget of $717 billion. Can you imagine what that amount of money could do for American infrastructure, public education, health care, social services, and immigration reform? According to Demos, a public policy organization out of New York City, it would take approximately $175 billion to eliminate poverty in America. Eliminate it! Think about that. And yet, our war spending continues to climb. The Program for International Student Assessment of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently gave its latest report. In testing 540,000 students from 72 nations, American studen...

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 human body – what a miracle. Despite all we do to it—abuse it, take it for granted, it still operates with amazing precision. Walt Whitman wrote, “If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred.” It is more than a work of art; it is the work of genius. The mind – a complex computer with nearly unlimited capacities. Think of all we do without even thinking about it. Breathing, swallowing, sleeping, waking, walking, running. My typing, at this moment, without actually thinking about it, my fingers run across the keys effortlessly as though they somehow instinctively find the right letters on their own. It’s all the involuntary work of the mind. Creation gave us a brain but life gives us a mind. If we are aware, life will feed and nurture our mind. The ancients called the mind “a palace.” Such a gift. Intimacy – touching, kissing, making love, holding one another; it’s all so vital to our humanity. We shrivel and withdraw, we isolate and grow remote when there is no real i...

“The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as  Socrates  understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think.”  ~ Chris Hedges, Author/Journalist

“It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. ” ~ James Baldwin, Writer

“Unfortunately, as a society, we do not teach our children that they need to   tend carefully the garden of their minds . Without structure, censorship, or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation.”   ―  Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor,  Neuroscientist/Author  

“Everybody’s gotta learn; nobody’s born knowing.”   ―   Harper Lee, Novelist

Let’s let it be said that too much of Christian religious talk and action today is a wild distortion of what we have traditionally understood Christianity to be. This fear driven, hostile, endlessly close-minded Christianity of today is a vulgar mishandling of faith. It is a treacherous attack not on liberalism, socialism, atheism. Its target is humanity. And with unscrupulous ferocity it is deadening the spirits of its followers, and, it is literally destroying any possibility of cooperative problem solving in this country. The institutional Church, whatever Christian form it currently takes—Protestant or Catholic, Liberal or Fundamentalist, Strip Mall setting or giant Multiplex Citadel—is in danger of total irrelevance simply because of the grotesque arrogance of today’s far right radical, strident, offensive Christians and their pervasive attacks on people they dislike. They’re not picky. They’re after anyone who does not walk in lock step with their extremism. This row...

I’m not sure I could be more disheartened about our political system. I feel sorrow and dismay, anger and disillusionment, and I do not know what the answers are to our corrupt and rotting national political apparatus. A character in N.K. Jemisin’s novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms , speaks for me, “…and when I lift my head to scream out my fury, a million stars turn black and die. No one can see them, but they are my tears.” The Republicans are doing everything in their power to completely dismantle the orderly flow of Congressional procedures. Going on 6 years now they stubbornly and arrogantly refuse to cooperate with the President. They serve in their elected places of responsibility only to block his judicial appointments, to discredit and sabotage the Affordable Care Act with nothing to replace it, to defund public education, to bow down and kiss the feet of the wealthy, to interfere with any economic progress whatsoever because they are terrified a Democrat might get...

“The blizzard of the world Has crossed the threshold And it has overturned The order of the soul.” ~ Leonard Cohen, Canadian Poet/Novelist I am bewildered by the discord in our world but mostly the kind that exists in our own country. There is a whirling raging sickness within us, a deep and troubling emotional and spiritual dysfunction that separates us from any real unity as a nation.  It is a blizzard of some kind, some terrible inner storm within so many of us, that, as Cohen so aptly puts it, has overturned the order  of the soul.  The soul of America.  And the souls of many of us who say we love our country but never seem to show it. I have trouble understanding all of the hate and just viciousness towards President Obama.  It’s not just political differences.  It’s not mostly about his policies.  It’s much deeper than that.  People keep saying it’s not about race; but that is a huge component of it.  It real...

Do we care about this presidential campaign?  Probably not.  The thing has degenerated into such loathsome nonsense.  It feeds the anger in our country.  It distorts whatever facts exist whether good or bad.  It pits people against each other.  Makes us choose sides.  Prompts us into silly stupid conflicts that bring out the toxic forces in our human nature and poison all the ground around us and all those standing there. I’d like to live in a country that took care of the sick, the poor, the elderly, the handicapped and disabled and those who have a tough time taking care of themselves.  I simply do not mind paying taxes and having some of my tax dollars go to help meet those needs.  Why would I?  I’m not afraid of expanding social services that help meet needs I would never be able to meet on my own no matter how much money I might have. I think Medicare and Medicaid are terrific resources for the elderly and for those on ver...