The Unclad Soul

Guest Post By Heather Von St. James Courageous mother, wife, writer and cancer survivor My First Year of Motherhood and My Battle with Mesothelioma My first year of motherhood was an amazing prospect.  My friends and family reminded me that it would take a village to raise my child, but I had no idea just how true this was.  Neither did I realize just how important my village would become.   I gave birth to Lily on August 4, 2005.  The emergency C-section was the only complication of the entire pregnancy, but holding my daughter was worth it.  My own village quickly surrounded me, and things were wonderful.  I expected that my recovery from the C-section would be a little challenging, but when I returned to work two months later, I was still very fatigued.  I was also breathless and this really disturbed me.   I made an appointment with my doctor.  After a battery of tests, he found the problem.  A diagnosis of malignant pleu...

Last Sunday night I attended what was called a Candle Light Vigil for Syria.  My friend Charlie Johnson who spoke at the event invited me.  Charlie is the pastor of Bread Fellowship in Fort Worth and had been tweeting for weeks about the tragedy in Syria.  Some Dallas Syrians picked up his tweets and invited him to join in the vigil and to share his thoughts. Around 9pm about 75 people gathered at the Grassy Knoll in Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas to remember the ongoing suffering of the people of Syria who live under the endless brutality of the Assad regime. Descriptions of some of the horrors of the conflict were read.  Poems and prayers were given.  People lit candles and raised them in solidarity.  There were speakers, including Charlie, whose own words were calm and encouraging but passionate and wise. As far as I could tell Charlie and I were the only ones there who were not of Syrian descent.  I had hoped there might be a more di...

“Don’t be intimidated by other people’s opinions.  Only mediocrity is sure of itself, so take risks and do what you really want to do.” ~ Paul Coelho, Novelist

And so the world goes on in its complexities, in its bewilderment. And we in America contribute to it one way or another. Violence does a number on the innocent in places so absent of hope so bankrupt of the slightest respect for human life that finally the dignity of people turns stale and then sours and life crawls in despair for all of them.  And this happens in the ghettos of Chicago as well as the bloody streets of Syria. War still carries the day, still gets all the attention, still struts in defiance of everything decent and humane and sucks dry the economies of the oppressed while boosting with endless bounty the finances of those who ride this beastly machine to their fortunes. The shrillest, pettiest, most shameless acts of selfishness and greed and blatant lying unfold daily in places of governance, not just in evil empires and far off places of darkness but right here in our own political campaigns, among people running for the highest offices in America, an...

I stumbled onto Amos Lee the other day while listening to Jango, an online radio station.  I’d never heard of Amos Lee but he was singing something called, “El Camino,” and I liked it. His voice is mellow and a bit gravely and it carries some pain in it but the pilgrim’s spirit can be heard in him, too. “Well to all my friends That treated me so well You know I’m headed out To that mission bell Gonna wash my soul, gonna get it clean Headed down the border road called the El Camino” This is a beautiful song filled with pathos and truth-seeking. I love the image of the sort of forlorn traveler perhaps a little weary with life taking off to find his way, leaving his friends behind to seek some redemption, some transcendence and transformation, down a border road to where the mission bell is calling him. I want to go, too. I want experiences that call me to deeper insight into life, and, to higher places of self-awareness.  Not egotism.  No...

The disintegration of the Christian faith saddens me. Where is it going today?  It is lost in some need to relate to the culture at hand.  It is beset with shallow ideas of celebrity status and wealth, of a theology so flimsy it barely supports a life much less a nation. Someone posted on Facebook the other day a video of a bumbling, vulgar, oahfish Baptist preacher from North Carolina saying from his ornate pulpit that he’d had a vision of what to do with all of the “lesbians, the homosexuals and queers.” He said to put them all in an electric fenced in area, drop food in there, and then let them die off. Listening to his obscene rant, all in the name of God, made me think of a book my friend Danny Redding suggested to me, Charles Kimball’s “When Religion Becomes Evil.” For a minister, like the North Carolina man, to say such things from a Christian pulpit is evil.  Plain and simple.  It is an inexcusable evil. Dallas minister Ed Young ...