The Unclad Soul

I stumbled last night onto “Billy Connolly's Route 66” on PBS.  Connolly is a British actor and comedian.  The show is centered on him riding a three wheel motorcycle across the country.  He starts in Chicago and follows the famous Route 66 all the way to Santa Monica, California. There are four episodes in the series.  They were filmed in 2011 and originally shown on British television.  I have only seen the first one.   But it has me hooked. Connolly is an aging but vibrant man.  He has long white flowing hair and matching mustache and goatee and dresses like someone out of the 1970’s.  He looks part Hippie and part motorcycle gang from an assisted living center. I wasn’t much interested at first but the strength and sheer joy of Connolly’s personality kept me engaged.  He’s a bit of a rebel with an absolutely infectious laugh.  He’s old school and loves the historic architecture of the cities and towns he visits...

“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...

Ingrid called me the other night to tell me she could whistle.  I call her every night to chat for a minute, see how homework is going, and to tell her goodnight. But this evening she called me.  She has been trying to whistle for months, since last summer.  She kept asking, “Poppy, how do you do it?  I just don’t understand.”  I would try and tell her the mechanics of it and whistle for her and she would follow all of that and still nothing worked.  I told her to just keep practicing, that it would just take time.  “One day,” I said, “it will happen and you won’t even know how or why.” And so it did.  She whistled into the phone that night and it was the sweetest little sound.  She whistled some tunes and giggled with delight each time afterwards.  “See?” she said!  “Yes, sweetheart, you’ve got it now,” I said. There are so many things in life that are like that.  You just have to work at them and keep practicing...

I have thought lately about Louis L’Amour’s novel, “The Proving Trail,” the story of a young man who goes off to find his father’s killer.  The journey becomes more about him proving himself than it does proving who his father’s murderer was. Life is often a proving trail. I have a good friend who recently went in for a kind of routine brain surgery, if there is such a thing, only to be told the tumor the doctor thought was harmless turned out to be malignant and the prognosis not good.  A loving husband and father of a darling young daughter he now faces challenging treatments and involved medical procedures.  But his spirits are high and he is determined to beat the odds.  He is a tough, smart guy who loves life and he is walking his proving trail with remarkable courage.  I cheer him on and find in his faith, hope for my own feeble beliefs.  Another dear friend recently came to the awareness that perhaps in her childhood she was sexually ab...

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...

It seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work.  ~ Madeleine L'Engle, Novelist The work of God it seems to me is not about some kind of holy living.  It's not about someone's prescribed righteousness.  It's not about moral rules.  It has nothing to do with saving people from hell or even from themselves. There are of course endless ideas about God.  Whole religions and theological doctrines have been built upon those ideas.  Some of those ideas come from various sacred texts: the Bible, the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, and others. But whatever your thoughts or beliefs about God may be, if they don't begin and center in and end in love, then they seem to me to be little more than attempts at strained piety or becoming holier-than-thou. It is not in the protection of ourselves that God's work is done.  It is not in making sure we have the right beliefs.  It is not in fooling ourselves that we ful...

Carl Sagan, the brilliant and eloquent astronomer and astrophysicist said not long before his death, "I worry...that pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive.  Where have we heard it before?  Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose  or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us--then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls." He did not live to see how prophetic his words would prove to be. Today, with a small but vocal and hostile segment of our population incensed over the re-election of President Obama, we see people stuck in old mindsets of fear and hate trying desperately to grab for the controls. The Tea Party wants a recount of the election.  Some extremist Republican politicians want the pr...