The Unclad Soul

I watched on C-Span last night Secretary of Health & Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, return to Congress’s Roman Arena, known as the House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing. There she was once again thrown to the Republican lions who had a delightful time ranting and fuming against this public servant. I watched her wither and age in the hour I forced myself to view the spectacle. She does not come across as a warm person, but then not many people have sunny dispositions while being stomped and chewed to pieces by drooling lunatics all in a frenzy of uncontrollable rage. The petty insults, the sneering condescension, the harassing bitterness spewed by Republican members of the Committee were a shameful and atrocious display of partisan politics. Many made no attempt to control their tempers. Some of their outbursts were blatantly acts of bullying and some even bordered on just outright cruelty. To treat a woman, a professional member of the President’s Cabinet,...

Religion is struggling these days to be relevant. About the only place it seems to me, strangely enough, to be entering some slight renewal is within Catholicism, which needs it, considering all of the horrors of past priest abuse. And that flicker of renewal is due solely to the fresh presence of Pope Francis. Pope Francis is in many ways a maverick. He is one of the few in religion today who gets religion. He is telling us and showing us what religion is supposed to do. Choosing not to live in the luxurious pontiff’s apartment and the surroundings of the papal palace he moved into a small modest cottage nearby. He has scorned capitalism and materialism and asks us to live for what matters. His sermons are filled with words of mercy and peace and the love of Jesus. Pope Francis goes to the people after each mass and tenderly, lovingly shakes their hands, waves, kisses babies and touches the sick and prays for them. There was a photo online the other day of him approac...

Out there in the beautiful unknown, out where life’s mysteries are created and apportioned, out in the wonder of our deeper existence surely lies a welcome for each of us. I want to be connected to that. I want to be open to all of the gifts that wait for me, and you, and all of us in those sacred places of the extraordinary presence of something inexplicable and good. For instance, comfort, in the midst of life’s muddle. Across every path we travel today, the blinding traffic of cars, the early morning neighbor rolling out the trash bins, the coworkers at our workplace, the weary homeless man pushing across the intersection a grocery cart of used debris--there and elsewhere--passes someone just entering or leaving a devastating experience. Heartbreak knows no boundaries. The wounding of the soul comes not with some predetermined assignment or punishment for the few; it comes to all of us, deserving or not. But into the tumult there often appear the mystical open arms of c...

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 gifted “New York Times” columnist, novelist, and writer, Pete Hamill, battled alcoholism for years. It dramatically influenced every aspect of his life and nearly destroyed him. In one his books he tells how he would senselessly sit in a bar for hours and drink himself into a stupor. He writes, “The world was a grand confusion. Finally, when I was drunk, and my mind couldn't do what I wanted it to do, I went home. I would lie alone in the dark, feeling that I was a character in a story that had lost its plot.” I know that feeling, literally. Many of us do. But figuratively, it has great meaning, too. For me, it is such a profound description of where we are in this broken country of ours. A beautiful and gracious nation, we are nevertheless floundering in our own “grand confusion.” We are drunk with some powerful inebriating fury and dysfunction that leaves us incapacitated, unable to do what we really want and need to do as a people. From our highest leaders to th...

How did we lose the fundamental joy of the human spirit? How did we come to be so distrusting of one another? How did we learn to give in to such appalling responses to our differences? There is a beautiful stanza in one of poet laureate Billy Collins’ poems that says: “It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.” Today, though, there is this: Hateful, spiteful, ruinous politics. Superficial, sanctimonious, greedy, judgmental religion. U.S. drones that roam the world killing terrorists, yes, but far too many of the innocent. Spying on everyone by our fear soaked, paranoid government. Indifference to poverty, to domestic violence, to abandoned children, to the needs of the old. Making a mockery of our educational system by defunding its deepest budgetary needs. Cops—impulsively mean, brutal and lawless, out of control. Old time bigotry dressed up in patriotic garb. Health care for all ...

There is a lurid kind of selfishness among us today. It struts itself in religious language and patriotic mumblings. It looks out on the world and our nation and sees only forces out to take away one’s security, one’s freedom, one’s money. This selfishness never sees the needs of people, the scarring hurts, the struggle to be human, the longing to have self respect and to be loved. It knows no empathy, only resentment bathed in bitterness. It convinces us that people on the fringes of survival are losers, void of ambition and initiative, wasters of resources we want for ourselves. This selfishness scorns the provisions of government agencies that exist to assist single moms stuck in the debris of betrayal and abandonment. It dismisses the limits of the disabled who are seen by this selfishness as cripples useless to us and to our economy, beggars looking for a handout. It disregards the elderly in their tiny homes with leaky roofs and thin walls that can’t hold back the cold o...