The Unclad Soul

Our maniacal obsession with money in this country is ruining us. This obsession has corrupted and made incompetent our political system. It now works only for the rich and powerful. It is not capitalism that guides our politics; it's greed. Congress is populated not with patriots but with plutocrats, filthy rich money bags recklessly and arrogantly working for themselves and their billionaire patrons not the American people they supposedly represent. According to Stephan Richter, publisher and editor-in-chief of “The Globalist,” a daily online magazine on the global economy and politics, the average American family has a net worth of $120,000. The average American Congressman has a net worth of nearly $700,000. Two-thirds of Congress are millionaires. It is a rich man's club and the rest of the country is not welcome. This obsession with money has corrupted and is making many of our religious institutions irrelevant and repugnant. The prosperity gospel now trumps the tea...

Here in this happy season of enraged shoppers and rude store clerks and Target’s phenomenal credit card security system, there is the real spirit of Christmas. It goes something like this. Work with other nations? Why do we need them? We have no need of them. They’re all primitive countries with terrorists and taxes and people of other colors and strange cultures who don’t even observe Christmas. Who can understand a thing they say anyway. Other countries are useless. God bless America. Obamacare? Good Lord no. We don’t need that. If people are stupid enough to get sick then let them figure out how to get well on their own. I don’t want my tax dollars helping other people. The Bible says help yourself, or something like that. Stop war. Are you kidding? Wars are great. Some of the best movies ever made in this country are war movies. John Wayne is still a hero here. Did you not ever see “The Longest Day” for God’s sake? And besides, who gives a flip about the Germans, ...

As I get older Christmas changes. For one thing, the cheeriness of the season seems to get more and more lost in the annoyance of the shopping frenzy. Every year brings a new disgrace from the conduct of those shoppers who turn Christmas into a battle zone of mall derangement. And there’s Black Friday. And retail stores with 18 hour schedules. And sale’s wars. These things make Christmas preposterous. Why not make it a rule that everyone gets $100 of Christmas shopping money per year and no more. And nothing goes on sale. No bargain bins or price cuts. Everything stays the same as always. The stores all keep their usual hours. People might then decide to only get one nice gift for someone and then perhaps make the rest of their gifts. People might actually think about what gift or gifts they give. People might even get creative and shop in remote little places where there are items no one has and people have not endlessly handled. People might stay home more and enjoy the pre ...

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...