The Unclad Soul

While the Paris nightmare was going on last weekend I was safe in Los Angeles with my son Caleb and my daughter-in-law Kameron and my little grandchildren Avery and Austin. It was the weekend of Avery’s 6 th birthday and we all had such a nice time together. I caught glimpses of the terrorist attack on my phone and here and there on television. Late at night before I went to sleep I would check the Internet on my phone to see the latest details. My heart was broken by the tragedies in Paris. So many people killed on a lovely Friday evening while sitting in bistros and cafes or attending a concert or the theater. I thought of how precarious life is, and how fragile. I thought of all of those who didn’t get to go home to their loved ones that night. And the many still severely wounded and hospitalized. The agony of it all, the loss, is still with me. In the meantime I was surrounded by love. Caleb and Austin picked me up from the airport Thursday and as I got into the car I hea...

Could we all possibly take a deep breath and not go insane over the terrorist brutality in Paris? Yes, it was horrific, cowardly, and barbaric. Innocent lives were murdered in cold calculating hate. But there needs to be a sense of reasonable thinking now. Not just panicked terror. That is the precise goal of terrorism: to provoke fear, frenzy, paranoia, and chaos. And when all of Europe and the Western world collapses in horror and hysteria, screams threats against Muslims, reaches for the big weapons, stirs up more hate and violence; and the decent and the thinking and the caring people of the world give into the urge for matching ruthlessness, then terrorists have truly hit their target. This is a war of ideas. You can’t kill an idea with bombs. This is a war of beliefs. You can’t annihilate a belief system with deadly arsenal. And let’s not compare this to Nazism thinking we that destroyed that idea with war. Nazism was the mastermind of one brilliantly demented man. The whole...

“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” ~ Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize winning Poet

The masterminds of 911, whether they intended to be or not, were geniuses. Not because they managed in the most terrifying way to collapse the Twin Towers but because their hideous act successfully severed our nation from its bearings. They didn’t just viciously murder nearly 3,000 Americans and temporarily shut down various financial institutions and disrupt the flow of commerce for a while. That wasn’t their goal. They created an ominous, debilitating, relentless fear among us. A terrorizing fear that still to this day remains in force in the lives of so many Americans. A fear writhing and twisting in hate. An irrational fear. A fear that gallops headstrong through our churches and schools, our Congress, our businesses and our homes. And that fear has made us so distrusting of people, so neurotically detached from reality, so emotionally hardened, bigoted and vengeful, that it is in many ways destroying us. That’s what terror is supposed to do. Weaken. Cripple. Confound. Torment. Di...

I am struggling more and more every day to understand the Syrian humanitarian crisis. I sympathize with those fleeing trying to save themselves and their families from the horrors happening every hour in Syria, horrors that have gone on far too long. It doesn’t matter to me whether they are refugees or migrants, they are escaping for their lives and any hope of a future, and they deserve a safe place to live. Have you seen Syria? Who can live there now? It is a place of utter devastation and ruin. Why aren’t the Arab nations, including Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates doing more to help these people? Why aren’t we? So far, according to NPR radio, we have taken in 1,500 refugees. That’s deplorable. I know we have given money and arms and the Syrian catastrophe is a complex situation but surely we can do better to help these desperate people. European nations have so far, except for Germany, been stubbornly indifferent to the mass of refugees risking their lives to g...

In her fascinating book, Dark Age Ahead , journalist and urban studies specialist Jane Jacobs writes about great cultures that come to a defeating and devastating close. The Roman Empire is an obvious example and she writes eloquently about its sad ruin. Her big point is that cultures die, even great brilliant ones, from what she calls “mass amnesia.” Meaning, the people of that culture just stubbornly forget the beauty of what they had created and trade it for something sinister, ugly, selfish and inferior. She writes, “Many subtractions combine to erase a previous way of life, and everything changes as a richer past converts to a meager present and an alien future.” Ms. Jacobs’ important book is a warning to Americans to beware of succumbing to “mass amnesia” and losing what was once a culture of genius, inventiveness, humane compassion, acumen and skill. Today we are getting a startling look into sections of our society that are seemingly unaware they are forgetting these v...

  “Close your mouth, block off your senses, blunt your sharpness, untie your knots, soften your glare, settle your dust." ~ Lao Tzu