The Unclad Soul

I would encourage every American to watch the Ken Burns series, The West. It is available on Netflix and PBS. What you learn from this extraordinary documentary is that the White Man has, from the beginning of his presence here, done everything in his power to prevent first, the Native American Indians, then the Mexicans, then the Blacks, then the Asians, from ever being given the right to be legally assimilated into the free function of American society. The White Man is an immigrant. Unless you have Native American blood in you, you did not come from this land. Your ancestors brought you here from somewhere else. Whites came to this country from Europe, Western Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, and North Africa. This land did not belong to them, they stumbled onto it and then they took it to be their own. Many came here fleeing religious persecution, poverty, disease, lack of economic opportunity, and the freedom to build a life for themselves and their families. ...

There is a wonderful native American tale told in the Ken Burns series, The West. Seven siblings are playing. Six girls and one boy. The boy pretends he’s a bear chasing the girls and they pretend to be afraid. Then the boy actually becomes a bear and the girls are then actually frightened. They run past a tree, and the tree tells them to climb up, that it will keep them safe. The girls climb into the tree. The bear claws all the bark off the base of the tree. But the tree only rises higher carrying the girls into the sky until they become stars in the Big Dipper. The greatest lessons in life always bring us back to nature, to the land and the sky, to the place of our origin. What happens when our peers, our protectors, turn against us? We run to the safety of what we instinctively know to be good and right. We go into the arms of nature, to what we can see and feel. And, we also go into the mystery of the spirit world, into what we know deep inside us is of authentic value....

Intelligence is more than education. Even higher education. It is more than book learning. Intelligence, for me, is about character, integrity, the ability to weigh information, to believe things that affirm life and people. Today, intelligence is mocked as snobbery, pretension, acting as though one is better than others. It’s true there are those who act intelligent who are guilty of that. But those people are basically insecure and fearful of being found out just how little they know. Intelligent people want to know things. They are open to new ideas, to change, and to evolving themselves and their beliefs. People who make fun of intelligence, who see it as arrogance and elitism, are typically those who are clueless about the world. They have few experiences in society working with people different from themselves. They are anchored to a culture, a mindset, that is often limited, provincial, and resistant to anyone or anything outside their safe zone. There woul...

“When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me / Speaking words of wisdom, let it be / And in my hour of darkness, she is standing right in front of me / Speaking words of wisdom, let it be… And when the broken-hearted people living in the world agree / There will be an answer, let it be / For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see / There will be an answer, let it be… And when the night is cloudy there is still a light that shines on me / Shine until tomorrow, let it be / I wake up to the sound of music, Mother Mary comes to me / Speaking words of wisdom, let it be / Let it be, let it be, let it be, yeah, let it be / There will be an answer, let it be…” That is a song written by Paul McCartney after the death of his mother, Mary. She had come to him in a dream at a difficult time in his life and told him to let it be, that things would be okay Let it be. For the longest time, I thought that was all the song was about, ...

While walking the track the other morning at the large high school behind where I live, I saw something that disturbed me. As I was making a turn there was a small group of boys at the end of the football field that is in the middle of the track. Standing far above the others was a big kid, maybe 6’2’, 250 pounds. He was waving something in his hand. There was a much smaller boy a few feet in front of him with his hands up in front of him. From a distance, I thought the big kid had a small football in his hand because he was waving the smaller boy out onto the field as though to catch something. Just as I got near them, I saw the big kid had a cell phone in his hand. He threw it long and high in the air. The smaller kid was awkwardly running to catch it, but it hit hard on the ground and bounced twice. The big kid just laughed along with the others and walked off. The smaller kid picked up his phone, put it in his pocket, and walked over to the group and sheepishly stood wi...

There is an insightful comment from the novelist Virginia Woolf in her search for purpose in life. She had often come to detours and dead ends. There were high moments of discovery and low times of nagging self-doubt. In a personal essay she concluded, “What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with the years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” It is such a magnificent comment. Most of us at some point in our lives, often in mid-life or our later years, look back over it all and wonder what any of it meant. We see people we loved for the wrong reasons. Relationships that ended badly. Pathways we should have never taken. Choices we knew were questionable but made them anyway often with regret. We see good times, laughter and celebrations, deep love; that fun concert, the hila...

The poet, Tyler Kent White has written, “I promise if you keep searching for everything beautiful in this world You will eventually become it.” It is a promise I cling to. When I lived in Hamilton, Texas, a small town in the central part of the state, I often took to the countryside. When small-town life got to me—yes, there are political divides and social conflicts and elitism there, too--; when the strain of ministry seemed overwhelming to me because of unexpected deaths and divorces and fixed old beliefs and my own inner questions; I would hit the walking trail East of town. Or, I would drive through groves of trees along dirt roads out North across rickety bridges and the sight of grazing cattle on the other side. I would bird hunt with friends and fish in the tanks on their property. I never killed anything I didn’t eat. But it wasn’t the hunting and the fishing that refreshed me, though I did enjoy it. It was simply being in the country, in natu...