Yearly Archives 2013

The kind people at the Unitarian Universalist Community of Lake County invite me a time or two every year to step into their pulpit and deliver a guest sermon. Earlier today, I shared this message on forgiveness with them, which serves as a kind of followup and elaboration to my post last April in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. I found it useful to return to this topic in a more expansive way after some time had passed, and I hope readers may get further food for thought as well.

Forgiveness is one of those topics we’re never quite done with in human life. The “I’m sorry/That’s OK, I forgive you” dynamic gets introduced to us sometime in our toddler years, when we inadvertently take a whack at our grandma’s nose while reaching for her glasses and our parents, aghast, tell us with great earnestness, “You hurt Grandma, tell her you’re sorry!” Mortified and confused, we mumble something and hope ...

Life ain’t easy. “When you’re dark and troubled…” begins the Carole King song that was made even more famous by James Taylor. When we hear these first words to “You’ve Got a Friend,” all of us inch right up to the edge of our seats and bob our necks forward in anticipation, because we know in our bones this what of being “dark and troubled,” oh yes we do. It’s the human lot, at least on occasion, and when the Brood Brothers descend and linger, wearing their dark suits with midnight-black shirts and matching hankies, we know they’re not our friends, and we need a Carole King and James Taylor to fill in the second half of that opening line, that dependent clause, with a soulful, wise and expansive response.

Or else, at the peak of summer, we can consider the sunflower.

Let’s, shall we?

Sunflowers are part of a huge family—think Italian baptisms with dozens of long tables set out in the coun...

*Why do I always feel, when I am meandering about in the mountains, so wildly free and self-possessed, and at the same time so puny and insignificant? Does the vastness and majesty of the setting release some heretofore unknown chemical that allows me to settle contentedly into my niche as a speck of cosmic dust, desiring nothing more than to exist in this moment of plain clarity and calm?

These are questions the naturalist John Muir may well have asked himself at age 30 when he nixed an offer of a partnership in an Indiana machine shop that made wagon wheels and set out to discover the world. He first headed to Florida on a 1,000-mile walk and eventually crossed back over the continent toward the Sierra Nevada Mountains, over which he was to spend much of the rest of his life tramping...

None of us, save for George Zimmerman, will ever know exactly what happened the night he shot and killed Trayvon Martin at close range with a bullet from his 9 millimeter semi-automatic handgun. Reactions to the killing and Zimmerman’s eventual acquittal fell along the usual and predictable faultlines of American life: African-Americans and white liberals decrying the verdict as racially tinged, with most other whites and conservatives pointing to inconclusive evidence in supporting the acquittal.

According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted early this week and cited by NPR, “86 percent of African-Americans expressed dissatisfaction with the verdict, compared with just 30 percent of whites.”

Determining Zimmerman’s legal culpability was a matter for the jurors to decide, and the jurors have spoken...

Poets are by turns lyrical, expressive, rhythmic, and profound, but perhaps most of all, they are intense. Their intensity manifests in the sharp eye they cast on the world and every detail in it, the careful, sustained scrutiny they give to every object, person or situation in front of them, and to every resultant thought in their mind and gut that is yearning for expression.

It is this intensity that perhaps most shines forth from poet Christian Wiman’s recent memoir, “My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer.”

If poetry has a way of concentrating the mind, then a wretched and ostensibly terminal disease befalling the poet no doubt does that concentration one better. Wiman has been suffering/benefiting from this fate for nearly eight years now, holding at bay a rare blood cancer that struck him at age 39 and which his initial prognosis suggested would kill him long ago...