Yearly Archives 2013

Please forgive the impossibly pretentious headline above. I think Rev. Martin Luther King would both forgive and understand it, because he above all would appreciate the tremendous sense of solidarity engendered by his justifiably famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail” and all the other events of 1963 in this quintessentially Southern town that would so change the course of history.

I arrived here on the eve of the 50^th anniversary of George Wallace’s theatrical standing in the University of Alabama school doors to ostensibly prevent the admittance of black students in defiance of a federal court order. (Wallace at least had enough sense not to actively defy the federal marshals and troops sent there by President Kennedy and his attorney general and brother Bobby to enforce the law.) I paid respects with my family at the now historic 16^th Avenue First Baptist Church where Ku Klux Klansmen murdered four...

Is the sheer number of stimuli our beleaguered brains are exposed to on a minute-by-minute basis in modern life driving us out of our minds? Does the multi-tasking we joke nervously about to our family and office mates increasingly make us perform those tasks poorly and absent-mindedly, with little of what we do manage to accomplish sticking in our memory as we click our way through yet more stimuli that press in upon our attention like hungry children clamoring for food?

I have been trying to think through these questions in prepping this post over the past week, but incoming emails and text messages and those darned attractive pop-up ads blinking on the 16 open windows currently on my computer screen have been interrupting my train of thought about every 7.2 seconds.

Oh dear.

Let’s be clear: Human life has always been difficult, so this will be no “Woe is us” lamentation bemoaning how tough we have it ...

Last week in church, my 14-year-old daughter and her cohorts in their “Coming of Age” program culminated a year of reflections, retreats and fellowship by presenting their personal “credos” to the congregation. These were summations of their developing views on religion and life—and what is most important about it. It was a worthy exercise, and the kids were charming and varied in their presentations. And it occurred to me that in one form or other, we all live and act out of our “credos,” and there is great potential value in pausing to examine and elaborate what those are. Here’s mine (as of today). What’s yours?

I consider myself a “deeply religious non-theist.”

Non-theist, because I have no sense of a personal God, a Supreme Being, a Prime Mover, who controls or directs any aspect of life, to whom we can pray and get a response.

Religious, because I do believe in the sanctity of l...

Returning from a run at the school track around the corner, I behold a small gathering of crows in the middle of the street, all of them looking down, as they tend to do, with their uncanny radar for discerning food in the urban wilderness. The object of their attention looks to be a small tree branch at first, but I can’t fathom why that would occupy them so concertedly, so curiosity bids me to intrude upon their circle. Where I come across an obviously besieged alligator lizard, its mouth agape in an “I will bite and swallow you all!” bluff that had been effective enough to keep the gathered crows dancing gingerly in the moments before my arrival. The crows squawk in retreating to the surrounding trees and telephone wires, wary eyes cast upon me, their sudden competition for a protein snack.

One lone lizard, maybe an inch high and a few inches long, already missing its tail, against probably five c...

Thirty years ago, the scientist, physician and essayist Lewis Thomas published an essay, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, that concluded his best-selling book by the same name. Just like Mahler’s symphony, the brief (1,200-word) essay had a haunting, luminous quality. The difference was that Thomas juxtaposed Mahler’s themes of human mortality and its attendant melancholy with the sustained buildup of nuclear arms through the height of the Cold War in the 1980s.

Facing personal mortality can of itself entail a kind of somber acceptance and beauty, Thomas suggested, especially when conveyed with the profundity of a great composer writing for an orchestra...