Yearly Archives 2014

Apologies for the long strange headline above, but it descended on me in the midst of a run, charging up a hill, fuming, while wondering what to do about the Rick Perrys of the world.

Outgoing Texas Governor Perry, as you probably have heard by now amidst all the other mayhem and head-shaking absurdities of the daily headlines, responded to a question after an address at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco earlier this week about whether he thought homosexuality is a “disorder” with this nugget:

“Whether or not you feel compelled to follow a particular lifestyle or not, you have the ability to decide not to do that. I may have the genetic coding that I’m inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that, and I look at the homosexual issue the same way.”

So there you have it: a remarkable response in all ways—for its ignorance, its small-mindedness, its complete refutation of actual k...

I am a churchgoer, and though I have made many friends within my church community over the 10 years of my membership, outside of that community very few of my other friends and acquaintances from a now long life step inside a church with any more regularity than is required by an occasional invitation to a wedding or memorial service.

So do I consider these non-churchgoing people’s souls to be in some kind of danger, their lives somehow less capable of experiencing the fullness of love and charity, grace and communion and exultation?

No, I don’t. Not one whit or bit.

Salvation, such as it is, comes in nearly infinite forms of expression and experience. If hell is the ultimate destination for non-churchgoers, God’s minions are going to have to carve out a very large cavern.

So then why does anyone go to church?

Why do I?

I was talking with a couple of mainline Protestant minister friends of mine not t...

There has been another shooting…

The names and locales and exact number of victims begin to intermingle and fade into each other over time as a wearying sequence of outrage, grief and calls to do something give way to a series of volleys that see the left and right political flanks in our country dig deeper into their respective trenches of outrage tinged with near despair on the left and dismissive gun rights absolutism on the right.

“When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, ‘Stop this madness!’? Too many have died. We should say to ourselves, ‘Not one more!’”

That’s Richard Martinez, father of one of the six victims left dead at only the most recent carnage last weekend at UC Santa Barbara.

“As harsh as this sounds—your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”

That’s “Joe the Plumber,” a supposed American “everyman” who catapulted into the media spotlight w...

The best anti-war song ever written actually began its life as a poem. But like most fine poems, it contained an abundance of musical elements and concrete, vivid imagery. So much so that folk singer John Gorka readily saw the opportunity to turn it into a haunting, masterful song, so plaintive and quietly anguished that it throws off the power of its anti-war outrage under the cloak of a mother’s muffled sobs.

“Let them in, Peter,” implores the first line, and we immediately know which “Peter” the poet Elma Dean was referring to in the dark days of 1942, when the war was going very badly in post-Pearl Harbor America. This is the Peter who does not need a last name. The sentence finishes: “…they  are very tired.”

And the next lines:

      Give them couches where the angels sleep, and light those fires
      Let them wake whole again, to brand new dawns
      Fired by the sun, not w...

Once a year or so, I’ll fill the pulpit for a lay-led service at my home church, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation, Santa Rosa. Today was one those days, with the sermon title as noted above.

Oh, what a long, strange and compelling story humanity has written for itself over the eons! Some of this story is reflected in our history books—especially those weighty tomes that tend to sit on our shelves for decades collecting heavy carpets of dust. Under the dust, we can barely make out grandiose titles like The Story of Man…or Civilization. Or, if you want to get more micro about it:  Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners’ Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America.

But there is another class of stories within the narrative of history. Another way of telling humanity’s tale. Rather than focusing on external events—who, what, when, where, why?—this way focuses on internal eve...