Category Personal Reflections

These Are the Best of Times

Can we just stop complaining now? Even more important, perhaps: How ‘bout we cut out the fear, the foreboding, the heavy mantle of doom?

Hear me, folks: Never, ever, in the entire history of humankind, have so many had it so good. And whatever the ebbs and flows of your temporary situation or mine, or the tremendous individual suffering that undeniably continues around the world as I type these words, things on a global scale are getting better all the time—as they have been for the last 50,000 years, give or take.

“CONFUSED, CONFLICTED, TIRED NATION” read the recent newspaper headline. O.K, so those ISIS fanatics are awful, pure evil, subhuman in their explicit cruelty.

Ebola will get worse before it gets better (and it will get better; we can be quite confident we’ll die from something else).

And the economy isn’t exactly humming along (only a 4% growth rate!) and the Repubs and Dems are at each ...

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Father Bob and the Misapprehension of Spiritual Life

Way back in 1980-81, I spent one of the most stimulating years of my life in seminary, taking whatever classes I wanted at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. It was one of those “exploration in graduate theological education” programs: one year, no requirements, graze to your heart’s content among the consortium’s eight seminaries. There’s a synonym for all that, and here it is: Heaven.

I spent pretty much the entire year enraptured, mostly reclining on my mattress-on-the-floor (the true graduate school bedding protocol) with a pile of books when I wasn’t running in the East Bay hills or walking the never-dull streets of Berkeley.

Grazing through catalogs from the various seminaries before the start of the semester, one easy pick was a course in spirituality from Father Bob, a Jesuit priest who turned out to live fully up to his order’s reputation for being learned and engaging masters of ...

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We Are All Guilty

My online pal Amy Morgenstern over at Sermons in Stones had a brief blog post recently in which she asked, “…Is there a special place in hell for people who spend $425 on a lace t-shirt in a world where they could use that money to feed a hungry family for a month? And if so, am I going there too for spending $65 on a jacket?”

It’s a great couple of questions, and in my response to her I indicated that I had long had a blog post in mind addressing them, with the headline as you see it at the top of this page. She said she would read that post if I wrote it, so Amy, this one’s for you. (And for anyone else who has pondered these same questions, which I am going to guess is everyone who peruses this site.)

Unfortunately, the issue is not only $425 t-shirts and other forms of conspicuous consumption by what is commonly regarded as the 1% in this country...

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A Sermon on “Fiction and the Religious Imagination”

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...

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Creative Tension in Leonardo da Vinci, or, Why I Love My Lawn!

Here in drought-stricken California, we’re being told to let our lawns die. The farmers and the fish need the water, it’s a precious resource, we’ve got to face reality, etc.

After a bone-dry December and January, I was acquiescing, though my lawns, front and back (quite modest-sized, I assure you!) were hunkered down in their winter dormancy and thus not showing any grievous withering face, no brittling yellows that would invite battalions of ever-hearty crab grass and dandelions to mass in preparation for their ultimate invasion and triumph.

Then in February, which effectively brings spring to this Mediterranean climate and would thus reveal the doleful demise of my lawns, the distant sound of cavalry grew suddenly prominent in the form of some nice drenching storms. Not enough to be drought-busters, the newspapers and TV news incessantly reminded us (subtext: “Don’t even think about watering y...

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