Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Health

Two Colorful People Together

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Spring                  Full Seed Moon

Yes, we need no appraisal, we need no appraisal today.  Our bank, Wells Fargo, decided we do not need an appraisal to refinance our loan.  Something about our loan balance, equity and that it would be a roll-over instead of a brand new loan.  OK.  That means we can refinance sometime next week.  A good thing.

The last week and a half, since the root canal, has had dealing with the infected jaw, then one organ after another taking up my mornings.  All important to my long term health, but it has left me tired and with a sense of little accomplished.

This need to accomplish, to achieve continues as a backdrop.  Kate says when she retires she’s ready to rest on her laurels, sit back and reflect on her life.  “We can just be two colorful people together,” she said.  I’m not sure I can give up the hope of something over the horizon, a realization, a book, a political action a defining event for this stage of my life.  If not, I may find the last two decades or so of life a struggle. Or, I suppose, they might be very productive.

Drifting right now.  The melancholy at bay, but not too far away, ready to bring a tear or a heaviness to my now.  Feels empty.

Faith and Spirituality, Family

Family and Friends, All of It

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Spring          New Moon

“A person writing at night may put out the lamp, but the words he has written will remain. It is the same with the destiny we create for ourselves in this world.” — Shakyamuni

Paul Strickland and I sat at the Origami eating noodles and sushi.  We muttered about the AIG bonuses, parsed some recent appearances by Obama and then veered into the realm of faith.  Paul remains a committed Christian and I have long since fallen away.

“I miss the assurance and comfort faith gave me,” I admitted to Paul, “but it’s a bell I can’t unring.”  He looked at me with a trace of doubt about how to proceed.  Such admissions tempt the faithful to evangelize, but Paul steered a path away from temptation.  He refers to God as the Great Spirit, a nod, I imagine, to his Cherokee heritage.

We went on to the nature of time.  He commented on the strange notion of simultaneity, which apparently he and I both embrace.  That is, everything that ever happened and will happen are, at each moment, all in existence.  This odd idea proceeds for me from the notion of conservation, nothing is ever lost, matter and energy constantly in transition from one state to another, but never exhausted.

There was other stuff, too, but in the end we got up, two older men, baby boomers approaching retirement age, and commented on the way out of this Japanese restaurant that family and friends, that was it, all of it.


Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality

A Thought on Extinction

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Spring     Waning Moon of Winds

Quick notes for some future thought.  Often I carry a notion around for days before I set it down and I’ve had one banging around for a week or so.  On Monday last at Frank Broderick’s I offered a view of legacy that featured, as I posted here, Shelley’s poem Ozymandias.  The more I’ve thought of that poem and the sinking in to the sands of time of 99.99999% of us, often not even name remaining for long, I’ve felt strangely liberated by it.

Let me extend  the notion.  Not only will even the best and the brightest of us fade from view, as have all but a very few, but given time even the starship on which we travel will die away, too.  Long before that humanity will have ended its time here on earth, perhaps we will go out to the stars, perhaps not, but at some point the planet we know, that humanity has known as its only home, will disappear from the universe, swallowed by an expanding red giant.

This cheery line of thought led me backwards then to our self-awareness.  We know we will die.  This is said to be the ur-fear, but I think is not.  The ur-fear is not death per se, but the question of extinction.  Somehow extinction makes us uneasy, as if we should be an exception to what we expect for dogs, cows, trees and frogs.  This winking out of aware life carries a potential and, I think, actual message of nihilism.  That is, life has no overriding moral purpose when seen in light of death.

Does this mean no ethical system has roots, punch.  No, of course not.  Camus felt that death made us all brothers and sisters, committed to each other and to as smooth and happy a course of life for the other as for ourselves.  Ethical systems validated only by post death rewards or punishments do fall by the side.  But they are no great loss.

Faith and Spirituality, Writing

Then Again.

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Last day of Imbolc      Waning Moon o Winds

Since I was nervous last Sunday and wrote about it here, I thought I’d also post this reaction, printed in the Groveland E-Wire.

E-Wire, Vol. 11, March 19, 2009

What You Missed Last Sunday

American Identity in the Time of Obama, Presented by Rev. Charles Ellis

Charles Ellis based his talk on the book “Who Are We?” by Samuel P. Huntington.

Agreeing with Huntington’s analysis of US national identity from his book, Charles laid out Huntington’s assertion that this identity has four parts: race, ethnicity, ideology (or creed) and culture. Charlie explored these four parts and talked about their changes over time.

Charles disagreed, however, with Huntington’s assertion that “…Americans should recommit themselves to the Anglo-Protestant culture, traditions and values…”, saying that Huntington does not account for change, and that the America rooted in Anglo-Protestant traditions will not be the same if Latino culture rises up strong.

Charles ended on a passionate note, saying “Never, ever let it be said that love of country and dissent from governmental policy are contradictory. Never, ever let it be said that we cannot form a new perfect union, a new nation conceived in the fires of Latin culture and Asian values, yet a nation neither Latin nor Asian, but American, not an Anglo-Protestant America, but a new nation, one never seen before on the face of the earth.”

He got a standing ovation.

Faith and Spirituality, Our Land and Home, Politics, Writing

After the Service

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Imbolc            Waning Moon of Winds

To follow up on the morning jitters.  At the end of my American Identity sermon I received an unusual and rare compliment: everyone clapped.  I took time on the way in to center myself and become part of the beautiful day underway.  As I got more centered, I remembered that I had never served and never intended to serve as a parish clergy.

Why?  Because my views occupy one end of a spectrum, the far left edge.  In the Presbyterian community they perceived me as a prophet, so much so that when I left back in 1990, the Presbytery bought a large print of a Jewish prophet and gave it to me in a nice frame.  Oh, yeah.  That was my place.

I recall a 1972 sermon at Brooklyn Center United Methodist Church on July 4th.  After I got done calling the congregation to patriotic resistance to the war, I went back to stand by the door and shake hands.  The congregation split like the Red Sea and went everywhere but where I was.  I’m that guy.

This sermon has a radical message to and it received resistance today, but in a much gentler and more dialogical way than that one 37 years ago.  I’ve learned some and this community of people knows me well, so we can disagree and still remain friends.

As Popeye used to say, I y’am what I y’am.

Faith and Spirituality

62 And Still Worried About High School

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Imbolc                Waning Wild Moon

Leaving for St. Paul in a few minutes.  Managed to work myself into an anxious state.  Wonderful.

The day itself has glorious possibilities, bright and warming.

What I’m experiencing falls under the category of pre-tramautic stress syndrome; that is, stress caused by anticipation of an unlikely, but possible phenomenon.  Last night I wrote that I gave up wanting more speaking opportunities and that the work is its own reward.  True enough as far it goes, but I also want to be liked and know that my prickly, combative personality does not lend itself to the warm fuzzies of human interaction.  God, here I am, 62 and still worried about high school.

At my best I know and accept the path and the person I have become, but just before a public event, sometimes, like right now, I’m not at my best.  Anyhow, it helps to write it down, say it out loud.  Thanks for listening.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Our Land and Home, Politics

With Apologies to Canada and Mexico

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Imbolc            Waning Moon of Winds

I edited and revised American Identity today.  It needed a paragraph indicating what I believe to be similarities between the ante-bellum USA and our current era.  National identity was weak during the ante-bellum period and is weak now.

In ante-bellum America the Unitarians William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson made a strong push for American letters.  On the one hand they wanted a break with the European dominance of American literature, painting and scholarship; but more, they wanted American letters, literature rooted in the American experience, painting using American themes and flowing from the genius of American talent and scholarship trained in the new nation and carried out by American academics.

American identity is weak now for several reasons.  Increasing Mexican immigration has raised a potent challenge to the Anglo-Protestant traditional US culture.  We are now a multiethnic, multiracial society, but our identity has only made tentative steps to say what that means.  We lost a prime enemy in the USSR and now have no one over against whom to identify ourselves.  Since the 1960’s there has been an erosion of trust in the basic institutions of our society:  business, government, the church, education.  Each of these challenges the old ethnic, racial and Anglo-Protestant consensus that underwrote US identity through the 1950’s.

Like the ante-bellum USA this is a time for a new American letters, a new American literature, a new American painting and sculpture and music, a new American poetry and a new American scholarship, one that reflects the multiethnic, multiracial society we have become.

Faith and Spirituality, Our Land and Home, Writing

Listen to the Rhythm

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Imbolc            Full Moon of Winds

We’ve had snow all afternoon and into the evening.  Don’t know how much we got, but it’s not the 6-8″ predicted.  Still, the landscape looks nicer.

I’ve got a rhythm going.  Breakfast, write one and a half to two hours, study, lunch, nap, collate research and write, workout, supper, watch some tv, read, come downstairs and do a little more writing.  Sometimes, like Monday, I write all day until I finish a project’s first draft.  This is a good rhythm.  I am productive, creative and learning.

Kate and I have the re-fi bug.  She’s done the research, the hard part of meeting with the mortgage bankers–pawns of the stupid rich.  Now we have to pick a package at an interest rate below 5% and go through the hurdles of appraisals, credit checks, underwriting and closing.  It will help our monthly nut in a big way.

Tomorrow or Thursday I’ll edit American Identity, remembering to add in the impact of national identity (it changes our political behaviors and the policies we support) and perhaps a teaser about geographic components.

A full moon, snow coming down and darkness all round.  And to all a good night.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Politics

I Love the Midwest

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Imbolc      Waxing Moon of Winds

Finished the Asmat tour and a visual thinking strategies (VTS) tour for 3rd graders.  I give them tomorrow morning.

Put together the legislative update for the Sierra Club blog and a morning entry for the Star-Trib.  Soon, it will be nap time.

This afternoon and over the weekend I’ll dig back into the American Identity piece for the 15th. It’s been fallow since Monday, but it has not disappeared from my consciousness.  I’m leaning now toward a definite geographic hook, an addition to the more usual psycho-political work I’ve read in Huntington and some of the other essays.  I’m not sure yet whether I consider it an equivalent to those notions or whether it is a more important category.

Here’s what I mean.  The notion of a nation is abstract, in the instance of a nation as geographically large as the USA, it can become even more abstract.  My hunch is that, as all politics are local, so are all experiences of national identity.  In other words, my experience of my land, my hometown, my home state or region is, both of necessity and emotional depth, the basic ingredient of my affection for my native land.

That is not to say that This land is my land, from California to the New York Island doesn’t also inform my national identity.  I feel the Rockies and hollers of Appalachia, the rain forests of Washington State and the glaciers of Montana have a place in my sense of national identity, some of them in spite of my never having visited them.  They recede in importance for me, however, when I compare them to acre after acre of corn and wheat.  They do not have the emotional resonance for me the Great Lakes have, especially Huron, Michigan and Superior.  My life has been lived in the towns and cities of the Midwest and I love the Midwest.  When I think of my US identity, I think first of the Midwest.

More on this to come.