Category: Personal

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Personal

Keep ‘the main thing’ the Main thing

Some of you may remember this quote from Stephen Covey, the Franklin Planner guru who was popular (along with his famous upbeat planning book) in the 1980s.  

            As I write this, President Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill remains afloat in the “slough of despond” that the U.S. Senate has become.  It has been “the main thing” for the President for so long that a growing number of Democrats are becoming very nervous.

            The months long conflict between the two Joes (Manchin and Biden) has given the national media a field day, allowing them to seek readers by criticizing the Biden administration for inaction even more than they criticized the Trump administration for its actions.

            Some of us, watching from the sidelines, Democrats and even a few sensible and worried Republicans, are wondering if this bill, given the strife it has caused, should continue to be Biden’s “main thing.”

Last December, Stuart Stevens, a Republican who worked for candidates George W. Bush and Robert Dole before becoming a chief strategist for Mitt Romney in 2012, sent out an email seeking support for the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group formed in 2019.

            In it Stevens made the point that the Bush administration gained Congressional seats in the 2002 mid-term elections, a very rare thing, because, after 9-11, they “galvanized America around a shared belief in the threat” to the nation represented by the 9-11 attack.

            Now, Stevens says, we have an even greater and clearer threat: “Democracy itself is on the ballot” in the upcoming mid-term elections. He then makes a very scary but intriguing prediction. Stevens says that if Republicans win a majority in the House of Representatives, not Kevin McCarthy [current minority leader] but “someone like Jim Jordan will be Speaker of the House. . . .And if you are following the news you know that [Marjorie Taylor] Greene and [Matt] Gaetz and Jordan run this party now. Not McCarthy.”

            “There’s a message for Democrats in all this. What would you lose if Republicans win?”

We are being told repeatedly that the Republicans will indeed win the mid-term elections.

            To all those I know in both parties, and to those Independents, should any still exist, but especially to all Democrats: It is time to make the survival of democracy the main thing.

            President Biden can’t say that the Republicans are threatening our democracy if he has wishes to work with them, but that seems unlikely to happen anyway.  Now might be the time to change the subject in a major way and focus on the Republican attempt to use their power in at least nineteen states to change laws to enable them to restrict votes and to “legally” throw out those cast in traditionally democratic precincts in 2022 and 2024.

            It is time for Democrats to alert all Americans that power is the main thing motivating Republicans today. Mesmerized by Trump, they are willing to gain power, not by winning over voters with attractive policies, but through state laws which will enable them to dismiss election results that are not in their favor. 

            If they are successful, it will not matter whether we extend monthly tax credit cash to families, create family leave policies, or provide tuition-free community college.

            If they are successful in regaining control of the House, there will be a quick end to any further investigation of the January 6 attack on the Capitol and no punishment of those who organized it.

            If they are successful in ignoring legitimate votes in upcoming elections, we will no longer have majority rule in the United States, and if that happens, we will become a DINO—a Democracy In Name Only.  

Where are the TV ads pointing this out?  Where is the public outrage?  Where is our Edward R. Morrow, who condemned Joe McCarthy on TV in the 1950s?  Why aren’t political leaders taking this obvious threat seriously?

            Do most Americans really see or care about what is happening? Can we rouse them to stop it?

            Maybe, maybe not. But if we care about preserving our democratic republic, we should at least try. For once democracy is gone, it will not be easily restored.

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Personal Religion/Spirituality

When Prayer is Incarnational

After referring to Harold Kushner’s famous book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1981) in several recent posts on this blog, I decided it might be time to recheck this classic I first read decades ago.  

The central point is clear and familiar by now to people who to ask questions about how “God” should be understood. Rabbi Kushner’s understanding of God and “bad things” (or evil) has been incorporated into what some call “Progressive” or “Incarnational” (my term) Christianity.

For Kushner, God doesn’t cause evil, nor does he attribute “bad things” to the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, as do many Christians. Rather, the unfortunate things that happen to innocent people are neither sent by God nor caused by sins committed by humans.  Bad things are just part of creation. We live in a world in which “everything belongs,” to use the title of a book by Richard Rohr. This includes natural disasters and evil murderers like Adolf Hitler. These things are “are not the will of God, but represent that aspect of reality which stands independent of His will, and which angers God even as it angers and saddens us,” Kushner wrote.

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Personal Religion/Spirituality

Prayer: Winking and Working

(This essay was written in 2018: The original title was “Prayer: What Why and How?)

Prayer, in its many forms, styles, traditions and languages, has always been essentially a way for us to narrow the gap, ease the separation that we feel between ourselves and our Source—God or Divinity.  Yet when I was becoming an adult in the 1960s, many of us who were unhappy with the restrictive beliefs and practices of the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church were inclined to dismiss formal prayer as too self-centered.  We used phrases like “my life is my prayer” as we prepared to help social justice rain down on the oppressed.

Recently, I read a passage in the Science of Mind magazine’s “daily guide” that described prayer as (my paraphrase) stillness, surrender, inarticulate longing, and as something beyond reason. This was for me a newer, more comprehensive, psychological and mystical way of understanding prayer. Here prayer is quiet listening rather than asking.

Intrigued, I tried to remember the categories or “types” of prayer that I had learned in my Catholic youth. My memory, assisted by Google, came up with the following: Adoration (worship), Contrition (seeking forgiveness), Petition (seeking favors), and Thanksgiving (expressing gratitude).

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General Personal Religion/Spirituality

Hope versus Optimism

Just before the 2020 Presidential election, a friend sent me and others friends a list of suggestions to help us cope with the political, economic and emotional stress we all are facing during this year in Coronaville.

His last line read “Be hopeful—not the same as optimistic.”

Thinking about that over the past several weeks and, wondering about the difference between hope and optimism, I consulted my “oldie but still goodie” American Heritage Dictionary  (Third Edition, 1992)

HOPE, the verb, was defined as “to wish for something with expectation of its fulfillment” and, as a noun, the thing wished for “with expectation of its fulfillment.” 

OPTIMISM was defined as “a tendency to expect the best possible outcome or dwell on the most hopeful aspects of a situation” and an OPTIMIST as someone “who usually expects a favorable outcome.”

Of course, as is often the case, there are philosophical and theological meanings of these words, some listed as “archaic” (interesting term) in my iphone dictionary. Philosophically, optimism is used to describe the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz, who believed that “this is the best of all possible worlds” and was ridiculed for this belief by the French philosopher Voltaire in his story “Candide,” written in the 18th century.  Theologically, hope is defined as confidence or trust in a future good, something “difficult but not impossible to attain with God’s help”

Given these definitions, HOPE is a wish or expectation that you want fulfilled while OPTIMISM goes from a wish to a “tendency to expect the best possible outcome.”  It would seem then that one cannot be an optimist without hope but one can be hopeful without being optimistic.  It all depends upon how seriously one “expects” one wish to be fulfilled.  

Yup, these are slightly different, but a very narrow gauge railway runs between them. I do suppose that a “tendency” might be a bit stronger than a “wish or expectation,” but English has become so elusive that it would be difficult to come up with an iron-clad distinction based on today’s usage of these terms.

I do hear many politicians being quizzed on the TV news networks fervently proclaiming they “remain an optimist.” I don’t believe them, but think that they want me to believe they are optimistic when they are not.

It would be better if, as my friend suggested, if we could restore some real meaning to the distinction between these two words. Maybe we could become hopeful, even in that “archaic” sense of having confidence or trust in something larger than ourselves, instead of just saying how sure we are that things will get better. 

Not to be too negative, but in our sad country ravaged by the mutating and deadly COVID-19 virus, which I just learned has spread from humans to minks in Denmark and then back to humans, it is hard to be either hopeful or optimistic.  However, given a choice and a chance that these terms may actually describe two importantly different ways of thinking and being, I will choose the more abstract theological version of HOPE rather than what appears to me to be the “cheap grace” offered by politicians and others who want to sell me on their OPTIMISM.

If I have hope, it will be easier to find help in community. If I am merely optimistic, I don’t need help.

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Personal Religion/Spirituality

Aging Thoughts: Different Energy

It is a cliché to say that as we get older, especially after age 65 or 70, we lose some of our physical energy. Our joints and disks have less padding and we can suffer chronic pains from surgeries we had (or didn’t have) or just from normal wear and tear on various muscles, nerves and organs.

Our bodies stretch in the wrong places and our patience with other people shrinks. Some muscles become too tight while others become too loose. Although our fingers and toes can become numb, things still manage to “get on the nerves” that remain alert.

Yet this apparent loss of energy may be a blessing.  As we reckon with and grieve over what we are no longer able to do, or not able to do as well as we once could, we also have the opportunity to “fall upward” into what Richard Rohr calls “the second half of life.”

This period of life, which can be entered anytime (usually after age forty) is a time when, if willing, we can begin to release the strivings, desire for control and what Rohr calls “the merit-badge thinking” that usually marks our early adult years. We can, he says, become “soul drawn instead of ego driven.”  We can get our spiritual head on straight.*

This possibility has become more intriguing to me as I have now entered that time of life when I am told “don’t lift anything over fifty pounds, ever,” and when I (who used to be able to jog 6.2 miles in an hour) now tire after a twenty-minute one-mile stroll.

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General Personal

Aging Thoughts: Control and Death

As an aging American male, I long ago learned that, although not necessarily a clinical “control freak,” I certainly do like to control people and situations in my life. This applies to family members, those with whom I work and direct when in leadership positions, and even the driver in front of me who is going much too slowly.

One of the consequences of aging is that we are forced to accept the fact that we are no longer as “in control” as we once were.  This applies to our bodies, which no longer respond to our commands as they once did, and to our minds, which, as early as age 50, challenge us with something known as “delayed recall.”  That is a nice way of saying that we can’t remember names, places, words, or sometimes even why we just entered a particular room in our house.

And that can be scary. I am thankful that I can still draw the numbers and the hands on the clock face that my insurance company nurse asks me to do once a year during her home visit. That test has a name, but I can’t remember what it is.

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General Personal

Aging Thoughts: Palmer

I first encountered the work of the Quaker educator and social activist Parker Palmer in 1998 when I joined some colleagues at Murray State to discuss his book The Courage to Teach (1997). Our college of Humanities had just instituted a program of “Teaching Circles” whereby faculty members from different departments could apply to receive several hundred dollars to buy books or lunch and get together to discuss a topic that crossed disciplinary lines.

Later in 2016, I joined another group of academic friends to discuss his treatise The Healing of Democracy (2011). We were reading that book while watching the election of the first American president who took as his aim the weakening instead of the healing of that democracy.

Palmer is a man of spiritual depth who believes that we can only become whole by opening our heart—what he calls “breaking open our heart”—to others. He is also a poet, a devotee of the late Thomas Merton, holder of a Ph.D in Sociology, and founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal, a leadership and training institute for teachers and other professionals: It’s mission is “to create a more just, compassionate and healthy world by nurturing personal and professional integrity and the courage to act on it.”

It was this year, 2020, that I became aware of his little collection of essays and poems entitled On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old (2018). This is not a systematic look at the stages of retirement or old age, but rather a series of psychological and spiritual reflections on aging.

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General Personal

Aging Thoughts: Introduction

(The word “Aging” in this title does not mean that these thoughts are necessarily about aging. Rather, these particular posts are comments that occur to me as I have time to reflect on life, not thoughts about aging, but thoughts that have, I hope, like good wine, aged appropriately.)

First, I want to make clear that I am not a “boomer.” I am among the small number of Americans which demographers barely squeeze into the category of “Silent Generation,” which ends in 1945.  Born in 1943, I am a tail-ender to that generation just as my wife Deanna, born in 1946, is a pioneer boomer.  We are both, as the as the astrologers say, on the cusp.

Our parents were shaped by the Great Depression, bequeathing to us a certain sense of scarcity (in my family anyway, where “money didn’t grow on trees”) while we were simultaneously growing up in what was to become the most prosperous period in American history, never experienced before or since.

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Personal Politics

Daughters in Decisionville, Coronaland

We have two daughters, born fifteen months apart. They each live away from their parents and each other, although we all live in Kentucky.  They love each other and their parents (most of the time), and both are entering their mature years (fifty-somethings). They have very nice families.

I have counseled both of them to begin thinking seriously about preparing financially for retirement now, especially given the current disarray in the old USA. And like good daughters everywhere, they always pay close attention to advice from their father (wink, wink, nudge).

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Personal Religion/Spirituality

“Light of the World?”

When I was still young in the 1950s, there was an interesting show on our black and white TV sponsored by a Catholic religious order, the Paulist Fathers. While I don’t remember much about the show, I was captivated by and internalized the song with which they ended the program.

With a picture of a candle burning, a strong voice sang the following words: “If everyone lit just one little candle, what a bright world this would be.”  Every once in a while, that one-line melody pops into my head. 

This morning was one of those times. In a quiet house on a rainy Sunday morning, I was reading a short piece on “The Light of Humankind” by one Rocco Errico in the current issue of my Science of Mind magazine.  Scholar Errico has two degrees (Th.D and Ph.D) and is founder and president of the Noohra Foundation in Smyrna, Georgia.

Noohra is the Aramaic word for “light,” one of Dr. Errico’s favorite languages. He tells me that in the northern Galilean dialect that Jesus spoke, the words of Jesus in Matthew 5:14—“you are the light of the world,”—came out as “Aton enon noohreh dalma.

He (Rocco) explained that “Jesus was telling his disciples and the people that they were the carriers of the light of God on Earth.”  He then noted that the Aramaic for “world” was alma and that alma had other meaning as well. It could refer to “age, life-time, eternity, everlasting.”

As it happens, noohra also has other meanings. It can mean “sight, brilliance, brightness, enlightenment.” What a nice but challenging way to look at ourselves.   It does, however, remind me of a line of Charlie Brown’s in the Peanuts cartoon strip: “There is no heavier burden than a great potential.”

Is it possible for us to enter into and live up to the truth that we are indeed God’s messenger’s on earth? Can we identify and somehow grasp in our heads and our hearts that we do have access to the mind and heart of Jesus and that, as Brian Clardy said in yesterday’s First Presbyterian sermon on Facebook, Jesus is only telling us what the Father (Abba) has told him to say?’

All I can say is that I struggle with this—and I hope that you will struggle with it as well.

                                                                                 7-13-20