The Taste of Wonder Hits the Spot

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung February 11, 2025.

Of all the attractive events in our city, one of our favorites is the “Taste of the Town” festival.  As in years past, it was held at the Civic Center from 6-9 pm on Thursday, February 6th. It was our 12th. year (maybe more) of attendance.

My wife Sandy and I like to arrive early, ½ hour before the doors open, and always heralded by the New Braunfels High School drum core marching through the long hall to the entrance of the large spaces that contain the festivities. Before then, we hand our admission tickets to one of the volunteers collecting them and dispensing wrist bands. It reminds us of a ritual initiation, allowing us to cross the threshold into the wonder of this grand city celebration.

Once inside, we survey the familiar layout: vendors from local restaurants, bakeries, wine bars, stores and wineries; they have been preparing for this evening by assembling the fare of their businesses for our delightful consumption. We can feel the energy of hospitality pervading each of their tables. Employees from each of these many sources are welcoming and generous with their offerings.

A general feeling of goodwill and generosity both within those of us who have paid for this feast as well as those who are offering them. In the middle of the room, large round tables have been elegantly decorated in cloths and programs of the event for those who have paid for them.

The theme for this year was “All in the Family” presented by the New Braunfels ISD Education Foundation in partnership with McKenna and Joeris General Contractors, Diamond Sponsors for the evening. Many other sponsors and participants were listed in the inclusive program.

On stage tuning up for musical entertainment was the NBHS Jazz Band, Drumline and NBHS and LCHA Choirs. Their musical talents from our young musicians, led by the superb band director, offer some of the finest young artists in our schools.

But something more was evident. Perhaps it was less tangible, but no less real. It grew more palpable as the crowd increased. Something of a common purpose congealed in the space of a few hours: a deep need or desire to be part of something larger than each of us as individuals. It transcended our appetites and personal concerns. While the food, the drinks and the raffles may satisfy one set of hungers, there is another, more deeply and universally felt.

This larger need was to share in a common purpose to benefit others. Sharing such rich and varied experiences as “Taste of the Town,” or a football or basketball game or church service, enrich us as a member of the collective punctuated by  rituals that tap into a universal need to give shape and form to our lives.  

At one point in the evening, I took a photo of the joyful crowd of humanity meeting friends, talking with strangers, applauding the wonderful talent on stage—and yes, there is a spiritual sensibility bonding us as civic citizens—gathered in “the civic center,” a place of strong community heartfully felt as goodness. One writer has written about the experience of awe and wonder that often companions each communal event that transcends us in service to others.

Courtesy is one of the driving qualities that inhabited this magnificent feast; one hears, as we did, “after you,” or “go ahead of me.” An often-missed quality of beauty attends “Taste of the Town.” It is laced with “civic,” “civilized,” “civility” “courtesy” and “care.” We have already made plans to attend next year.

Awe in Both Science and Daily Life

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung January 18-19 2025

Sometimes, as we know, life can imitate art and art can imitate life. I want to extend this idea from two recent experiences to suggest that what we read can imitate life and the reverse also happens.

Recently I attended a webinar in which one of my former students in mythological studies, having just published a book entitled The Practice of Enchantment. Her chapters were initially short essays for the Joseph Campbell Foundation website. She gathered these over the years to create these fascinating vignettes of where enchantment emerged in her life. Of course, when the time came, we all had stories to tell of when we too were enchanted, often by the ordinary, not the spectacular or once-in-a-lifetime moment.

She then suggested a book whose title enchanted many of us: Dacher Keltner’s Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. It conveyed so much more than a self-help book. As scientists, he and a colleague laid out 8 fundamental life experiences common to people around the globe, in whatever religion, language, ethnicity they were part of.

Located at Berkeley, the pair had a team of helpers translating many of the 26 languages that people used in submitting moments of awe in their lives. The results astonished both Keltner and his social science colleague.  Some 2600 narratives were gathered and catalogued.  They put them into categories of what was most and least able to meet the criterion of the word awe. Here is how they defined the term: “Being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.” That’ it.

Powerful, scientifically based and spiritually inflected. What they discovered as they worked through the submissions was the following. “What most commonly led people around the world to feel awe was other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming. They concluded that this human behavior signaled a feeling of awe “when moved by moral beauty,” which ismarked by purity and goodness of intention.

Second story, where reading imitates life. I recently took my wife to our local hospital for some tests that she was not looking forward to but knew needed to be done. After getting her settled with the nurse that would take her back for the procedure, I sat down and breathed a long sigh of relief. A woman across from me in the waiting room looked up at me and said: “You look like you need a hug. I was at first taken aback, then said, “yes I do.” She got up, walked over to me and hugged me. I immediately felt better, more settled, less rattled. She explained that she was waiting on her husband to see what the source of his pain was.

I felt like I needed to know her name and tell her mine. Without even thinking, I told her of the book above that I was reading and that she might like it. She wrote down the author and the one word: awe.

Soon, an orderly came to let her know her husband was now resting quietly in a recovery room. She said goodbye to me and wished my wife a positive result from her tests. I sat there and thought, yes, it sometimes happens that what one is reading materializes in a human situation in the world. What energies, forces, or saving graces are present to allow such awe-filled moments to occur?  More than enough here to wonder about for some time.  

Dignity and the Democratic Spirit

Originally Published in the “Opinion” page of The Herald-Zeitung, December 14-15, 2024 Pp. A-5 and 7.

One of our most popular American poets, Billy Collins, wrote a poem entitled “On Turning Ten.” In it, the voice that animates the poem feels as if something important in life is ending as they move to double digits in marking their age. Some threshold is crossed which the poem likens to “a kind of measles of the spirit, /mumps of the psyche, /a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.”

These alarming images may also be present when a person, a race, a class of people, loses their dignity. Dignity can be stolen from them by others if those whose dignity is at risk have no means of defending themselves.

Its etymology is telling: From the Latin, Dignitas, it means worthiness and prestige (Wikipedia). Dignity also carries qualities of “being worthy of honor and respect.” Taking a person or a class of people’s self-respect from them is an act of emotional violence. Those who suffer from such an attack try to recover from such a trauma, often with mixed success. The wound runs deep and can traverse generations.

Difference, in some circles, is reason enough for creating a group or a person as undignified.

I sense that dignity is an essential quality in the cultural curriculum we are all exposed to by leaders. Or have they too sidelined dignity as an SOS—a Soulful Operating System?

We are familiar with the phrase, “beneath one’s dignity.” What is it that inhabits the “beneath” space? Cruelty, lawlessness, grasping and clinging to all one can amass in the service of one’s own agenda can be one option. Authoritarian impulses in any form would seem to quash dignity and replace it with “unworthy.” Now what was once beneath is now blatantly on the surface to interrupt the spirit of integrity, a quality sharing kinship with dignity. Both have kinships with democracy.

The etymology of Democracy is formed of two Greek words: demos means “of the people “and kratos means “power or rule.” Democracy not only leaves a place for the dignity of a people but insists on it. Democracy and Dignitas are like mirrors of one another.

Without a sense of dignity as an active agent, those in a democracy fragment, split and shatter into parts, devoid of a sense of wholeness. Threats to the populace, instilling fear in its citizens, or cultivating an atmosphere of distrust and resentment collapse the spirit that animates and energizes democracy.

On the other hand, qualities of kindness cultivate a feeling of wholeness, courtesy (from the French coeur, meaning heart) promotes the integrity of self and self in relation to others. Blessings create feelings of unity, or a common shared ethos that allows the dignity of individuals to flourish.

As a teacher of more than 55 years that encompassed elementary special education students, high school students, undergraduate and graduate students on the Masters and Doctoral levels, I discovered how important it was to make space for the dignity of each student’s ideas, hunches, insights, and even resistances to what was being taught, as we all struggled to deepen the appeal of our subject.

Most important for me was to create a learning field so no student would feel their inherent dignity was questioned or worse, under attack. Then they felt the true spirit of democracy that allowed them to speak up, to speak out because their questions or assertions were dignified.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Man and the Message

Originally Published in The San Antonio Express News, December 12, 2024

My wife and I recently attended a late morning showing of the film, Bonhoeffer, two days after it opened at our local theater. Besides us there were two others in the audience. We knew little about him or his writings. The film opened our eyes to his brilliance as a writer and as a fierce critic of Hitler’s Third Reich and of his own Church that lacked the courage to speak out against the growing authoritarian regime.

Born into a wealthy family in Wroclaw, Poland, he was one of nine children. His father was a famous psychiatrist. For most of his life he was an accomplished pianist. When later as a divinity student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, a fellow black student from Georgia, took him to Harlem to a Baptist church where parishioners sang and worshipped Jesus with great enthusiasm.

Their singing celebrated their faith in joyful awareness, as did all dimensions of their lives. Bonhoeffer was introduced to jazz, which he adapted his musical talents to accommodate and became a superb jazz pianist. He had never seen in his Lutheran Church in Germany a congregation with such gusto in loving Christ. He was transformed by their love of the Savior.

In the 1930s, with Hitler gaining more power in Berlin and across Germany, Bonhoeffer realized how unworthy this political figure was of being Chancellor and believed he would never be elected.

A priest friend of his who eventually began speaking out publicly against the Reich, told Bonhoeffer that Hitler did not need the German people to elect him, only enough of those who did vote to believe the lies until they cast their ballot. Hitler was elected, to the surprise and chagrin of many.

As Hitler’s power became absolute over time, it rested in part how he had successfully targeted the Jews in Germany as the source of all of the country’s woes. Bonhoeffer, resisting the advice of others in New York on his second visit to teach for two years at Union Theological Seminary after the Gestapo had shut down his alternative seminary in Germany, returned to Berlin after only twenty-six days in New York.

His credo had was unshaking:  when those who remain silent in the face of evil, their silence becomes evil.

He was arrested in 1943 and spent two years in various prisons for being a member of a plot to assassinate Hitler. There he was allowed to write and to continue to minister to other prisoners and several guards sympathetic to his cause: his passionate love of Jesus—his only lodestar and guiding light that sustained him.

Bonhoffer knew, as one writer observes in a prefatory essay in The Cost of Discipleship, one of the most famous of his thirty-four volumes, that “the fanatical devilish forces within National Socialism…were aiming at the destruction of Germany as a European and Christian country.”

Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship, “if individuals choose ‘cheap grace,’ “which is the deadly enemy of the Church because it demands nothing from its adherents, over ‘costly grace,’ which he asserted is what we must fight for, it will lead to separation from Jesus; the former “is sold in the market, while ‘costly grace’ is the incarnation of God.”

The film ends with a fact we know too well: that antisemitism is on the rise globally. We need voices of heroic stature like Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s to counter the dreaded infection of such prejudices.

Can Hatred, Happiness and Democracy Mix?

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung November 16-17, 2024

 Hatred, like any human emotion, is complex and nuanced, mysterious and ever-present as a possible solution to social, cultural and emotional conditions. Now that the election is over, I asked myself: what is it that hatred wants, even demands of us?

Recently I came across a talk given by Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic from 1989-92. He died in 2011. He was known for being a playwright, memoirist, politician and influential leader on the world stage.

In 1990, he gave a talk at The Oslo Conference on “The Anatomy of Hate.” I found many of his insights relevant for our national identity today. Calling on his own life and the people who hated him, he discovered that “their hatred always seems to me the expression of a large and unquenchable longing, a permanently unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire,. ...”

What I found surprising is Havel’s comparison of hatred with love, for both emotions include a “self-transcending aspect” as well as “a fixation on others, the dependence on them, and in fact, the delegation of a piece of one’s own identity to them.”

But the differences between hatred and love are even more striking. In his reflections on those who hated him, he found that many of them “harbor a permanently ineradicable feeling of injury. . .that is, of course, out of all proportion to reality.”

We know that love too can be excessive, distorted or diminished. Literature from many cultures and historical periods are full of forms of love that fit one or more of these categories: Shakespeare’s Othello, King Lear, and McBeth. We can trace these complex relations between love and hate in Dante’s medieval poem, The Divine Comedy. The souls in Inferno all suffered from love in distorted forms, beyond all measure.

Havel also investigates another quality of hatred: in it “there is a great egocentrism and great self-love. . .. Hating people feel that they are the victims of an insidious evil, an omnipresent injustice that has to be eliminated to give justice its due.”

Feelings and beliefs enter more forcefully as attributes that may sideswipe a more shared sense of reality; but can hatred, as an independent state of mind, offer another version of the world? It seems so.

Finally, there is also communal hatred, or hatred in numbers. Havel sees this more encompassing form of hatred thriving because of its simplicity. One may join such a hate group by choosing not to think too deeply about the object of their hatred: ethnicity, race, color, or, in the parlance of today, the “otherness” of others. The thinking says they are not like me, so hating them is a form of communal superiority which continually reinforces hatred’s power.

Of course, there is another option: to accept and treat with understanding and compassion that very otherness as another expression of how our own otherness is felt by those we might first cast out; but we have the power and free will to welcome them in. I sense that in certain moments, a group that has settled into hating others may not yet have celebrated their own strangeness, which is part of their uniqueness, their value and their identity, in short, their collective myth.

Often, hatred can be an expression of fear of change, of things not being what they once were; yearning to return to an earlier time—which so often disappoints—is paved with the hot asphalt of hatred.

I am optimistic about our future, one which can lean into compassion for others, not conflict with them, and accepting the otherness in ourselves, which cultivates a new age of mutual tolerance, not hatred.

Turning 80 and no Longer Counting

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung October 3, 2024.

I have ceased grasping at turning 80 on October 12th. It is a fact to accept and nurture for what wisdom may develop from this crossing. Many of you have made the pilgrimage this far and have felt the changes that attend it.  

What a moment to take stock, to ask some basic questions as I look back at a life that feels very full, meaningful and nourishing. With it arises areas of reflection that feel most crucial to entertain now.

I find in looking back that I was less in pursuit of happiness, more in pursuit of meaning and purpose. Certainly, biology is front and center, but more importantly are matters of soul that shape my identity.  For in a reflective life meaning is always expanding; when it’s not, perhaps it signals a time to question and perhaps to abandon worn out patterns of thought and behavior.

I find that I am less invested in life’s clarity and more attuned to life’s mystery within each day. I like the word “enchantment” to convey this feeling of renewal. I also have slipped out of the harness of regretting the past and anticipating the future. I have traded those out for a deeper sense of awakening to the present moment.

I no longer strive for a sense of prestige and importance, but by a will to wisdom. It allows for responding to life, not reacting to it.

Here are a series of questions I want to contemplate further:

What have I been and am now in service of?

What sections of my life have I shirked responsibility for?

What wounds do I still carry from childhood and young adulthood as they shorten and narrow life’s possibilities?

What calls to me now as I saunter across the 80 threshold?

How many choices in my life were made by others and not me?

Have I followed story lines that were foisted on me by others or the society I live within?

Did I yield to them while pretending they were my own?

As one who believes that we all contain both a conscious and an unconscious, I wonder what remains beneath the floorboard of consciousness that is pushing up from below to be heard and seen?

My psychologist friend, James Hollis, suggests that all of us lack a deep sense of permission to lead our own lives. What have I not allowed myself to create that would deepen my sense of Self?

In my spiritual life, am I still living within a framework that is woefully outdated? Have I pursued a deepening relationship with the divine, the sacred and the sacrosanct that provides guidance every day if I am willing to allow it?

What have I used or abused in my life that medicated me such that I was insensitive to the voices of the soul that clamor for attention that could benefit me and through me, to others?

As a teacher of 60 years, did I use my subject matter to deepen and enlarge my own vocation into a more creative life and to share it with my students?

Where do I feel a sense of urgency, of something that is calling now, perhaps for the first time that I am morally obligated to ponder and activate?

What gives me joy, pleasure, and delight in being alive?

I end on a poetic note. One of my favorite poets, Rumi (1207-1273) was born in Afghanistan. In one poem he writes: “Be silent now. /Say fewer and fewer praise poems/Let yourself become living poetry.” The last line expresses how I have continued to live most fully.

The Sacred Ordinary

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung September 6, 2024

In my habit of journaling each morning, I used to recall the day before and the Big Events that shaped it. Over time, however, I found more intriguing musing with my pen about the ordinary events that infiltrated yesterday’s unfolding: the smile from a stranger in passing; the moment a driver gave me a break in heavy traffic; the kindness of a person who saw I dropped something and retrieved it for me; the smiling sliver of a bright moon against a dark, starry sky; the way our cat Ginger climbs up on our bed and cuddles with my wife and me.

What is most glorious about shifting our imaginations from the big, the one time only event, to the small that may repeat itself often—is that there is so much more of the ordinary than anything else. But often we don’t pause long enough to notice, much less appreciate, these incidentals.

Certainly, a different program of perception structures our noticing the ordinary. It does not need us for it to happen; every day the ordinary, the mundane goes on without us. Sure, some of this new interest may increase as we age. Perhaps it is in slowing down; yet it is available to anyone curious about the way things are, how they unfold, and what may make ordinary events even sacred as divine gifts.

My curiosity was piqued recently when I found two books on my shelf I had read parts of years ago. The first one is The Sacrament of the Present Moment by a Catholic priest, Jean-Pierre De Caussade (1675-1751) who lived in southern France. For many it became a classic of Christian devotion, but it exists for anyone who senses mystery in the ordinary.

He wrote: “the only condition necessary for this state of self-surrender is the present moment in which the soul, light as a feather, fluid as water, innocent as a child, responds to every moment of grace like a floating balloon.” He believed that when we pay attention to these ordinary occurrences of life, that who we truly are can surface.

The second book by a much more contemporary author and teacher Lynda Sexson is Ordinarily Sacred. There she offers that “intrusions of the mundane become agents of the sublime,” a word we don’t hear very often in our consumer-oriented culture.

Fond of using metaphors to reveal a truth that rational or literal language cannot express as well, she crafted this rich image: “The sacred is the leopard lying in wait--the shock of its sudden appearance. Perhaps one of the most startling places the leopard can appear is among the ephemeral nonsense that distracts us into metaphor.”

Using metaphorical language is commonplace in all of our communications. If we listen to individuals telling one another their stories, often about ordinary commonplace occurrences, we hear their expressions abundant with metaphors. Without metaphors, we don’t have an interesting story. Metaphors can transform the ordinary into a compelling incident.

Ordinary moments can provide the context we need, even desire, to “discover or rediscover, one’s world view, one’s depth” writes Sexson, but it can be buried under life’s busyness. However, for both writers, paying attention to what usually goes unnoticed, we can discover where the subline resides--in the ordinary.

I end with a question for you: what did you notice yesterday as you carried out your obligations, meetings, and tasks that claimed you? What rises to your mind as you remember? Think small here, ordinary, what largely remains unnoticed. The sacred ordinary may surprise you.

The Haunting Ghost of Imperfection

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung, weekend edition, August 24-25, 2024.

Over the years I have conducted workshops on body and psychic woundedness, personal boundaries and the life stories that feed them.  While all these topics have been powerful in working with individuals’ personal myths, none has been more intriguing than the topic of ghosts that haunt us. James Hollis’ book, Hauntings, has guided me in this pursuit.

One of the most cited ghosts is imperfection, of not measuring up, of feelings that one is not adequate, of feeling small and insignificant in the world they inhabit.

I ask myself:  do these feelings of discontent, of feeling ashamed in their imperfection, originate only in one’s early upbringing? Is this where one becomes attached to a series of habitual self-stories that we tell ourselves in our bewilderment of what our value is?

Is it not also cultural? We can recall dozens of ads shoveled at us daily through many outlets. Their message repeats one major theme: 1. Problem: You are not good enough as you are. 2. Solution: Use our product, service, or program and you will relocate to a more perfect you.

In the political arena rival opponents will seek out the imperfect, the gap, the falling short, the deception that make the other unworthy of leading. Compare them with me, the more perfect candidate, and you will see that. Being infiltrated by ghosts of imperfection is part of the fabric of our personal and cultural lives.

Sociologist Brene Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection explores our life hauntings, especially the stinging ghost of feeling unseen unheard or valued. Her desire and determination to reclaim her own worthiness, of feeling more than “good enough” led her to search out the dynamics of feeling inadequate and falling short.

She learned that “perfection is an unattainable goal,” but that does not deter many from seeking it out. The consequences most often feel like signing on board a treadmill of terminal imperfection with no “off” switch.

In The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning, Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham deploy the wisdom of 12-step recovery programs. One key insight is that “spirituality involves first seeing ourselves truly, as the paradoxical and imperfect beings we are. . .”.

They refer to us as “paradoxical” because it is “only within our very imperfection that we can find peace and serenity available to us.”

When workshop participants write of this all-pervasive ghost of imperfection, then share it with others, they often comment on how healing it was to “go public,” with their ghosts of not feeling good enough ever since they were judged harshly by a parent or other authority.

Often individuals realize that in simply naming it, then claiming it through sharing with others struggling like them, they are able to begin forgiving themselves for the self-taunting inflicted on themselves, sometimes for years or decades. All share one belief: the process is as spiritual as any other life dimension.

I have recognized over time that participants are not seeking a quick fix or cure; rather, they seek being cared for, and the most important person in their lives to express this care is themselves.

They are no longer tethered to live a discounted life, as when we say of someone: “Simply discount what X has said or written.” Total dismissal.

It is a powerful moment when an individual realizes they have an inner authority to revise their narratives into plots of self-acceptance, not self-perfection.

Self-forgiveness becomes a positive antibody to neutralize self-shaming. They can choose to retire the ghost that escorted them to this changed image of who they are.

Caring For Words is Caring For Culture

A version of this essay was published in the San Antonio Express-News, August 13, 2024. A-11.

Like breathing, we don’t generally think deeply about the words we use in normal communication.

Yet there is something basic about connecting the words people express and the health of the cultural world in which they live.

The origin of the word “word” is fascinating. In Old English, “wurda,” and even earlier, “were,” meant “to speak or say. “When we think of where we directly address words, we find numerous examples: “It’s his word against mine, “to break one’s word,” “in the beginning was the Word,” ‘to put words into someone’s mouth,” “may I have a word with you?” and “one is as good as their word.”

Words are a guide. I begin each day by journaling about the day before. It’s as if I cannot make sense of what happened unless I submit it to words. Only then do yesterday’s events rise to another level of reality.

Psychologist James Hillman has written: “Speech and myth are one and the same.” What we do to soil and stain speech directly affects the shared mythology owe live by.  To debase or trivialize speech is to diminish and tarnish the myth we share. Democracy as our shared myth is then abused; if the abuse is repeated endlessly, to the undiscerning audience it becomes reality. The result is a further erosion and corrosion of what holds us together in a common good.

For a current example: I listened recently to Donald Trump answer questions at a Mar-a-Lago news conference, his first. Most often, instead of answering questions from reporters directly with specifics, he used their inquiries to launch vitriolic invectives against his political opponents. His vocabulary was demeaning and enraged: “crooked Hilary” “stupid Joe,” the worst president in history, “Gavin Newscum,” Kamala Harris “is not bright, cannot hold a news conference, ruined San Francisco, ruined California, . . . “World War Three is imminent if I lose.”

I felt I was in the presence of a man both enraged and deranged, without boundaries, lashing out at whatever crossed his mind with no logical sequence or point accept to attack others with untruths, fantasies of world doom, an obsession with crowd sizes that put his crowds in the history books as the largest that have ever gathered.

I was unsettled as well by the narrow bandwidth of his vocabulary that in his self-praise, never reached beyond “incredible,” “unbelievable,” and “never before in history has this happened,” and other blusters that felt like a person in desperate need of feeling the approval of others. His oscillations between blame and self-praise were mind-numbing.

Of course we can grow numb to words, to slogans, to cliches emanating from personal fantasies. Therein lies its danger for individuals and for the cultural health of a nation.

Words themselves are prostituted to serve a frantic ideology shared by a few, not the many. Such an ideology divorces us from a shared communal sense of what is real and beneficial for the greatest number. In its place a dead myth attempts to pass for what is true.

The upshot of such a shift is that the distortions, lies and untruths can infect and reshape our world; they deform, divide, and deflect us from our shared humanity. Look closely at the words used in political discourse; there you will see a mirror of the world shaped or misshaped by such rhetoric.

Seeing this clearly is the first step toward tempering the tantrums of distortion by reclaiming the truth we share. Our well-being depends on it.

A National Threshold Crossing

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung on July 31, 2024.

We cannot always plan or orchestrate when a liminal space might arise. From the Latin word “limen,” it means threshold. It also connotes “transition.” It can refer to something personally, locally or nationally. But transformation seems to be its trajectory.

Liminality is a universal construction; it has been with us since the beginning of time. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, has called liminality “the space of imaginal activism.” It is a vibrant space where something new may arise.

Not only is liminality spatial; it can be a moment or an instant in time that is often seen more clearly when we look back at its occurrence. Then we grasp more readily its mythic overtones, even mythic renewal.

In liminality, something is crossed over—perhaps a new beginning of some impulse, some movement, some yearning that finds its time and space to emerge. It marks the space between what has been, like a habitual way of thinking, speaking and behaving, and into a new, fresh, reinvigorated and expansive arrangement that ushers in renewed energy. Its enthusiasm highlights what has been needed but not heretofore recognized. In liminal moments, the psychic energy moves from a former stasis into new kinetic power.

What had grown stale with overuse and abuse is sidestepped. Now accompanied by a feeling of renewal and reinvigoration, a sacred element may enter to secure a greater liberation for its members. Of course, not everyone will agree with what the threshold crossing expresses. It seldom is.

Rohr points out what the ancient Celtic people called “thin times,” was often celebrated with a ritual. The thinness of these moments collapsed to allow separate worlds to join hands: this current world we share, and the next world that is in embryo. Time also congealed in liminal moments; past, present and future dissolve into a communion where all time became unified.

The above might be recognized in expressions like: “It’s about time!” or “Why did it take so long to happen?” or “I thought this day would never come.” And yet here it is, nurtured by the energies of liminality.

Liminal thresholds can also emerge from a collective yearning, perhaps for a new narrative to replace one grown crusty, brittle and exhausted. Or a story that no longer serves the common good. As such, liminal moments spring more from imagining than reasoning. A yearning that brings us closer to the theme of this essay is the yearning in a nation to refashion itself through more humane and equitable values, even more tolerant attitudes towards one another. Integrity, generosity, compassion, coherence are the energy pockets of a liminal experience.

Something or someone appears in liminal space; it is creative space, where all may benefit from its largesse.

Liminal space is both an “opening” and “open” to wisdom, to value revision, to hunger for depth both in understanding and in quality of life. Its space hosts new ideas. A reinvigorated future we could not have imagined before suddenly becomes possible.

When Joe Biden yielded his position as presidential candidate for another term, he created a liminal space overnight.

Into that liminality a woman of color stepped into this opening as a candidate for the presidency. The outpouring of support in both morale and money has been unprecedented. That is what liminal moments often convey—the unprecedented.

What is also part of this liminal moment is the likelihood of a new plot to build up and out. An old established boundary has yielded to new plot options in the service of a more equitable freedom for diverse voices to enjoy.

Family Photo Albums a Portal to the Past

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung, July 20-21, 2024

My wife Sandy recently decided to tackle two full shelves of boxes containing photos collected over 4 decades. Her goal: to sort them into thematic stacks, then choose from among the roughly 900 photos and gather 200 of them into photo albums with plastic sleeves. We had never taken home movies, so only the photos hold images of our histories.

She commandeered both the kitchen and living room tables for 8 days and worked diligently for hours each day—a lady with a fervent mission: to excavate our pasts, including uncovering photos of herself as a young girl of 5, holding hands with her mother. I had never seen them, as well as many others from her history that antedated our meeting at Kent State University in 1966.

As I passed her working on this huge project, I would pause from my own business, pulled, it seemed, into the vortex of labeled piles of photos. I lingered and began surveying them. A sense of wonder came over me at the array of scattered photos covering both tables and decades of our lives.

 I fingered the photos now congregating in stacks with labels like “Motorcycles” (I had owned 8 over 55 years of riding); “Italy” (we lived in Rome for 2 years when I taught for a Texas university); “California” (10 years living and teaching in Santa Barbara); “vacation trips” in many states. “Conferences” in Italy, Ireland and 4 trips to Greece; “Our sons” (now 53 and 45); “grandchildren,” to name several.

And you know what happens: each photo has one or more stories sticking to it. Some are more vivid and involved than others. My wife patiently paused often in her mission as we asked questions like where the photo was taken, what year; or “remember that seafood restaurant in Maine we enjoyed so much? What was the couple’s names we met there for a meal?”

And suddenly the present moment was swallowed by the looming remembered past. We laughed about incidents that surrounded some photos like haloes, even auras, of adventure: a moment of risking a life change, a major move, a new city, state or country.

So many of the photos became transport carriers that ushered us out of the present time-space continuum into a past moment lived deeply through the image. We felt an acceleration of both imagining and remembering. It was a rush not to be rushed.

A feeling of nostalgia as well as gratitude arose and embraced us, as well as a trembling sadness for a life now vanished. But not quite, for the photos breathed new life into the moment; yes, a sense of loss, but also a sense of found. Something disremembered of our earlier selves was found in those enchanted moments of recollection.

So often she or I would say: “I’d completely forgotten we visited that place,” or “What was the name of that lake where we rented a motorboat and cruised on for a day?” And on--into new depths of recollection.

Yes, she recently finished her arduous and loving task.

 I have, however, not yet gone to the 2 albums holding her selections in the amber of plastic jackets. Perhaps this next weekend we’ll take another transit through time and linger once more over more stories that will certainly emerge from the deep past. And we will revisit once again many more moments that have so profoundly defined our identities.

Finding Value in the Pauses of Everyday Life

Originally appeared in the Herald-Zeitung, July 6-7, 2024.

We remember the popular soft drink commercials that ran for decades with the slogan: “The pause that refreshes.” Simple, easy to recall, it worked on us when we shopped. Another nod to pausing was the advice: “Count to five.” Another: “Take a deep breath.” All of these were in the service of the pause. Pausing is the other side of being so busy that we feel frenzied, overworked and overwhelmed and may suspect that a pause might refresh, but often we press on.

The pause creates a break, opens a gap, some silent space, for something or someone to enter, to be seen, to be heard, to be considered. Pausing has its own genius. It is a moment of self-consideration, even of self-care. It invites in a greater consciousness of who one is and what one thinks and does. Pausing, then, is not doing nothing.

Pausing is active, but in a more contemplative way. I say contemplative here because it relinquishes ego-control over what’s next. Pausing relinquishes ego control both of what will be and what has been.

In a very successful television series entitled The West Wing, from the genius of Aaron Sorkin that ran for 6 seasons, the president would insist from his advisors: “What’s Next?” No pause. Keep the affairs of state, the levers of power, in constant motion. Sometimes an illness, a ruptured relationship, the loss of a loved one, economic or psychological traumas, may force one to pause.

Best that the pause is an option that one can turn to when depletion is next on the agenda. It may be a conscious choice, it may be instinctive, it may be a life preserver tossed our way when we are swept downstream by objects, obsessions, others, or the squeezing necessity of finding instant solutions to complex conditions.

Vacations are ostensibly a more formalized form of pausing. Good luck. We know the response of some who are glad to be back at work after the pressing activities of a vacation that leave one seeking the workplace or simply being at home to recover.

I sense that running from pauses may be as exhausting as running from obligations. A pause is a choice of allowing oneself to be at home. In that at-home place in imagination, the pause may allow one to ask: “Why am I doing this or that?” What is its purpose? What is the value in continuing this path?” All important pause questions.

Here is my pause place. I like to rise early at 4 a.m. and have for the past 32 years. After fetching a coffee and lighting a candle in my study, I turn on my small gooseneck lamp and sit in my lounge chair. I pick up pen and journal—and then I pause. I am in between the new day just beginning, and yesterday fading now from memory. I enjoy this metaxis, a Greek word for an in-between space, the space of the pause.

I ask one question: what was joyful and challenging about yesterday when I was gifted and perhaps gifted another? I then write for about 30 minutes. It is both a pause that refreshes and a pause that remembers. Pausing, I have learned, allows that still point—where our deepest identity dwells—to be reached and renewed.

So one might ask: “how long should I pause for?” But that is an ego-control question. One might ask instead: “What has pausing allowed to open up in me, something to reconsider, or someone who needs caring for?”

Finally, we may respond to an impulse to pause with: “Catch me later; I’m busy.”It never arrives.

Ageism And Elderhood

Originally published in the San Antonio Express-News June 20, 2024

Questions about President Joe Biden’s age have intensified recently as ways to discredit him and his ability to lead. But their questions are often wrongheaded. Instead of putting aging in one category, biology, we should be asking different questions about competence and character, not the calendar as indicator of being able to lead successfully. But this one category fuels ageism and stereotypes of growing older.

Stereotypes of aging narrow our imaginations of what growing older implicates. Implicit in ageism stereotypes: Someone younger is better. We need a more youthful leader. Fantasies of superior qualities in younger candidates compared to the worn down-and-out elder proliferate.  Ageism then accelerates wrong impressions of incompetence and the ability to create constructive public policies.

Yet living into later years has benefits often discounted in the rush to demote Biden. What is kept out of the discussion include the following:  a deeper, more holistic life perspective, a softening of perceptions through compassion, moving away from the hardening of the arteries of outmoded ways of thinking and responding, a deeper commitment to service through awareness of the needs of others, accumulation of experience that grows from a source of wisdom, a more fully-formed character honed from years of dealing with prickly political issues, the ability to tolerate multiple perspectives, and seeing the deep truth of one’s life.

Psychologist James Hillman asks in his book, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life: what is character? This is different from being a character; rather, character points to who one is meant to be. It respects one’s destiny, the core of one’s integrity, often clarified through the harder lessons of life, like loss, suffering, the ability to feel into another’s plights and aspirations, becoming more compassionate towards one’s limits, and sensing the inherent value of something larger than oneself.

These qualities inhabit the elder, not one simply aging. Aging privileges chronology and biology; eldering highlights a transition into a wider orbit of understanding and a deeper consciousness of what will benefit the common good.

In eldering one grows more aware of their specific mythology: an awareness of what has organized and ordered one’s life, produced a greater coherence, and identified what meanings predominate as one grows down into life. One’s unique character grows compliantly towards these senses of what is important and establishes what to relinquish in life’s later stages.  

One can be in one’s 70s or older, yet remain arrested at an adolescent stage, which demands its own way as the only option.  But Hillman suggests “we need to recognize how helplessly our thinking about the last of life has been trapped in disparaging ageism” that fixes older people as handicapped by body breakdown and enfeebling restrictions.  Again, a failure to imagine more deeply.

He also believes that “ideas of soul, of individual character and the influence of awareness of life processes have become necessary decorations” to hide a basic premise: “Old age is affliction.” We must examine our fantasies of aging and set it beside what President Biden has accomplished within an unrelenting schedule that demands a level of stamina, experience and expertise that individuals much younger would find exhausting.

Biden’s consistent “force of character,” his diplomatic skills honed from a lifetime in the public arena of world politics and his presence as a beacon for the common good, has not been without flaws. Yet they too have shaped his character.

Within his own limits, he has heard and responded to the call of eldering rather than to fixed, narrow obsessions for self-gain. In the latter pursuit, character degenerates into caricature, a distorted version of the good.

Late in life, through the quality of character, as Hillman notes, “there is a clear distinction between statistical prolongation and psychological extension.” The soul of aging honors the latter.         

Lessons of Myth and the Creation of Reality: Procrustes

Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung in New Braunfels, Texas, June 13, 2024. A-4 and A-10.

As a lifelong student of mythology from many cultures, I am always asking how ancient myths shed light on our contemporary world both locally and globally. Because myths tell us ageless stories of who we are, what we seek, the values we adhere to, and what connection to the divine seem to be constants in their stories, I found the ancient story of the Greek hero Theseus and his ordeals with human situations worth exploring.

Myths often appear as puzzles that we puzzle over to see what gold might be contained in them. Theseus’ story initially centers on whether he is in fact the son of King Aegeus, who instructs the young man’s mother, Aethra, to take Theseus to a particular rock to test whether he has the strength to lift the rock and find beneath it his father’s sword and sandals. Then he is to journey to Athens to give them to his father and declare himself the legitimate son.

But instead of taking the safer passage across water, Theseus chooses to travel along the coast which is peopled by all sorts of criminals. In his journey to Athens, he is confronted with one after another of ordeals who test his skills as a man and warrior.

One of the last ones he encounters is Procrustes, perhaps the best known, according to mythologist Edward Edinger (The Eternal Drama: The Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology). Procrustes delighted in capturing travelers and laying them out on his famous bed, the bed of Procrustes. All had to fit his bed perfectly. If they were too long, he cut them down to size to fit the bed’s length; if too short, he stretched them out until they filled the bed.

Edinger helps us to think about what is taking place psychologically and culturally in this mythic tale: “A procrustean bed is a rigid, preconceived attitude that pays no attention to the living reality one is confronting, but brutally forces it to conform to one’s preconceptions.” Remember that myths are not to be taken literally but metaphorically. So, we must imagine into the action of the story to glean its insights but avoid getting caught on the procrustean bed of literalism.

What the myth reveals, as Edinger describes it, is using alien standards by which to judge something or someone while sacrificing our own standards for what is real, what false. Amputating or stretching some situation or condition beyond their normal shape ends with a distortion of reality, while ignoring its natural condition.

We might see in this simple but profound story what harm is done by deforming, bending and fantasizing the truth of a shared reality so that what we generally agree on as to what is real is open to all forms of grotesque convulsions. Making up reality to enhance or encourage a fiction that serves an ideology harms the body politic and the health of a people or a nation.

Distortions pretend that they are the real truth, while harboring a more sinister design, often led by appetites for power, control and finally, domination. At the same time, all contrary points of view are vilified and dismantled to keep the distortion supreme. Pretense is at the heart of Procrustean malformations.

Finally, when a myth is active, organic and assists us all to further align our purposes with principles that serve the common good, Procrustes is silenced and his actions muted. But Procrustean influences are never far from the surface.

Solar and Lunar Powers of Myth

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung, April 11, 2024

The cloud cover where we live in New Braunfels kept the eclipse mostly out of sight, except for a few rare peeks through the fast-moving clouds. Nonetheless, we had the experience that proved the power and force of the celestial order.

I brought out a sleeping bag and placed it on our driveway. Then my wife Sandy and our sweet cat, Ginger, laid on our backs for the better part of an hour and glimpsed through the ether at a white sun slowly overtaken by the black moon. The wind picked up, the temperature dropped, night descended on our neighborhood, all birds stopped their songs, and we were plunged into a cosmic darkness that left us breathless. The cat seemed to take it all in purring stride.

Such is the power of myth. When the sky soon lightened, we gathered up the sleeping bag and went in to watch the moon’s cosmic shadow race northeast at 1500 miles per hour, towards Dallas. It slid up through several states and into Canada. The reports from every news team stationed along its shadowy path was the same: “WOW!”

And something else, something that emanated directly from the feminine moon’s presence eclipsing the masculine sun’s brilliance for a few moments that created a sublime unity within the darkness. The two celestial bodies elicited from many who experienced it a felt sense of unity, of coherence, of a shared species story that we exist on this planet as home. A feeling of homecoming descended on viewers from whatever angle of vision they chose.

Couples along the way proposed marriage and its rousing acceptance; others married, singly or in groups—another joyful outburst of masculine and feminine energies finding one another both before and during the darkness.

The energies unleashed in the eclipse bent towards feelings of wholeness, of a shared narrative felt viscerally; it was not hard to believe that so many felt, even if they did not see, the energy pervading the atmosphere. For a few moments a shared narrative illuminated and conjoined all participants, a new way of seeing through dark glasses, if necessary. The result was a rising tide of coherence, cohesion, and clarity.

Feelings of relationships with others who moments before might have been viewed as strangers were the result of something stirring deep within the inner cosmos of each of us. The eclipse revitalized a narrative of connectivity we had have forgotten amidst the current negativity of divisiveness and squabbling over ideologies and petty elbowing for power.

For a short time, ideologies themselves were blessedly eclipsed by the mythologies of moon conversing with the sun over thousands of miles separating them. As we watched the various locales where the viewing was sublimely clear, we felt moments of what I would describe as reclamation, a return of feminine power and presence through the lunar wisdom of insight. It moderated the more Apollonian brilliance of solar energy. For a moment they too were in communion.

In this historic moment we were all connected by the umbilical cord of time back into history and into prehistory, a time that antedated our own presence in the universe. Such connection offered a resurgence of our shared life story, from beyond antiquity to the present. And well into the future.

Finally, as my wife and I continue to reflect on April 8th. We knew that this event had such a firm mythic foundation, in the sense that myths often point us to ontology, to the nature of being itself. We are called “human beings.” Perhaps during the eclipse, we might have been called “human becomings-in-community.” From now on we will tell our stories of where we were and what we saw, as part of a renewed species story, and how we consolidated with one another in a firm illumination of wholeness.

What a respite it was to be with one another, free of toxic acerbities that divide us, and to celebrate instead our home in what gives us joy.

Has Silence Been Vanquished Today?

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung’s Opinion page, May 3, 2024.

I remember attending catholic elementary and high school many decades ago. I performed well in all my classes but one: when our teachers asked us to be silent. My classmates and I struggled with this discipline, this attitude, of being still and silent for part of the class day. I failed miserably.

Today it is often difficult to find places of refuge, pockets of silence; as a nation of extraverts, we seem to demand noise, music, activity, play, and keeping busy inside a noisy bubble. Silence seems to frighten many people. It appears to be so unproductive, and producing is one of the hallmarks of a consumer culture.

Some schools are introducing basic meditation practices that encourage and cultivate silence as a behavior that can calm, order, and organize one’s thoughts, aspirations, anxieties and general well-being. It tends to the soul life of the student, not just to their minds and bodies.

Thomas Moore, a fine writer and author of one of the best-selling books in decades, Care of the Soul, has gathered his thoughts and practices in a recent book with an enticing title: The Eloquence of Silence: Surprising Wisdom in Tales of Emptiness. The word emptiness may put off many would-be readers of his reflections. But his history reveals how deeply he descended into silence.

From the ages of 13 to 26 Thomas lived in a monastery where the religious life emphasized obedience to a routine with a minimum of clutter and of desires to purchase and possess. A pleasurable life, he learned, was not a possession-filled life; in fact, the latter may cancel out the former. His life of openness gave space for the soul’s needs.

In silence there is time to reconsider, to ponder what and who one is, where one is headed and the purpose for one’s life. In silence one may grasp the important difference between what one wants and what one needs. This kind of discernment can grow out of emptiness, which is not a vacuum but an attitude of contentment, not grasping, not clinging, not wanting but being.

We all know the capitalist adage: time is money. But what if we placed that conventional wisdom next to “time is meaning.” The second truth encourages open spaces, gaps, cracks in the solid block of each day for slowing down.

I also liked the short entertaining chapters. Each begins with a quote from a wisdom text, a poem, a play, a film, a fairy tale that sets the table for that chapter’s meditation. Each ends with a blank page, an empty space, where the reader might jot down how the chapter impacted some insight from their own life. We are given some emptiness to complete the text through the filters of our own experiences.

Eloquence is also playful: a few chapter titles include “The Empty Pot,” “The Empty Plate,” “The Wine Ran Out,” “Sacred Ignorance.” They bespeak a sense of humor driving Thomas’ reflections that encourage a quiet presence to the ordinary motions of one’s day and night.

When we hear, for example, that someone is “full of himself,” we know that emptiness is not a major goal. The observation is not a compliment. Too much self, not enough trust and willingness to accept what is.

Thomas likes the image of a life structure with many doors and windows that let the air of life in. He encourages us not to stuff all the openings in our daily life, which leaves no room for surprise, for the unexpected, even for wonder to enter.

Quiet, he believes, is a form of emptiness, which is so important for any of us who wish to “reflect and remember.”  Open the windows, prop life’s doors, and breathe easily. Abundance will appear everywhere.

Odysseus: A Myth Retrieved and Updated

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung, March 1, 2024.

This morning, early, I walked out for the newspaper, this one, and looked up at the full moon. It looked different; it was surrounded by a light haze of clouds accompanying its voyage. I felt the same chill as I did over half a century ago when the first astronauts touched down on its surface and left a footprint.

My wife and I watched with millions of others on February 22nd, when, after several challenges, teamwork, and ingenuity, as well as resolute resiliency in responding to glitches in the systems, the robotic craft landed.

NASA has used Greek names before, beginning in the 1950s; originally they named missions after sky deities: Apollo and Saturn, then beginning in 2022, Artemis replaced Apollo and there are four more Artemis voyages on the books. There was also the Mercury (Greek, Hermes) program. But this mission was named after a Greek hero, whose story is immortalized most fully in the Greek poet Homer’s magnificent epic, the Odyssey. In 24 Books, Homer tells the story of one Greek warrior who leaves his home of Ithaka to fight in the Trojan war. It lasts 10 years. His return, initially with many men and ships, is filled with challenges and obstacles often created by the gods, that strip from him all his ships, men, and possessions. But Odysseus is wily, a trickster and able to adapt in an instant to unforeseen challenges.

He arrives at his homeland with nothing but the stories he carries in his memory, for he has substantially changed. His voyage home was one one of self-discovery as well as self-recovery from his traumatic war wounds inflicted on him for many years. As he leaves Troy, he is more like an orphan without a home or a full sense of self; but with the aid of the goddess Athene as well as other feminine figures, both human and divine, he finds his way home. As did the robotic Odysseus.

Every journey away from home carries the seeds of a homecoming; these are archetypal or universal events that happen to all of us; since they are universal experiences, they are the core of mythic stories. They help to organize events and situations into coherent forms that we can reflect upon. Myths give events their identity, which opens a way to understand their meaning.

NASA partnering with Intuitive Machines, have their home in Houston’s “Space City.” Their Odysseus is a robotic lander, partly relying on being controlled from home, partly autonomous. Its onboard software was autonomous from 6 miles up as it scouted for a safe home on which to land. Like Odysseus, it knew when to follow instructions from the gods in Houston and when to exercise its autonomy. My sense is that a new myth is being formed before our eyes, as an ancient hero partners with tomorrow’s technology.

In addition, individuals in the space community have begun to ask new questions: “race to the moon, being first” is being outmoded as a story that is too narrow. Other questions are arising: How does this event expand human progress?

How might we partner with other countries in joint ventures? Who owns the moon and sets down perimeters for those whose space programs include landing on it? What ethical concerns should we entertain in this process of leaving home for another habitation? I would add: what myth should we watch for and help create because of this monumental event in history?

Homer’s Odysseus returns to Ithaca, but he will journey out again, to a foreign land where no none recognizes an oar; there he will die, in his final home.

Mission Director, Tim Crain, uttered the new myth when he announced: “Odysseus has a new home.” In that sense, we all are Odysseus experiencing a home we will get to know intimately in the coming years. Homecoming is a mythic enterprise.

History and Its Consequences

Originally Published in the Opinion Page of the Herald-Zeitung February 10-11, 2024.

I am hearing from more friends and acquaintances their feelings of exhaustion, of depression, anxiety and even loss of life energy in their daily lives. A recent national study revealed that feelings of alienation, of being on the margins of life rather than centered within it, are causing panic attacks and disruptions in eating habits.

Friends admit that the endless rounds of news stories of violence, coercions, examples of injustice, of exclusions of large swaths of citizens on racial, ethnic or economic grounds are gaining momentum. What, I have to wonder, is assaulting the American psyche to create such conditions of scarcity, discomfort and feelings of dis-ease?

The possibilities are endless, but Franciscan theologian Richard Rohr, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, offers some worthy insights that might help us think more clearly about the current accelerating malaise. But we need a frame of history to see it.

He offers in one of his daily meditations, gathered in a volume entitled Yes, and…daily meditations, that early in our history as a species, we “were deeply connected to myth, story, and the pre-rational.” A deep connection to the natural world and close observations of its patterns of birth, growth and death, grounded us as a people in these rhythms that sustained us and allowed a shared sense of what is real to prevail. The earth’s nature and our human nature were bound in the same web of life.

With the rise of the scientific and industrial revolutions, he continues, arose “the birth of individualism—and individual consciousness.” Here is where he identifies one of the major splits that have shaped our at times skewed world today: This rise of self-consciousness was accompanied, fortunately by “responsibility, ethics, and personal subjective experience.” But it carried with it a shadow, as is true of most moments of psychic reality.

The shadow had a shape: “privatized self-absorption, ego defensiveness and mental overanalyzing. What was deleted with this new formulation that in today’s world has become so excessive in its distortions, is a deeply human involvement that takes in earth, spirit, body and stories that carry the prevailing myth of wholeness and coherence. When a myth that was once collectively believed in begins to tarnish, corrode and find itself under attack by competing myths, it can no longer sustain itself or the people who subscribed to it. Excessive attention to the individual over the collective breeds a malaise of dis-ease, of non-inclusion and deepening alienation.

Beliefs, faiths, and certainties begin to break down in such an atmosphere, one appears to thrive on gaining power, control and authority, perhaps snatched from the social body rather than earned.  The result is a crippling of the social and cultural body because of assaults to its integrity and truth. Truth itself is given wide berth; in its place are fantasies, ideologies and falsehoods that further undermine a populace that has lost its ability to reflect deeply on its surroundings.

Rohr ends his reflection by offering a way forward, inward and outward: a healthy society “must combine the best of both worlds: the mythic and nonrational” that opens one to the wholeness beneath the fragmented world, along with “the critical and rational to keep us honest and humble about what we can know and what we don’t know.”

Here begins the long and arduous path to retrieve a sense of coherence, faith and honesty that no one is excluded from participating in. No one should feel unattached from participating in such an enterprise to restore wholeness to the commonwealth.

Loss of a Caregiver

Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, January 20, 2024.

The email was as startling as it was unexpected. My wife and I had received it on our computers simultaneously:  the family physician we had enjoyed for more than a decade had left the consortium of which she was a member. Nothing more could be learned nor offered. We were asked to call in to be assigned another caregiver and so remain in the consortium’s membership. Simple as that. Swap out one doctor for one we had never met nor knew anything about. Without exaggerating here, we were both traumatized by this abrupt shift in our medical lives.

When we had this physician highly recommended to us years ago, I waited for 5 months for a vacancy to open before I was accepted into her practice. My wife waited another 3 months before she was invited to be a patient. We counted our lucky stars for several reasons.  

We had never had a family doctor who listened as closely as she did, who gave us all the time in the world, as if we were her only patients. In reality, her schedule was always booked solid. But when the door closed and it was just the doctor and me,  I felt that, yes, this person saw me as a full and complex individual, not as another unit carrying the label: patient.

Another important advantage we were to learn over the years: she was thoroughly connected to a network of other doctors in New Braunfels. My eye doctor, a superior fellow in his field, was her recommendation. My Ear, Nose and Throat doctor was also recommended by her, and by extension, the young doctor who introduced me into the world of hearing aids. 

Our former doctor networked for her patients and made sage recommendations because she knew us so well. Knowing our medical histories, she was able on more than one occasion to suggest cease taking certain medications I no longer needed, based on physical exams and my history.

She also offered short tests for memory loss, tests for depression, anxiety, level of life satisfaction, for meaning in life. She treated the whole person, not the individual who happened to have a body.

But her best medication, which she doled out generously, either in person or on a zoom call, was her gift of listening, holding back professional advice until she was sure she had grasped a more nuanced sense of which physical, psychic and emotional health I conveyed in our conversations.

Over time, and a bit beleaguered as a sole physician in her practice, she joined a consortium of doctors in order to have a larger network of colleagues with whom to consult on various patients. All to the good.

Then suddenly, she was gone. Without a trace. It felt at that moment for my wife and me that a close friend of many years had died; she was someone in whom we confided intimate details of our lives that besides us, no one else was privy to. As it should be. Confidentiality is another of those medical absolutes based on trust that is nurtured between caregiver and patient.

As we age into our late 70s, the relationship we had with our beloved doctor-- and many of you reading this know the experience—was suddenly over; we felt this dramatic loss with great sadness. I think the uncertainty of what happened to her is most haunting. The psychic and emotional cost we continue to feel as it grows more acute, rather than diminishes, is a major adjustment in our lives.

All of us know the priceless treasure of a caring caregiver. It goes way beyond skin deep.  

A New Year and a New Myth

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung January 1, 2024

Years before his death in 1987, the renowned mythologist, Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) offered reflections in an interview about where he saw we were as a culture and as a nation. This and other interviews are contained in a host of interviews just published in November: Joseph Campbell: Myth and Meaning. Conversations on Mythology and Life.

In our current plight of accelerating information and increasing tribal loyalty groups bent on their own political and economic agenda, Campbell saw that this structure was out of date and detrimental to the real crisis of today: the health of the planet.

He dreamed that out of this static state of rigid dogmatism there might be an evolving mythic image of a global man [sic]. Today we would say a global person. It would, however, require a collective effort to transcend national identities for it to occur. Such a migration of thought would allow us to ease the tensions today between a “pull toward a more universal perspective and a contraction into tribal, sectarian groups.”

But Campbell was a life-long, card-carrying optimist. He believed that we could as a species create a mythology for people “recognizing the humanity of a person on the other side of the tennis net.” Such a mythology would allow a collective pilgrimage, not of nations, but of a species into a realm of no more horizons but the planet itself. The horizons placed on any group or collection of people and nations, are placed on it by the myths they choose to ritualize their values through. Campbell believed that when such limitations are removed, a global perspective would be possible.

He is clear-eyed, however, in what he proposed decades ago: “Nothing will really straighten out until the sociological image of the planet, rather than of this group or that group, takes over.” He made this remark well before the climate catastrophe was yet to enter our consciousness in the language, much less the insistent factions that deny there is even a  problem.

His thinking, as one who studied world mythologies for his entire adult life, is that “in terms of history, we are coming to an end of a national and tribal consciousness.” Even the interest groups that cling to their own agendas have the capacity to shift their perspective to see that “the shared interest group before us is “our society is the human race. And our little suburb is the globe. Spaceship Earth.”

Campbell had a novel take on the root image of all viable, organic myths, namely, the way they promote accord with the world of nature; he even includes history as part of nature, including our human nature;  damaging, exhausting, and exploiting the Earth is to exploit our own natures in this destructive cycle.

While we all recognize the global reach of the myth of capitalism which unites the world order, it does nothing to elevate the spirit of humankind, which is essential for our survival. Campbell saw this in world mythologies; for him the “new myth is going to be one that recognizes the whole planet as our society.” People experience this sense of unity when visiting other countries and befriending and engaging others in human conversations. Within a global consciousness, the foreign becomes family.  

Finally, as Campbell asserts: “in one’s political action and influences, if one can think of oneself as a member of a world community without betraying the legitimate interests of one’s local neighborhood, one would be helping the world forward.”

The result of all these efforts performed by each of us, would be a breakthrough, “which has to be of the recognition of the planet as the Holy Land.” Such a miraculous revisioning of ourselves could lift us out of self-serving interests into a world community where the planet herself is respected as our true home.

In the wide sweep of human history, dreams of the future have often come through.