'Tis the Season For-giving

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung, December 9, 2023.

We are now in that rich and generous season of showing our love, admiration, and care for others through gifts, some of which are temporary gestures and others are gifts that “keep on giving.” As tangible forms, these objects that reveal thoughtfulness, care and love of others, represent love’s expression.

Recently, however, I realized another gifting through the engaging and transformative book on The Wisdom of Forgiveness by Victor Chan. He was a close friend of the Tibetan sage, the Dalai Lama years ago, and wrote of his experiences accompanying His Holiness through countries all over the world. The theme the Dalai Lama returned to for most of his life was Forgiveness; he saw it as a gift that one can bestow or gift to oneself and to others.

Ever since he was driven out of his beloved Tibet when the Chinese invaded his country in 1959, the Dalai Lama has lived in exile. Such forced homelessness, as his people were tortured and killed by Chinese invaders, would embitter any of us; to be homeless for decades was even more painful  for one so in love with his people. Yet, through his Buddhist practices of compassion for others, his exile served him in ministering to people to its wonders across the globe.

His life on the road gave him a unique perspective on suffering and even in finding “joy in the sorrows of the world.” He taught that to dehumanize others in any form “was to dehumanize myself.” By contrast, “to forgive was actually the best form of self-interest.”  

The road of compassion and the road of forgiveness are tightly interrelated, as is one of the essential beliefs of Buddhist thought held by the Dalai Lama:  we are all interconnected in an intricate web of relationships. Nothing exists independently, by itself. Instead,  the spiritual leader learned that everything is dependent on everyone and everything.  To forgive is to be forgiven. To hate, to resent, to chastise, to brutalize others, is to perform the same intentions on oneself.

Forgiveness, however, opens one out of the cocoon of one’s own concerns, sufferings, torments, and frustrated desires that are most often self-inflicted. To forgive, on the other hand, is to widen one’s orbit of concern and understanding. It is also an opportunity to forge a larger relation, through stretching one’s understanding to care for others, things, and the Earth herself.

His biographer Victor Chan cites the Dalai Lama: “To reduce hatred and other destructive emotions, you must develop their opposites: compassion and kindness. They will help you in your spiritual development.”

I have recently made my own list of those who I would like to forgive this holiday season. I wrestle with beginning with myself, for the harm that I have caused others.  I can recall treating others at times with disrespect, with ignoring them, or in knowing someone could use a phone call to comfort them and refraining from doing so. If I am to truly enter this season of giving, I must begin with for-giving.

Think of forgiving someone in the form of a phone call or a letter or a special note on a Christmas card telling them you care for and love them. In that small but critically meaningful act, you participate, in the words of the Dalai Lama, “in the future, which extends to global well-being.” His thinking is echoed, in attitude and practice, in the words of our own “Our Father” petition: “. . . and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespassed against us. . . .”

Begin with your own self-trespasses; in that single act you enter forgiving all the wounds against you, for we are all, finally, co-dependent on one another; it is where our deepest humanity is shared with others, extending out to the world at large.

Happy Forgiveness!

The Many Faces of Prejudices and Their Influence

Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, November 24, 2023.

No one can successfully avoid them. They creep into our lives with great stealth and energy. It is human nature that this process is universal. But we can become conscious of them, so they show themselves in their shaping and framing power to create who we are.

I am referring to the power of prejudices and their offspring: assumptions, opinions, hunches, a felt sense of things, inheritances from others, negative thoughts and feelings. The meaning of prejudice—to cause “injury, physical harm”—arises in the mid 14th.century, as does the legal sense of “detriment or damage caused by the violation of a legal right.”

The meaning, “preconceived opinion” (especially but not necessarily unfavorable) is from late 14th. century in English; now usually understood as a “decision formed without due examination of the facts or arguments necessary to a just and impartial decision” (www.etymology.com). “To terminate with extreme prejudice,” meaning to “kill,” is by 1972, its most frequent description.

Many meanings cluster around the above history of the word. I am focusing though on “preconceived opinion.” It connotes a view that one forms with often only a tenuous connection  to reality. Prejudices can certainly protect us from facing what might be distasteful or injurious to our sense of identity, to our unique world view, and to internal clusters of beliefs that harden into fixed positions with no latitude for flexibility.

We sense that prejudices are extremely effective in creating and sustaining tribal thought and behavior because prejudices often label without knowing, or knowing fully, or knowing the truth over against a deception. Then we often tend to fill in what we don’t know with assumptions, stereotypes, diagrams of grouping and collecting others into a mass audience with few differences or distinctions. In short, absent particulars.

Prejudices, I sense, also flourish in the darkness of a fearful life or are created to generate fear and loathing of that ever-present specter: “the Other.” In prejudice, the soul aligns itself with an image that is in a questionable equilibrium with a shared commons sense of things as they are. It may then create or manufacture its own reality to coincide with its own idea of reality.

Cultural observer and critic Brooke Gladstone reminds us in her provocative book, The Trouble with Reality, “Reality is what forms after we filter, arrange, and prioritize those facts and marinate them in our values and traditions. Reality is personal.”  I take this as a given, and yet we know that reality can extend out from the personal.

Dispelling prejudices rests on a new level of awareness and a generous accommodation of otherness.  We may say “I am willing to accommodate this reality without agreeing with it or attacking it.” Which makes me wonder: Can a prejudice we hold allow us to see more, not less. I say this because prejudice does not have to be an exclusively negative judgement. One can be positively prejudiced towards learning, towards helping others, toward practicing resiliency.

Finally, our prejudices are mythic, that is to say, they assist us in shaping, forming and creating what gives our lives coherence, order and arrangement. They help us align our interior lives with the outer world we inhabit. One might then ask:

What does a prejudice, assumption, opinion, or belief I hold block me from seeing?

Is a prejudice I cling to a strategy not to face a part of myself that needs to be explored? Is there something or someone I hate that is entangled within a prejudice that haunts me, but I have not been able to face?

Such explorations can be a first step to opening a realm of ourselves we may find rewarding to explore.

Poetic Knowledge as Newsworthy

Originally Published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, October 21, 2023.

It is commonplace for any of us to turn to news channels, newspapers and magazine articles to gain a foothold on what is taking place both locally and internationally. Some perspectives we find helpful, others we may not agree with but read anyway to see what another point of view might teach us if we remain open.

In earlier times, people would often turn to literature, to novels, short stories, and dramas to gain insights into the larger and deeper human condition that is foundational to the actual historical events. Poetry was often consulted as another way to reflect on the facts of history. These earlier wisdom sources are infrequently consulted today as a rich source for human understanding.

Yet many of you know the poetry of one of our finest voices, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. One of his most familiar and often-quoted poems may sound familiar: “The Second Coming.” I have been rereading it lately in the face of so much horror and devastation that seems to be metastasizing into other nations than Israel and Iran. Our own country has its own infectious disruptions that we struggle with, seeking a balance that may include us all. The virus of violence and bloodshed seems to scoff at any boundaries that might contain it.

Yeats’ poem, a mere 21 lines, was written in 1919, just after World War I, which shook the foundation of much of the world. Yeats’ imagery in his exploration seems to be finding new ground in which to be reconsidered. Poetry penetrates deeper than news stories can reach; poetry seeks a deeper truth that is both particular as well as universal in its expression.

Some dominant images emerge early in the poem: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, /Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The bold-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned”

The disarray expressed above is closely followed by the following punch line that I have heard in different forms but expressing the same sentiment: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” Of course, we know that poetry’s metaphors are not always to be taken literally. But if one meditates on the above lines, what might emerge in their own thinking about the human condition today? What has collapsed that allows the worst to gain such ferocity, such anger and vitriol?

In the second part of the poem, an image begins to take shape that carries a dark power; it plays off the holy presence of Jesus, but now with a terrifying image: “Surely some revelation is at hand;/Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” We might question whether what is “surely” coming we agree with. Poems do not lecture or tell us outright what it is; they often work obliquely, catering to the imagination of the reader or listener. They teach rather than preach.

Yeats’ poem then asks us to delve deeper into what the poet envisions: “Somewhere in the sands of the desert/A shape with lion body and the head of a man/…Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it/Real shadows of the indignant birds./The darkness drops again; but now I know/That twenty centuries of stony sleep/Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, . . . .”

These lines invite us to look historically to what has been shaping itself into the image that follows. The entire poem up to the last two lines has been prepared so the final image can find its full stature. The topsy-turvy world described above needed to happen first before this ghastly image can achieve its full birthing: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, /Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” In his wisdom, the poet does not tell us or state it; he leaves it an open question for the reader to see with his own heart what has been unleashed so it can slouch towards its own birth. We might consider whether this is the image that we wish to have prowling in our midst.

Long-Term Friendships Add Texture to Life

Published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung on September 8, 2023.

Recently for personal reasons I had to drop out of attending our 60th. high school reunion in Cleveland, Ohio. I had looked forward to seeing many of the men with whom I attended an all-male Catholic high school, St. Joseph’s. We were a closely-knit group, so to miss seeing them was difficult.

But later, in early August, I flew to Cleveland to visit family, relatives and friends for a week. Seeing all these loved ones face-to-face was an added gift, a simple but profound abundance.

This annual pilgrimage north, however, would not be complete without meeting two friends, Bill and Bob, whose friendships originated in 1953 with Bill (3rd grade) and Bob (5th. Grade) at Holy Cross elementary school in Euclid, Ohio.

In our most recent gathering, and after a few beers, Bill surveyed our long history and concluded that we had had been meeting for 19 years, and always at the same place: Muldoon’s Irish Pub on East 185th. Street in Cleveland.

The geography is no accident, for a little over a mile north on the same street, where it intersects with Lake Shore Blvd. on the Cleveland-Euclid city limit, sits our high school, now renamed Villa Angela-St. Joseph’s High School, now under major renovation.

And less than a mile east of that construction is Holy Cross elementary school where we met and attended classes through 8th. grade under the stern supervision of the Ursuline order of sisters and several lay faculty.  In fact, many who attended either of these schools still live within a few miles of them.

I asked myself, as I flew home to Texas after the week of engaging with so many I love, what is the value of such enduring and endearing friendships?

Long friendships have a way of anchoring us in our evolving history. Even while we don’t communicate often between visits, we carry one another in our imagination and hearts. Affection bonds us and memory unites us in a common heritage.

If one of us hears of the passing of a common acquaintance, we report it to the alumni. These annual visits serve as ritual markers of time’s passing. When we gather, we recollect communally what we thought we had forgotten.

We speak of the women with whom we attended classes in the elementary grades,  who we may have had a crush on, who we dated, and where, if known, they are now. In fact, we find that there are a host of topics yearning to be recollected. Some we never get to. Never mind; Bill and Bob offer yet another version of coming home, of being at home in history.

The intricate webbing of time present resting atop the long history of our lives with one another, as well as the depth of delightful memories, the anguishes of life that have become part of our biographies—all are somehow modified in the sharing.

Our ritual gatherings at the Irish pub, owned, incidentally, by a graduate from the class in front of ours, interlace and speak to one another. I sense that a life of abundance takes up residence right here, where the texture of our shared pasts nod gently to the shortening span of time left to each of us.

Yet within this texture of time and circumstance resides a deep joy at every annual meeting. So much when we meet needs no explanation. When we speak of our own, or the lives of others and how they turned out, what destiny they followed, we are a community of brothers who have walked a similar path in life from pre-adolescence to becoming grandfathers. And, most mysteriously, we always pick up the conversation where we had left off the year before.

Such a journey with “brothers” Bill and Bob offers an abundance that is unique to long friendships; there is no substitute for this treasured form of relationship.

Ancient Wisdom in Northwest New Mexico: Chaco Canyon

Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, July 15, 2023.

Sometimes one hears the call of a journey. My friend Larry of 50 years, and I had promised a road trip together for many years.  We made it happen in July of 2023 when we met in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he from Dallas and I from New Braunfels.

We rented a car and drove north to Santa Fe. There we set up in a hotel not far from the main plaza. On the second day we headed northwest to Chaco Canyon, one of the most preserved and mysterious sacred sites in the world. I had been there once before over 25 years ago during a spiritual pilgrimage.

The drive through the gorgeous and ever-changing desert landscape took 3.5 hours. The last 10 miles was over the bumpiest, teeth-rattling, and challenging washer board road of gravel and deep scarring we had ever encountered. But we made it.

At the national park’s entrance, a smooth paved road welcomed us the last mile to the visitors’ center. We paid the entrance fee and were told to drive the 9 mile loop road that would take us past the center of the sprawling elaborate structures; we were told that Pueblo Bonito was the one to park and walk to because the day was going to be abnormally hot and this central Pueblo was the center of the complex.

The structures we passed were constructed of flat sandstone bricks, each made to fit so tightly that no mortar of any kind was used to hold them together. The structures were built between 850 AD and 1200 AD by the Anasazi people, the original tribe of today’s Pueblo people.

For those interested, there is an informative and brilliant 1 hour documentary, “The Mystery of Chaco Canyon,” narrated by Robert Redford (1999) and can be found on Amazon Prime.

The park was not busy, so we were able to drive slowly along the route, pausing to admire faces in the large sandstone boulders and the cascades of sandstone rocks that had been pulled down by gravity over the centuries.

We parked in the lot of Pueblo Bonito and hiked up to the structures where we could enter many of the rooms, all facing an open cloudless blue sky.

We had the site to ourselves at 1 pm; the dry wind was quickly heating up. We did not care, for we felt the strange beauty, the sacred presence of a transcendent reality, as many of you have experienced in visiting sacred sites in our country or in others. The architecture had its own energy that was palpable to us. No other visitors were in sight under the blazing sun.

We talked little as we lowered our heads to enter one room after another, to touch these stones that had stood for over a thousand years and that were beautifully preserved in the dry landscape. Temperatures can be extreme in both summer and winter months; snow is not unusual.

We both experienced feeling enwombed, enclosed, and embraced by energies that we felt were in the architecture and the bricks themselves. We learned that the walls of the buildings here and elsewhere were constructed in accord with the rising and setting of the sun and the moon. This cosmic dimension to where we stood made our short time there even more profound.

Outside the buildings we entered a kiva, a round space below ground level that could seat over 60 people during rituals or other forms of communal gathering.

The only sound we heard, other than our voices, was the wind passing around us and through the open rooms of what felt like a timeless sacred site. It was what the ancient Greeks called a “temenos,” a sacred space set apart from the world for meditation, ritual reenactments and perhaps returning to one’s roots as individuals and as a people.

Larry and I felt, however briefly, a part of the world that left its traces here for others to enter, admire, puzzle over, and be changed by. We knew that something profound had occurred on this sacred road trip to Chaco. We continue to talk about what that experience continues to mean to us today.

Former Inmates Punished After Release

Co-authored with Dr. Roger Barnes, Emeritus Professor in Sociology at The University of the Incarnate Word.

Originally published in the San Antonio Express-News, June 28, 2023.

In his book, The Decent Society, Rabbi Avishai Margalit believes that such a society is one whose institutions and beliefs do not humiliate people. Instead, all members are shown respect by recognizing their intrinsic value.

A new, 32-minute documentary, “Home/Free,” shows that recognizing intrinsic value can be difficult.

The documentary focuses on three individuals who have served prison time and are now rebuilding their lives in the midst of a system that continues to incarcerate them.

They find it difficult, if not impossible, to have their criminal records wiped clean, to be employed and to escape continued punishment. Even outside of prison, they are kept outside of society.

One of the three, Marcus Bullock, observes: “I have a felony tattooed on my chest.” 

The documentary was created by the chief executive officer of “The Clean Slate Initiative,” Sheena Meade, and is narrated by singer and songwriter, John Legend.

The documentary attracted our interest because we both have experience teaching in prison settings.  We have witnessed prisoners struggle to rebuild their lives.  After incarceration, we have seen the difficulties ex-offenders face in reentering the social mainstream.

Another of the three, Anthony Ray Hinton, served more than 30 years on Alabama’s death row for a murder he did not commit.

He says, “After spending 30 years behind bars, you have no medical insurance.  You have no place to live, no job.  How does one pay the rent, if they have no job?  How does one go and buy clothes, if they have no job?  How do you buy food, if you have no job?”

Hinton concludes, “Freedom is not the way that I always thought it would be.”

That sentiment is echoed by Bullock, who says, “Home is not what you imagine it to be.”

 This problem is massive, as one in four Americans has a record.  Legend points out that “33 million children in America have a parent with a record.”

America has the highest incarceration rate in the world.  The documentary adds that “113 million adults have an immediate family member who is formerly or currently incarcerated.”

But, most prisoners are eventually released back into society.

Who is there for them?

Sadly, for many the answer is “nobody.”  Jessica Bonanno was in that situation:  “My family didn’t talk to me for 10 years after (my) release.”

Bullock had the same experience, saying, “A lot of my family members weren’t there for me.”

Added to the absence of social and economic support are the legal barriers to reintegration.  John Legend reports that “48,000 legal barriers (are) faced by people with records.”

And then there is the reality of being rejected.  Bullock comments, “The anxiety of a background check will stop a lot of people from applying in lots of places.  It’s soul crushing.”

Of course, there is unemployment and life on the street for many released from prison. 

The documentary states that the “unemployment rate for formerly incarcerated people is five times higher than the general population.”

The result is that “formerly incarcerated people are 10 times more likely to be unhoused/homeless than the general public.”

Can one “make it” after being released from prison?  The short answer is yes, but one needs a lot of support—social, economic, even religious support—and a fair amount of luck.

And it would certainly help if we reduced the degree of humiliation and stigmatization faced by the formerly incarcerated.

The documentary notes that 27 states restrict the voting rights for formerly incarcerated people.

The reality for too many is that one pays his/her debt to society through prison time, but after release from prison, they keep paying and paying.  There is no forgiveness.  There is no clean slate or fresh start.

In this sense, America certainly does not qualify for Rabbi Margalit’s label of being a “decent society.”

What is to be done?  The documentary directs the viewer to explore projects like the Equal Justice Initiative, Next Chapter, and Clean Slate Initiative.

These are various efforts at helping, not hurting, those released from prison.

We might also try reducing the stigma and condemnation attached to ex-offenders, too.

Letting Go on the Path to Mindfulness

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung, June 9, 2023

In a culture which often leans towards consuming, possessing and accumulating, many feel overwhelmed. The amount of information consumed is compounded by whether it is even true, valid, or certain: Advertising to persuade us to purchase even more than we have or need has the capacity to numb us with their siren calls to accumulate more. The myth of capitalism and the myth of consumption are constant in their relentless presence.

The idea of letting go is, in the above frame, not very popular as a regular feature of our lives. Twelve-step recovery programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, Al-Anon and others offer alternatives to the addictions that can consume one’s entire life. In AA one of the most popular slogans is “Let Go and Let God.” Letting go of baked-in habits of negative thinking and behaving that are often forms of self-abuse is both courageous and difficult when practiced daily in a mindful way.

Letting go as a creative act, one that is spiritually oriented, is one major strategy towards a deep and lasting sense of freedom. Giving oneself over to “a Higher Power” can be a creative moment of renewal.

Today the thoughts of Buddhist psychology continue to enhance the above programs towards self-retrieval of one’s deeper identity. One of its most popular conveyors of Buddhist thought is the Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, affectionately referred to as Thay. He died in January 2022 after pursuing a life of serving others by helping millions achieve a deep sense of peace in their lives through meditation practices that are laid out in two of my favorite books of his: The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation (1987) and Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life (1992).

A third book that helped me bridge the space between Christian thought and Buddhist practices is perhaps my favorite: Living Buddha, Living Christ (199), in which Thay reveals that to live the life and practice of Buddhism is to live the faith of a Christian.

His gift, one of many, was to help dissolve the divides between religious traditions that pushed individuals to choose one of the other, when in fact they shared so many of the same beliefs, and more importantly, attitudes towards living a free, peaceful, and mindful existence.

By mindfulness, he suggests, is to live in the present moment, when we are persuaded so often in our thinking to be often anxiously anticipating the future or recollecting the past, at times in regret or in recalling a pleasant experience. Neither of these is wrong, but in Thay’s rendering of mindfulness, they both keep us orphaned from the present moment, lived fully. He goes deeply into this dilemma in Mindfulness to suggest that “the problem of life and death itself is the problem of mindfulness.”

Mindfulness training pays attention to the simple things in our life: breathing in full awareness of our breath, breathing in with full awareness of our action, and breathing out as a form of letting go. At the same time, we focus on what is before us at this moment in our simple acts of vacuuming the floor, cleaning out a cupboard, or taking care of our pets.

What is crucial is the quality of mindfulness one brings to the ordinary, and therein lies a path to peace and self-reconciliation that extends out to others. It is to be creatively present to the ordinary, to see the gifts within it and to feel gratitude for this life that we have been given to cultivate creatively in service to others.

For a series of meditations by Thay, visit Youtube and type in Thich na Hanh Meditation to find many instructions by him on this miracle of becoming more mindful.

Transition Through the Liminal Space

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung, May 5, 2023.

Change cannot be avoided. If we decide to ignore it, no matter. Transitions seem to be built into the large universal plot of life itself. So how do we deal with change, flux, impermanence, even the deeper mysteries that permeate these patterns?

A term used in the fields of anthropology and psychology to describe transitions is liminality. Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep used the term in his 1909 book, Rites of Passage. Psychologist Murray Stein writes in Myth and Psychology that liminality comes from the Latin limen, meaning “doorway or threshold.” Stein uses the simple example of when one enters or leaves a room, one crosses a limen, if only for a few seconds.

Essentially, it is a borderline where one crosses from one bounded space to another. In liminal space, we find ourselves loosened from fixed views, open, vulnerable, confronted at times with ambiguity. Our fixed positions are moderated, however briefly, which can create unsettling anxiety in their uncertainty. In extreme cases, they can even cultivate fear and acrimony.

Yet, being in liminal space can invite entertaining new ways of thinking about what has been familiar, safe, and protected. Liminal space is creative space, but it requires courage to risk listening to other viewpoints, ways of thinking, and new beliefs or angles on what has been taken for granted. It requires that we risk something.

An example: Every Thursday morning I drive from New Braunfels to Wimberly to be instructed in painting classes where I have learned the mediums of watercolor, acrylic and gouache paints. I am in year 11 of entering this liminal space. My art teacher, Linda Calvert Jacobson, has created an inviting liminal place for us students. Like them, I cross over into this cosmos of creativity.

I compare it to sacred space. My painting instructions are important because they contribute to my spiritual life. Here I turn myself over to being instructed as I struggle with crafting something that, in the end, gifts me with a feeling of achievement, even joy. Creating is a joyful gift in liminal space.

In a similar way, we as a culture are deeply enmeshed in liminal space. The rate of change today, fueled by media in all its varied forms, and other sources that cry to be heard or seen—all comprise liminal terrains.

Sometimes it feels overwhelming when our values are challenged by new forms of creation that may rustle against our many fixed positions. Yet, in liminal settings we are invited to awaken to a larger cultural landscape by crossing over from the familiar into what seems foreign, other, and alien. Of course, we can build barriers against these invasions that we interpret as threats to our familiar, fixed life decisions. Doing so is a choice.

But liminal spaces can touch us more deeply with situations that are outside our circle of certainty. Stein suggests at one point that liminal space may occasion feelings of grief, for example, over realizing one’s life path has been lost or misinterpreted.

Liminality is a creative space that rests on what may initially appear unclear, uncertain, and unseen. Yet, in our creative imagination, which is often stimulated by liminal spaces, new information may bring forward a transformation in our settled views.

Liminal space is a place, even a condition, of being conscious, where we may experience a “shake-up call.” Being called often happens within liminality. These bound spaces may create new life by inviting us to imagine what we have taken for granted and yield revelations that what is possible is already present.

Being called forth or called to, can open us to a deeper, more vital life by witnessing what still needs to be lived. Such discoveries are moments of renewed vitality. Entering and exploring liminal spaces seems worth the risks that accompany them.

Retribution or Reconciliation

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung of New Braunfels, Texas April 15, 2023.

In today’s national atmosphere, many forms of illusion ferment that do not square with a shared sense of what is real. In one quarter of the political spectrum, the promise of “retribution” surfaces as a substitute for policy. Its self-serving stance only stokes the appetites of separateness, of us/them more keenly. While retribution falls far short of a responsible policy to improve our nation’s fractured sense of itself, it is nonetheless attractive to illusionists who believe in its benefits.

The illusion of separateness has an enormous appetite. It feeds off victimhood, where the voices of feeling cheated congregate in outrage. It also stuffs itself with a constricted vision that precludes notions that don’t fit into “me,” “mine” and “my,” while conveniently discarding others. For some, colonizing the illusion of separateness allows it to harden into a belief. It transports us well beyond politics to a darker, more sinister region of the nation’s collective heart.

Fixity is one of the impulses that undergirds separateness and retribution. It can override diversity, uncertainty and ambiguity that are part of all our lives; but at what cost? What is sacrificed is a community of shared concerns that is conscious of and embraces those most vulnerable and those on the margins of prosperity. Separateness continues its mischief. It clamps down and holds tight to, “This is what I know.” It is less a truth than a stance against others.

In the stance of retribution, “I am” dominates. In the stance of reconciliation, however, “We are” widens the orbit of understanding and opens a space for forgiveness over forgeries and cooperation over complicity. Within the vessel of reconciliation, individuals and entire cultures can be exposed to what the Greeks called “metanoia,” a change of heart. The heart is the locus of feeling thoughtfully for the other. It incubates solidarity that gathers around a shared concern for the welfare of the many, not the few.

Retribution grows out of the hard soil of our inauthentic sense of who and what we are as a people. We can only truly know ourselves through how we relate to others, for those who are others are indeed us, whether or not we have the heart to recognize and acknowledge them. Further, “getting even” does not aim toward “getting better.” By comparison, “getting even” is uncourageous in its violent design. It promotes isolation while inhibiting the communal imagination’s work of inclusion.

Retribution contains the robust infections of alienation and fragmentation, encouraging an attitude of superiority over inferiority. It offers a false comfort of certainty and fixity. Cemented prejudices, assumptions and fields of value that insist on exclusion fail to assuage a deeper fear of being dethroned.

Seeking retribution is not a political program; it is more primal,  and resides closer to the instincts that recoil in fear at the threat of change that is beyond those who seek retribution. It is also a category of value; it cultivates resistance, distrust, and desperation because it fears losing power.

But another “re” word, reconciliation, moves in a constructive direction. It recognizes others as who they are as well as the values, dreams, hopes, insecurities and uncertainties they have — just like the illusionists who champion retribution.

Retribution is a knee-jerk response by those in the restricted business of self-promotion. Reconciliation is an awakened awareness of the values of others, not in competition with, but in a mutual spirit of inclusion.

With its shortfalls, democracy leans into the sacred and mysterious quality and equality of “each” that benefits the “all.” But only if a change of heart recognizes the sacred quality of the other not as a threat but as a nutrient that nourishes the whole.

Entertainment as the New Reality

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung of New Braunfels, Texas March 11-12, 2023

In the 18th. century the famous French author, Jean Jacques Rousseau, published his Confessions. His goal was a noble one: to give a full account of himself as a unique human being. His work may comprise a moment in history where our current blurring of fact and fiction began. He wrote that while he wished to stay with the facts of his life--but “if by chance I have used some immaterial embellishment it has been only to fill a void due to a defect of memory. . . . I have bared my secret soul. . ..”

When I read his autobiography, I found it impossible to tell where these “embellishments” appeared. His medium was the printed page. Since then, the delivery systems we turn to today are often social media outlets. Media guru Marshall McLuhan announced decades ago that media are not just channels of information. They also “shape the process of thought,” as Nicholas Carr reminds us in his 2011 study, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

There is a further consequence that Carr tracks in his study: the “Net. . . is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” Both activities, we know, require time, a slowness, to absorb the content through reflection. The electronic speed of our social media channels diminishes, if not annuls, these human faculties.

One of his colleagues, who writes about the use of computers, admitted to Carr that he had lost the ability “to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print.” This atrophied capacity seems to be one of our most epidemic maladies today: the inability to even read most writing of any length, much less to reflect on its meaning. This withering of attentiveness may be a global virus, but it is gaining greater omnipresence in our culture.  

A recent Atlantic article in this month’s issue by Megan Garber, a staff writer, is titled “We’re Already in the Metaverse.” Her research is both astonishing and not a little unnerving. Garber’s byline gives summarizes of her argument. In the metaverse “Reality is blurred. Boredom is intolerable. And everything is entertainment."

Entertainment is not an evil. My wife and I gravitate to it regularly, watching documentaries, movies, or specials on cultural topics. But we don’t deploy it full time nor take up residency in this habitat of diversion. It is not a substitute for being in touch with a common reality and participate in its making. Garber points to the metaverse’s toxicity: “Dwell in this environment long enough, and it becomes difficult to process the facts of the world through anything except entertainment.”

How often do we see the declaration in what we view or read: “Based on a true story.” Fair enough. So what part is true, which fiction? Shades of Rousseau’s Confessions skips across centuries to signal an alert.  The blurred boundaries have led us to a world in which the fantasies of some event, the fictionalizing of it, now often replaces any allegiance to historical facticity. This replacement is compounded when we notice how often someone’s way of processing information  is stunted, shallow, nonreflective and scattered. Individuals may find themselves existing as regular residents of a fractured world.

When Garber offered several titles to watch that reflect this new fashioning of facts and history, my wife and I chose Gaslit. It is a fascinating and entertaining series on the Watergate break-in of the 1970s. But we continued to ask ourselves: How much of what we are viewing reflects the reality of that event, and what is engineered entertainment filler? We could not tell.

In a democracy, weakening the sense of a shared reality through entertainment’s portal can be dangerous and divisive for all of us.

Putting the Wisdom of the Psalms into Practice

Originally published in the San Antonio Express-News February 18, 2023.

Not long ago a close friend gifted me with a book: The One Year Book of Psalms: 365 Inspirational Readings. Her Christmas gift was well-timed; I began reading a Psalm and commentary on 1 January as part of my morning meditation. Over many decades making retreats at various monasteries in the United States, I loved rising early to chant them with the monks. It enhanced the Psalms’ poetic wisdom; chanting them always brought a sense of healing.

Each day I find the Psalm for that day a source of joy in both its intentions as well as the rich poetic images in its language. Most specifically, the Psalms for January 19 and 20 were 11 and 12. They helped me realize, to cite another book of the Bible, that there may in fact be nothing new under the sun. Perhaps under the moon’s white light as well. The Psalms are extraordinary in giving the reader a context for today’s turmoil, placing some of the disruptions into a larger historical and mythical container, to be contemplated from a new angle.

Psalm 11 introduces a renewal of Trust in God. “I trust in the Lord for protection” even as “the wicked are stringing their bows.” Their goal, continues the Psalm, is “to shoot from the shadows at those who do right.” Emotionally, we are pulled in several directions: “The foundations of law and order have collapsed/What can the righteous do?” Yet we are comforted by this epic observation: “The Lord still rules from heaven,” which pulls us poetically into a much larger vision, beyond the limits of all forms of media narratives that often would have us despair. We gain a new access in learning that “He hates everyone who loves violence” for God’s love is “righteous and he loves justice.” And then this revelation: “Those who do what is right will see his face.”

Poetry sees into the invisibles underpinning the visible world and offers by way of analogies furthers visions of wholeness. They are meant to be contemplated, not analyzed away. As poems, Psalms carry or transport knowledge to the heart; for millennia it was understood as the seat of knowledge. Poetry is heart-knowing. Reading the Psalms is another form of prayer from the heart.

Psalm 12 continues several of the same themes: “Help, O Lord, for the godly are fast disappearing. . .. Neighbors lie to each other/speaking with flattering lips and insincere hearts.” We can sense that each Psalm is a short story that first outlines a conflict or obstacle in the human heart, then reveals a saving intervention. Like any good story, a conflict is necessary to even have an engaging narrative.

Hope appears in a rich image that encourages our attention: The Lord’s promises are pure/like silver refined in a furnace/purified seven times over.” By a rich analogy we can see more, not less, of God’s power and purity. The Psalms are all rich in analogies that encourage the human imagination to see more of what is present, and to see more deeply into the souls that God addresses. And “even though the wicked strut about, /and evil is praised throughout the land,” faith allows the reader to know that God “will protect the oppressed.”

Like all wisdom poetry, including “Proverbs,” Psalms offer visions of wholeness and well-being that lie deep within conflicts; they can aid in adjusting our priorities to what is timeless and constructive; in so doing, one may commune with what is eternal in the human heart to moderate the dragons of despair and desperation. Such is the power of the human imagination in dialogue with itself and a larger landscape. The Psalms recognize the poet in each of us.

Happiness and Joy in Dialogue

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung, February 11-12, 2023

A friend and I recently visited on zoom. Our conversation meandered into the topics of happiness and joy and whether they were two terms for the same feeling.

We noted that in our “Declaration of Independence,” there were certain unalienable rights including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We thought about what happiness means and what its pursuit entailed.

He pointed me to a documentary on Netflix entitled “Mission Joy: Finding Happiness in a Troubled World.” It contained excerpts from a weeklong discussion between his Holiness, the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu on happiness, friendship and joy. It recorded conversations in 2015 of the Tibetan Buddhist monk who was exiled from his country after the Chinese government overran it and the Archbishop of South Africa who led the resistance against Apartheid in South Africa. His nickname is “Arch,” which he enjoys.

For both wise elders, suffering is a constant in their own lives. Both wished to explore what place joy has in a life of suffering. Joy and happiness, while sharing some similar qualities, are not synonyms. And both wondered aloud how joy can be cultivated in any life.

Joy, they discovered, came from a feeling of satisfaction with one’s life, when one feels that their life “has authentic meaning.”

Both men knew firsthand what living in squalor does to destroy a person or an entire people over time; both of their own people suffered this indignity for decades. Each man represented the voice of sustained suppression by powerful governments—Arch for being instrumental in bringing down the Apartheid Regime in Africa and the Dalai Lama for inspiring his people even as his country was being eviscerated.

Despair, despondency, and depression are formidable adversaries in any life, even within an entire people. A nation can become despondent. The Dalai Lama learned that suffering itself can be an appropriate testing ground for one who is. “Suffering can bring one to appreciate joy” the Dalai Lama affirmed. In the face of his own exile, he developed the art of curiosity that promoted well-being, which is a developed skill. It is critical to helping any person live a happier life.

His Buddhist training from early childhood on taught him “mentally to keep a calm mind. Take time each day for prayer, meditation and for quieting the mind.” He further encouraged in meditating to “begin with a death meditation. Remember that one’s life is impermanent.” Far from causing despondent thoughts, such a meditation can free one from the little orbit of their private lives and expand outward to others.

The Dalai Lama claims that “because the brain is very good, everyday keep learning, learning, being curious.” Neither man hides or diminishes the place of depression, despair and hopelessness as part of life, but both Arch and the Dalai Lama agree that cultivating “warm-heartedness” towards oneself and others can make a crucial difference.

If one’s cultivated attitude in life is to “give others comfort, it can offer others courage to go on.” Best not to make others feel guilty, they agree. Arch notes that “we are made for perfection” and our whole life is in that making.  

Part of one’s practice “in this delicate network,” Arch continues, engages us all in our shared humanity; “we are made to be compassionate.” Joy’s secret emerges when we can “touch our natural compassion—then live from there,” his friend adds.

Joy, Arch suggests, “is the reward of seeking to give joy to others” which rests on an authentic concern for others. Joy is also present in deep friendships; in fact, it is a basic quality of friendship.

The deep and lasting friendship between these two elders, elicits joy in us watching them tease, sport and joke with one another. They remain playful, heartfelt as they cultivate their friendship.

Being playful is another human form of being joyful. Perhaps less “pursuing happiness,” and more being joyful is closer to what can unite us in a universal friendship.

Haunting, Healing and an Open Heart

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung January 14-15, 2023.

As the New Year begins to grow legs and venture forth into uncertainty, there is for many of us a patterned pull to engage some repair work to our lives that may repeat what we pledged to improve on from last year. It can take the form of a resolution, a renovation, or a fix-up.

The beginning of a new year has a mythic image expressed in the figure of the Roman god, Janus, after which the first month is named. He is the god of transitions, beginnings, and endings. Images that represent this two-faced god, one looking ahead, one looking back, are doorways, thresholds, passageways that lead from the past to the future. Janus is often shown holding a key that unlocks doors from one condition to another.

Perhaps the impulse we often feel is to look back at the previous year and reflect on what we achieved and what renovations are still pending; we look to the future at what we might improve as we redesign our lives to more accurately align with what we believe about ourselves, our identity, and our aspirations.

I am interested in the places that haunt us in the form of ghosts that we carry from our history into the future in a project of improvement that is essentially mythic and heart-directed. These ghosts may take the form of ideas, patterns of thought and behavior that create internal filibusters to stop our progress towards a more whole and coherent sense of who we are.

Our ghosts are show-stoppers, blocking growth and awareness; their origins are in our history with their own narratives that can be obstreperous and stubborn. I think of these ghosts as forces that steal the key from the god Janus, effectively blocking the way into the future because the door to the new year remains locked.

Perhaps our tendency to resolve something of the new year is a method we may use to deal with a faction of what has haunted us in the past. So resolutions might be understood as attempts to revise our history into a new form that is more acceptable to the image we imagine of ourselves.

On a personal level, my own haunting ghosts include:

• Are you good enough to accomplish X?

• What are your willing to risk in order to step out of well-worn patterns of thought and behavior—and is the risk worth it?

• What changes in attitude towards yourself and others are worth sacrificing familiar habits that you have used for decades as protectors of your fragile narrative?

Friends have related their own ghosts that included the specter of remorse for not choosing a different life, one they yearned for but lacked the courage to pursue. Another asked: How much of my painful past—the ghost of intolerance--can I tolerate remembering without being completely overwhelmed and check-mated?

But perhaps there is another way to view this dilemma, one in which our ghosts are not dispelled or exiled but accepted as part of the fragile fabric of our identity. A Buddhist psychologist, Pema Chodron, suggests that far from exiling our ghosts, we develop a friendly and curious attitude towards them in a spirit of cease-fire with these haunting energies.

Far from resisting the haunts from our history, she suggests instead: “Give yourself a break. Get to know this stuff. Drop the story line; forget it.” The term “maitri” expresses an attitude of loving-kindness towards ourselves and the ghosts that haunt us. Then arises the possibility of extending this same heart knowing towards others.

Our hauntings can awaken the heart, not suffocate it or incite a heart attack over our ghosts. In this perspective, what haunts us can fill us with greater awareness of who/what I am that needs acceptance.

Democracy and Human Dignity

Originally published in the San Antonio Express-News, January 6, 2023.

A single word can spawn a host of thoughts, images and associations. As 2023 moves forward, the word dignity demands our attention. 

For the last half dozen years we have suffered the rhetorical slings and harpoons of indignity from a faction of our nation’s restless landscape. Many of us feel exhausted by the indignity of the Big Lie and the fantasy of widespread voting irregularities, nestled in the politics of grievance. Hardly a viable political policy; and a poor substitute for the goodwill needed to create better living conditions for the majority of American citizens.

Anger, arrogance, grievance, expressions of indignity over fantasized wrongs, victimhood, howlings for revenge— these are pale stand-ins for the constructive largesse of a functioning democracy. 

Recently I read a chapter from a series of lectures given by Wole Soyinka, recipient in 1986 of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Soyinka, born in Abeokuta, Nigeria in 1934, has been an activist for social justice his entire life.

In one of his projects to help a group of rebels in the Nigerian Civil War (1967), Soyinka “spent most of the next twenty-seven months in solitary confinement in a cell that measured only four by eight feet.” More than 30 years later, I met him at the University of Southern California where one of his plays was being performed. When my former student introduced me, I immediately felt the elegance and kindness of this poet-statesman.

In 2004, he delivered five lectures titled “Climate of Fear” to the Royal institution in London. That same year, they were published in a book, “Climate of Fear: The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World.” 

Soyinka’s thinking made me realize democracy is neither a thing nor an abstraction. Rather, it is an occasion, an event, a moment in history for human dignity to be expressed and encouraged as a fundamental universal quality of being human. 

One of its most crucial representations of this human quality is made public in everyone who qualifies for the right to vote. Beneath this right, which is also a rite, or a ritual, however imperfectly expressed, is the recognition of “equal membership in the human community, along with a confirmation of every member’s self-worth,” Soyinka writes.

Such an idea is buttressed by the encouragement and maturation of what Soyinka calls “self-consciousness,” which is inspired by allowing each member to become part of “interacting rings of community or association.” Its most crucial foundation is imparting to each member a sense of belonging, of being part of a magnificent whole to which each contributes a part.

In contrast to a politics of indignity, where indignance is a new form of entertainment for those who gravitate toward its stoked emotions, exists an attitude of thoughtfulness expressed in an allegiance to the shared reality upon which democracy rests.

Soyinka advises that “Dignity is simply another face of freedom,” thus the obverse of power and domination through grieving solicitudes. Litanies of anger, fury, outrage, feigned humiliation all conspire against the moral grain of dignity. When humiliation is extended to the population, it can harden into hate and its primal expression, violence. 

Despite its flaws and failings, democracy can still be the best strategy available to restore or deepen the dignity of the individual over the indignant voices that stoke victimhood and self-serving agendas. Democracy touches and encourages those mysterious treasures in the human heart: dignity and self-worth.

What Story Will We Choose to Remember?

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung December 9, 2022.

The second anniversary of the January 6th. Insurrection is not far off.

I have thought about what story or stories will surface to express the reality of that day and those leading up to its execution. As in the past, there will be competing narratives, each advancing the events and their meaning to conform with outcomes that may be self-serving.

For several reasons I was drawn to an article in the December issue of The Atlantic entitled “How Germany Remembers the Holocaust and What America can Learn About Atonement,” written by Clint Smith.

As a mythologist I am interested in stories as carriers of values, aspirations, and ideals as well as the shadow side of both personal and collective myths. I also share with many an interest in what motivates some versions of stories to be cultivated and shared and which rise up through the energies of specific interests—political, spiritual, practical, fictional—and by whom?

Stories are vehicles that have as their core a belief or set of beliefs which we choose to adopt or reject in our personal or national life. Their power resides in their ability to shape our thinking as well as behaviors that emanate from them.  Stories are like the infrastructure that supports and maintains our identity. Who we allow, tolerate, or assign authority to in telling our story is a monumental decision because it shapes our destiny as a people. Today we find ourselves in the tall grass of competing narratives.

We might pay close attention to what kinds of stories are being suppressed today, what is allowed to be taught, what books should be banned, what ideas should be exiled, what values should be marginalized. For stories, more than any other form of expression, are the oldest carriers of our identity of who we are committed to.

These narratives grow directly from how we choose to remember our history and what we lean towards surgically removing, including our founding narrative as a Democracy, our shared origin myth.

Unfortunately, there are those in power positions who are making decisions with wide consequences. We must be cautious and vigilant about those who step forward to proclaim:

The following book titles should be banned from libraries and schools.

Topics on sexuality, race and gender should be prohibited to “protect our children.” For some age groups this is a good decision.

Certain truths about our own history of genocide would best be kept under wraps, their identity simply denied.

Real respectful conversations about our differences should be avoided, deploying instead a series of “d” words: deny, deflect, deceive, deflate, demean, destroy.

Such a “method” for silencing alternative views puts in direct jeopardy the most fragile, and seventh “d” word: Democracy.

Much has been written about America’s pseudo-innocence, which in its expression has taken up a less-than-nuanced stance towards history, especially our own. Pseudo-innocence prefers to keep the same historical accounts, the stories we wish to remember, frozen, atrophied so that our nation’s shadows remain hidden in the basement of our consciousness.

Remembering seems unwise. Yet it seems that remembering has its own propriety, its own moral or amoral code feeding it. So how we refuse to remember is worthy of our study, and along with it, what fiction we drive into the hard ground of history, will further form, or deform our fragile yet coherent myth.

Clint Smith’s illuminating article reveals how Germany today continues to create new rituals to remember the Holocaust; he notes that the movement to remember anew emerged not from government authorities who have their own myth to promote, but  “from ordinary people outside the government who pushed the country to be honest about its past.” He also delineates places in our country that have begun such efforts of honest reclamation of our story through memorials.

His final words will be mine: “It is the very act of attempting to remember that becomes the most powerful memorial of all.”

What Draws Us To Wonder?

Originally Published in the Herald-Zeitung, November 19,2022

Who has not occasionally paused to wonder about something or someone, some circumstance, some situation, that gathers mystery around it? For over 30 years I have written in my journal most mornings. As a prompt, I write about what wishes to be remembered from yesterday. It takes only a few seconds, after I have brewed coffee, lit a candle in my study at 4:30 a.m. and sit with that question, that the remembered events line up.

At the end of each morning’s writing, I ask myself: “What did you wonder about or become curious about yesterday?” Sometimes no answer steps up; other mornings two or three emerge, competing for attention.

I sense that wonder has its own way of knowing. A deeper form of learning is often evoked through wonder. Not seeking the right answer but paying attention to the questions that grow naturally from wondering, like the fruit that emerges from a well-tended seed that blossoms into a plant. That is wonder’s pathway.

Curiosity is also a form of wondering. So can questioning what we believe, value, and even what we sense might be time to discard in our lives. In one of his Dialogues, the Greek philosopher Socrates questioned his student on what he thought was the nature of knowledge. When his student grows dizzy trying to answer this question because it sets him wondering, his teacher saluted him: “this sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher,” namely, the love of wisdom (Philo-Sophia). I sense that it grows directly from being curious.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell suggested that one of the primary functions of myth is to stir in the individual a sense of awe and mystery. I don’t think we have to travel any farther than what is valued in an ordinary day to find illustrations of either; but there is no such thing as ordinary, especially when events in our lives encourage or provoke wonder.

Wonder gains traction when it emanates from the heart, not the head. One experiences something or someone that is heart-felt. Wonder does not seek the right answer, the fixed fact; it is more nuanced than that, more pliable, more oblique.

In wondering we run the risk of touching what is mysterious in life, what gravitates toward a sense of awe. It brushes against what is both ineffable and sacred. In the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “what we cannot comprehend by analysis we become aware of in awe.”

As an example: In these blessedly cooler mornings, my wife and I step out early, before daylight, and gaze for a few moments at the stars that appear so brilliantly against a black sky. There, in the stillness of 4:30 a.m., we stand for a moment in silence.

Gazing up at the night sky full of brilliant lights, we are inevitably drawn to wonder what this new day will bring, how it will both shape itself and be shaped in part by our plans, our schedules and our obligations. Wonder then seems to dissolve under the weight of duty.

In this early moment, however, we sense the power of wonder implicit in the ordinary. Wonder coaxes what we call “ordinary”—a word so inadequate to our experience, so we remain for another moment, silent in the immensity of the early morning sky before it dissolves into the day’s birthing sunrise.

In the cool dark air of the morning, we don’t stop to think; we stop thinking. For wonder seems more intimate with a felt sense of what is real and mysterious. In wonder we are allowed to exist in that narrow hyphen between them.

I sense that such fleeting moments are what poets and artists seek through their creative imaginations: to capture the beauty exposed by wonder and how, for instance, the moon’s shadows will spread across another day, shaping itself, already, from darkness into light.  

I end by wondering if these moments of closeness with the natural world serve as bridges to the ineffable mystery of the sacred’s presence, suddenly there in front of us if we open ourselves to its terms, not ours.         

Trout Fishing is Not About the Fish

Co-authored by Dennis Patrick Slattery and Roger Barnes
Originally published in the San Antonio Express-News on October 26, 2022

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing
that it is not fish they are after.
—Henry David Thoreau

We have been fishing for rainbow trout in the Missouri Ozarks for 30 years. It is an annual pilgrimage from San Antonio to a rural fishing lodge in southwest Missouri, 1600 miles round trip. We recently returned from our pilgrimage with reflections to share.

Over these three decades our friendship has strengthened on each excursion to the point that we now admit the week together is not about fly rods, reels, dry flies and nymphs. Nor is it about the fish we hook.

So, if the trip is not primarily about the mechanics of fishing, then what is the through line of this adventure?  We now realize that fishing has become a rich metaphor for what matters in our lives.

It is about camaraderie and friendship, undertaken in one of the most ancient of human activities, the journey, and what we discover each time we enter this vessel of adventure.  

In our younger days we fished early in the morning, then again late in the afternoon for hours on end. No longer. Our time on the stream has shortened considerably.  

Our pilgrimage has assumed a more contemplative, less active rhythm where the fish play a smaller role than they once did.  Emphasis has shifted comfortably from the fish and the size of the catches to our shared friendship.  

Catching three fish per day, not eight, is more than satisfying. Something more valuable is caught now in the nets of our imaginations, like a return to the value of an ordinary day and the treasures which invite a sustained feeling of gratitude.

Preparing and enjoying our meals together in the house we rent has become a sacred ritual.

Now, it is about sitting on the porch and feeling dusk descend. We enjoy hearing the crickets and other critters that stir in the thickening shadows, creating a chorus of sounds as the day curls into its own darkness.     

Our time of stepping out of the regular rhythms of our lives allows for remembrances and giving story form to memories of previous trips and to our lives more broadly.

Now in our 70s, we fish for stories to pull from the deep waters of memory. The stories allow their shiny, colorful hues, like those of the trout jumping into sunlight, to illuminate our present identity.

We have become more conscious of the reality that where the water runs most swiftly, and especially in the shadows of the stream, is where the invisible trout are clustered.  

It has become our way of reconnecting to the natural order, with its own wondrous rhythms and shadings.

Our fishing excursions bring much of our individual lives to the surface. Our life events are for a moment fixed in the telling, which is itself one of the richest elements in a long and sustained friendship.

Our fly lines have, over time, morphed into our story lines. We read more now on our outings and fish less.  It has become a shift in awareness where we now sense there are bigger fish to fry.

It is a time for rich conversations about what we have read or films we’ve watched. We are now, at our age, casting our attention at the meaning of life itself. These trips are the occasions for taking stock of the bigger questions that life poses.  

A shift in our collective attitude is itself a migration from quantity to quality, an important observation to consider because it includes the very journey of life itself in its constant flow, eddies and currents that attend our lives.

What we now grasp is the importance of connecting our stories.  They are the mythic underpinnings of our lives, offering us coherence, cohesion and camaraderie.

But, to be clear about the trout we do catch: yes, we take them home and we eat ‘em!

Meditation Has Lasting Benefits

Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, September 6, 2022.

A renewed interest in meditation practices is growing in our country. It is being used to increase consciousness, to improve health and vitality, to deepen one’s spiritual life and to offer a counter way of being conscious of our everyday experiences. It is also being evoked by more individuals pausing in their lives to ask: What kind of world is being shaped and insisting we accept its terms, values, assumptions and prejudices, as well as its beliefs, all of which can indoctrinate us into a world view that we may not be aligned with?

If we fail to pay attention to these often-subtle changes and shifts, we can become victims of the illusion of freedom. Pausing less to analyze, which is often ego-driven, one sided and reductionistic, and more to meditate, which draws us closer to our most authentic selves and to the implicit holiness of the ordinary, can improve our understanding. It coaxes us beyond information to a deeper transformation of who we are and are becoming.  

To cultivate a practice of meditating opens us to experience the daily round of our lives in greater depth. Each day we are asked by a variety of sources—news outlets, shows, movies, advertising, podcasts and political maneuverings, to remember and accept certain circumstances and conditions, and to forget others. We can then fall asleep in this din of forces to what is truly remarkable. I have discovered that meditating can cultivate a different attitude as well as a fuller way of imagining the world’s ordinary particulars as tinged with the sacred qualities of life.

In contrast to egoic, one-sided thinking, in which power is accumulated under the guise of analysis, meditation is more wholistic; it does not explain, it illuminates understanding. Meditation leans toward recognizing the interrelatedness of all parts of what at first glance seems so diverse, even antithetical to one another. Meditation allows, even welcomes, paradox, contradiction, as part of the fabric of life; it is closer to the image of weaving, of creating a tapestry rather than reinforcing the independence of life’s complexity with no underlying unity.

One of meditation’s most important qualities is that it can lead us to wonder, that is, to envision the ordinary happenings of each day—a brief contact with a stranger, an act of courtesy, a moment of self-forgiveness or forgiving another, the sounds that gather around one during a morning walk—as instances that evoke gratefulness for what might have seemed trivial before.

Meditating slows us down, even for the space of 20 minutes if one chooses to find a time each day for silence and solitude. Even taking a moment to become aware of our breathing, and to notice how often each day we move breathlessly from one task to another increases our conscious awareness.

Meditating awakens us to the beauty of our heart and to our sense of being embodied. It reveals how we might take in the world we inhabit at a single moment, with all of our senses and to feel joy in the process.

Meditating can also reveal where our lives are unlived or possibly needing renewal and revision. We may imagine how our inner life is disconnected from the outer social world we traverse daily.

It can also assist us during times of illness, misfortune, loss and grief by finding a place for such suffering within the larger fabric of who we are and to what we are destined.

A meditative practice can shift us from skating across the surface of posessions, distractions and future plans and promotions by reminding us of what we all paossess in common: this very moment of vulnerability and promise. We can be present only to the present. That itself is a gift worth acknowledging in meditations of gratitude.

Journey into Space and the Mythic Imagination

Originally published in the Opinion page of The San Antonio Express-News, September 3, 2022.

Human beings possess a deep hunger to explore, to leave the familiar known world and reach out to mystery, to what is uncertain and to gain new insights that deepen our understanding of who we are as a species. Myths have revealed this  for millennia.

With NASA’s announcement of a new series of 8 exploits called Artemis, the mythic dimension is once again front-and-center. The moon will serve as both destination and way station in the Artemis project, whose goal is to eventually reach Mars named after another Greek divinity, one of strife, but also of ambition, excitement and drive.

The Apollo program is no more. Next in line is Apollo’s divine sister, Artemis, who is associated with the moon and its illumination, as well as with nature and especially animals. Her favorite was the bear. As a huntress she possessed, like her brother, deadly accuracy with her arrows, especially as they travelled long distances to their intended mark.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell reminded us that myths use the language of metaphor for their energy and durability. Based on two words—meta=across or beyond—and phorein=to carry--a metaphor, like a myth, is “a transport vehicle” that encourages us to move out of the boundaries of the known and familiar into unknown worlds. By introducing Artemis, a goddess, NASA adopted a new metaphor, a new mythic figure, for such a transport.

This is a healthy sign both mythically and imaginally; it complements the earlier masculine presence of Apollo to establish a greater presence of feminine energy in space travel.

I sense in the “Artemis” naming for the next eight space flights—which includes the goals of sending a woman and a woman of color to walk on the moon’s surface—a mythic expression of integration with the masculine in the service of a greater wholeness and completeness. Her name is no small matter for our national imagination. A new analogy ripens with her presence, for both Apollo and Artemis are known in the wisdom tradition of myth for their healing powers. They are curative forces that promote healing wounds of infection, strife, dissension and disorder.

Mythic thinking has a strong poetic element,  and NASA rises in our imagination as a witness to this presence. Mythic—or mythopoetic thinking—rests on the power of analogy in creating a new story by reviving an old narrative and fabricating it in modern clothing. The space program is once again the launch pad for the imagination; it allows us to see ourselves withing a larger cosmic frame.

The power of myth is then twofold: First, to see ourselves anew within the frame of epic and vast terrain; the space program yields to something far greater and grander than us, yet includes our greatness as a species. Second, to see and imagine from a double perspective by retrieving from ancient history, as filmmakers Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas have done, stories and figures of earlier wisdom traditions, and reinstating them within our cosmic dreams.

The ancient past, then, coalesces with our dreams of a distant future. Such is the power of mythic imagination. We all need the mythic world to refresh us as we gaze skyward at the future. Let Artemis show us the way as our new guide, joining  the constellation of earlier figures on our trajectory deeper into the universe and into our knowledge of ourselves.

Theft of a National Narrative Harms Us All

Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, July 23-24, 2022.

There is an Irish saying my friend, Phil Cousineau included in his book, The Oldest Story in the World: any journey one takes is not complete until one tells a story about their adventure. So, the story about the voyage is as crucial to its meaning as the adventure itself.  In mythologist Joseph Campbell’s classic work of 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he illustrates three “moments” of a journey: 1. Departure from the normal and familiar; 2. Meeting with both adversaries as well as helping companions; 3. A return home with “the boon” or the story of what one has learned during their quest.

The boon or story surveys the knowledge and perhaps the wisdom that expands and deepens the storyteller’s vision of themselves and the world traversed. When shared with others, the story may deepen the level of their self-and-world knowledge; stories look both within one and outside to the world they inhabit. Many of you know that Twelve Step Recovery Programs are guided in large measure by stories, personal narratives told to and received by others. Some healing power emerges in narratives that one can experience imaginally, not necessarily literally.

We can connect with strangers and friends more deeply when we share our tales with them, which is to share our identity, our history, with others. Telling our narratives and listening to others’ plots satisfies a deep hunger in both speaker and listener. Our stories voiced is one of our most creative acts; sharing our stories can be a generous way of relating deeply to ourselves and with others on a level far more profound than those offered by statistics, surveys and other forms of facts that don’t reveal the contours of a coherent narrative on a deeper level.

When someone asks who we are, our response often takes the form of a story. Each story we tell or hear carries a mythic resonance. We remember that the word “mythos” means story.

When we identity deeply with our own story, we tap into closely-held beliefs, prejudices, shadows, values, assumptions and aspirations. In a sense, we language ourselves into our present being through the stories we tell. Narrating ourselves in the world seems to be essential to our nature as a species. This deep hunger reveals the impulse to present ourselves both as a story and in a story.

Storyteller Richard Kearney observes in his book, On Stories, that “each nation discovers it is at heart an ‘imaginal community,’ a narrative construction to be reoriented and reconstructed repeatedly.” Forgetting one’s narrative origins, he goes on, is dangerous, because it can lead to “self-oblivion” when the disease of a community takes itself for granted or becomes so narcissistic it believes it is the center of the world and therefore entitled to assert itself, to the detriment of others

In this light, Democracy is less a noun, more a verb; it is a story in motion. However imperfectly, an origin myth or story, embodies shared values and stabilizing meanings that promote the following in the collective imagination: 1. participation, 2. integration and 3. aspiration.  It shapes our past into formed memories that guide us as a people.

I am therefore more concerned with the theft today of our origin story, our founding narrative, that largely defines who we are and wish to become as a people sharing a communal narrative that aspires to benefit all its citizens.

Such a theft--to be replaced by a groundless fiction that is self-serving and just next door to wishful thinking—is felonious. If we allow our founding narrative to be eclipsed by a story-as-scam, we lose something essential to our identity as a people. Such corrosion unmoors us from a shared history and more painfully, perhaps, from one another.