Midlife Meditation

Can you help me out? I seem to have misplaced someone. He shouldn't be too hard to find: he's about my height (maybe half an inch taller), has my face (only clean shaven) and a hairline a few inches lower than mine. His hair, which was once bright red, has darkened over the years, but is now starting to go gray. Other than that, he looks a lot like me. When last seen, he looked very much like the man in this picture: Now here's the hard part: he's been missing for fourteen years. By now, you've almost certainly realized I'm talking about myself. Fourteen years ago this month, I left the United Methodist ministry--though that's not quite the right word for it. It's more like I was pushed. The push was gentle, but it had been going on almost as long as I had been a minister. I can't entirely blame the church for pushing me, either: a good part of the pressure came from inside me, from the realization that this was not the right place for me. ...

I might be losing a lot of you with this, but I'm going to go ahead and say it: I hate bullying. Still reading? Because I really needed to get that off my chest. I know it's an unpopular position, but we can't all be bully lovers now, can we? If you read much of what I write, you probably know that I'm a Bill Maher fan. If you're not, because you think he can be a jerk, an asshole, reductionist, argumentative, confrontational, condescending--in sum, a bully, I completely get it. When he's engaged in bullying behavior, I don't care for it, not one bit. I don't like to see anyone, including bullies, being bullied; and now, I will not make allowances for him being a comedian, because I don't care for bully humor, no matter what the political persuasion of the comic. With that disclaimer out of the way, I will point out that the commentaries that conclude every episode of Real Time with Bill Maher  are some of the best op-ed pieces I see. (I say ...

Bad boy classical violinist Nigel Kennedy. The popularization of classical music has been going on for a very long time. I remember watching a Leonard Bernstein children's concert on PBS when I was in junior high. Bernstein was talking about Beethoven's sixth symphony, and trying to remove the associations his audience had with the imagery of Fantasia.  Since I had never seen Disney's early foray into producing animated images to accompany classical music, I had no idea what Bernstein was talking about--though his effort to make this lovely piece of pastoral music interesting to a young audience was well-intentioned, and I stayed tuned in to listen to the performance. Serious music has always had a hard time finding an audience. Music historians are fond of talking about how Mozart and Beethoven were the rock stars of their day, but they exaggerate the popularity of these great musicians. Mozart died in poverty, and Beethoven had to sell the same compositions to ...

(Click on the picture to see the article in Slate  that prompted this blog post.) "When will this ever end?" That's how I felt sitting through my first live classical performance. I was a freshman in high school, and my parents had obtained tickets to a recital by Van Cliburn, one of the greatest American pianists of the mid-twentieth century. I can't remember if either of them was there (it would've been a natural for my mother, herself a classically trained pianist who almost went to Julliard), or if any of my brothers was there with me (and please, bros, if you were and you remember, chime in in the comments); all I really remember is I wished I'd brought a book to read, though even at that age I knew it would've been considered rude. My fourteen-year-old musical skills (trumpet and piano) were unremarkable, and my exposure at that point in my life to classical music was limited to watching The Boston Pops  on PBS, and wishing they'd play le...

The Rev. Willie B. Smith, 1928-2014 What a man he was. John Schwiebert introduced me to Willie Smith in September, 2000. I'd been living at the Peace House for two months at that point, nursing my wounds over losing both a marriage and a career, unsure what direction to take in the days ahead. John knew that, apart from being a minister, I was a musician; in fact, my last six months as a pastor had been spent in music ministry, directing a choir and playing the piano when I wasn't engaged in other tasks. John knew that Willie Smith was looking for a pianist for The Church of the Good Shepherd, an independent African-American congregation he had founded six years before. I had an affinity for black worship and needed some income, so I agreed to meet with Willie, and was soon spending my Sunday mornings at his church. Willie Smith was a striking man, tall, handsome, energetic, and utterly confident in the truth of what he had to say. He had served in the Air Force ...

So much for the holiday. Our plan was to spend the weekend at a condo in Sunriver, driving up to Mt. Bachelor for cross-country skiing and/or snow-shoeing. That didn't happen. Oh, we drove to Sunriver Friday night, as planned; but by Saturday morning, it was obvious to both of us that I shouldn't be outside in the cold dry air, exerting myself on the trails. My chest was full of mucous and what voice I had was a hoarse whisper that was too painful and frustrating to attempt except in emergencies. So we packed up and drove all the way home. The end of January is nearly here, and we have not yet been to the snow. Frequent colds are part of my job. During the four years I was away from elementary music, I'd almost forgotten this. I took hardly any sick days during my two years of half-time high school teaching, and I don't think I missed any days the year before that when I was 0.1 FTE at a Portland middle school, so it had almost slipped my mind. Now, however, I...

This showed up on my Facebook feed this morning, liked by a friend who has a decidedly conservative bent. It's a Youtube of a teenager delivering testimony to a state legislative committee as they consider a gun control bill. Here's the headline attached to it by conservativepost.com: "It only took this 15-year-old 3 minutes to silence all liberals in the room." Apart from what I'm about to say concerning this clip, there's no way to verify whether anyone was silenced, as there's no video of their reaction, if any, by the committee. I encourage you to take a look at it yourself. Here's the link: http://conservativepost.com/it-only-took-this-15-year-old-3-minutes-to-silence-all-liberals-in-the-room/ Listening to the clip, I had just one reaction, over and over again: really? This is supposed to blow me away? This is supposed to silence me with its stunning logic, brilliant rhetoric, moving delivery? What I heard was boilerplate: a list of tal...

Don't get me wrong: I love technology. My first memory of loving technology was my twelfth birthday. That day I unwrapped probably the best present my parents ever gave me: a Kodak Instamatic camera. The year was 1973, and for its day, this camera was a masterpiece of design. Film came in a cartridge that popped in easily. Flash photography was accomplished by snapping a cube on the top of the camera. I'm not certain on this point, but I believe it was completely mechanical, no battery required. It looked like this: And it took pictures like this: So yes, forty years before Instagram, all my pictures had that square grainy badly-exposed look that the kids are now using technology to create. What I remember most about that first camera was the smell of it, particularly of the film cartridge when I tore open the bag it came in. There was something exciting about that chemical tang that filled my nostrils with the promise of technological magic. That smell, which came ...

Check out the horn-rims on those guys. The year was 1975, the place, the First United Methodist Church of Emmett, Idaho. I was in the eighth grade. My father, who was also my pastor, was proudly pinning my God and Country badge on my Scout uniform. He was 48; I was 14. I had just discovered girls, though it would be another nine years before I finally went on a date with one. The boundaries of my world were the walls of a decrepit middle school, a brand-new public library, a tiny manufactured home that was the parsonage, and this church. The parsonage was eventually sold (presumably so the pastor could live in something with room for a family), the school relocated when a new high school made the old high school building available, and the church was eventually torn down, with the congregation buying to a former Church of Christ as they, too, moved to a larger facility. Only the library is as I remember it--though now it is doubtless showing the wear and tear of its forty year...

Another area of fuzzy thinking out there is the movement called Intelligent Design. It asserts that somethings are too marvelous or too intricate to explain. The contention is that these things defy common scientific accounts for cause and effect, and so they’re ascribed to an intelligent, purposeful designer... So let’s start a movement called Stupid Design, and we’ll see where that takes us. For example, what’s going on with your appendix? It’s much better at killing you than it is at anything else. That’s definitely a stupid design. What about your pinky toenail? You can barely put nail polish on it; there’s no real estate there. how about bad breath, or the fact that you breathe and drink through the same hole in your body, causing some fraction of us to choke to death every year? And here’s my last one. Ready?  Down there  between our legs,  it’s like an entertainment complex system  in the middle of a sewage system.  Who designed that? — Neil DeGrasse ...

They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside.   When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"   Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”   Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.”   So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus.   Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.”   Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way. (Mark 10:46-52) I was six when I put on my first pair of glasses. My mother loves to tell the story of my reaction, how I immediately bega...

Counting down to the New Year has got to be one of the silliest things our culture does. Our world is artificially segmented into time zones, which cause the entire planet to function as a 24-hour clock, the hours clicking along from zone to zone as if the planet was rotating like the ticking second hand on the 60 Minutes  watch. In fact, the planet rotates smoothly, its orientation to the sun shifting constantly. To experience it in real time, one has to be watching a sunset or, much better, a total eclipse of the sun. Instead, we rely on devices to tell us what numbers go with any given moment in time. Once a year, those numbers click over to a new year. The fact that our Julian calendar new year comes a week after the winter solstice, and has no relationship whatsoever to planting or harvest cycles, just underlines the arbitrariness of celebrating a shift of digits in the naming of the year. And yet we celebrate with great abandon. Two nights ago, Amy and I attended a conc...

Yikes! I wanted something somewhat goofy for this selfie, because I am, in fact, feeling odd about what happens in about 48 hours: lasers will reshape my corneas, and for the first time since I was six years old, I will be able to see the world without corrective lenses. Unless you knew me in my youth, chances are you've never seen me in my glasses. I got my first set of contacts in 1982, when I was 21, and since then, I've rarely worn glasses in public. I have this week in preparation for Friday morning's LASIK procedure, and it's got me feeling slightly nostalgic for the bad old days when looking up (and over the rim) meant not seeing anything clearly. Only slightly, though; there are many things about both glasses and contact lenses I will not miss in the least. Let's start with blindness, which I define not as the absence of vision, but the inability to function visually in the world. I can see without my glasses, but what I see is distorted to the exten...