Midlife Meditation

I was driving my step-daughter to the gym yesterday when she spotted this bumper sticker: It was the first time either of us had seen this particular graphic, but it instantly reminded us both of another that's been around for awhile: Tolerance, coexistence--these words are commonly interpreted as societal ideals, the next stage in the evolution of Western culture, a Utopian paradise of peace and good will. I'm sympathetic with that hope, but I'm of the opinion it falls far short of what our society should really be striving for. Starting in the early 1990s, when I was pastor of a Reconciling Congregation (a United Methodist Church that seeks full inclusion of gays and lesbians in its ministry), I have been working for on what educators call a "scope and sequence" of accepting diversity. It's a framework for understanding the historical development of cultures both toward and away from being at peace with minorities. This morning, I finally put this fr...

It's a beautiful sunny morning in Portland, Oregon, but my thoughts are elsewhere. The good news is that, in Idaho and Kansas, cooler heads prevailed. That may still happen in Arizona, as well: Gov. Jan Brewer has already vetoed one law like this one. That bit of good news is cold comfort, though, when held up against the fact that people can be elected to a legislative office, take an oath to uphold the Constitution, and then with a straight face insist they have a constitutional right to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, and that to question such discrimination is to deny them free exercise of their religion. That's the essence of all three of these latter-day Jim Crow laws: if my religion teaches that some aspect of your personhood is sinful, I have a right to deny you service at my establishment--even if, in the case of the Idaho bills, that establishment provides vital medical services. You may already have seen the sign posted by Rocco's Pizza ...

It wasn't until my second year of teaching elementary music that I learned I was special. I'm sure the word was in use long before that, but somehow I had never heard it before. And no, I don't mean "special" in the sense of "special education" (which, in education vernacular, has evolved to "sped"). In an elementary school, a "special" takes an entire class of students off their homeroom teacher's hands for a set amount of time. Specials, recess, and lunch are usually the only time during the school day that classroom teachers have for prep--and it's rare that recess and lunch are entirely student-free. Kids have a way of needing their teachers during those periods, whether it's for some one-on-one tutoring, as a reward for good behavior (lunch in the classroom!), or as a punishment for bad behavior (recess in the classroom). Specials in most schools are music, PE, and library; a few schools add a dedicated art teacher...

Is all-star college football player Michael Sam gay by choice, or by birth? Slate writer Will Saletan makes the convincing argument that, considering all the difficult choices Sam had to make to become the athlete he is, being gay is hardly something he would've picked; and by extension, coming out is certainly something he could have elected not to do. This point has been in my arsenal since at least 1992, when my opinions about gay rights were first confronted by a well-meaning homophobe. The impetus for this conversation was the 1992 General Conference of the United Methodist Church, which was making national headlines for its quadrennial struggle over whether to relax its rules against  ordaining gay pastors. In that conference, as at every time the battle has been joined, the church came down conservative, tightening rather than relaxing restrictions. Even so, the very fact that Methodists were having this debate, that it wasn't a simple given that homosexuality alw...

It's been five days since the Great Creation Debate of 2014, and I'm still torn. Not by the debate itself (which, full disclosure, I've only read about), but by whether it ever should have happened in the first place. In case you haven't heard about it, Bill Nye, science educator and entertainer (my kids watched his PBS show back in the 1990s) traveled to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, for a debate with Ken Ham, Christian apologist and author of this book: Judging by the length of the video posted by the museum on Youtube, the debate was nearly three hours long. Judging by the commentary on Slate Magazine, it was also pointless. Nye deftly dissected the standard Biblical creationist arguments and, as might be expected, made the case for science, primarily evolutionary biology and geology. Ham smoothly rolled out sputter-inducing fallacies, unanswerable questions easily answered by Nye, ignored the answers, and layered on even more creationist silli...

Portlanders are calling it Snowmageddon and Snowpocalypse. And yes, it is quite a winter storm: snow that turned my usual 35-minute commute into two hours Thursday afternoon; wind that knocked limbs off trees; more snow that closed schools yesterday, and continues to disrupt business today; and now freezing rain on top of that. It will probably be tomorrow night before the Willamette Valley starts to thaw out. And it will. Which is why the "mageddon" and "pocalypse" suffixes are just plain silly. Three and a half days of playing in the snow (which is what Amy and I did yesterday and today, both skiing and snowshoeing our neighborhood) do not the end of the world make. I do have to admit that this weather is out of the ordinary. The last time I lost a full day of work to a snowstorm was December, 2008. Of course, then it was a full week, and the snow and cold continued for a second week, disrupting the Christmas holiday. I was trapped in Forest Grove for that s...

I have always been itinerant. I moved for the first time when I was five weeks old. My father's career as a minister, first in the American Baptist Church, then the United Methodist Church, meant we moved on average every three years. Once I finished my schooling at the age of 30, I kept moving. The longest I've had a single address was the four years I lived in Philomath--my high school years. It appears the moving has, finally, slowed down: our plan is to remain in this house another four and a half years, then move to somewhere in inner Portland, where we may expect to spend the rest of our independent adult lives. That was my parents' story, too: my father's longest appointment was his last, and since retiring in 1990, he and my mother have lived continuously in the house they inherited from my grandmother. I've changed jobs a lot, too, and not just in my ministry years. I was technically in the Banks district for six years, but the middle two were on layo...

"Practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking."--Mary Poppins, moments before, her work with the Banks family complete, she takes flight, never to see them again. There's a poignant rightness to that scene, something I recognized from an early age. I've seen Disney's Mary Poppins  more times than I can count; I may even have seen it when it was first released in 1964, though since I was three, I don't have any memory of it. There's plenty of meat here for both children and adults: magic that turns chores into play, adventures on rooftops and inside a chalk painting, lessons in the relative worth of money, work, and family, how to recognize a horrible Cockney accent, catchy songs and invigorating dance routines, and on and on it goes. Almost all of it can be brushed away as a feel-good fantasy about a magical visitor helping a broken family come together, with the requisite happy ending one expects from a Disney movie--almo...