Midlife Meditation

Just stay in this circle, and everything will be fine. "Okay, we get it, divorce hurts. Now can't you please cheer up for a change?" That's the message that finally drove me out of the ministry. As I've written more times in this space than I can remember, I never really belonged there in the first place. But I'd invested so much of my self--so much "blood and treasure," to borrow from language about the Iraq War--that I stubbornly refused to leave. Thanks to ministry, at the age of 38, I was now twice divorced, had no close friends, was always teetering on the brink of too much debt, and could only see my children by appointment. At least, I kept telling myself, I was working with people who cared, people who felt called to serve, to lift up the downtrodden, liberate the oppressed, blah de blah de blah. And then my senior pastor told me people were getting impatient with me for being sad. That's when I knew it was time to leave, and w...

No, these are not actually the colors of their robes. Except for the black ones; those are real. The sad part of the decision is that it was so close. This one should have been a no-brainer. The vote was 5-4, a complete liberal-conservative split, with Justice Kennedy, author of the two previous decisions expanding basic rights to include gay and lesbian people, being the swing, deciding, vote, as well as author of this decision. All three decisions arrived on June 26, and human dignity was the common theme in each. The opposing justices were nearly apoplectic in their dissents, stooping in Scalia's case to critiquing Kennedy's prose, while Roberts fretted that marriage equality opens the door to the normalization of polygamy, and Thomas grumbled that dignity is not something that can be either granted or taken away by a government, citing slavery and internment camps as cases of human beings remaining dignified even as they were legally treated as subhuman by the United...

From top to bottom: the Stars and Stripes, the South Carolina state flag, and the Confederate battle flag. The picture was taken in 2000, just before the battle flag was removed from the state capitol's flag pole. I struggle with flags. I learned flag reverence as a Boy Scout: how to present it, salute it, retire it, fold it and, when use had rendered it too tattered to respectfully display, how to burn it. The only proper way to wear the stars and stripes, I learned, was as a shoulder patch. To this day, seeing flags worn as articles of clothing troubles me. I'm aware that other cultures have different customs regarding their flags--the British, in particular, seem find with Union Jack underwear, hot pants, bikinis, etc.--but even so, seeing any flag displayed for purposes of ridicule, amusement, titillation, or symbolic disrespect gives me pause. I'm the same way with any symbol that has meaning to a group of people: seeing it desecrated troubles me. And yet,...

The day after the shooting, this headline, this image, and this ad appeared on the front page of the Charleston Post and Courier: That ad's a little hard to read in context, so here it is all by itself: In case you're still not sure what it says, here's the text of the ad: Ladies' Night THURSDAY! ATP Gun Shop & Range specializes in teaching ladies to learn to shoot for fun, sport & self defense! $30 GETS YOU EVERYTHING! Eye/Ear Protection, Souvenir T-Shirt, Pistol or Revolver, Range Pass, 50 Rounds of Ammo, Instructor  The morning after a young man, using a pistol purchased at a department store, shot and killed nine African-Americans at a Bible study, the local newspaper ran this ad, partially obscuring the headline announcing the killings. To its credit, the newspaper acknowledged the horrendous timing of the ad, as did the ADP Gun Shop and Range. What neither did was admit the irony of the juxtaposition--or make even the smallest admission that ...

Mourners pray at Emanuel AME Church for the victims of Wednesday's shooting. He sat through an hour of the Bible study. Once captured, he told police he was having second thoughts about what he was about to do because everyone was being so nice to him. But then he took out his gun, called the people who had just been so nice to him rapists, said they were taking over his country and had to be stopped, and shot and killed nine people, leaving one witness alive so she could tell others what he did and why he did it. The shooter's motives were clear for many reasons, most obviously the statement he made before opening fire. There were other clues: the confederate flag stickers on his car, the photograph that surfaced of him wearing patches of the flags of Rhodesia and Apartheid-era South Africa, and the particular church he carefully selected as scene of the crime, then drove two hours to reach. Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church--"Mother Emanuel," to ...

Rachel Dolezal In almost every category Americans use to discriminate, I come out on top. I'm white. Very very white. I don't tan; I freckle. I'm a melange of European blood lines--French, German, Swedish, Scottish--that plant me firmly in the Anglo-Saxon camp. I'm solidly Protestant: Baptist-Methodist, to be exact. I'm university educated, with a Bachelors and two Masters degrees, plus enough post-graduate credits to put me on the top step of my district's pay scale. I'm neither too tall nor too short, and have an average weight for a man of my age and height. And last, but certainly not least, I have a Y chromosome. With all these status points in my favor, one would think I would've lived a charmed life up to this point: privilege, wealth, career, easy credit, immunity from traffic tickets, and all the other benefits, both tangible and intangible, typically enjoyed by male WASPs. And in fact, I almost certainly have be...

Jumbotrons somehow manage to make Annual Conference look even more conventional. Thursday night reminded me why I used to love going to Annual Conference. I was there for the annual memorial service, when the conference lifts up the names of clergy and clergy family members who've passed away since the last conference session. I was there to honor my father. This was yet another in the long line of observations of Dad's passing that will culminate next month with the scattering of his ashes. I was prepared for the reading of his name, for the singing of traditional hymns, for the extended sermon by a retiring clergy person. What I wasn't ready for was how much it felt like coming home. In so many ways, it was if I'd never left: all those faces I recognized, so many of them coming up to me before and after the service to warmly greet me, share their condolences, wish me and my family well. Participating in the service was like putting on an old shoe: every...

Funny; Alice Cooper doesn't look that excited that school's out. Time frame disclaimer: this post, started two nights ago, with two days of school remaining, is being finished four hours after the buses rolled away, carrying away children from the very last day of school. It's the best of times, the worst of times, the timeliest of times when teachers and students are united around one basic measure: the countdown to the last day of school. It's been running in the staff room for at least a month now, the counter on the whiteboard ticking off how many student contact days remain. Last week, I noticed it was also on a small sign just inside the entrance: how many "wake up days" remained for students. The most unavoidable measure of time remaining, though, has been the students themselves: fifth graders behaving like Soviet engineers counting down their last days on a meter stick, feeling more entitled to talk back with each successive day. This is...