Midlife Meditation

St. John of Patmos, the Dragon, and the Beast Hey choir! Yes, I'm talking to you: the faithful few who are here every Sunday, come heaven or high holy water, up there in the loft waiting for your special moments to shine. You're the glue that holds this congregation together. Your nods, smiles, scowls, "Amens" and "watch yourself, preacher" are the applause sign on this variety show. You've seen it all, heard it all, since long before I entered this pulpit, and you'll be here for whoever fills it once I'm gone, and the next one after that, on and on until this church is no longer here. As reliable a core constituency as you are, you're still human. Sometimes you shine, sometimes you fall hard on your face, most of the time you're just normal folk like anyone out there in the pews. You need the magnifying glass of scripture too, convicting you of your shortcomings; and you need the word of grace, releasing you from the burden of g...

The subjects of Trump's latest assault on American values. There are so many ways to say "no" to this president. No, the four congresswomen you attacked are not going to be flown "home" by Nancy Pelosi to get them out of her hair. No, they're not foreigners, aliens, or even immigrants (even though one of them once was), they're citizens. No, the color of their skin does not make them any less American than invasive pink-skinned you. No, the act of criticizing this country is not unpatriotic (in fact, you did plenty of it during your own campaign). No, no, no, no, no. Since Donald Trump began his campaign with an attack on Mexican-Americans, "no" has been the prevailing message of every thoughtful pundit, regardless of political persuasion. No to the misogyny, the lying, the sabre-rattling, the racism, the rabble-rousing, the bluster, the threats, the incompetence, the corruption, the grifting and graft, the assaults on anything and eve...

Woody, Buzz, Jessie, and Forky Warning: here there be spoilers aplenty. Sequels have been around as long as storytelling. The best storytelling is incomplete. It creates outlines of engaging characters, but lets the audience use their experience and imagination to fill them out. It does the same with the universe in which it places these characters, as well as with the plot that carries them from beginning to end. To do this well, the storyteller must trust the audience, and have confidence in their intelligence and creativity. The best-told stories leave audiences both satisfied and hungry, wanting to revisit the universe, spend more time with the characters, see it from different angles. But the best stories are so complete that sequels are unnecessary: the work stands on its own. To justify its existence, a sequel must present something so new, no distinctive, that it is a good story in its own right. Such was the case with the most ancient story/sequel pairing I ...

Entrusting the governance of a nation to democracy is like turning a horse loose in a hospital: the best result that can be hoped for is that no one was severely injured. Reading the Constitution, it's easy to see just how skeptical the founders were of this system they'd chosen for the fledgling United States of America. They were in agreement of the principle that power should reside in the people, but they were unsure how to channel that power into governing authorities. Looking back on history, they could see that classical experiments in democracy had been limited to city states, and none of them had lasted long. For democratic government on a national scale, they had only Britain to compare themselves to, and that system's reliance on a hereditary monarchy was the very thing they had rebelled against. They'd also had several years to experiment with a weak central government, and the results had been so chaotic as to mandate a major revision of the ne...

Two tanks arrive for Trump's National Mall speech. In yet another you-can't-make-this-shit-up moment, Donald Trump delivered a hackneyed, mostly non-partisan address mainly to his biggest fans while flanked by two state-of-the-art yet obsolete war vehicles. Getting the tanks to the Lincoln Memorial entailed an enormous feat of engineering, as simply driving them through Washington would have caused extensive damage to streets and infrastructure. Instead, they had to be shipped first by rail, then on flatbed trucks on a carefully selected route to the Lincoln Memorial, where they were parked on pads designed to distribute the enormous weight and protect the surface underneath. As journalist and Iraq War veteran Elliot Wood points out in a New York Times op-ed, tanks are relics of a form of warfare that no longer exists.  These mobile bunkers were created to break the brutal, bloody stalemate that was trench warfare, and they accomplished that goal: World War II saw fa...

A Bradley fighting vehicle at the Lincoln Memorial. Lies told and retold without fear of consequence. Cabinet positions exploited for personal gain. Nepotism on an international scale. Children locked in cages. Journalists accused of treason. Truth labeled as fake news. Scientists marginalized. Polluting extractive industries subsidized and promoted. Democratic allies shoved aside while authoritarian murderers are lionized. And tomorrow, in just the latest abomination to be committed by the Trump regime, the traditionally non-partisan Capitol Mall Independence Day celebration transformed into a militaristic political rally for a populist demagogue who stumbled into office in not just an example, but the apotheosis of Murphy's Law. We're well beyond the point at which Washington has become a dark, satyrical parody of itself. The Republican party surrendered any last vestige of being a force for good shortly after Barack Obama was elected, when Mitch McConnell stated t...

A note from a fourth grader. It's my favorite moment in one of my favorite movies: her work completed, the Banks family restored, Mary Poppins is just about to take off when the parrot head on her magic umbrella calls her out, chiding her for not acknowledging her own feelings, particularly jealousy of the father the children love more than their nanny. She responds that that's as it should be, and that "practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking." I don't consider myself perfect, or even practically perfect. The most Methodist thing about me is my fundamental awareness of just how flawed I am. I've spent the last year having this driven home to me again and again as I've struggled to hang onto a job that was rejecting me. This was most true in my work with an especially recalcitrant bunch of fifth grade boys whose collective goal in music class was to get me to explode. I tried strategy after strategy, and none of ...

The only one not having a good time at my own party--or am I? No, I'm not. The question was rhetorical. If you guessed I wasn't enjoying myself, you guessed right--but you had an equal chance of guessing wrong. As I've been pointing out in my recents posts, it can be very hard to know what I'm thinking or feeling from the stoic expression on my face. I don't wear my feelings on my sleeve, or anywhere else on my body. That doesn't make them any less real, though. In fact, in this photo, it's not that I was having a bad time, despite the best efforts of my parents and brothers. (That cake would've been my favorite, angel food with seven-minute frosting, and there's a good chance those candles were the joke candles that were hard to blow out--my parents had a thing for them in the early 1980s.) The truth is--and I remember this very well--that I was grieving a relationship that was never going to be what I wanted it to be. Just a few days...

March 24, 1982: my 21st birthday party, and everyone else was having a better time than I appeared to be having. I occupy an extremely particular nook of the spectrum. Fifteen years and approximately 4000 students into my career as a music teacher, I've met and taught students from across the spectrum, from those so high functioning their autism presents as only a mild quirkiness to nonverbal children who express themselves through screams. In that time, I've rarely met any child who more than superficially reminded me of myself. Occasionally, there's an exception. There's a fifth grade boy at my current school whose single-minded enthusiasm for Harry Potter comes across as slightly obsessive, and who becomes deeply upset with his misbehaving classmates. I feel a real kinship with this well-meaning, nerdy kid, and imagine I probably came across the same way to my teachers when I was his age. However disturbed he feels at his peers' disrespectful attitu...

Even at 2, I didn't know how to smile for a camera--unlike my 6-month-old little brother. If the concept of an "autism spectrum" had existed in 1961, I would've been tagged with it then. Wait a minute--weren't you born in 1961? Why yes, I was. And from the beginning, I was different. To be clear, there are plenty of baby pictures of me smiling, even laughing. Although first-born child photography of the 1960s was limited by the cost of buying and processing film, there are still plenty of stills, slides, and even some 8mm movies of my tender years. It's what young parents do. And there are occasional candid smiles coming from my little face. In posed pictures, though, from the moment I became aware that cameras existed, my teeth stopped showing. The corners of my mouth might turn up a bit, but that was it. More significant were the silent tears. When I was hurt, frustrated, angry, sad, I wouldn't wail. Tears would roll down my cheeks...