Midlife Meditation

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 ...

I spent ten years working toward the moment chronicled in this photograph, my ordination as an elder of the United Methodist Church. I was in the midst of my first divorce, so instead of my wife standing with me, it was my daughter Sarah, six years old and just out of kindergarten. My father was one of two elders I chose to lay hands on me, the other being my mentor, Ernie Bell. My brother Jonathan was ordained a deacon at the same service. I worked hard to get to this moment. I relocated to Dallas to attend seminary, to rural Illinois and suburban England to hone my skills, sweated over volumes of theology, wrote reams of papers, marched myself into hospitals, nursing homes, and living rooms, forced myself to learn new skills for dealing with people passing through the highs, lows, and far-more-frequent mundane middles of life. I taught myself to leave my sermon manuscript in the car, on the computer, and ultimately, not even to write it out, because I knew that I, as a congre...