Midlife Meditation

Nothing illustrates a point like a personal story. A personal story make an indelible impact on the listener, lingering long after whatever point was being made has faded. The more personal the story, the deeper it worms its way into the listener's psyche, until just the hearing of the story is a powerful personal experience that cannot be forgotten. It could be argued, in fact, that stories so overwhelm arguments that they do them a disservice, that to tell a story is to guarantee that whatever it is illustrating will be lost. To illustrate this point, I have (no irony intended) several personal stories about hearing personal stories--and also about telling them myself. All of them were heard during sermons, and in almost none of these cases can I remember what the sermon was actually about. First story: sometime between 1982 and 1986, my father preached a sermon at the Monroe United Methodist Church during which he told a story about a young college student having a c...

There's a lot of irony to this picture, and especially to where I found it: an anti-Obama blog accusing him of heading a cult of personality. There are at least two problems with that notion: first, apart from his speeches, Barack Obama has demonstrated in the first four and a half years of his presidency that he is, if anything, less charismatic than his predecessor. Second, Superman is, of all superheroes, the one demonstrating the least personality charisma. Try having a conversation with him, and you discover in no time at all that, like Obama, he's very impressive in what he does with the powers he has, but schmoozing is not one of them. For a person to be the center of a cult of personality, he or she must, in fact, have a personality. Powerful speeches or a rocking physique do not generate a cult. Having a personal touch, making people feel like you're addressing them individually, that you really do feel their pain and care deeply about alleviating it, and d...