Midlife Meditation

I've had a lot of therapy. It's not something I'm embarrassed about. It's been an essential part of my adult development; without it, I'd be far from functional. Therapy has walked me through traumatic transitions in relationships and vocations, helped me understand where I come from and why I react to things in the ways I do. Most importantly, it's given me the freedom to choose how I will respond to situations that seem to threaten my well-being. As a young man, I often felt trapped by my personality. I'd be the lone introvert in a meeting, and because of my native shyness--what some of the retired farmers in my first church called "backwardness"--I could go for the entire meeting without saying a word. I didn't enjoy this. Often I had things to say, but I couldn't bring myself to interject them, to break the flow of the conversation, which seemed to naturally move from one extravert to another, with no room for me to insert my opin...

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...

This is me doing standup. I'm good with microphones. As a preacher, I learned to tell stories from my heart, to invite people into my inner pilgrimage and entice them to accompany me on my quest for awhile. During my second (and ultimately successful) attempt at ordination, several pastors came to observe me preaching a sermon. They took me out to lunch afterward, and one of them told me, "What you do is very powerful. Please use it for good." It gave me pause, made me think about Virgil Howard, one of my preaching models back in seminary, and a sermon he had delivered in the seminary chapel that was so revealing that, even as I was enthralled, I felt my skin crawl. I have wondered ever since if that sermon, however effective it was at delivering its message (I believe it was about overcoming fear), went too far, maybe even committed a kind of emotional assault. I preached revelatory sermons for many years, talking about my inner struggles, fears, inadequacies, using...