Midlife Meditation

Just one of the many things I've had enough of: Calvary. I've had my fill. Sunday morning was Easter, the day around which the Christian year revolves. In the ancient church, every Sunday was supposed to be a little Easter, and Easter itself was, well, the big Easter. Most churches have allowed the Easter to seep out of the other 51 Sundays, but all of them still make a big deal about the Sunday that is above all other Sundays. Anyway, I went to church on Sunday, as I have every Easter Sunday of my entire life. I went to sit with my recently widowed mother because, quite understandably, it wasn't easy for her to be their by herself. My father (as you know already if you've spent any time at all reading my previous posts) was a United Methodist minister, so being in church without him was a hard thing for her. For my part, I'm a former minister myself. I've also been a church musician for more years than I was a minister. When I wasn't prea...

"Superman is what I can do. Clark is who I am." It took Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman  two years to get to the great reveal, when Lois Lane was confronted, by a time-traveling supervillain, with a truth she had been denying herself from the beginning: the dweeby co-worker she liked but could not love was the same man as the hunky hero she adored. Put in context, it's comic-book ridiculous; by itself, it's a profound insight that hit me like a Kryptonian punch in the gut. To add insult to injury, I watched this scene play out on TV as I was in the midst of an identity-shredding divorce. The conundrum of doing versus being is as ancient as human thought: how much of me is in my actions? Am I what I do? To others, there is no other way to know me; and yet, to the extent that my actions are inconsistent with my self-concept, the me they know is not the me I know myself to be. It's a conundrum for Clark Kent/Superman, too: Clark is a...

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...