Midlife Meditation

I knew I wanted an opening image that combined the American flag with a Bible, but until I googled it, I had no idea something this perfect existed. Yes, this is a thing. It's available on Amazon. It's not just Bible wrapped in a flag cover, mind you: it's the God's Glory Bible , and it's the King James Version (known in Britain as the Authorized Version), so it's all written in the language of the empire the creators of that flag revolted against. And all that irony is, I suspect, completely lost on the people who will plunk down $39.99 to own it. I googled the image because I've had a Trumped-up controversy on my mind. I've already written (was it really just seven weeks ago? Seems much longer...) about the Trumped-up controversy around NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem , and I thought I'd said all I needed to at the time. But then I spent four days in Texas, and it all came flooding back: the three years I spent tread...

From top to bottom: the Stars and Stripes, the South Carolina state flag, and the Confederate battle flag. The picture was taken in 2000, just before the battle flag was removed from the state capitol's flag pole. I struggle with flags. I learned flag reverence as a Boy Scout: how to present it, salute it, retire it, fold it and, when use had rendered it too tattered to respectfully display, how to burn it. The only proper way to wear the stars and stripes, I learned, was as a shoulder patch. To this day, seeing flags worn as articles of clothing troubles me. I'm aware that other cultures have different customs regarding their flags--the British, in particular, seem find with Union Jack underwear, hot pants, bikinis, etc.--but even so, seeing any flag displayed for purposes of ridicule, amusement, titillation, or symbolic disrespect gives me pause. I'm the same way with any symbol that has meaning to a group of people: seeing it desecrated troubles me. And yet,...

Terror is a wonderful aid to memory. I mostly loved eighth grade US History. On day one of the class, Mr. LaFordge introduced himself with a clever current events joke, pointing out his name should be easy to remember, since it contained (and after writing it on the board, he underlined) "Ford," the name of our brand new (he'd been sworn in, following Nixon's resignation, just two weeks earlier) President. He then passed out our brand new textbooks, and I had the delightful experience of being the first person to crack mine open, luxuriating in the smell of virgin paper and ink. It was going to be a wonderful year, I thought. That feeling lasted--in this class, anyway--until we wrapped up the unit on the Revolutionary War, and began learning about the Constitution. The final exam on this unit was to be an oral recitation, from memory, in front of the entire class, of the Preamble. Yes, that's the same text that Oprah Winfrey's character recites at...

Last week, driving through Washington state, I saw this bumper sticker: My first reaction was anger. I remember well how, following the 9/11 attacks, my country went insane with bloodlust. We wanted desperately to find someone, anyone, responsible and teach those monsters a lesson. We wanted to bomb their camps, invade their countries, obliterate every human being who was in any way involved with any organization that might have had something to do with this attack on America. And when rooting out the actual terrorists proved more difficult than we'd bargained for, and capturing the mastermind of the atrocity an elusive goal that was to prove, for more than a decade, unattainable, we found a different target, and rained down our fury on Iraq, a country that had had nothing at all to do with the attack, but did have a real jerk for a president. Just to be clear: for all the empathy I may have felt for that reaction, I opposed it. I was living in a community called the Pe...

Wow. There is a lot of bad God art on the internet. Look through this blog, and you'll notice that I try to put an arresting image at the top of every post. For this one, I wanted something other than the typical old but virile white guy to represent God. I briefly considered a blue, flute-playing Krishna (nice to see God playing the flute), but Hindu art always feels schlocky to me. The same is true of most Christian art, by the way; I'm an equal-opportunity snob when it comes to religious iconography. In any case, I do like to think that, if God were to pick a contemporary human face, it would be that of Morgan Freeman, so here he is: Writing this blog has brought out the frustrated theologian in me, and I've gone on at length about a wide variety of theological problems. Today I'm going to tackle idolatry, in the sense of what makes a god obviously false. I will not be attempting to prove the reality of God (I'm no Schubert Ogden), but I will begin with my...