Midlife Meditation

Just how good can that place be? Requisite spoiler alert: if you haven't watched the ultimate (a word I rarely use, but it definitely applies here) sitcom The Good Place , but intend to (and why wouldn't you? It's ultimate!), and would rather not have any of its many wonderful twists and insights revealed prior to watching it, stop reading now, and come back once you're through it. Skipping commercials, it'll take you a little over eighteen hours. I believe that's time well spent. To make sure you don't accidentally glimpse a spoiler, I'll spend the next few paragraphs not  writing explicitly about The Good Place. As a young child, I had a shaky belief in Heaven as an afterlife in the clouds. Good people went there after they died. I didn't outfit this special place with any architecture or landscaping. I just imagined it was nice and restful. I liked to think of the grandparents I never met being up there, smiling down at me. As I gre...

On the list of ideas that aren't new is graphics depicting human development from infant to elder. Just Google it. What has been is what will be,      and what has been done is what will be done;      there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9) Newness is the burden of youth. (Me) I can remember having the illusion of originality. I had it as a musician, a writer, a seminarian, a preacher: the sense that what I was doing was new, unique, never before created or experienced. This song I was writing was unlike anything ever composed before, this sermon was looking at this verse from a brand new angle, this editorial was revealing the truth that no one had ever put in words before, this paper was synthesizing theology and aesthetics as no thinker ever had. And as far as my own knowledge was concerned, I was right about these things: I had never encountered these ideas before. At times, the reception to what I had created s...