Midlife Meditation

Hawkeye loses it. Aw geez. There I go again. I was listening to NPR's Up First  podcast, a ten-minute early morning rundown of the top three stories of the day, and I found myself tearing up. It wasn't the latest example of the Trump regime exemplifying its ABE motto (Always Be Evil) that did me in this time, though that has happened in the past--forced parent-child separations? American citizens, born in this country, denied a passport because of their Mexican ancestry and their birthplace being south Texas? And there I go again...[sniff] No, this time it was two stories about the funerals of great Americans: John McCain and Aretha Franklin. Earlier this week, I listened to a Fresh Air that played interviews with McCain from 2000 and 2005, and hearing the sincere, idealistic voice of this wounded warrior, even as he explained policy positions I vehemently oppose, had my eyes misting up. And don't get me started on Aretha: I've had her music on a constant loo...

Just stay in this circle, and everything will be fine. "Okay, we get it, divorce hurts. Now can't you please cheer up for a change?" That's the message that finally drove me out of the ministry. As I've written more times in this space than I can remember, I never really belonged there in the first place. But I'd invested so much of my self--so much "blood and treasure," to borrow from language about the Iraq War--that I stubbornly refused to leave. Thanks to ministry, at the age of 38, I was now twice divorced, had no close friends, was always teetering on the brink of too much debt, and could only see my children by appointment. At least, I kept telling myself, I was working with people who cared, people who felt called to serve, to lift up the downtrodden, liberate the oppressed, blah de blah de blah. And then my senior pastor told me people were getting impatient with me for being sad. That's when I knew it was time to leave, and w...