Midlife Meditation

One of thousands of Trump Troll images I Googled. It took just over six months for President Trump to fulfill the destiny foretold for him by generations of necromancers, seers, and pundits: utterly ignoring his printed talking points (which were about opioid addiction), in total disregard for the criticisms he had levied against his predecessor for drawing lines in the sand and then not acting on them, Trump promised to exercise the literal nuclear option if North Korean dictator Kim Jung-Un makes any more threats of his own. Within hours, Kim called Trump's bluff, threatening to attack Guam, the American territory closest to North Korea's missile launchers. Thus begins the Trumpocalypse. All through the campaign, we joked about it. Slate Magazine summarized the speculations in its "Trump Apocalypse Watch," issuing a daily estimate on a scale of one to four horsemen of "how likely it is that Donald Trump will be elected president, thus triggering ...

  I didn't set out to be an internet troll.   It was early in 2007, years before I even encountered the term. I was music director of a large (by Northwest standards) United Methodist congregation in Vancouver, Washington, supplementing the income from my 0.8 FTE job teaching music in Hood River. Between those two jobs, I was on the road a lot. Early on, there were grumblings in the church that I wasn't doing enough "contemporary music" during the early service. It soon became clear to me that what these peoples meant by "contemporary" was Praise music, a form of simplistic, rock-flavored worship music that is heavy on praise (hence the name) and light on everything else. You won't get much theology from a praise chorus. You may get the feeling that the hymnal has been chucked in favor of the religious rack at Hallmark. Despite the word "contemporary," the musical style of this music is usually about 15-20 years behind curr...