Midlife Meditation

These are not my students, but they're doing something you can see my students doing almost any day of the week. If church is the medium, the place and structure upon which and within which we exist as spiritual beings, then religion is what we do within that medium. That was not an easy definition to write. Like many Americans my age and younger, I've had a love-hate relationship with the word religion, trending more toward hate in the last decade or two. Post-War (World War II, that is) children have increasingly moved away from the clearly defined religion of our parents and grandparents, seeking less institutionalism, less dogmatism, less formality, less pomp, less structure, less of everything we were taught to respect as children. We shy away from titles, resist authority, eschew decoration. We long for freedom, intimacy, inspiration, and we find none of these in the stern, hushed gatherings our elders preferred, where we were expected to be seen but not heard. ...

,  I did some of my best ministry in this church, but it was never really mine. "Journalism is my church, reporting is my religion." --Jose Antonio Vargas on the Slate Magazine podcast The Gist , Tuesday, February 24, 2015. "The Lord works in mischievous ways, his blunders to perform." --William Power, Professor of Biblical Literature, Perkins School of Theology, c. 1986. Some people seem to know who they're meant to be from birth. Some have to wait until high school or college for the spirit to move them in the right direction, to hear the call of their true vocation, but once they've got it, they're happy to spend the rest of their working lives answering that call. And then there are those of us for whom the whole vocation thing is a ridiculous 5000 piece puzzle that takes us most of our lives to put together. In case you haven't figured it out over the last 300+ blog posts, I'm in the last category. In high school, ...

Of course young me can't just take the advice of old me lying down. Even though at 22 my tendency was to be far more respectful of authority than most young adults I meet, by the time I reached my early 30s, that had worn off. When it comes to insolence, I was a late bloomer, but bloom I did. And when I talked back, I did so with all the rhetorical powers I had honed as a preacher, taking on whomever I was pissed at point by point, not stopping until I had immersed every argument a would-be mentor might make in a bath of boiling logical scorn. So now, without further ado, I project myself back nineteen years. Young Mark holds in his hands a letter from the future filled with the typical platitudinous valedictory advice middle-aged men cannot help dishing out to adults young enough to be their sons and daughters. He pores over it, highlights flimsy arguments, feels his blood boiling at the Hallmark Graduation Book quality of the thing. He sets it beside his keyboard--it...

Did I mention I like Star Trek ? Welcome to Sisko's Creole Kitchen, an establishment that epitomizes the economics of the 24th century, when technological innovations work hand-in-hand with fully enlightened attitudes toward work and leisure to liberate human beings from wage slavery. People are no longer locked into drudgery by the need to earn a living wage, for all essential human needs are provided by society. Money is a dim memory, as anything one wants or needs can be instantly replicated. Individuals are freed up to follow their true vocations, whether that means enlisting in Star Fleet to explore the galaxy or opening a five-star restaurant in New Orleans. This doesn't mean that anyone can just do exactly what he or she wants. Joseph Sisko, I assume, prefers serving authentic dishes made from scratch, rather than replicated to identical perfection, which means someone still has to catch the crabs for his kitchen, and someone else has to cook it. I expect there...

December 30, 1999: the day I discovered my favorite place on earth. The occasion was my second post-divorce retreat to the desert. In December 1995, I drove to Utah to tour the national parks, something I had wanted to do throughout my first marriage but had never been able to interest my wife in. As luck would have it, though, that trip coincided with the Clinton/Congress budget standoff, and all the national parks were closed. I was able to see parts of a few, but only if they were visible from the highway (Capitol Reef, Zion, and on my way home through California, Death Valley). Within days of my second marriage ending, I knew I would repeat the odyssey, and this time I'd see Arches. On New Year's Eve, I made it. I only had one short winter day to see as much of it as I could. In term of size, Arches is actually one of the smaller western parks. It's possible to see most of the highlights in a single day, and I set about doing just that, visiting Park Avenue, the B...