Midlife Meditation

When I was in nursery school (what they used to call preschool, back in the olden days), my favorite toy was a plastic Noah's ark, complete with plastic Noah, plastic Emzarah (Noah's wife), and two each plastic giraffes, plastic elephants, plastic lions, plastic tigers, plastic et cetera. When my own children were of preschool age (because that's what we called it in the not so olden days), they had their own plastic Noah's playset, though this one was bigger and cuter, probably made by Fisher Price or Playschool. I spent many a happy hour with mine, and my kids did with theirs, walking the animals up the ramp and onto the boat, floating it off in the air, perhaps even in the bathtub, never stopping to think about this: The artist's name is Flora Tucinovic, the title is "Accurate Noah's Ark," and it depicts quite well the part of the story that we don't tell our children, because it really is a horrible, ghastly, abominable tale of global genoci...

I'm thinking about buying a car. Actually, "thinking" may be too mild a word. "Obsessing" comes a bit closer. There's nothing in particular wrong with my current vehicle, a 2008 Hyundai Sonata. In the two years since I acquired it in a near-emergency (my Acura CL had had its second major breakdown, and I needed a reliable car for my then-new job of teaching band and choir at Banks High School), it has never given me a lick of trouble. I had an iPhone link cable put in, but apart from that, it came with everything I really need in a car. It even has a musical name, ideal for someone in my profession. It does have some niggling things that keep me from really liking it: a previous owner was a smoker, and on hot days when it's been shut up for awhile, there's a stale tobacco smell in the upholstery. It's the bare-bones model, no bells or whistles, just the most basic equipment. It doesn't get very good mileage. But these are really ...

  Here's a practice I'm not going to miss at all: the flowering cross. They come out on Easter, and I have wondered for years if the idea came from a florist. The sentimentality behind it is understandable: Easter is the celebration of the Resurrection, and it just happens to fall in early spring, so let's buy a bunch of cut flowers and decorate the cross with them! It's a popular custom, and typically the cameras come out after the service so people can take pictures of themselves in their Easter best, posing with the beautiful flowering cross. And I hate it. I always have. From the very beginning, I believed the cross should symbolize one thing: the death of Jesus. It actually does this best when there's a bloody corpse hanging from it, as can be found in many a Catholic church. But that imagery is deemed ghoulish by many, and probably properly so. It also teeters toward idolatry, which is why the Puritans removed it from Anglican c...

 A gay wedding presided over by a United Methodist Bishop? Can it be? Are the progressive leaders of the church finally putting their money where there mouths are, stepping up to the plate, diving into the deep end? Well--not quite. The symbolism of this wedding was significant. There have been same-gender weddings performed by Methodist clergy for decades. Some have even been out in the open, and have resulted in the pastors who presided over them being put on trial by the church. This is the first to be performed by a Bishop, who did so over the objection of the actual Bishop in charge of the Conference where the wedding took place. So it appears that Bishop Melvin Talbert was putting his career on the line, risking the highest-profile discipline yet meted out by the denomination, a church trial that could bust this issue wide open. Except for one thing: Bishop Talbert is retired. Which means there's little of real significance being put at risk. Bishop Talbert will no...

His name is Hank Green, and he's brilliant. He's a musician, entrepreneur, and vlogger (video logger) on many matters of importance. He creates short videos that run on YouTube and lay out well-reasoned arguments about such topics as the health care crisis, global warming, and human sexuality. I find him engaging, entertaining, informative, and unbearable. Yes, I said unbearable. I can't stand to watch his videos. The reason? He's edited out every single pause, every throat-clearing, every breath. Watching him for a few minutes, I find myself gasping, and not because of the startling things he says (though, as I said, I'm very impressed by his logic). It's the inhuman rapidity of what he's doing, the sense that he's got so much to say, and so little time to say it, that breathing is expendable. This is problematic. Humans breathe. That quality has shaped the way we communicate both information and feelings. Punctuation, sentence structure, grammar...

I've written thousands of words in this space about things I no longer believe, and why I have lost my faith in them. Ironically, my favorite part of the church service used to be the recitation of the creed. Methodism is not a creedal faith--the church has no official statement of beliefs (don't tell the conservative Good News lobby this unless you're up for a thumping of Biblical proportions)--but most Methodists spend a couple of minutes every Sunday speaking a creed in unison. Because none of them is official, there can be a different one each week. I liked the Apostles' Creed for its conciseness, and because I could say it from memory; and the Creed of the United Church of Canada for its contemporary social justice orientation. The Nicene Creed, on the other hand, felt like an exercise in dogmatics, which is exactly what it was intended to be from the beginning: a bureaucratic summary of those beliefs deemed essential to Roman Catholicism. For much of the histor...

Have you seen the light? Yes, that's James Brown in the academic robe favored by African-American preachers, and he's calling out the question to John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as the Blues brothers. It comes in the midst of a stirring rendition by Brown, a church choir, a backup band, and a company acrobatic fan-waving dancers of "The Old Landmark," a gospel standard that inspires the brothers to put their band back together to raise money to save the orphanage in which they were raised. The movie is The Blues Brothers , and it's a shaggy dog of a film stuffed with amazing R&B performances, car chases, celebrity cameos, and occasional blue language. It manages to respectfully poke fun at Catholicism, full gospel Protestantism, neo-Nazism, soul culture, blindness, prison life, government bureaucracy, law enforcement, homelessness, and probably several other politically dangerous topics more successfully than any other Hollywood movie I can think of. See it....