Author: dudley

While stumbling down many stardust paths since heaven knows when, several life-changing quests have led me up many mountains and down several rabbit holes. Musical movies planted seeds in my psyche and soul many miles back, and I’ve never been able to shake their impacts on how I see the world. The Wizard of Oz put me on the yellow brick road for a spell, where Dorothy and I were “always chasing rainbows, watching clouds drifting by…waiting to find a bluebird in vain…” But thanks to our dear special needs friends, we kept going until we found our Emerald City […]

Picture the first Thanksgiving in that poetic pose we’ve always imagined with freshly arrived Pilgrims and the original American patriots sitting around a bountiful table with turkey, dressing and all the trimmings. I wonder if they burst into a round of “This land is your land; this land is my land” or did the natives find it hard to imagine who these pale faces were and what language they were speaking. Did they wonder about what the lack of immigration laws would do to their peaceful lives so in tune with the land that belonged to all of the people. […]

Fresh out of seminary and into a small-town congregation, I decided to add altruism to Halloween. This was the late 1960’s, and we gathered all the children to go together in small groups of masked missionaries armed with their little collection boxes in quest of alms for UNICEF [United Nations Children’s Fund]. The one memory that stood out from that evening was the question a little child posed at the end of this worthy endeavor: “What’s a communist?” When I asked why she wanted to know, she said that a certain household closed the door and told her that they […]

Church signs have always intrigued me and helped me ponder the eternal question of who could think up that stuff? How about this one: “God recycles and all of us came from dust” [think stardust]. One of my favorite signs is “If God had a wallet, would your picture be in it?” For what seems like forever, Capital One has been pushing their credit cards by asking “What’s in your wallet?”. Or maybe you get those very personal letters like I do: “Dear William Dudley Crawford, did you know that you already qualify for $10,000 credit? By simply completing the […]

Remember the good old days when we used to wonder if our children could ever pray again in school? The bumper sticker campaign that had emerged every now and then was “Kids Need to Pray”. The drivers of such vehicles fervently believed that the American God listed on our dollar bills as in whom we trust, was anxiously waiting for school prayers to earnestly begin each school day, along with the pledge of allegiance to the flag. We added “under God” to that pledge in 1954 to cover all bets. When I was a kid in the 50’s, I prayed […]

We have had immigration issues since heaven knows when, but it began when those white European invaders started taking over native American lands in order to bring in slaves from Africa to see if capitalism would work with free labor. The art of the treaty was used to bring about this change, and military power was used to ratify everything. The Doak’s Stand Treaty was invented in my part of Mississippi in 1820 and served as good example of how great a deal this was for the Choctaw tribes whose land was about to be had for plantations. They were […]

Most of us have grown accustomed to utilizing masks to prevent the spread of this crazy and careless Covid19 virus. We have seen the science and understand that vaccines and masking really do the job in bringing down those morbid statistics. And if more of us would live by these gracious truths, we could save more of us from death. But the proverbial fly has landed in this ointment of cure. The devil in disguise this time is the politics of misinformation. I try to be considerate of others and wear my mask in most public buildings like the post […]