Proper Presbyterian protocol demanded that I be brought up in the “nurture and admonition” of the church. In my case, they had to go heavy on the “admonition”. One of the tools employed in my indoctrination was the Westminster Catechism, beginning with the Children’s edition which asked “What else did God give Adam and Eve beside a body?” Answer: “God gave them souls that will never die.” [Remember, they did not have belly buttons!] Question 19: “Have you a soul as well as a body? Answer: Yes, I have a soul that will never die.” As Answer 20 and the […]
The Contagious Catch of Curiosity
Magicians were few and far between during my sordid youth, but I’ll never forget the magic spell they cast on me and the others in their audience. White rabbits were extracted from black hats. Some beautiful lady was sawn in half. A volunteer just disappeared right before our eyes. Slight of hands made card decks do wonders. It would take days to unscramble all that hocus pocus of the curious magician on our school stage. Certain human attributes are both helpful and hurtful. Like a magnet, they seem to have two poles: one positive and the other negative. Or, perhaps […]
The Summer of Our Discontent
Written in 1961, the title of John Steinbeck’s final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, was based on a term from Shakespeare’s play about Richard III. The story mainly concerns Ethan Allen Hawley, a former member of Long Island‘s aristocratic class. Ethan’s late father lost the family fortune, and thus Ethan works as a grocery store clerk which is exactly what I was doing in my freshman year in college to make ends meet while reading the Steinbeck novel each evening. The continuous calamities within the book’s plot made my life seem more like Shangri-La and gave me a perspective on […]
A Prayer for Growing Older
I have always lived on a wing and a prayer without ever believing that prayer changes God’s mind or much of anything else. The first prayer I can remember was the “blessing” at every meal: “Bless this food to our use and us to Thy service. Amen” Never could figure out such words that were repeated each and every day no matter the menu. The scariest prayer I learned as a child was that bedtime ditty: “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray […]
Let’s Take a Quick Break
For the past two years and some change, you have been faithful participants in stumbling over the stardust of this blog, and I am grateful for your consistent companionship. Most of you have read the 121 issues, and your interest has created the kind of synergy a writer needs to keep up the pace. Even so, there comes a time when the best laid plans of mice and old ministers just need to take a break. This good old summertime seems like just the occasion for such laziness on both our parts. When you’ve sailed your boat through many waters, […]
No More Communion for You!
All of this hullabaloo about withholding communion from the President until he yields to the pressure of Catholic bishops on the abortion issue reminds me of Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi. Throw in Galileo’s house arrest for daring to question the authority of the church’s five thousand year old flat earth or Martin Luther’s heresy trials for questioning indulgences, and you have the makings for the most imperfect tempest in a teapot. And don’t forget how the church and the empire started a mutual back-scratching thing during Constantine’s time or when Henry VIII needed a handy divorce so he became the head […]
Without Malice for Absence
There’s a wonderful country and western song entitled “How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away?” The sentiments expressed in that one are similar to Jimmy Buffet’s “If the Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’s Me.” These are musical ways of negatively expressing that marvelous maxim about absence making the heart grow fonder. Over the past year or so, absence has become quite commonplace. During the depths of Covid time, I remember how much I missed seeing the people who would otherwise gather every Sunday in the sanctuary for worship if the medical establishment and the responsible government agencies had […]
Be Kind to God Week
Once a year the little Methodist college I attended used to have what was called “Religious Emphasis Week”, which some of us more cynical students referred to as “be kind to God week”. With some reluctance, we went to chapel religiously for a whole week. I’m not sure how much God may have appreciated our perfect attendance. Seems like there’s a month or a day for everything under the sun. April brought us Earth Day and Arbor Day. Memorial Day and Labor Day are called the “bookends of the summer”. Just this week Congress officially made Juneteenth a national holiday. […]
Around the World in Sixty Minutes
Before television and internet, someone had to bear the burden of delivering the news hot off the press to folk in my little town. Paper boys would gather with their big-basket bicycles early every morning at the bus station to receive their route bundles. We would sit on the curbs and roll each edition with a rubber band or fold them into a flat square which would sail better when thrown from bike to porch. I hand tossed the “Clarion Ledger” each and every morning, come rain or shine, and finished in just about an hour. At the time I didn’t […]
How Critical Is Your Racial Theory?
Our local school board is fighting tooth and nail over an issue that most of us thought was gone with the wind. However, some of the throw backs among us believe that they should take some sort of imaginary last stand against godless communism threatening our wonderful white way of life. When you dissect this weird phenomenon, it’s nothing but a head trip to avoid what the heart knows as a “little white lie” to a bigger truth about the mistreatment of African Americans since they arrived on these shores in the chains of chattel slavery to bolster plantation capitalism […]