Illusions, Delusions, and Downright Deceptions

As recently as this morning, January 24, 2026, anyone watching the morning news on CNN was able to witness the peaceful arrest of an anti-ice protestor in her apartment building. The interaction between the two groups was cordial, even genial as they laughed together about one officer who had fallen on the ice.

But then we witnessed an illusion in the form of an AI-generated photo of the same woman, now distraught and weeping as she was led away. That is the photo that the illusion machine of our government chose to feed us. Unreality, manufactured, engineered to portray a reality of their own choosing, for political gain as well as for dominance in what we are to believe.

 I recently returned to my copy of international reporter and correspondent, Chris Hedges’s brilliant Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009). His exploration of a series of illusions that comprise a different facet of this camouflage includes chapters like: “The Illusion of Literacy,” “The Illusion of Wisdom,” “The Illusion of Happiness” and “The Illusion of America.”

The inside of the dustjacket affirms: “A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies. And we are dying now.” While the gods of another earlier era, whose presences and powers supported a myth that proclaimed that the transcendent realm has validity and power, now in our current world invention, have been coopted by celebrities that ignore or disclaim the depth of the soul’s needs and yearnings.

“We all have gods,” Martin Luther said, “it is just a question of which ones.” In American society our gods are celebrities. Primitive urges remain alive and well sought after: “Those who can touch the celebrity or own a relic of the celebrity hope for a transference of celebrity power. They hope for magic” (p. 17).

The deep hunger for power for its own good is frantically pursued, but the form that political and corporate power assumes today is shoddy and shallow. Keeping life simple and simple-minded has become more pronounced since his book’s publication. “We are a culture,” Hedges writes, “that has been denied or has passively give up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from reality” (p. 44).

Is it any wonder today that the vocabulary of Trump is that of an 11-year-old, the product of an individual who does not read, cannot reflect, and who would deny or make up a narrative that has divorced itself from a shared reality. Such an itinerary is preferable because he lacks the ability to converse, to see others’ possibilities, and who follows the advice of his often-malignant sycophants. Their own malignant end is to make Americans’ lives less prosperous and more fear-driven.

The last chapter, “The Illusion of America,” affords readers an opportunity to measure Hedges’ America with our current condition. From his perspective he writes: “The country I live in today uses the same civic, patriotic, and historical language to describe itself, the same symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains” (p. 142). Hallowed out and exhausted, the myth as a corpse with no psychic energy—delineates the disease of a country which has grown more anemic as it struggles into 2026.

In addition, many of the most powerful corporate executives remain hidden; we don’t know the names of those who rule and who pull Trump’s strings. He dances like an intoxicated person with no direction except for what he is told. The entourage also includes world leaders’ intent on cashing in while the leader and nation are distracted by silliness, incompetence, and fake deadlines.

Hedges further flushes out business leaders whose “Corporate media control nearly everything we read, watch, or hear. It imposes bland uniformity of opinion. It diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. Friends and family members have told me that they tune into the news less than half the time now; they are fed up with being infantilized by nonsense to keep commerce flowing, goods devoured and ideas that have mushed into nasty porridge (my image).

Another of our nation’s most lucrative businesses is the defense industry traveling under the shop-worn idea of “national security.”  Hedges envisions it as a virus. “It destroys healthy economies. . .. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants yet struggle to find money for environmental studies. One of his sources, Seymour Mellman, “coined the term permanent war economy to describe the American economy.

His critique also extends to the insurance industry. “The attempt to create a health-care plan that also conciliates the corporations that profit from the misery and illnesses of tens of millions of American is naive at best, and probably disingenuous” (p. 155). We are today still stuck on Obama Care while millions of Americans have lost all or most coverage they once enjoyed as American citizens.

Millions of citizens have also lost the ability to purchase sufficient food. At Hedges’ writing, “There are now36.2 million Americans who cope daily with hunger, up by more than 3 million since 2000, according to the Food Research and Action Center in Washington” (p. 161). One can easily assume the number is far higher nationally and globally today

Even as I write this, our New Braunfels Food Bank as well as the San Antonio Food Bank are unable to stay up with the increasing numbers of folks who just want to get ingredients to make their own meals or food to feed themselves and their families. More than one commentator has described the United States in 2026 as akin to a Third World nation.

 One observer, “Joseph Schumpeter calls it ‘creative destruction[which]. . . is the essential fact about unfettered capitalism” (p. 186). Hedges then closes his exploration with this indictment: “Mass culture is a Peter Pan culture. It tells us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have faith in ourselves if we tell God that we believe in miracles. . . our lives will be harmonious and complete” (p. 190).

When alleged leaders increasingly capitulate to their own insatiable desires for money, power and prestige, more people are awakening to the sham and the shame of a country out of control and vulnerable to international forces.  

Some Post-Christmas Thoughts on Gift Giving

Published in the Herald-Zeitung on January 16, 2026

Now that we are at the end of the gift-giving season, I am reflecting on just what it means to give and to receive gifts. It might be good to reflect on the gifts we gave to others during the holidays, and the gifts we received. Not just the act of exchanging gifts, more of what the gifts themselves mean.

If we look at gifts from another angle: we are all gifted in our own way. Over time we may because of our own gifts be more willing to share them with others. A gift created by you for others has more intimate, creative energy than something store-bought; yet they too have their place.

We use or hear the phrase, “never look a gift horse in the mouth.” It suggests being grateful for a gift, no matter how small. We realize that a gift is shared freely, with affection. It makes me wonder what gifts I have not shared with others. Are there new ways to use my gifts to benefit others?

Years ago, I bought a book on a friend’s recommendation. Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. At well over 300 pages, it is a massive and deep exploration of the powers and paradoxes of gifts.

In a footnote, which is often more interesting than the main text, Hyde cites a French entomologist: “There is a.. . . medical usage in which [the Greek word] dosis denotes the act of giving, whence develops the sense of the amount of medicine given, a ‘dose.” Gifts may be given or received in the right dose, what dose we may need in specific circumstances.

Many have heard of individuals who have been prescribed an “overdose” of a medicine—physical, psychological, spiritual—to their detriment. When we are encouraged by circumstances to give an individual “a dose of his own medicine,” that can be seen as a gift of sorts because having a gift fall back on itself in this manner, may in fact transform the one in need of change.

Gifts have a powerful spiritual dimension attached to them. Hyde suggests that “when art acts as an agent of transformation, that we may correctly speak of it as a gift. In healthy cultures, as Hyde writes, “it will have spiritual teachings available at all levels of maturation and for the birth of the spiritual self.”

Some paradox is at work in what he adds: “Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude.” The result to complete the ritual of gift-giving is that “a gift is not fully realized until it is given away.” Some inner vitality is awakened “when we give away what has been received.” Life itself, the author believes, is gift-giving, taking care of the other.” We may also, in caring for others, give a gift of ourselves to ourselves.

n other words, a paradox of gifts is that they grow in value and transformation when given away to the recipient, which may in fact be us. Paradox opens us to mystery, which Hyde tracks. “The Greek word for mystery—muein--means to close the mouth; thus, what is learned cannot be said.”

This short exploration has taught me that at times a gift can be shared by allowing for silence. We might ask ourselves what gifts we have not yet shared or revealed to others. Enough said.      

Playing the Game: A Necessity for Civilization?

Often, when we ask ourselves what is the price we pay for something, we don’t ask what we play for, that is, the benefit, the necessity, the attraction, the frivolity in play? We are a nation, even a world which loves to play, or in many cases, to pay enormous amounts to enjoy watching others play.

I am curious about what ways each of us play. For me, writing is a form of playing—with ideas, with notions, which transcend the ordinary round of daily life, for satisfaction, even for identity. It is not too much to say that we identify ourselves by what and how we play; but not to play, to leave space for play, is to live a fractured life, for play is a necessity for our own development as well as the culture we take part in shaping.

A book I read years ago and have returned to as a guide on play is by Johan Huizinga: Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Originally published in German, it was translated into English by the author shortly before his death. He suggests play can be an effective way of knowing. Here we are speaking of play that goes beyond table tennis—though that too has its play space.

However, play can take us deeper into what we know so we can uncover what we don’t know. We can also hit periods in our life when we lose a sense of play; when this has happened to me, I felt an emptiness, a vacuum in part of my emotional life that play once nourished.

I have also had friends say that what they have been doing to “make a living” has grown dull and boring. One said to me: “I think I have played this job out.” Then what? Suffer through to retirement, to pension-land?; or to change, to risk, to play with options, to imagine, perhaps, what one has always wanted to do but the monster, “practicality,” inhibited it.

Perhaps we sell ourselves short when confronted by an obstacle, a “dead-end,” in life by attempting to find a solution through logic instead of a sense of play. In Karen Armstrong’s superb little book, A Short History of Myth, she writes that “play is a path to understanding, though perhaps obliquely, round-about, not head-on.” Perhaps seeing something or someone by indirection, playfully, might be more fruitful.

We should also remember, as you already know, that animals too have an instinct for play. Witnessing animals play with one another, with a ball of yarn, with a rubber bone that is thrown by a dog’s owner, is also entertaining and even joyful. We can also play by proxy.

Sorry for so many titles, but this next one by a medical doctor, Stuart Brown, is called Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. Early on he declares what we know: “you never really know what’s going to happen when you play,” adding that “play is the essence of freedom.”

Brown has learned from neurology that “play connects disparate maps in the brain.” Even more startlingly, he poses the question, “What difference does play make?” with a wondrous response: “The truth is that play seems to be one of the most advanced methods nature has invented to allow a complex brain to create itself” (my emphasis).

He then lists what is evoked in play: “anticipation, surprise, pleasure, understanding, strength and poise.” Play invigorates us to live a more fully satisfying life, when we lean into playing around with play.

Bored to Death?

Originally Published in the Herald-Zeitung, November 29-30, 2025

Generally speaking, it is not difficult for us to know when we feel the energy of joy, anger, anxiety, contentment, even happiness. But more recently, and from wherever it originated, I found a lengthy study entitled A Philosophy of Boredom by Lars Svendson, who wrote it in Norwegian in 1970 when he was 30. First published in 1999, it was translated into English in 2005.

Intrigued by the subject matter, I began reading it; at just under 200 pages, it has yet to bore me. Part of his questioning of this state or condition of mind and body was to ask: “What is boredom? How do we know when and if we feel it? We often recognize, for example, when we are frustrated or stuck in our lives, but boredom seems from his research less easily identifiable. Boredom’s presence can be a rather knotty problem.

Has boredom always been with us throughout history? Perhaps. I have learned to trust my responses to what I am reading, watching, hearing or thinking. I can’t be sure if what I experience at times can accurately be called “being bored.” I asked myself: What is it to be bored? Can I be bored and not know it? Can boredom saturate one’s life to such an extent that one is constantly in an emotional stew of boredom? What responses would you give to the above questions?

I also wonder if boredom can be a way each of us can be victimized by those forces that promise us—through a product or through persuasion—that they can liberate us from boredom?

If viewed from another lens, what feels like a constant increase in our cultural and political violence be a desperate and perhaps futile attempt to enliven one’s life with meaning and purpose? Or to escape the terrible inertia of violence that both distracts one as well as destroys one’s quality of life?

Svendson at one point suggests that “boredom and depression overlap.” Ok, but where does each of us draw the line in this overlap? Am I feeling bored or depressed? It seems to me important at least to entertain where that demarcation resides.

Even more interesting: Svendson cites several writers who believe that boredom “contributes to a great deal of evil.” Not unrelated, the author locates moments historical moments where the outbreak of some wars were heralded “by manifest joy, with euphoric crowds filling the streets, as if celebrating the fact that something has finally broken the monotony of everyday life.”

Yet, on a day-to-day level, so many of us, and I count myself in this category—where one is not immune in moments of  life, when we are easily distracted because the present moment is not reflected upon and appreciated in its ordinary mystery. Can we become bored by not caring for the deeper strata of our lives, one in which spirit and soul need attention and cultivation. Is feeling bored a calling, a vocation to return to the quality of our lives, not their quantity?

We may also succumb, as Svendson believes, that “boredom normally arises when we cannot do what we want to do or have to do something we don’t want to do. But what if we have no idea what we want to do? When we have lost the capacity to get our bearings in life?

We all live in a world packed to the rafters with distractions, of competing ideologies, beliefs, trends, fashions and fabrications demanding our attention. These alone are enough to bore us to death!

Letting Go: When is Enough?

Published in the Herald-Zeitung November 8, 2025

Well before entering my 80s, I thought with a bit more zeal, of what I feel a need to hang on to and what to discard. Such decisions can shift over time, but the more urgent question is: in what ways do clinging to what no longer serves not just me but others at any age, continue to burden us unnecessarily?

My favorite Franciscan writer, Father Richard Rohr’s collection in Yes, And. . . Daily Meditations, has given me further guard rails by which to discern what might be pushed beneath those rails because no longer necessary. But here is his twist: letting go is finally not about material items or even about emotional strictures that keep one ensconced in a small world of ego’s rage for control. Now, pushing it a bit, Rohr writes persuasively that letting go homes in on identities.  I had not thought before reading him, that we all might possess two identities.

First, “Your little self that appears to be visible here and takes itself so seriously is merely a relative identity (whether good or bad; it is not your absolute identity that you are eternally, in God.” Then the conversation becomes thicker  when he weaves several traditions of thought together: “The Buddhist idea of letting go of your attachment to your relative identity is almost identical to Jesus’s teaching of dying to yourself (or even “renouncing the self,” as in Mark 8:34).”

What is my responsibility, then, towards what I have decided to let go of? Can I answer the question: “What difference will it make?” Shall I also consider the effect it might have on others as a result of jettisoning it from my small world that cries for enlargement, for more spaciousness? Even for greater authenticity? The clock is ticking, after all!

Rohr cites Jesus’s own thinking here about “the self that must die. Go ahead and let it die, and then you will be free.” The freedom he speaks of is the one formed by becoming a part of a larger spiritual and social community that supports you and gains support from you. Perhaps culturally we have put too much emphasis on individualism, Rohr suggests, which “has made an art form of the individual person.” But what did we let go of in its service?

Reaching a level of consciousness where one sees themselves as one is and not a fantasy of what one thinks they are an provides an instance of true knowledge. Learning deepens when we notice and accept those traits in ourselves that have been denied, or we have been deluded into thinking are not real, but then not to be hostile to them but embrace them with full acceptance. Better, as Rohr encourages, turn them over to God. Being deeply transformed through both letting go and fully accepting are spiritual experiences at their core, for they rely on forgiveness. “Those who receive forgiveness can pass it on.” Now one’s individual world has expanded through an act of grace that unites us in community with others

This art form of letting go is given insightful language at the end of his meditations on this creative act: “What comes around will also go around. The art of letting go is really the secret of happiness and freedom.”

First discerning, then being willing to surrender what needs shedding, can bring us around to gaining what might not have been given its due until now: the secret.

Sensing Animal Presences

Published in the Herald-Zeitung, September 12, 2025

How often do we think about the animals in our lives, in our surroundings and in the broader world in which we move daily? On some level, they are ubiquitous. Animals infiltrate our dreams, our language, our own behavior in metaphors, symbols, and in our formed images of the natural order. We also as a culture slaughter them, garage them in cages, zoos, kennels as well as disrespect many species by raising them in often abominable conditions for food.

Something in animals 'natures’ mirror our own vital animal being, our instinctive lives as well as our sense of the world through five bodily senses in the way we sniff around, adopt an eagle eye in negotiations, become catty toward those we are not fond of, horse around when boundaries weaken,  or stay as consistently busy as a beaver.

When a beloved pet of long-standing dies, owners often mourn for months or years over their loss. In my own case, my wife and I adopted a Ginger cat when he showed up at our front door one morning over three years ago. Ginger has become a fully-fledged family member; losing him would deeply wound my wife and me.

In an impressive "Book of Symbols," a substantial portion of the 800 page book is devoted to "The Animal World." One of their gifts is that animals reconnect us back to the symbolic order of being. Nations as well often adopt a particular animal as a symbol to promote their identity and core values, what some have called that nation's collective myth. We in our country have adopted the eagle, which appears on our currency. The Russian bear is known around the world, while the salmon marks the Alaskan frontier. Of the four evangelists, three are represented by animals: Mark by a lion, Luke by an ox, and John by an eagle.

In primal times it was believed that animals embodied a wisdom, a way of understanding and “sensing” the world that allowed them to be our mentors, guides, and sources of original knowledge.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell offers this insight about the animal and our own embodiment: “Biologically, in what theologians call our animal nature, we are as deeply grounded as the animals themselves moved and motivated from within by energies” (The Way of the Animal Powers, vol. 1).

Some years ago, during a four-month retreat at various monasteries in California, Washington and Oregon, I noticed how much animals were part of the landscape. At the Carmelite House of Prayer in Napa Valley, Rusty, their German Shepherd mascot, would wait outside my dormitory door and guide me to morning service; he waited for me each day to walk me back to my room. He was old and wise. I saw it in his eyes and in his majestically-wrinkled forehead.

When in the evening I sat on a bench next to the fishpond for a few minutes, he would suddenly and silently materialize next to me and put his large head on my lap. I found that his presence enhanced my solitude rather than interrupted it. He was well-schooled in the Rule of St. Benedict; Rusty’s calm, compassionate eyes would calm my loneliness at being away from home for so long.

I end with a meditation: Describe where and when in your life an animal has played a major role in who you are. You may be surprised at what you discover.

Blaming and Shaming: Ways to Camouflage Imperfections

Published in the Herald-Zeitung, June 27, 2025

Lately my wife and I have returned to a series we watched decades ago: All in the Family, starring Carroll O’Connor, Jean Stapleton, Sally Struthers and Rob Reiner, which ran for nine seasons (1971-79). While it is always comic in presentation, each episode takes on a cultural shift or exposes an issue like racism, sexism, women in the workplace, scammers, arrogance, or rigid ideological bigotry.

Archie, the often-unconscious patriarch, blames his sweet and loving wife, Edith, for anything and everything that goes awry. She often fails to measure up to his despotic and intolerant standards.

Even when he commits outrageous blunders, he quickly discovers a way to twist it into Edith’s failings as a wife, mother or her own person. Yet even though his belittling responses are repetitious through each show, Edith rises above it all through her feelings of compassion for him, whom she loves dearly.

Sandy and I have asked ourselves: why is it that some individuals, even nations, default to blaming others, when so often the origin of the prickly disagreement emanates from the blaming nation?

Closer to home, I ask myself where the impulse to blame others—a family member I love, a person in traffic, indeed any situation where I find the knee-jerk response to blame someone else for something I brought on and nursed mightily?

Is this ancient impulse in our shared humanity a yearning to make life conform to my version of it? Is blaming others our futile desire—even obsession—to assume what is, is imperfect and needs to be made “right”?

Finally, might there be an alternative way of thinking that insists on abundant courage to reflect what is imperfect in us?

In Buddhist writer, Pema Chodron’s best-selling book, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (2000), which I’m rereading, she offers this insight: “We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who’s right and who’s wrong.”

What is assumed here is that these two choices are all we must choose from when we blame, which, she suggests, “is a way in which we solidify ourselves.” We gather firm ground beneath our feet through blaming.

On the practical level, blaming the other has reached the level of a contact sport, but it hardly follows a sports code where the opposition is treated with integrity.

Blaming has in many cases become a vicious attack on those who think or feel differently than us, and how blame paralyzes both positions, right and wrong. Feeling that we must be right at all costs can quickly erupt into anger, rage, violence and even death of the other.

Blame is now used more frequently to assassinate others, both literally and figuratively. So many individuals today grieve for having been labelled “to blame.”

Chodron introduces a third option: “the middle way.” Attempting this way involves not hanging on to our crafted version so tightly. “It involves keeping our hearts and minds open to entertain the idea that when we make things wrong, we do it. . .to obtain some kind of good on society.”

Yet blame often creates an enemy out of another’s beliefs that rub abrasively against our own. The middle way allows the option for the other to be partly right, partly wrong; the real point here is that they are allowed to be more fully the person that is more like us than an alien.

Spring Scholarship Social 2025: A Ceremony of Hope

Published in the Herald-Zeitung May 13, 2025

On Tuesday evening, May 6th. my wife and I attended the Scholarship Awards ceremony at the Mckenna Center in New Braunfels for the third year in a row. It was my third year as a member of the evaluating team under the superb leadership of Betty Taylor of the New Braunfels Community Foundation, which is now in its 11th year of awarding scholarships.

For the past few months some 60 evaluators have been reviewing applicants, primarily from high school seniors applying for a host of scholarships created by various businesses and organizations. One of the joys of evaluating the applicants is getting to know this group of promising, accomplished, and successful young individuals who we might otherwise never meet.

When we joined other evaluators, recipients, and their family and friends for a buffet meal before the awards ceremony began, we would find a table  with recipients and their families so we could learn more about them, their goals and  aspirations. Each year the atmosphere is always upbeat, joyful, and expectant, full of hope. Gathered here were those selected to receive financial help to pay for their schooling in the fall.

All these talented individuals revealed in their application how they have and continue to contribute to both the high schools they are ready to graduate from as well as how they have served the larger community through volunteer work as well as employment that would ease their financial burden in their next adventure.

Two large screens identified each winner’s name, what scholarship they received, a list of additional scholarships they had been awarded, what school they chose, as well as their major field of study.  Betty Taylor, who directs candidates to each of us evaluators, asked us to stand and be recognized; then followed recognition of each scholarship recipient in turn who was applauded as they approached the stage to accept their scholarship and enjoy a photo-op.

I jotted down a sample of areas of study that awardees had chosen to pursue at a college, university, technical, or trade school: Engineering, History, Entrepreneurship, Aviation, Automotive and Repair Technology, Architecture and Planning, Social Studies and Veterinary specialties.

 As an evaluator, each of us read the files distributed to us and assigned points to each category. We learned the statistics about grades, their ranking in class and what they have contributed to their school that revealed special recognition, as well as what they have been able to contribute to the larger community. How they accomplished so much while maintaining an impressive academic level of achievement, is testimony to their character.

One of the essays they are asked to write is one in which the candidate describes a situation in which they overcame adversity in their lives. Their stories contain events of loss of loved ones, illness, shyness, feelings of not being worthy; yet they persevered, most often with the help of someone who stepped up to mentor them, who saw who they were and guided them with loving support on their journey. Their resourcefulness kept them from giving up or accepting defeat. Many of them became mentors to others because they knew what a classmate or friend was suffering through. They were once in a similar trauma themselves.

The evening ended with a group photo of all the recipients. My wife and I left with that image of communal talents and gifts gathered in such solidarity with one another.

Finally, I want to acknowledge all those applicants and their families who were also deserving of recognition and assistance, whose stories and achievements were equally worthy. My hope is that they too find a source of financial support to ease their burden as they begin a new adventure in higher learning.

A Late Friend and the Patterns of History

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung April 8, 2025.

Recently I attended on Zoom a celebration of a good friend, Paul Zolbrod, who died just a week after our last phone visit. The celebration of his life was attended by many who were inspired by his love of learning.  

Paul was a literature professor for many decades. He was also deeply invested in the Navajo people’s stories, their central myths and their beautiful weavings of rugs that captured their narratives, their traditions and their love of the earth. I have been reading his book, co-authored by Navajo Roseann S. Willink; they worked for decades ‘to bridge the gap between Navajo culture and non-Navajo society.”  He even mastered their language to more fully represent them and their tradition.

His exploration of Navajo rugs is the theme of Roseann and Paul’s study. It inspired me to think of our own American tradition, what it expresses and how this basic history is under siege by those who would rewrite it to serve their selfish agendas. But first a few ideas on why a people’s tradition like ours is so basic to our sense of identity that is still in-formation.

Tradition is what we see and understand by means of. It can also put blinders on us so we don’t see what should be included. Traditions contain the forms of our history, beliefs, values and aspirations. Democracy is much more than a political stance; it encompasses what our identity calls us to become.

As an organic living structure, tradition, both personal and collective, offers resiliency as a touchstone when we become confused, uncertain or fearful of forces intent on dismantling it.  We garner our way of viewing, valuing and validating a particular angle on reality, adjusting according to historical, spiritual, economic and psychological needs. Our tradition is our living, vibrant, shared myth.

At its best, tradition serves all of us. It acts like a value conglomerate that continually reminds us of what we mean to the collective, that is, to one another. Greed, lust for power and other ego-centered perversions distort, disorder and deflect us as a people from our basic identity. That includes those among us who have been marginalized, written off, ignored or chastised by those in power.

A tradition is not to be confused with an ideology. Following on Paul’s study of Navajo rug art, tradition is a shared tapestry on which we weave changes into it for the benefit of all of us, including the most vulnerable in need of our assistance, not handouts.

History reveals that when the transcendent realm is not part of the weave, societies often collapse on their exclusively secular selves. While an intolerant ego in leadership can damage this fragile ecology of values for the good, the collective wisdom of the people can sustain it.

No less important to the survival of a tradition is our relation to our shared home, the earth herself. To be dismembered from the planet’s needs and nurturing will be as devastating as our loss of the sacred.

No tradition can survive without a clear sense of boundaries, limits and finite realities. These virtues help maintain a sense of balance, order and shared meanings. They are all cultivated and shaped gradually over time. But they can be sundered over a much shorter interval if cowered by fear into defeat.

Our American tradition is unique, one-of-a kind; it should not be surrendered without a fight. For what is emerging today in its place will serve only authoritarians seeking more and sharing less of what belongs to to the collective.

Nature, Wildness, and the Human Spirit

Published in the Herald-Zeitung, March 11, 2025.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is one of our best American writers, both for the depth of his insights on being human as well as for being one of the finest prose stylists our nation has created.

Recently I went back to a book that had been hiding on my shelves for far too long but now demanded to be noticed: The Thoughts of Thoreau: Selections from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau. If you don’t think books have their own personalities as well as their own desires to be witnessed, you have missed something crucial in the biography of a book. Just try writing one.

Perhaps most famous for writing Walden that relates his time living alone along the shores of Walden Pond in Concord Massachusetts, his copious journals fill many volumes on a host of topics.

In a time of mass social conformity, Thoreau’s breezy prose “On Wildness” blows through to push the fog from our eyes on what it means to be wild, to allow wildness its vital expression. Thoreau’s meditation, “in Wildness is the preservation of the World,” is a tonic and a counterbalance to increasing “realities” engineered by the expanding AI revolution.

His writing is far more than “a return to nature” motif that governed the 19th. century. More than a fad, keeping wildness part of one’s mythology does not imply recklessness or abandon. Rather, it confirms a sense of wonder in the ordinary and the awe that nature can inspire in us.

Here is what summons him as a writer, a naturalist and artist: “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil.”

In another place he draws a rich parallel with “nature’s solitude and darkness” with God, “who is silent and mysterious.” When I feel a need to connect with nature, I simply leave our front door, take a right on Laurel Cliff Drive and walk the sloping road down to the Guadalupe River, where I sit by the water and enjoy the stillness and the wildlife on the river and in the surrounding woods. I need not book passage to Yosemite National Park. Wildness is no farther than an hour’s walk to the river and back.

Thoreau’s reach is broad; it stretches to include what we read: “In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness.” The wild in his imagination is not synonymous with a life that is boundless. Instead, “what we call wildness is a civilization other than our own.” A walk in the woods can be adventuresome because it offers a chance “to see out and around myself.” I sense that for our nature writer, there is a natural intimacy between our human nature and the natural order, a webbing that we may miss in its nuanced filaments.

Thoreau is also a categorical writer in the way he offers delineations in the world that we can grow numb to. “Whatever has not come under the sway of man is wild. In this sense original and independent men are wild—not tamed and broken by society.” Yes, we have a Declaration of Independence. Thoreau hints we may choose to extend it out to include a Declaration of Wildness.

I have thought that what we no longer see in Nature carries into our blindness of what within us we have lost sight of. For both Nature and our human nature are causes for wonder and gratitude.

The Taste of Wonder Hits the Spot

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung February 11, 2025.

Of all the attractive events in our city, one of our favorites is the “Taste of the Town” festival.  As in years past, it was held at the Civic Center from 6-9 pm on Thursday, February 6th. It was our 12th. year (maybe more) of attendance.

My wife Sandy and I like to arrive early, ½ hour before the doors open, and always heralded by the New Braunfels High School drum core marching through the long hall to the entrance of the large spaces that contain the festivities. Before then, we hand our admission tickets to one of the volunteers collecting them and dispensing wrist bands. It reminds us of a ritual initiation, allowing us to cross the threshold into the wonder of this grand city celebration.

Once inside, we survey the familiar layout: vendors from local restaurants, bakeries, wine bars, stores and wineries; they have been preparing for this evening by assembling the fare of their businesses for our delightful consumption. We can feel the energy of hospitality pervading each of their tables. Employees from each of these many sources are welcoming and generous with their offerings.

A general feeling of goodwill and generosity both within those of us who have paid for this feast as well as those who are offering them. In the middle of the room, large round tables have been elegantly decorated in cloths and programs of the event for those who have paid for them.

The theme for this year was “All in the Family” presented by the New Braunfels ISD Education Foundation in partnership with McKenna and Joeris General Contractors, Diamond Sponsors for the evening. Many other sponsors and participants were listed in the inclusive program.

On stage tuning up for musical entertainment was the NBHS Jazz Band, Drumline and NBHS and LCHA Choirs. Their musical talents from our young musicians, led by the superb band director, offer some of the finest young artists in our schools.

But something more was evident. Perhaps it was less tangible, but no less real. It grew more palpable as the crowd increased. Something of a common purpose congealed in the space of a few hours: a deep need or desire to be part of something larger than each of us as individuals. It transcended our appetites and personal concerns. While the food, the drinks and the raffles may satisfy one set of hungers, there is another, more deeply and universally felt.

This larger need was to share in a common purpose to benefit others. Sharing such rich and varied experiences as “Taste of the Town,” or a football or basketball game or church service, enrich us as a member of the collective punctuated by  rituals that tap into a universal need to give shape and form to our lives.  

At one point in the evening, I took a photo of the joyful crowd of humanity meeting friends, talking with strangers, applauding the wonderful talent on stage—and yes, there is a spiritual sensibility bonding us as civic citizens—gathered in “the civic center,” a place of strong community heartfully felt as goodness. One writer has written about the experience of awe and wonder that often companions each communal event that transcends us in service to others.

Courtesy is one of the driving qualities that inhabited this magnificent feast; one hears, as we did, “after you,” or “go ahead of me.” An often-missed quality of beauty attends “Taste of the Town.” It is laced with “civic,” “civilized,” “civility” “courtesy” and “care.” We have already made plans to attend next year.

Awe in Both Science and Daily Life

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung January 18-19 2025

Sometimes, as we know, life can imitate art and art can imitate life. I want to extend this idea from two recent experiences to suggest that what we read can imitate life and the reverse also happens.

Recently I attended a webinar in which one of my former students in mythological studies, having just published a book entitled The Practice of Enchantment. Her chapters were initially short essays for the Joseph Campbell Foundation website. She gathered these over the years to create these fascinating vignettes of where enchantment emerged in her life. Of course, when the time came, we all had stories to tell of when we too were enchanted, often by the ordinary, not the spectacular or once-in-a-lifetime moment.

She then suggested a book whose title enchanted many of us: Dacher Keltner’s Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. It conveyed so much more than a self-help book. As scientists, he and a colleague laid out 8 fundamental life experiences common to people around the globe, in whatever religion, language, ethnicity they were part of.

Located at Berkeley, the pair had a team of helpers translating many of the 26 languages that people used in submitting moments of awe in their lives. The results astonished both Keltner and his social science colleague.  Some 2600 narratives were gathered and catalogued.  They put them into categories of what was most and least able to meet the criterion of the word awe. Here is how they defined the term: “Being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.” That’ it.

Powerful, scientifically based and spiritually inflected. What they discovered as they worked through the submissions was the following. “What most commonly led people around the world to feel awe was other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming. They concluded that this human behavior signaled a feeling of awe “when moved by moral beauty,” which ismarked by purity and goodness of intention.

Second story, where reading imitates life. I recently took my wife to our local hospital for some tests that she was not looking forward to but knew needed to be done. After getting her settled with the nurse that would take her back for the procedure, I sat down and breathed a long sigh of relief. A woman across from me in the waiting room looked up at me and said: “You look like you need a hug. I was at first taken aback, then said, “yes I do.” She got up, walked over to me and hugged me. I immediately felt better, more settled, less rattled. She explained that she was waiting on her husband to see what the source of his pain was.

I felt like I needed to know her name and tell her mine. Without even thinking, I told her of the book above that I was reading and that she might like it. She wrote down the author and the one word: awe.

Soon, an orderly came to let her know her husband was now resting quietly in a recovery room. She said goodbye to me and wished my wife a positive result from her tests. I sat there and thought, yes, it sometimes happens that what one is reading materializes in a human situation in the world. What energies, forces, or saving graces are present to allow such awe-filled moments to occur?  More than enough here to wonder about for some time.  

Dignity and the Democratic Spirit

Originally Published in the “Opinion” page of The Herald-Zeitung, December 14-15, 2024 Pp. A-5 and 7.

One of our most popular American poets, Billy Collins, wrote a poem entitled “On Turning Ten.” In it, the voice that animates the poem feels as if something important in life is ending as they move to double digits in marking their age. Some threshold is crossed which the poem likens to “a kind of measles of the spirit, /mumps of the psyche, /a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.”

These alarming images may also be present when a person, a race, a class of people, loses their dignity. Dignity can be stolen from them by others if those whose dignity is at risk have no means of defending themselves.

Its etymology is telling: From the Latin, Dignitas, it means worthiness and prestige (Wikipedia). Dignity also carries qualities of “being worthy of honor and respect.” Taking a person or a class of people’s self-respect from them is an act of emotional violence. Those who suffer from such an attack try to recover from such a trauma, often with mixed success. The wound runs deep and can traverse generations.

Difference, in some circles, is reason enough for creating a group or a person as undignified.

I sense that dignity is an essential quality in the cultural curriculum we are all exposed to by leaders. Or have they too sidelined dignity as an SOS—a Soulful Operating System?

We are familiar with the phrase, “beneath one’s dignity.” What is it that inhabits the “beneath” space? Cruelty, lawlessness, grasping and clinging to all one can amass in the service of one’s own agenda can be one option. Authoritarian impulses in any form would seem to quash dignity and replace it with “unworthy.” Now what was once beneath is now blatantly on the surface to interrupt the spirit of integrity, a quality sharing kinship with dignity. Both have kinships with democracy.

The etymology of Democracy is formed of two Greek words: demos means “of the people “and kratos means “power or rule.” Democracy not only leaves a place for the dignity of a people but insists on it. Democracy and Dignitas are like mirrors of one another.

Without a sense of dignity as an active agent, those in a democracy fragment, split and shatter into parts, devoid of a sense of wholeness. Threats to the populace, instilling fear in its citizens, or cultivating an atmosphere of distrust and resentment collapse the spirit that animates and energizes democracy.

On the other hand, qualities of kindness cultivate a feeling of wholeness, courtesy (from the French coeur, meaning heart) promotes the integrity of self and self in relation to others. Blessings create feelings of unity, or a common shared ethos that allows the dignity of individuals to flourish.

As a teacher of more than 55 years that encompassed elementary special education students, high school students, undergraduate and graduate students on the Masters and Doctoral levels, I discovered how important it was to make space for the dignity of each student’s ideas, hunches, insights, and even resistances to what was being taught, as we all struggled to deepen the appeal of our subject.

Most important for me was to create a learning field so no student would feel their inherent dignity was questioned or worse, under attack. Then they felt the true spirit of democracy that allowed them to speak up, to speak out because their questions or assertions were dignified.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Man and the Message

Originally Published in The San Antonio Express News, December 12, 2024

My wife and I recently attended a late morning showing of the film, Bonhoeffer, two days after it opened at our local theater. Besides us there were two others in the audience. We knew little about him or his writings. The film opened our eyes to his brilliance as a writer and as a fierce critic of Hitler’s Third Reich and of his own Church that lacked the courage to speak out against the growing authoritarian regime.

Born into a wealthy family in Wroclaw, Poland, he was one of nine children. His father was a famous psychiatrist. For most of his life he was an accomplished pianist. When later as a divinity student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, a fellow black student from Georgia, took him to Harlem to a Baptist church where parishioners sang and worshipped Jesus with great enthusiasm.

Their singing celebrated their faith in joyful awareness, as did all dimensions of their lives. Bonhoeffer was introduced to jazz, which he adapted his musical talents to accommodate and became a superb jazz pianist. He had never seen in his Lutheran Church in Germany a congregation with such gusto in loving Christ. He was transformed by their love of the Savior.

In the 1930s, with Hitler gaining more power in Berlin and across Germany, Bonhoeffer realized how unworthy this political figure was of being Chancellor and believed he would never be elected.

A priest friend of his who eventually began speaking out publicly against the Reich, told Bonhoeffer that Hitler did not need the German people to elect him, only enough of those who did vote to believe the lies until they cast their ballot. Hitler was elected, to the surprise and chagrin of many.

As Hitler’s power became absolute over time, it rested in part how he had successfully targeted the Jews in Germany as the source of all of the country’s woes. Bonhoeffer, resisting the advice of others in New York on his second visit to teach for two years at Union Theological Seminary after the Gestapo had shut down his alternative seminary in Germany, returned to Berlin after only twenty-six days in New York.

His credo had was unshaking:  when those who remain silent in the face of evil, their silence becomes evil.

He was arrested in 1943 and spent two years in various prisons for being a member of a plot to assassinate Hitler. There he was allowed to write and to continue to minister to other prisoners and several guards sympathetic to his cause: his passionate love of Jesus—his only lodestar and guiding light that sustained him.

Bonhoffer knew, as one writer observes in a prefatory essay in The Cost of Discipleship, one of the most famous of his thirty-four volumes, that “the fanatical devilish forces within National Socialism…were aiming at the destruction of Germany as a European and Christian country.”

Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship, “if individuals choose ‘cheap grace,’ “which is the deadly enemy of the Church because it demands nothing from its adherents, over ‘costly grace,’ which he asserted is what we must fight for, it will lead to separation from Jesus; the former “is sold in the market, while ‘costly grace’ is the incarnation of God.”

The film ends with a fact we know too well: that antisemitism is on the rise globally. We need voices of heroic stature like Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s to counter the dreaded infection of such prejudices.

Can Hatred, Happiness and Democracy Mix?

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung November 16-17, 2024

 Hatred, like any human emotion, is complex and nuanced, mysterious and ever-present as a possible solution to social, cultural and emotional conditions. Now that the election is over, I asked myself: what is it that hatred wants, even demands of us?

Recently I came across a talk given by Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic from 1989-92. He died in 2011. He was known for being a playwright, memoirist, politician and influential leader on the world stage.

In 1990, he gave a talk at The Oslo Conference on “The Anatomy of Hate.” I found many of his insights relevant for our national identity today. Calling on his own life and the people who hated him, he discovered that “their hatred always seems to me the expression of a large and unquenchable longing, a permanently unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire,. ...”

What I found surprising is Havel’s comparison of hatred with love, for both emotions include a “self-transcending aspect” as well as “a fixation on others, the dependence on them, and in fact, the delegation of a piece of one’s own identity to them.”

But the differences between hatred and love are even more striking. In his reflections on those who hated him, he found that many of them “harbor a permanently ineradicable feeling of injury. . .that is, of course, out of all proportion to reality.”

We know that love too can be excessive, distorted or diminished. Literature from many cultures and historical periods are full of forms of love that fit one or more of these categories: Shakespeare’s Othello, King Lear, and McBeth. We can trace these complex relations between love and hate in Dante’s medieval poem, The Divine Comedy. The souls in Inferno all suffered from love in distorted forms, beyond all measure.

Havel also investigates another quality of hatred: in it “there is a great egocentrism and great self-love. . .. Hating people feel that they are the victims of an insidious evil, an omnipresent injustice that has to be eliminated to give justice its due.”

Feelings and beliefs enter more forcefully as attributes that may sideswipe a more shared sense of reality; but can hatred, as an independent state of mind, offer another version of the world? It seems so.

Finally, there is also communal hatred, or hatred in numbers. Havel sees this more encompassing form of hatred thriving because of its simplicity. One may join such a hate group by choosing not to think too deeply about the object of their hatred: ethnicity, race, color, or, in the parlance of today, the “otherness” of others. The thinking says they are not like me, so hating them is a form of communal superiority which continually reinforces hatred’s power.

Of course, there is another option: to accept and treat with understanding and compassion that very otherness as another expression of how our own otherness is felt by those we might first cast out; but we have the power and free will to welcome them in. I sense that in certain moments, a group that has settled into hating others may not yet have celebrated their own strangeness, which is part of their uniqueness, their value and their identity, in short, their collective myth.

Often, hatred can be an expression of fear of change, of things not being what they once were; yearning to return to an earlier time—which so often disappoints—is paved with the hot asphalt of hatred.

I am optimistic about our future, one which can lean into compassion for others, not conflict with them, and accepting the otherness in ourselves, which cultivates a new age of mutual tolerance, not hatred.

Turning 80 and no Longer Counting

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung October 3, 2024.

I have ceased grasping at turning 80 on October 12th. It is a fact to accept and nurture for what wisdom may develop from this crossing. Many of you have made the pilgrimage this far and have felt the changes that attend it.  

What a moment to take stock, to ask some basic questions as I look back at a life that feels very full, meaningful and nourishing. With it arises areas of reflection that feel most crucial to entertain now.

I find in looking back that I was less in pursuit of happiness, more in pursuit of meaning and purpose. Certainly, biology is front and center, but more importantly are matters of soul that shape my identity.  For in a reflective life meaning is always expanding; when it’s not, perhaps it signals a time to question and perhaps to abandon worn out patterns of thought and behavior.

I find that I am less invested in life’s clarity and more attuned to life’s mystery within each day. I like the word “enchantment” to convey this feeling of renewal. I also have slipped out of the harness of regretting the past and anticipating the future. I have traded those out for a deeper sense of awakening to the present moment.

I no longer strive for a sense of prestige and importance, but by a will to wisdom. It allows for responding to life, not reacting to it.

Here are a series of questions I want to contemplate further:

What have I been and am now in service of?

What sections of my life have I shirked responsibility for?

What wounds do I still carry from childhood and young adulthood as they shorten and narrow life’s possibilities?

What calls to me now as I saunter across the 80 threshold?

How many choices in my life were made by others and not me?

Have I followed story lines that were foisted on me by others or the society I live within?

Did I yield to them while pretending they were my own?

As one who believes that we all contain both a conscious and an unconscious, I wonder what remains beneath the floorboard of consciousness that is pushing up from below to be heard and seen?

My psychologist friend, James Hollis, suggests that all of us lack a deep sense of permission to lead our own lives. What have I not allowed myself to create that would deepen my sense of Self?

In my spiritual life, am I still living within a framework that is woefully outdated? Have I pursued a deepening relationship with the divine, the sacred and the sacrosanct that provides guidance every day if I am willing to allow it?

What have I used or abused in my life that medicated me such that I was insensitive to the voices of the soul that clamor for attention that could benefit me and through me, to others?

As a teacher of 60 years, did I use my subject matter to deepen and enlarge my own vocation into a more creative life and to share it with my students?

Where do I feel a sense of urgency, of something that is calling now, perhaps for the first time that I am morally obligated to ponder and activate?

What gives me joy, pleasure, and delight in being alive?

I end on a poetic note. One of my favorite poets, Rumi (1207-1273) was born in Afghanistan. In one poem he writes: “Be silent now. /Say fewer and fewer praise poems/Let yourself become living poetry.” The last line expresses how I have continued to live most fully.

The Sacred Ordinary

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung September 6, 2024

In my habit of journaling each morning, I used to recall the day before and the Big Events that shaped it. Over time, however, I found more intriguing musing with my pen about the ordinary events that infiltrated yesterday’s unfolding: the smile from a stranger in passing; the moment a driver gave me a break in heavy traffic; the kindness of a person who saw I dropped something and retrieved it for me; the smiling sliver of a bright moon against a dark, starry sky; the way our cat Ginger climbs up on our bed and cuddles with my wife and me.

What is most glorious about shifting our imaginations from the big, the one time only event, to the small that may repeat itself often—is that there is so much more of the ordinary than anything else. But often we don’t pause long enough to notice, much less appreciate, these incidentals.

Certainly, a different program of perception structures our noticing the ordinary. It does not need us for it to happen; every day the ordinary, the mundane goes on without us. Sure, some of this new interest may increase as we age. Perhaps it is in slowing down; yet it is available to anyone curious about the way things are, how they unfold, and what may make ordinary events even sacred as divine gifts.

My curiosity was piqued recently when I found two books on my shelf I had read parts of years ago. The first one is The Sacrament of the Present Moment by a Catholic priest, Jean-Pierre De Caussade (1675-1751) who lived in southern France. For many it became a classic of Christian devotion, but it exists for anyone who senses mystery in the ordinary.

He wrote: “the only condition necessary for this state of self-surrender is the present moment in which the soul, light as a feather, fluid as water, innocent as a child, responds to every moment of grace like a floating balloon.” He believed that when we pay attention to these ordinary occurrences of life, that who we truly are can surface.

The second book by a much more contemporary author and teacher Lynda Sexson is Ordinarily Sacred. There she offers that “intrusions of the mundane become agents of the sublime,” a word we don’t hear very often in our consumer-oriented culture.

Fond of using metaphors to reveal a truth that rational or literal language cannot express as well, she crafted this rich image: “The sacred is the leopard lying in wait--the shock of its sudden appearance. Perhaps one of the most startling places the leopard can appear is among the ephemeral nonsense that distracts us into metaphor.”

Using metaphorical language is commonplace in all of our communications. If we listen to individuals telling one another their stories, often about ordinary commonplace occurrences, we hear their expressions abundant with metaphors. Without metaphors, we don’t have an interesting story. Metaphors can transform the ordinary into a compelling incident.

Ordinary moments can provide the context we need, even desire, to “discover or rediscover, one’s world view, one’s depth” writes Sexson, but it can be buried under life’s busyness. However, for both writers, paying attention to what usually goes unnoticed, we can discover where the subline resides--in the ordinary.

I end with a question for you: what did you notice yesterday as you carried out your obligations, meetings, and tasks that claimed you? What rises to your mind as you remember? Think small here, ordinary, what largely remains unnoticed. The sacred ordinary may surprise you.

The Haunting Ghost of Imperfection

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung, weekend edition, August 24-25, 2024.

Over the years I have conducted workshops on body and psychic woundedness, personal boundaries and the life stories that feed them.  While all these topics have been powerful in working with individuals’ personal myths, none has been more intriguing than the topic of ghosts that haunt us. James Hollis’ book, Hauntings, has guided me in this pursuit.

One of the most cited ghosts is imperfection, of not measuring up, of feelings that one is not adequate, of feeling small and insignificant in the world they inhabit.

I ask myself:  do these feelings of discontent, of feeling ashamed in their imperfection, originate only in one’s early upbringing? Is this where one becomes attached to a series of habitual self-stories that we tell ourselves in our bewilderment of what our value is?

Is it not also cultural? We can recall dozens of ads shoveled at us daily through many outlets. Their message repeats one major theme: 1. Problem: You are not good enough as you are. 2. Solution: Use our product, service, or program and you will relocate to a more perfect you.

In the political arena rival opponents will seek out the imperfect, the gap, the falling short, the deception that make the other unworthy of leading. Compare them with me, the more perfect candidate, and you will see that. Being infiltrated by ghosts of imperfection is part of the fabric of our personal and cultural lives.

Sociologist Brene Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection explores our life hauntings, especially the stinging ghost of feeling unseen unheard or valued. Her desire and determination to reclaim her own worthiness, of feeling more than “good enough” led her to search out the dynamics of feeling inadequate and falling short.

She learned that “perfection is an unattainable goal,” but that does not deter many from seeking it out. The consequences most often feel like signing on board a treadmill of terminal imperfection with no “off” switch.

In The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning, Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham deploy the wisdom of 12-step recovery programs. One key insight is that “spirituality involves first seeing ourselves truly, as the paradoxical and imperfect beings we are. . .”.

They refer to us as “paradoxical” because it is “only within our very imperfection that we can find peace and serenity available to us.”

When workshop participants write of this all-pervasive ghost of imperfection, then share it with others, they often comment on how healing it was to “go public,” with their ghosts of not feeling good enough ever since they were judged harshly by a parent or other authority.

Often individuals realize that in simply naming it, then claiming it through sharing with others struggling like them, they are able to begin forgiving themselves for the self-taunting inflicted on themselves, sometimes for years or decades. All share one belief: the process is as spiritual as any other life dimension.

I have recognized over time that participants are not seeking a quick fix or cure; rather, they seek being cared for, and the most important person in their lives to express this care is themselves.

They are no longer tethered to live a discounted life, as when we say of someone: “Simply discount what X has said or written.” Total dismissal.

It is a powerful moment when an individual realizes they have an inner authority to revise their narratives into plots of self-acceptance, not self-perfection.

Self-forgiveness becomes a positive antibody to neutralize self-shaming. They can choose to retire the ghost that escorted them to this changed image of who they are.

Caring For Words is Caring For Culture

A version of this essay was published in the San Antonio Express-News, August 13, 2024. A-11.

Like breathing, we don’t generally think deeply about the words we use in normal communication.

Yet there is something basic about connecting the words people express and the health of the cultural world in which they live.

The origin of the word “word” is fascinating. In Old English, “wurda,” and even earlier, “were,” meant “to speak or say. “When we think of where we directly address words, we find numerous examples: “It’s his word against mine, “to break one’s word,” “in the beginning was the Word,” ‘to put words into someone’s mouth,” “may I have a word with you?” and “one is as good as their word.”

Words are a guide. I begin each day by journaling about the day before. It’s as if I cannot make sense of what happened unless I submit it to words. Only then do yesterday’s events rise to another level of reality.

Psychologist James Hillman has written: “Speech and myth are one and the same.” What we do to soil and stain speech directly affects the shared mythology owe live by.  To debase or trivialize speech is to diminish and tarnish the myth we share. Democracy as our shared myth is then abused; if the abuse is repeated endlessly, to the undiscerning audience it becomes reality. The result is a further erosion and corrosion of what holds us together in a common good.

For a current example: I listened recently to Donald Trump answer questions at a Mar-a-Lago news conference, his first. Most often, instead of answering questions from reporters directly with specifics, he used their inquiries to launch vitriolic invectives against his political opponents. His vocabulary was demeaning and enraged: “crooked Hilary” “stupid Joe,” the worst president in history, “Gavin Newscum,” Kamala Harris “is not bright, cannot hold a news conference, ruined San Francisco, ruined California, . . . “World War Three is imminent if I lose.”

I felt I was in the presence of a man both enraged and deranged, without boundaries, lashing out at whatever crossed his mind with no logical sequence or point accept to attack others with untruths, fantasies of world doom, an obsession with crowd sizes that put his crowds in the history books as the largest that have ever gathered.

I was unsettled as well by the narrow bandwidth of his vocabulary that in his self-praise, never reached beyond “incredible,” “unbelievable,” and “never before in history has this happened,” and other blusters that felt like a person in desperate need of feeling the approval of others. His oscillations between blame and self-praise were mind-numbing.

Of course we can grow numb to words, to slogans, to cliches emanating from personal fantasies. Therein lies its danger for individuals and for the cultural health of a nation.

Words themselves are prostituted to serve a frantic ideology shared by a few, not the many. Such an ideology divorces us from a shared communal sense of what is real and beneficial for the greatest number. In its place a dead myth attempts to pass for what is true.

The upshot of such a shift is that the distortions, lies and untruths can infect and reshape our world; they deform, divide, and deflect us from our shared humanity. Look closely at the words used in political discourse; there you will see a mirror of the world shaped or misshaped by such rhetoric.

Seeing this clearly is the first step toward tempering the tantrums of distortion by reclaiming the truth we share. Our well-being depends on it.

A National Threshold Crossing

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung on July 31, 2024.

We cannot always plan or orchestrate when a liminal space might arise. From the Latin word “limen,” it means threshold. It also connotes “transition.” It can refer to something personally, locally or nationally. But transformation seems to be its trajectory.

Liminality is a universal construction; it has been with us since the beginning of time. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, has called liminality “the space of imaginal activism.” It is a vibrant space where something new may arise.

Not only is liminality spatial; it can be a moment or an instant in time that is often seen more clearly when we look back at its occurrence. Then we grasp more readily its mythic overtones, even mythic renewal.

In liminality, something is crossed over—perhaps a new beginning of some impulse, some movement, some yearning that finds its time and space to emerge. It marks the space between what has been, like a habitual way of thinking, speaking and behaving, and into a new, fresh, reinvigorated and expansive arrangement that ushers in renewed energy. Its enthusiasm highlights what has been needed but not heretofore recognized. In liminal moments, the psychic energy moves from a former stasis into new kinetic power.

What had grown stale with overuse and abuse is sidestepped. Now accompanied by a feeling of renewal and reinvigoration, a sacred element may enter to secure a greater liberation for its members. Of course, not everyone will agree with what the threshold crossing expresses. It seldom is.

Rohr points out what the ancient Celtic people called “thin times,” was often celebrated with a ritual. The thinness of these moments collapsed to allow separate worlds to join hands: this current world we share, and the next world that is in embryo. Time also congealed in liminal moments; past, present and future dissolve into a communion where all time became unified.

The above might be recognized in expressions like: “It’s about time!” or “Why did it take so long to happen?” or “I thought this day would never come.” And yet here it is, nurtured by the energies of liminality.

Liminal thresholds can also emerge from a collective yearning, perhaps for a new narrative to replace one grown crusty, brittle and exhausted. Or a story that no longer serves the common good. As such, liminal moments spring more from imagining than reasoning. A yearning that brings us closer to the theme of this essay is the yearning in a nation to refashion itself through more humane and equitable values, even more tolerant attitudes towards one another. Integrity, generosity, compassion, coherence are the energy pockets of a liminal experience.

Something or someone appears in liminal space; it is creative space, where all may benefit from its largesse.

Liminal space is both an “opening” and “open” to wisdom, to value revision, to hunger for depth both in understanding and in quality of life. Its space hosts new ideas. A reinvigorated future we could not have imagined before suddenly becomes possible.

When Joe Biden yielded his position as presidential candidate for another term, he created a liminal space overnight.

Into that liminality a woman of color stepped into this opening as a candidate for the presidency. The outpouring of support in both morale and money has been unprecedented. That is what liminal moments often convey—the unprecedented.

What is also part of this liminal moment is the likelihood of a new plot to build up and out. An old established boundary has yielded to new plot options in the service of a more equitable freedom for diverse voices to enjoy.