Revolution in the Second Half of Life

If you recognize the title of this post as the title of a song, congratulations! You, too, are officially old – or you have a sibling who is. You will also know the significance of a brand new pair of roller skates, but I digress. After all, what good are the roller skates without a key? If you were raised in or around the Church, have you ever listened to the words of the hymns? I mean really…

While it is a bit of an oversimplification, there are essentially two perspectives within institutional Christianity. One says that belief is a matter of memorizing facts, scripture, and doctrine. Success in this view is like passing a final exam. Entering through the gates of heaven in this view involves taking a test on an IPad. This view tends to hold that people are easily lead astray, and so…

There I was Saturday at my grandson’s football game with my daughter and granddaughter when a young woman walked up and said, “can someone take a picture of the three of us sitting behind you?” All three of us said, “sure.” This moron bitch young lady then responded, “Not an old person, though, because young people take better pictures.” I told her that what she said was ageism, is untrue, and is…

Don’t expect change

…unless you are willing to admit our flaws. Americans are a horribly inconsistent bunch. We expect things we have no reason to expect, for which there is no evidence of even te possibility of manifestation, but not only do we expect them we also become enraged when we don’t get them. Some of that is what I call an error of direction. In short, we get the “to” and the “from” confused. Much…

I haven’t written in a while because I have been thinking about the current world situation. From a spiritual perspective, we seem to be in a period of moral bankruptcy stemming from all moral questions being profoundly oversimplified. The cause of that reductionism is neither on the left or the right alone. Rather, it’s everywhere. At the risk of oversimplifying the issue myself, I will wade…

I am coming to believe that, in nondual thought, there are advanced basic truths. If you feel some resistance to that statement, it may be because you don’t feel that “advanced” and “basic” can exist together in the same space. We have been trained to believe in an either/or universe, but in reality we live in a both/and universe. Allow me to elaborate. Science tells us that everything is…

The Fall of Jon Gruden

Allow me to begin by saying that I have never been a fan of Jon Gruden. I have found him a bombastic ego maniac with the equivalent of a comb over who speaks like a huckster used car salesman. What anyone sees in him is beyond me. Even his coaching successes have largely come on the back of his predecessors. However, there is a case to be made that he is partially a victim of culture in his…

The Ambiguity of Rules

Sometimes it seems there isn’t a corner of life not overburdened with rules. Some are probably necessary – Sammy Hagar still can’t drive 55, after all, even though in many places he can get an extra ten to fifteen miles per hour. He must be that guy driving slowly in the left lane! Games need rules, though some games have more rules than they need. Other rules are subjective, especially in the…

The Arrogance of American Imperialism

This is a brief description of how American Imperialism works: It is not a pretty thing at all. America decides she needs something from another country. That country isn’t particularly interested in giving us what we want, so American finds a pretext to invade militarily. We invaded Iraq because we lied and said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We found none. We really invated…

Things I Don’t Understand

Admittedly, there are many things I don’t understand. Today I received an email from the good folks at Meetup.com that informed me there are still people who play Dungeons and Dragons. Back when the game first came out, people so struggled to distinguish the game from reality that they would kill themselves believing they could roll a double six on postmortem dice and get a new life. Nobody ever…

Juneteenth Smoke and Mirrors

Don’t you see that it’s not what it seems? I don’t want to take away from anybody’s celebration, but they gave you nothing and convinced you it was something. Then you lined up behind Biden as he signed the bill making Juneteenth a Federal Holiday into law. We have a Congress that can’t pass anything, but they passed this – and you are happy? You believe something was accomplished. I hate to be…

It’s almost always a good idea to be logically consistent. When we forget that we almost always head down an ill advised path. We hear countries talk about going to war to achieve or preserve peace. For reasons that I can’t begin to comprehend, that makes sense to some people, yet we don’t hear about becoming sexually active to preserve chastity. Why not? The reason is that it doesn’t make sense.…

The Extremely Talented Heywood Banks!

Together we are all on a journey called life. We are a little broken and a little shattered inside. Each one of us is aspiring to make it to the end. None is deprived of pain here and we have all suffered in our own ways. I think our journey is all about healing ourselves and healing each other in our own special ways. Let’s just help each other put all those pieces back together and make it to…

Sometimes I spend quite a bit of time cleaning something only to step back and realize it isn’t very clean at all! This has been especially true when polishing altar ware. Brass and silver can be a huge pain to polish, especially if there are nooks and crannies that are hard to access. Wine and lipstick stains in linen surely are the work of the devil. If you are a church person, then you should…

In Praise of the Handshake

Yes, I know. Don’t shake hands because you will get covid and your nose will slide off your face. To be clear, I am not an anti-masker or a covid denier. My wife and I are both fully vaccinated. I have no political agenda on this issue. What I want to say is, let’s give up on the slimy used car salesman or Lyft driver fist bump and the forearm bump thing that brings us in closer proximity that…

If You’re Single, Have [consentual] Sex with Whomever.

I mean it. Just do it. Have fun. Do the same if you are in an open relationship. As long as your partner or partners and the sheep in your pasture are okay with it, I say go for it! Why? How can I say that? I really don’t want to get your puritan panties in a twist, though I’m not opposed to the idea if you enjoy it, but I honestly believe that we have wasted more spiritual time and energy…