Month: August 2017

Sex in the news.

Sex is always in the news.  How can it not be?  Sex matters to everybody.

Either the lack of it, the ecstasy of it, the pain of it, the surprises of it.  We can’t get enough of sex, either as a newstory or the real thing.

And making love always seems to be making history.  Last year, gay marriage.  This year, trans.  Next year, looks to be the abolition of contraception (I hope not!).

At the same time. making love is always the making of personal history.

Youth is wholly experimental, but youthful sex is not for that reason impermanent. We want so much to get some experience, to find out what it’s all about.  And we do, one way or another.  But, whichever way, it may not be news, but it’s history.

Later love can’t be resisted either.  As Oscar Wilde said, “I can resist anything.  Except temptation!”  We’ve learned some lessons by now.  Starry eyed again and taking a chance on love, we are eager to make some new history.

That’s the beauty of it, that’s the glory of it, that’s the beauty of love.

Your story, and the big story.

Your life is a story trying to be told.  You are trying to tell it.

Every day you come home and tell the day’s story to a mate or a friend.  On your way home, on the bus or subway, or stopping at a neighborhood bar, you will hear others telling their story, too.  Day after day, many life stories are being told, piece meal.

At night, you dream the day into another kind of story, some of the pieces mixed up randomly with others, always so crazy.

But your life just has to make its way into a story.  What’s inside you has to get outside, for some reason, as a story.

So it is that we have so many invitations to put the pieces together in a more complete way–classes on journaling, on writing a novel, on writing a memoir.  We are invited to an evening at MOTH.  We are invited to try our hand at conveying our story in a Six-Word Memoir.

Even if we do not ever intend to write, we still think of our story every day in its as yet unfinished completion, the history of me.

Whenever we go to a movie, a play, or attend worship, we get to put our story next to a bigger story, the story of a super heroine, a man-god, some paragon whose light throws our story into meaningful perspective.  And we are moved and understand ourselves anew.

We have to go to public space for such experience.  Public space exists to put ourselves in a larger perspective.  Do you create such public space for your charges?

Sorrowful Sunday, August 13

On Sunday, August 13, 2017, churches welcomed to Sabbath services sorrowful congregations looking for any wailing wall upon which to grieve the Charlottesville cataclysm. Another moral implosion in America’s pock-marked landscape!  While we wait for national leadership, in the meantime we look to our local religious leaders.  Fortunately, there are sanctuaries nearby to be found on the morning after the night before, somewhere to go for solace, insight and healing.  Bless those who lead our prayers and preach the sermons on such a difficult morning.

If we weren’t public churches before, we will become such now with the public issues pouring in through our doors this last year.  We are being asked to speak out.  Will we do more than host a vigil?  Do we know how to address a public event explicitly?  Or have decades of nervousness about keeping politics out of the church interfere?  Can we learn how to distinguish between partisan politics and the great politics of citizenship?  Can churches seize the role of “citizen in the aggregate” and become leaders in our communities?  Will we cultivate the vocabulary that properly belongs to the moral, not partisan, critique of our national behavior?  How can we become proactive rather than reactive and find ways for us to raise the local public’s consciousness?  And how can laypeople participate actively in this new habit of mind?

The public arena awaits our arrival.