​Thomas Hardy, the late-19th-century-early-20th-century English novelist, is famous for such works of fiction as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Additionally, he wrote poetry, with a first volume, The Poems of Thomas Hardy, published in 1895 followed by Late Lyrics and Earlier in 1922, six years before his death. One of his later poems, clustered under the rubric of “Satires of Circumstance,” took its inspiration from the April 12th 1912 sinking of the Titanic. In that work, called “The Convergence of the Twain,” the two things referred to were the supposedly unsinkable ship, on the one hand, and the iceberg, on the other. That fated and fatal coming together resulted in a score of Nature one versus Humanity zero. The novelist-poet lived up to his family name, moreover, for he died at the ripe old age of 87 ½, a huge achievement for an Englishman born in 1840...

​John Donne (1572-1631)—Anglican priest, English Metaphysical poet, and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral (1621-31)—has a Holy Sonnet with this startling line, “The first minute after noon is night.” Talk about the relativity of time! Because I had a hand operation for carpel-tunnel syndrome recently, I too have experienced the phenomenon of no time having passed. I’m on the operating table. The anesthesia enters my vein through the IV. I feel a pressure inside my skull, and in an instant I’m out. Then, not a second later, I find myself mysteriously recovering in the room where I’d been prepped. From my perspective, no time had passed. Yet the reality was, it was an hour later, the operation was over, and I was lying there with my left hand all bandaged.

​A current go-to term is mindfulness. You hear it in conversation, you read it online. The concept makes perfect sense. Be here now, not in yesterday or tomorrow. The old-fashioned adjective, mindful, is a synonym for thoughtful. You know, think before you act. Turn your mind on and ponder a matter before you say or do something connected with it. Off-the-top-of-one’s-head speech or action often leads to personal regret or even harm to others.

​An admirable quality of the Japanese is their unwillingness to show off. This manifests in many ways, most notably in home architecture. The outside of their houses is rarely ostentatious. A McMansion in Japan would stick out like a sore thumb. But go inside, and although there is a tendency toward minimalism, costly ceramics and lovely wall scrolls will adorn the interior. The lovely inside contrasts sharply with the bland exterior. I noticed the same tendency in Morocco. One of my meditation brothers is the scion of a well-known French couturier family. At last count he owned eight houses, apartments, or farms around the world. For my honeymoon in 2011, he gifted my new wife and me with a two-night stay in his mansion in Marrakesh. His house, inside the walls of the old city, was as modest and nondescript as its neighbors. But go inside, and it’s like moving from blurry black-and-white to sharp, glorious color. After meeting the staff of eight, who would be at our beck and call for the next 48 hours, we were taken by the head housekeeper on an extended tour. We learned that the current king’s sister had sold this mansion to my friend in appreciation for his funding of an orphanage in the nearby mountains...

​One of Mark Twain’s many bon-mots concerns smoking cessation. “It’s not hard to quit smoking,” he said. “I’ve done it hundreds of times.” Well, I feel the same way about dieting. I don’t know what happened. When I was a little kid, I was rail skinny. My parents were so worried they consulted with the pediatrician. How could they fatten me up? By the time I was 11 or 12, though, things had changed dramatically. They were now taking me to Barney’s, a men-and-boys clothing store in New York City that specialized in garments for the big and stout. Awe, as the Hawaiians say. It’s the Polynesian equivalent of Oy Veh! Now my worried parents were calling the pediatrician about something quite different....

​Okay, so the literal translation from the German saying—one of many pieces of folk wisdom I learned from my first mother-in-law—leaves something to be desired. But stay with me. For those of you with some German, the original goes Die Strafe fällt auf den Fuss. Our equivalent proverb would be “As you sow, so shall you reap.” In other words, we’re talking about Karma here: cause and effect. The Hindu concept adds the idea of reincarnation. So, if you were a wife-beating husband in this life, for example, you might merit rebirth as a beaten wife. It’s kind of a cosmic camper-counselor day. The hope is you’ll learn not to abuse your spouse in your next life....

​These are questions I am supposed to write a one-page response to in my Episcopal Education for [Lay] Ministry course, a four-year program of 36 two-hour sessions. In all, we spend 288 hours creating in community a theological grounding for our faith. Two-thirds the way through Year 3, I’ll answer in this way. You, my blog readers (and classmates) will share with me what I have discovered...

​When we are kids, we go to birthday parties, our own or our friends’ bar- or bat mitzvahs, or, in the Christian context, confirmations. Then, as we age, first it’s weddings, then anniversaries—we continue to go to birthday parties of course--, high-school or college alumni reunions, and finally it’s mainly funerals, or in today’s euphemism of choice, memorial services. My favorite, to be sure, is Celebrations of a Life Well Lived. That’s what I want for myself...

​Okay, I’m getting more philosophical today than usual, but, hey, I’ll keep the prose understandable. Promise! After all, I’m an English major, not a Philosophy or Physics one. So, to quote our current President, here’s the deal. We Americans along with the rest of the Western World tend to think in opposing dualities: night vs. day, black vs. white, good vs. bad—what the French Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre referred to as Either/Or. But I guess the paired opposite of either/or is both/and, although the latter is harder to reach. Today as I write these words, Russia (I almost wrote “The Soviet Union”) has just invaded Ukraine. It’s easy for us to support one side, the Ukraine, versus the other, the invading bad guys. Praying for both sides is much more of a stretch. Still, it’s what Jesus called on his followers to do. But I digress...

​Okay. In a recent blog I wrote about individual differences. If you’ll recall, I used a photograph of two amaryllis flowers growing at dramatically different rates as my meme. The beat goes on, by the way. Although the smaller stalk has entered a growth spurt, the bigger one has stopped growing and has begun to burst forth in lovely bright-red flowers. But at the end of the day, both are the same variety of flower and both inhabit the same box...

​Normally, when I compose these blogs, I do the writing first. Then I’ll search for a suitable meme, generally in www.getstencil.com, which has millions of images searchable by topic. Every once in a while, though, I’ll use a photograph, either one of my own or one in the public domain. In my blog called “Don’t Think!,” for example, I used a photo from one of the websites of my spiritual association, Subud. Today I’m featuring a photo I took myself. Moreover, I’ve placed it first rather than last, since it is my point of departure. Let me explain....

​What a thought from a certified thinker! Not to brag, but I [uh, was] graduated from Yale magna cum laude as a member of Phi Beta Kappa and then followed up with a Yale Ph.D. So, I’m supposed to regard cognition as the number-one way of solving any and all problems, right? Yet consider this statement from the recently deceased Vietnamese Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nath Hanh: “Do not try to find the solution with your thinking mind. Nonthinking is the secret of success. And that is why the time when we are not working, that time can be very productive, if we know how to focus on the moment.” Or recall this well-known piece of advice from Jesus: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matt. 6:34, KJV)...

I don’t usually start these weekly blogs with quotations, especially not extended ones from the Bible. Today is an exception. This quotation, attributed to the Prophet (not the bull frog) Jeremiah, is one featured in Lutheran churches on Reformation Sunday, which generally occurs around Hallowe’en. The passage is often referred to as “the new covenant between God and God’s people.” Here goes:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

​Now 82, I’m a junior in the demanding four-year weekly lay-ministry course of America’s national Episcopal Church. Another year-and-a-half and, God willing, and I’ll graduate from EfM, as we students refer to the program, formally Education for Ministry. Anyway, all four classes just spent two weeks reading and discussing a humdinger of a book entitled The Dream of God—A Call to Return by Verna J. Dozier (c. 2006). In it the author argues that we are not meant to worship Jesus, who, she asserts, is not God but the Divine in human form. Instead, we are to follow the way of living Jesus modeled for us. That’s much, much harder than mere worship. The latter is like walking up a local hill versus climbing one of Colorado’s 58 14ers, mountains that exceed 14,000 feet...

​If you’ve been following my weekly blogs, you may recall that I’ve written several on close encounters of the iconic kind, about my meetings with famous people, and one on close encounters of the eerie kind, on my experiences with ghosts. To round this series out, I’ll now share my one and only blog on close encounters with UFOs. Read on...

As far as I know, I’ve had four. Of course, I’ve been scared more times than that, but we’re talking here about ghostly visitors. So, four. The first occurred in November 1978 in Farnam Castle, Surry, England. Now old British castles are known for their ghosts. My late wife and I were there for a smallish week-long gathering on Educating for the Future, organized by Dr. Jonas Salk, the inventor of the first polio vaccine. The castle was genuinely old, the first part built around 1100 by the grandson of William the Conqueror...

​Last night my brother-in-law and I were discussing the phenomenon of anti-vaxxers. Then, like a bolt of lightning it struck us. They could really be a Democrat plot of Antifa undercover agents. I mean, consider this. Those not getting vaccinated are mainly less educated, rural Republican voters from red states. And guessing who are getting Covid in all its variants and dying from it. That’s right. Less educated rural Republican voters from red states. Not only that, but most of us know that it’s the older voters who historically have been the group that votes the most in elections, and it’s these very folks, the elderly, who are dying in greater numbers.

​When I was living and working in Greater Chicago (1973-87), I had a somewhat older thrice-weekly tennis partner named Dr. Sargon Odishoo who alas recently passed away in his 90s. He was the family optometrist. More importantly, he was the father of my older daughter’s best friend, Arbella, and a walking-distance neighbor. Doc Odishoo, as his first name suggested, was Assyrian. He was proudly named after Sargon II, the famous and feared ruler of ancient Assyria. Until meeting him, I thought the Assyrians had disappeared from history not long after the Old Testament era. Apparently, they had had their own diaspora. So, Doc and Wilma Odishoo had immigrated to the U.S. from Iran, where they had been minority Eastern Rite Christians. Not only that, but Sargon claimed that their Assyrian language, which he and his wife still spoke, was a close relative of Jesus’ at-home language of Aramaic. Hence, his family name, not unlike the related Arabic Abd-Isa, meant the slave (or servant) of Jesus...

​I haven’t seen many of the well-known performers or groups in person. I did see Maya Angelo once in Chicago in 1960 or ’61 before she became world famous as a writer. She was the warm-up act, as a dancer (!), for the Clancy Brothers at Mr. Kelly’s. Many years later, when I met her and told her about that experience, she smiled in a kind of “that was then” way. I did see Peter, Paul, and Mary, though, at around the same time. They too were not yet the big-name group they were to become a few years later, performing when I saw them to a small audience of no more than 200 people. Mary Travers died in 2009 at age 72 of leukemia. I guess she was following the principle of “ladies first.” To my knowledge, Peter and Paul are still with us, both well into their 80s...

​Okay, I have nothing against happiness. I think it’s great. In fact, I am always happy when I’m happy. So, what’s my problem? I think pursuing happiness is an exercise in futility. I’m a fan of the late Victor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) and the post-war founder of logotherapy, a psychotherapeutic healing process based on helping the client find and/or create meaning in his or her life. Frankl believed, and I agree, that chasing happiness directly is like running to find the end of the rainbow and, of course, the pot of gold said to be buried there. Since rainbows are visual rather than material phenomena, one can never do more than see one of its ends. Pursuit, as the Borg in Star Trek would say, is futile. And by the way, which end conceals that pot of gold anyway? Frankl’s basic point here is that happiness is the byproduct of something else. And to his mind, that something else was logos, meaning. Hence the term logotherapy. So, our Founding Fathers would have been more helpful had they only known to give us a national motto that read “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Meaning.” Then, per Frankl, as the day follows the night, happiness, or its more stable sister, contentment, would be sure to follow...

​I know, I know! We live in a time of cancel culture. So why am I complaining about this particular cancellation? Well, it’s the painful—and I mean painful—irony of it all. So, consider this scenario. You are sound asleep, aided by the heating blanket you wife thoughtfully bought for you so you wouldn’t wake her up at night to warm yourself up. You see, she is generally warm when she’s sleeping, no doubt because of being five years younger than me and blessed with better circulation, while I become cold, especially when I get up in the middle of the night to go to the . . . well, you can guess where. Anyway, her strategic generosity worked, and when I keep the blanket on #1 or #2, I manage to stay on my side of our king-sized bed most of the time, at least statistically better than in the bad old heat-blanket-less past...

​As a retired English professor, I’ve been struck by how some new crisis, social or personal, causes us to learn a hitherto unknown technical term. When my late father was diagnosed with it, for example, I became acquainted with the disease multiple myeloma. Now even little kids speak routinely about the pandemic, a term only trained medical personnel had spoken of prior to March 2020. Yet there is one pandemic, arguably the world’s oldest, that is totally under the radar, possibly because it is so taken for granted. I mean the pandemic of the misuses and abuses of power. From verbal and physical abuse at home to the boss from hell at work to authoritarian governments and ultimately war, this deadly disease has been with us since the first human society. You don’t need to be a Sunday-school summa cum laude graduate to remember that Cain slew his brother Abel in one of the earliest chapters of Genesis. And, as Sonny and Cher would say, the beat goes on...

A friend of mine in the Twin Cities, a former Catholic priest named Joe, asked me if I had ever written a blog or a section of one of my books on the relationship between wisdom and happiness. I hadn’t but promised that soon, as the Brits say, I would give it a go. Well, “soon” has come, so here I go...

​This is something David ben Gurion (d. 1973), the principal co-founder and first prime minister of the modern state of Israel, is reputed to have said. My research hasn’t yet been able to confirm that claim; nevertheless, given current trends, the concept may be borne out in the not-too-distant future. Certainly, the Jewish national movement founded in the 19th century, Zionism, asserted that if the Jewish people hoped to last, they would need a country of their own, and the Holy Land had been promised to them by no less a personage than God. At the time, to be sure, Jews and Judaism had managed to survive nearly two millennia in diaspora. Still, where were the Hittites now? ...

​It used to be so easy. The good guys wore white cowboy hats and were clean-shaven like John Wayne. Their leader often rode a white horse. And their horses had names like Silver, Trigger, or Tony. The bad guys, by contrast, wore black hats, often had evil mustaches like Governor Dewey of New York, Harry Truman’s unsuccessful presidential opponent right after World War Two, and tended to ride dark horses. Then as now, moreover, superheroes, even if they wore masks like bank robbers—I’m thinking of the Lone Ranger and Batman—they were the good guys and always prevailed over the bad guys who lusted for power and would do whatever it took to acquire it for their personal gain. Also, as someone who was a little kid during World War Two, I knew without a doubt that we and our allies were the good guys and that the Germans and the Japanese and, to a lesser extent the Italians were the baddies...