If only God were solid, I think. If only he were like rugs and pastries, like a freckle-faced boy on a bike. If only he meandered the streets, be he five feet tall or fifty, I’d take solace in that. It’s not that I want to see God (who truly would?) but I’d like him to have the connection to my life that the market has. I’d like him to draw my eyes, my fingertips. I’d like to feel some warmth coming from him. I’d like him to scrape my palms like tree bark. The thought of him interrupting my senses in any old way sounds a good deal more comforting than his current nebulous ubiquity. (more…)

She is looking at him when he wakes up with a detached curiosity, like his waking was an expected ordeal. She, on the other hand, was not what he had expected at all. She did not look like him. She didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen.

“How long have you been there?” he says.

“I’ve always been here.”

“No, you haven’t. You’re new.”

“New,” she repeats, tasting the word. She discovers that she agrees with him even as she says it, and the word falls newly from her lips into a garden in which many things were just so. She pulls her knees up to her and rests her chin on them, wrapping her arms around her legs. He thinks her movements odd, but he cannot stop watching.

They sit in the earth, with trees waving about them like hands to God. It is morning, and the garden is bursting with chatter. Creatures acquainted only with life and nothing else. The world green and naked and wild.  (more…)

Among the Lakota tribe, there is an old story of a holy woman named Ptesan­Wi, or “The White Buffalo Woman.” She was said have appeared out of nowhere, floating wherever she went, and taught the people four chief virtues: generosity, wisdom, courage and fortitude. Upon her departure, she said she would return one day to usher in a time of peace in an age of turmoil.

The sign of her coming, she said, would be a white buffalo born on their own land. The “Great White Buffalo” you may have heard about.

(more…)

I remember when I met my first Democrat the way some people might remember their first R-rated movie, or perhaps, their first tornado.

I was about nine years old. Me and some friends got shuttled once a week out of our tiny Nebraska town to the comparatively huge city of Kearney once a week, for drama class. Our drama teacher (of course) announced her political party to us with the weary nobility of Joan of Arc, and I suppose being a Democrat in a small midwestern town must have indeed seemed some sort of crucible. What had brought this conversation up escapes me now, but I remember our collective shock. “You’re a Democrat?” Micah had bellowed. It echoed all of our thoughts.  (more…)

We can all be free.

 

Maybe not with words. 

 

Maybe not with looks. 

 

But with your mind.

                                     -Cat Power

When I was in high school, I spent some time in Japan—ostensibly to teach English, though I don’t recall doing much of that. The trip as a whole is a bit of a blur, but I remember one young man named Ken and I don’t expect I’ll forget him soon. We climbed Mount Fuji together, and he assaulted me with questions about America and American freedom in particular. He said the word “freedom” like a spell, the way some people talk about Camelot or Eden. We sat in the back of a rickety old van, bouncing up and down ancient roads where he told me of his plan to move to America. “I want to be free,” he said, eyes shining. “I want to be free! I want to be free!” 

Whether or not Ken ever moved here, I do not know, but I would like to know what he found if he did. Americans see freedom not just as an institutional priority, but as a sacred birthright. In the Declaration of Independence (our most prized national possession, with a title we’ve heard so many times it’s easy to forget just how brazen and audacious it is), the Founding Fathers listed “liberty” as being on par with life itself. Modern times have diluted that equivocation down to “born free.” I recently saw a debate on Facebook that summed it up nicely. When one well-intentioned person suggested that the U.S. government needed to give its people more freedom, another shot back “Nobody can give you freedom.”  (more…)

I remember the way your face looked when you found out I was “religious.” I expect I always will.

The way your shoulders tensed and your chin jutted out—just a little, but enough. You suddenly focused on your drink. Your eyes narrowed. It didn’t look like you were afraid. If anything, you were the opposite. I’d compare it to the look of a wolf defending her cubs. Or, more appropriately, a wounded soldier preparing to show that she has some fight left in her.  (more…)

First, some thought on my repellant title.

The Church is uncomfortable with the idea of happiness. We trivialize its pursuit and, whenever a faith leader or author offers steps on being happier, our old Protestant work ethic rises up in protest. Happiness, we are told, is no noble aim. At most, you ought to be joyful. Generally, you ought to be “authentic,” which is our evangelical synonym for “grouchy.”

It’s a rotten way to live.

It’s hardly biblical. The Bible is full of lovely advice on how to be happy. And our very delight in happiness—the natural feeling of it—ought to be a sign to us that we are made for it, and ought to pursue it. There is no reason to be suspicious of those who suggest we ought to try being happier. It’s cruel and cynical to do so.

We go wrong, of course, when we tie happiness and holiness, as if right relationship with God were some guarantee of happy circumstances. Life is frequently miserable, and there are then no steps of mine that can rectify it. All I offer here are a few things that may actually make you “happier,” if not exactly always “happy.” These won’t cure your depression (trust me) and they won’t fix you.

But they won’t hurt. I can guarantee that. (more…)

9/11 is a day about fear. 

Not for all of us, obviously. The images of firemen running into crumbling towers to rescue whoever they could are among the finest in our nation’s history, but they are not the enduring legacy of the terrorist attacks. If you’d like to know the true legacy of 9/11, you need look no further than any recent news piece on the NSA, the NRA, IED’s, the CIA, Gitmo or any other stuffily abbreviated word trending on Twitter right now. These little stretches in what we consider to be right so that we can consider ourselves safe. 

9/11 made us afraid, and that fear is now part of our legacy. It’s part of the American framework. We bluster it up and make it look like power, but it’s not. Not really.  (more…)