Hopeful Thinking

Thank you for everything. It’s a simple prayer. One that cannot be expressed in simpler terms, actually. Thank you. Thank you for everything. For life. For even stress. For love and heartache both. Thank you. Now let’s define who “you” is. I can’t. At least not for you. You have to decide who the “you” is in that prayer. You are the only member of your faith. It will never be any other way. You are the leader of your own thoughts and beliefs. Even when you think you have been instructed, you will still have opinions about what and by whom. You may be a fully devoted Catholic, for instance, and yet will always maintain your own views about the doctrine. Blind faith is actually a misleading sentiment. No faith is blind. We can’t simply shut off our opinions. More so now than ever in history, in fact. So, who is your “you?” I prefer to assume that what people refer to as “God” is the literal connection between all life. The interdependent web of all existence. I believe that ...

On what level of our psyche does friendship occur? What part of us is doing the feeling when we have a friend? Is it an area of our cerebral cortex? Is it in the air between us? Is it an entirely chemical reaction in the body? Where are the literal threads of my friendships and to what in me are they anchored? I think most of us are comfortable with the notion that friendship is a real thing. Not imaginary. To be clear, I’m not speaking of the friends themselves. I’m speaking of the connection between them. That connection between you and your closest friend exists whether or not you are together. Across the globe from one another the friendship is no less strong. No less real. Do we form these kinds of connections online as well as in “real life?” I would have to say yes. And we regularly form them with people we’ve never met. My mother had a penpal in Australia as a child. They wrote to each other for years. Decades later they finally met in person. Were they not friends until...

There is one great overarching message which all mythology and religion tells us. It is repeated over and over. Story after story, it is drilled into us. God(s) want us to be grateful. They want our praise, our devotion. They expect total obedience and lengthy worship. At least, that’s how we have interpreted it. The haphazard character of humanity is so often ascribed to divinity. We love to believe that God feels the way we feel. That God is only interested in being praised for the benefit of an ego. Greek mythology is especially good at making the divine in their stories behave like spoiled children. Worse actually, self-absorbed teenagers. We historically sculpt the divine into a jealous reflection of ourselves. We know how we like to be praised. We know how good it feels to have a job well done recognized by people we respect. Some of us are obsessed with praise for unhealthy reasons and behave badly, even vengefully, when they don’t get what they need. We assume the same o...

Sadly, as this column publishes, I will be burying my father. He was a good man who served his country and taught me a lot. And while there are of course many sadnesses, there are also joys to be remembered. Stories. Jokes. Friends who cherished him. I look forward to shaking their hands. Of all the stories my dad told me, one in particular stands out. In the 1970’s my father and his brother moved our families from Fitchburg and Lunenburg nearly 1,500 miles south to Miami, Florida. They had purchased an oil company franchise and each drove gas trucks at night filling up the tanks of post office vehicles. My mother did the bookkeeping and cared for three mostly well-behaved very young children. My father’s job was extremely hard work. Very physically demanding. Racing around truck yards, lugging heavy gas lines from tank to tank, and climbing in and out of his truck cab hundreds of times a night. All racing against the clock before the mail carri...