Hopeful Thinking

I am a helper. And I often run the risk of helping too much. I want to solve things. When someone comes to me with a problem, I always want to leave them with a solution. That is both a good trait and a deep character flaw. I am reminded of a friend of mine once quoting an aphorism for which he did not know the author, but the wisdom in it merits mention even if without credit. “Weakness is merely strength in excess.”   It’s another way of saying that you can definitely have too much of a good thing. At which point it becomes a bad thing, a weakness. My desire to help people sometimes, in the past especially, has made my strength into a weakness, or at least a vulnerability. I am less easily taken advantage of now. Those lessons were learned at a price. But my desire to help remains. My desire to fix it all still ticks away in the back of my mind. I have been lucky though to have had some good teachers. They explained to me that it is not my job as a minister to fix things, bu...

Back when I was an actor I noticed an odd phenomenon about the memorization of my lines. In preparation for a show it never troubled me to memorize long bits of dialogue or song. I had a little method I devised for myself of tape recording everyone else’s lines leaving space for my own. I’d play back the tape and be my own scene partner to practice.  However, there was always a point at which I’d be the most vulnerable to forgetting all that I’d learned. Well not all, but usually the most important parts.  It was the second performance. Second night performances were always the most treacherous for my lines. Sometimes my costume changes as well, if they were particularly complicated. It got so that on the second day I’d take extra precautions to make sure I wasn’t being overconfident on the heels of a good opening night. Right now it’s possible to see a little light on the edge of the horizon. We have been through a year far more tragic than we can presently comprehend. The ea...

I have been fantasizing about committing vandalism lately. I know I won’t actually do it. But I really, really want to.  Growing up is complicated. If only that process ever ended. Much to our chagrin, we are learning from cradle to grave. We are learning and expanding throughout our entire lives. Day by day discovering where we have either been misinformed, ill-advised, generally mistaken, or ignorant altogether. It’s a lot of work. We also face an inner conflict between our baser human reactions and our higher-minded intentional responses. Sometimes we kick when we should have caressed. That is the purview of spiritual practices. Little bits of advice on how to enhance our inner calm so that we may share that sense of calm with others.  Progress of any kind does not occur in a straight line. I’d really love to think that as a religious and spiritual academic who works quite hard to practice what he preaches, I would be above things like fantasizing about vandalism. But I hav...

I had my tea leaves read once in Salem, Massachusetts. I think I was in high school. I don’t remember anything about the reading I received. I know I didn’t leave thinking I had experienced either a revelation or a fraud. Just $20 worth of entertainment and a nice cup of tea.  For those who don’t know about the act of tea leaf reading, or tasseography as it is formally known, it’s a style of fortune-telling that interprets the patterns left in the bottom of a cup by remnant bits of tea leaf. The same could be done in a cup of wine, coffee, or any beverage which might leave behind a trace of its former self. Those residual contents offer patterns that may be interpreted using a combination of traditional meanings and the reader’s own intuition. My grandmother always advised us to trust our intuition. And I certainly believe in it. I also believe in the existence of psychic phenomena. I don’t, however, believe it exists everywhere it is reported as such. This means to say that some t...