I know this is dumb. It’s hopeless. Maybe it’s even babyish. That’s why I’m just putting it down in this blue notebook and keeping it to myself. I might tell Carla some of it, or even read her parts. But not Rachel. She’s only nine, and she was only seven when it happened.

We worship a wish,
Make heaven of hope,
Seek deliverance from what is to…what?

A former executive editor of The Washington Post and current journalism professor wrote a guest essay for the Post addressing evolving opinions in journalism as to the proper role of “objectivity” in reporting and editing news.

There is a tendency to cast general social and political issues, shared universally in all  times and places, in single-culture terms. Maybe it’s an attempt to make them “more relevant” to the readership in a single culture. But it results in a parochialism, an overemphasis of one culture’s manifestation of what is better understood as a universal human condition.

He’d have said that we’re beholden
Not to leave things unexplored,
Said there’s always something lurking
Underhanded, untoward.

She saw life as long parade
Of tawdriest taste and kind.
She thought that made her renegade;
I wasn’t so inclined.

There’s no cause for hesitation
In embracing affectation.
We say we act, that we behave,
But truer said is we are slave
To act and to behave such that
We seem to wear the cloak and hat
That we think others want to see.

No one’s suited to conduct,
Since no one writes the symphony.
No leading light stands to instruct,
So we all play on whimsically.

Yesterday will not suffice

To justify the new day’s life.

Laurels can’t be rested on,

But prickle to be bested on.

The date itself, though inauspicious,
Hadn’t stuck me as suspicious.
The note invited all to come
That date to the inviter’s home,
Where we’d all “propitiate,
And, mood allowing, celebrate.”

There’s precious little I can do
To recreate the world for you,
And just as little you’ll revise
The world I picture through my eyes.

Much written about “faith” has an implicit or explicit sneering and dismissive quality, heavy with an attitude of “What kind of limited person believes this stuff?” This piece may be viewed that way by some, but the intention is to identify how and why the Christian religion is often construed and used in a socially detrimental and “un-Christian” way.

Religion, especially as offered in Christianity, is hobbled by contradiction. It exhorts to two antithetical behaviors simultaneously, and it seldom confronts or even acknowledges the schizophrenia. As a result, its pernicious side prevails over its positive one, because its pernicious side is so much easier for people to embrace.

Jesus—madman? What if true?
What would it change for me or you?
We all imagine selves to be
Unrecognized divinity.

There are those who read devotionals daily. I wonder at the practice. Is the emphasis on content, or is it on the activity? Is it processing of words, or processing of feeling? Is it a matter of thought or of attitude? Is it always a blend of these pairs?

It always had an ironic, almost mocking quality, despite its prettiness: “our better angels.” Charles Dickens used the phrase in a novel in 1841, and President Lincoln immortalized it as the slightly altered “better angels of our nature” twenty years later. It’s an odd phrase, somewhat like “most unique.”

Tommy suspected it was all a lie, and he wrongly associated the lie with women. That was because the only one who could have spoken truth, the only one he was close enough to for him to attach truth or falsity to what was said, was his mother. Because his father had died, maybe, in that war. His father drifted or popped in from time to time, but he was too ambiguous a figure to depend on for truth or falsity, not real enough for foundation.

He’d long known it was short of reason

To think a life spent other-pleasing

Would yield much more than pat on back.

He knew it was a lie, in fact,

That life lived trying to curry favor

Was anything but low behavior.

It isn’t the departure from norms and the normative that chill the soul in this Trumpolithic Epoch. It’s the exposure of the now-glaring fact that norms and the normative were and always are chimerical, just cherished illusions, gossamer distorters. These years have been a gradual awakening, not to our own metamorphosis into cockroaches, but to the transformation of so many much like ourselves into the giant insects.

The appeal of the message of the Christian faith is often diminished by the message seeming to be at odds with itself. At base, the human lesson Christianity seeks to instill is a fundamental and sound one: be decent. That’s an ethical and behavioral injunction. Treat others with respect. Call such respect “love” if you want or must, but respect is less ambiguous than love.