The Blog--Anything Mentionable

On a pilgrimmage to Arizona, sunrise fellowship, honest talk about grieving, and grateful tears in the desert for the hero of my life.

It was only then that I truly learned of and came to understand our shameful past when it came to race relations in this country. That knowledge forever changed the way I looked at people different than myself. Roland and I often talked about this

The call comes, or the text or the email, and we find ourselves on the way to the home of a friend or loved one who has just suffered a loss, or to a visitation or a funeral. Then comes an almost universal anxiety and the haunting questions: When I approach the grieving person, what should I say? What should I do?

But most of us live as if the opposite was true. We go through life believing in our “terminal uniqueness,” that we are the only ones feeling anger, sadness, shame, grief, fear, depression and self-doubt. Feelings are character defects, not inevitable and universal aspects of the human condition.

You don’t get to control it all. But choosing simplicity whenever possible adds to life an element of deepest freedom which so easily eludes us, and many opportunities to discover that less may actually be more.”

Fred Rogers did not come to us from a spiritual mountaintop. He was fully human instead, a person who grappled with the inner difficulties so familiar to the rest of us. There is comfort in knowing this.

But there was something they shared, a certain inner luminosity, a quiet joy. It was acknowledged with a nod or a smile or a few kind words of encouragement for a plodding old guy like me. There was a wonderful, unspoken truth up there, something about the grandeur of nature and the expansiveness of the human soul.

On a winter afternoon in 1989, I climbed into the cargo hold of a crowded Ryder rental truck, finding my place amid forty-nine Central American refugees. Over the next eleven hours, on a journey from the Texas border town of Harlingen to Houston, I learned that we're all refugees.