Thinking Outloud

From Madeleine L'Engle's Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage:  Speaking of her 40 year marriage to her husband Hugh Franklin: "We were not a latter-day Heloise and Abelard, Pelleas and Melisande when we married. For one thing, the Heloises and Abelards, the Pelleases and Melisandes, do not get married and stay married for forty years. A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out. The famous lovers usually end up dead. A long term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love. Of course, the culture tends to glorify the passionate whirlwind romance, rather than the steady committed marriage. Anyone fortunate enough to share in the latter, to enjoy true love, realizes how empty is the former." 

Over ten years ago, during the most difficult part of my career as a parish pastor, I took a quick summer trip back East with my two young children to visit my family. We flew in, and my parents picked us up from the airport. Toward the end of that visit, I coerced my parents into taking the 100 mile trip from their home to the town of my childhood. Though we had talked about it weeks before on the telephone (and what seemed at the time, promises were made), it took several tries before I could get at least one of them to agree to go along. I'd love to see Fairfield again, I said. I haven't been back since high school, over 30 years ago. As I talked, I could see from their faces that my desire struck them as odd. Though my grandparents on my mother's side had continued to live there long after we left, and lived in their home until their deaths many, many years later, the relatively close town of my childhood held little interest for my parents. I pushed. Finally we agree

Yes, I believe many of us are more smitten with our smartphones than each other. I'm wondering when that will finally feel painful enough to control ourselves. Not soon enough.

Several of my clients are suffering with destructive moods, relationships, jobs or unemployment at the moment . I understand what that vortex feels like: overwhelming physical tension, unclear thinking, rushed or confused decision making, hair-trigger temper, uneasy sleep. During times like this in life, it's very hard to trust that you can find a way to hang on. The present is so unpleasant it seems endless. When times like this come to us (and believe me, they will come to us all, at one time or another), I like to focus on two aspects of help: making the NOW better each day, and focusing o n the small decisions we make so that we can create a more hopeful FUTURE. The Now : There is a great deal we all can do every day to soothe our bodies and minds for optimum wellness even when in an emotional storm. They are aspects of daily self care, but few of us practice them with enough patience that they make a difference. Here are the basics I talk to all my clients abo

Back in the day when I performed weddings, starry-eyed couples would come to my church office to do premarital counseling and plan their (elaborate) wedding ceremony. I guess I never stopped to consider it much, but I assumed, as did they, that the promise to be "faithful until death parts us" was seriously considered and solemnly promised before and during the wedding service. They only had eyes for one another. Yet, I knew that about half of all the weddings I would perform over the years would end in divorce. That statistic didn't stop anybody, it seemed, from being certain about themselves. We can do it, the couple assumed. We can be each others' partner for life. I now have been in the marriage counseling field for 8 years, and practicing full-time for 6. It's not a lot of experience, but believe me: it's enough. Enough to feel like I have a new sense of the difficulties of pledging a life-long partnership, and the challenge of not only growing and ag

     For generations, family members have noted the differences that naturally arise in children raised in the same family. How is it that John, the first born and only boy, seems to have such different personality characteristics than his younger brother, raised in the same house by the same parents just two years apart?  Good question!      Theories of personality abound. You may be familiar with some of the more popular models, often used in work or educational settings. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), based on the four major personality styles described by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, is a favorite. The Enneagram, a model developed in religious communities and often used in spiritual direction, and other forms of personal discovery, is another.  These are models that seek to describe common types of personalities. Other models, such as the Big Five theory, attempt to describe personalities using the idea of common traits shared by human beings across the wo

I've been reading about blogging, and it seems that I'm not doing it right. Those in the know about such things tell us writers, mostly in their blogs, that to blog is to create a personal online community, one which is thirsty for the writer's words and self revelations; writing that steps toward the daily Diary or Journal, and away from more sedate Opinion or Editorial. The most successful of blogs these days - and it seems to change every day - drone on and on about the personal trials of having a newborn, or looking for a job, or recreating the work place, or reinventing the government, or the economy, or the Church. Again. These exemplars are often writing on the fly, with nary a concern for punctuation, spelling, brevity, or privacy. It's all about capturing the reader, and capturing as many as possible. You may have noticed that I'm not much of a rebel when it comes to the niceties of the published essay. I have spent far too many years putting words into

It's been over two weeks since the earthquake devastated the people of Haiti. Tens of thousands have died, including people you may know. And along with a desire to help, and a deepening sense of helplessness as we watch that impoverish nation respond, I am struck by a familiar conflict, or perhaps it is an observation about human life. I continue to wonder how my life can go on in its normal way while massive, untold despair, suffering and death occurs around me. It's the same experience those who suffer grief describe: how does the world continue on its way while my life seems to have stopped? I struggle with a low-grade angst; not a guilt exactly, but close to it. As if I have witnessed a massive car crash from the safety of my own vehicle and go careening by, with just a glance in my rear view mirror. I continue on, glad it wasn't me in that car, confident someone more capable is responding. I believe this soft anguish reflects this existential truth: we are sin

The best marriages are made by people who begin their relationship as friends and use friendship as their marriage model. Do you know how to make and keep a friendship? Listen and talk, share work and pleasure, respond to a friend's bids for attention, and get some attention back? Laugh and enjoy each other, be flexible when things don't work out, fix your disagreements, stay loyal but open to other people in your friend's life?  If you do, and can keep these skills going with people your own age, you already know how to sustain a marriage. The dramatic stuff of romantic attachment, the wash of sexual attraction, the focused desire for only that one partner: that biological experience, which is the core of nearly every popular song or relationship movie made in the last 50 years, is a piece of human experience, too. But it is crushingly brief. Most of us will only sustain that brain and body phase for 12-18 months. After that, we begin to readjust to a steady attachment

It's been awhile since I was up north, to Duluth and beyond. I'm going to visit today. I worked in northern Wisconsin for 12 years as a pastor of three different parishes. I loved many of the people I served, but none more than the friend I am going to see. We have held ourselves together through teenagers (hers), a wedding (mine), work system nightmares (both), cancer, deaths and funerals, births (my children, her grandchildren) chronic health problems, educational endeavors (both of us), aging and the general pressures of time and distance. We love looking at the world together, and from quite different points of view. We are blessed to have found each other and to have remained friends for over two decades.  Who in your life is the same kind of gift of God, a similar lens through which you see yourself and the world more gracefully, more lightly than you do alone? Give thanks to God for them. Cherish your relationship enough to go out of your way to stay connected. Oul