Two potentially harmful voices come to mind.

The first one is our own.

When I finished my first year of professional teaching, I said to myself, “I hate this! I feel like a failure. I want to quit.” My own voice didn’t  offer good guidance. Fortunately my father, in a phone conversation about this,  said to me,  ”Now you know how your students feel. Many of them  feel like failures. Now you know.”

That was a good voice, and I went on from there, following the leading of that voice to teach, until now, and I like it. When I finally do quit teaching, I think I’d like keep teaching,  part-time  —  for fun!

My own voice was suspect. This is hardly rare. Most of us have experienced bad feedback,  from ourselves, concerning ourselves.

Beware your own whining and sulking and quitting-talk.

The second kind of voice to avoid is the voice of the unwise family member or friend.  Family members — they don’t always get us right. Over time they tend to stereotype us.  ”Well she always has been a bit edgy, or sad or dominant or shy,” or whatever they come to label us. Others in the family, may concur, and the label may stick, when it shouldn’t.

Friends are often also unwise voices in our lives. In giving feedback, friends tend to simply project their own reactive, unresolved feelings onto our situations. We need to face this; most people aren’t great counselors.  If they hate men, they hate our man. If they hate women, they hate our women. If they don’t resolve their own conflicts well, they won’t resolve ours well either.

What to do?

Pick mentors carefully.

Find people who have life experience, good and bad, people who have been able to resolve conflicts, who have learned something about healthy boundaries, who have had some long-lasting relationships, who have raised some kids (and the kids still love them), who have been successful in their careers but who have also gone through some career-hell and come out still feeling like life is some kind of heaven, who know something about God, something along the lines that God loves us and will never, ever stop loving us.

There are many voices. The world is full of talk. The deal is to learn which voices are safe and which ones aren’t, which voices to tune out, and which ones to listen to when we are losing our way a bit.

This is one of those things to figure out, to get right, to get a handle on, to give some time to.

The right voice, the right answer, the wise counsel – it’s beautiful!

It’s protection.

Disability.

Ethnicity.

Gender.

Marital status.

National origin.

Race.

Religion.

Sexual orientation.

These are sometime the basis for unlawful, socially harmful discrimination.

I’ve been discriminated against. When I was a teacher,  I remember one of my students looking me in the eye, glaring and saying, “You’re not capable of understanding.” Then I knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of racism.

For me and for most of us, discrimination is something we think of  other people doing.  They are racists, bigots, fanatics, the unjust. But it is a symptom of the disease of unlawful or harmful discrimination not to see it in ourselves. With our “they” we  poke out our own eyes.

To actually experience condescension in our own voices, say when speaking to a sixteen-year-old or an eighty-seven year old or a disabled person, is harder.

We may also experience it in our silence. I noticed at one point that I spoke less to my daughter’s friend who can’t speak, than to her other friends. Why? He can’t speak back, so I felt awkward. I decided to change. Why shouldn’t he receive my attention as much as any of her other friends. It’s been a nice change for me. I have my own “way” with him now. We laugh a lot, together.

I know a young woman who in her twenties looks ten years younger. When she asks for help while shopping for clothes, store clerks sometimes ask her where her mom is or direct her to the “younger department.” She knows what it’s like to experience age discrimination, and while one might easily defend the clerks as having no way of knowing, such situations bring to light how easily we slight others and don’t  know it.

It’s subtle. I have felt a distancing going on in my mind as certain people have approached me. An observation of size or disability or age has  sometimes shot a small dose of fear or repulsion into me. I hate having to admit this, but my first impressions have sometimes been based  completely on superficial and  automatic distinctions.  And I don’t always catch on to the fact that I have done this.

Sometimes our racial or social distinctions seem to us to be  wise notations of  differences. We think of ourselves as understanding. We make a capability clarification or a  role clarification; we see our discrimination  as a necessity that reflects physical reality.  “There are differences between men and women.” As such, our discrimination begin disguised as enlightenment.

I remember in my younger days thinking that I wouldn’t go to a church that was pastored by a woman. I based this on an interpretation of scripture. I based it on no experience. I had none. I based this on my own insecurity. I based this on what other men and women that I knew said they believed.  Now I would gladly go to a church pastored by a woman, and now I can present a strong scriptural basis for this and now I am surrounded by other people who affirm this. It is so important to be able to change, to be able to shed former boxes of constricted and harmful thinking.

I have had to grow into the realization that different should not be disallowed. I have had to flight past social taboo and come out free to accept as women as equals and their contribution as enriching.

The truth is that we too often hide our “put downs”  in religious mandates, governmental programs, institutional values and herd mentalities.  “They can’t” or we “must not” or “God doesn’t want’” can be simply disguises for insecurity, fear and selfishness.

Discrimination often functions within social expectations and rules.  It is better to hear than to sign. It is better to see than to be blind. It is better to be light-skinned than dark. It is better to be rich than poor. It is better to be educated than not.

What is needed is a definition of what it means to not discriminate.

To not discriminate is to experience someone different from you and to not see them as less than you.

To not discriminate is to hire a person who is in some way the opposite of you,  and not compete with or intimidate that person. It is when an extroverted leader hires an introverted leader to enrich the emotional depth and quality of the organization.

To not discriminate is for a man to see a woman as his equal, fully empowered, taking her place in the family or the organization and being treated as in no way inferior or lesser or weaker or more emotional. It is for her not to be dominated and controlled or put in a limiting box.

To not discriminate is to treat the school smart daughter the same as the daughter who is in special education and to affirm them both, equally and to see that smart is not better it is just different and kind is not better either it is just a quality that some have more than others.

To not discriminate is to see a court case where the one charged is Hispanic and the one dead is black and to not see this as a brown versus black issue but a right or wrong issue that must be given a process that has as its goal the truth and justice and love.

The truth is that it is always a fight for the truth.

And the truth is that it is hard not to discriminate, that we all tend towards it, and that maturity and personal growth always involve movement toward loving other people more.

The beginning of the end of discrimination?

Think of it as something that you, not just “they” struggle with.

She had a disfiguring surgery, and it marked a new era for her – me too. Only later did I come to understand her experience as an extremely difficult self-consciousness regarding her body, her clothing and her sense of female wholeness. But as a teenage boy, although I couldn’t understand her conflicted feelings, and she didn’t share them with me, as I sat with her by her bed we fused over pain. The suffering-her and the anxious-me met in a way we had not experienced since birth had separated us.

G.K. Chesterton has noted that “birth is as solemn a parting as death.” When we are born, we get our first lesson in not-being-someone-else. We experience our first unhooking, a primal, existential psyche detrailering. It’s a good thing.

When I  was born I broke out of my mother, and the deep structure of my psyche must have shouted, ”I’m free!” But when she got cancer I returned to her, to an adult awareness of her, and I had the opportunity to enter the acutely poignant reality of her again. This happens.  We have chances now and again to make such movements. Birthed into liberating independence, we can be wooed by difficulty back inside someone we love. When we go through pain, there is an opportunity to trailer back up. She had surgery; the cancer was removed, but something remained in me.

It’s odd how connecting with each other works out – and when. When I was in grade school my grandma on my mom’s side of the family came to live with us in our home near Warsaw, Missouri. It was a migration that would take her out of element in the Los Angles area and into mine. She was alone at that stage of her life, her husband having died, her children having all set up their own households. Landing in our house, she landed in a thoroughly mid-west, male world.

I remember two things about her stay with us: That she bought us our first TV, and that I clubbed her to the floor in the laundry room. She changed our world, and we rocked hers. The TV she gave us saved our family. We were transplanted Californians,  lost and alone in rural Missouri, but we were saved through Gilligan and his  island and  Steve McGarrett and Dano and by the commercials where we learned what we really needed to thrive.

The TV was an efficacious means of salvation from the Baptist church we attended in Warsaw, but grandma’s clubbing was merely good fun. My brothers and I loved to whack each other, a punch on the arm, a toy gun war around the house, a generally good thumping with billy clubs. The clubs we made for ourselves by stuffing several socks inside one sock until we had nice long, hard slugging socks.

The day grandma went down, I was lying in wait for one of my brothers; grandma happened to slide open the pocket door that accessed the laundry room. I jumped out from behind the washer with the club already in motion; it landed smack on top of grandma’s little head, down she went. The apologies came next. Not too long after that, grandma moved back to California.

It wasn’t the only time my grandma had met family difficulty and had to move. My mom told me a while back that her mom was sexually abused as a child. It happened in this way; my grandma’s dad died when she was little, and her mom remarried, and her step-dad abused her.

“Really, mom?” I asked. “I never knew that! In our family — grandma was sexually abused? Wow!”

And after my mom told me this, and I knew it had happened, it crushed something in me, connecting me in some kind of bridging way to my grandma and giving me an option really, to think about and enter into a new conscious awareness of her.

My mom told me that afterwards my grandma was sent away to live with an aunt. I think of her now, our Nana, tiny like she was, when she was abused. I imagine her alone, confused and afraid afterwards, and I know she was, crying under her blankets in her dark bedroom – alone. And I wish I could have gone to her then, changed like I have changed now, changed by my own painful experiences into a more authentic self, into one who knows what to do with pain, and talked to her as if she were my little daughter — time and space swept aside for a moment – and me patting Nana on the back, this harmed little girl who was to become my mom’s mom and my very one-and-only Nana, and me putting my head beside hers like a real good dad would, in an appropriate unbordering of the self, and then breaking down with her, and saying to her with tears running out of my eyes and down my cheeks and onto her cheeks, ”What was done to you was so wrong. I’m so sorry it happened! Look at me, you didn’t do anything wrong! You didn’t do anything wrong! Something wrong was done to you. And it shouldn’t have been done, and I love you, and I am going to protect you now so that this bad thing never, ever happens to you again!”

Sticking to one’s own consciousness and harboring up within one’s own self is overrated. We cross over, at times, into someone else’s sacred space. In certain uninvited moments of life, we make this choice, when time and space allow, and as we can, and even when it doesn’t seem to be allowed, because who and what is allowed is what we choose.

And I wish I could have gone to her step-dad, and said what needed to be said to him too, in an emotionally controlled way, and then gone to other people who needed to look into this in some way that would set some boundaries up, and then I wish I could have taken my grandma away and found a loving place for her and said to her, “Now you are safe, and you are going to be okay, we are going to have someone talk to you about this and listen to you and help you be okay.”

My grandma eventually married a much older man than herself, whose first wife had died, and he was a very good man, and he had little girls that he protected and I think he gave her some of that, the place removed from harm for the wounded self to recover — and safety.

My grandma was abused when I was not yet a self, when I was still unborn, but now I am, and my consciousness of it connects me with my grandma, but not her to me because she’s gone now. The mental time-traveler’s option is to cross over the sacred border of the self and to trailer up with someone who isn’t even alive anymore, especially in a family. We do it all the time when we read biographies.  In nooks and corners of our lives we can choose to live in broken-down sameness together for a short time.

This is my experience, and it is increasingly so as I age. Over time, I find my edges smearing, fuzzing and blurring. It’s been a slow but certain transformation.

When my daughter Rosalind was two we started on the flash cards. And we made Sesame Street a habit. She made good progress – “dog, cat, lion.” We played school. I loved teaching her. I read, read, read and read some more to her. I read “Little Chick,” over and over again. These were some really good times together. At this point in life, I was working as a high school literature and writing teacher, and my wife worked in a library. Our family loved a book shelf, a pile of books head high, a campus, a life of print, but then something happened to Rosalind, and we had to learn to not make that the standard by which we measured value.

One day, when Rosalind was one and one-half, she stopped breathing, turned blue, and started convulsing. It was a moment that I haven’t yet fully recovered from. You don’t get over such things; you just take shelter, and remain hyper-vigilant and take comfort where you can. The paramedics came to the house with a siren blasting, and we all rushed off to the hospital. The needle in Rosalind’s baby spine was a tough moment. You spend all your energy protecting your baby, and then you hold her so someone can hurt her. It doesn’t feel right.

The diagnoses came in turn and over the next few years. She has “febrile convulsions.” Then she has “epilepsy.”  And eventually, we were told the kicker that we never thought we would hear. She has, “brain damage.” Finally, the label-verdict on how school would go was given by a neuro-psychologist after extensive testing: “She is retarded.”  Bam, that label hurt, all of us, from grandma on down. And with the labels came the drugs, phenobarbitol,  topamax,  depakote – a sluggish life, lots of naps. I hated it, I still do, but I have learned to be okay with it, kind of, and not.

I know that as tightly as I’m woven by my opinions and experiences and choices into a unique and personal self,  my psychic independence unravels  at the unwanted threshold I passed over with my family.

One evening when Rosalind was in grade I went into her room. Her face was red and soaked with tears, and angry and hurt.

“What’s the matter?” I asked sitting on the edge of her bed and putting my hand to her head.

“Nothing,” she said angrily.

“No, something is wrong,” I said, “just tell me. I won’t be mad at you.”

“I’m stupid!” she blurted out. “I can’t read!”

I put my head down by hers. Her pain swept up out of her and into me. I started crying. We were like that for a moment, my sobs mixed up with  hers. She hadn’t seen that so much. I a guy, touch, not given to excessive humidity, especially with others.

We were close like that for a moment, then Rosalind pushed my face back and looked into my eyes with profound puzzlement. She stared and asked, “Daddy, are you crying for me?” It was out. Our eyes were locked. Then she knew something she hadn’t known as well until then — she wasn’t alone.

I think again about my mom, my wife, my daughters my grandma, and I know and always have known, and will and always will come to times when my carefully stitched up edges unravel. It tends to be when I get close to the women in my life. I am autonomous, and yet with them, I am not, and now perhaps more so over time. I have leaky borders.

If I have to live alone someday, and I may, without wanting to, for instance if my wife dies before I do, I won’t like it, especially at night. I hate to sleep alone. And I hate to go through hard things alone.

Recently, I spent the morning with my wife. We painted our bedroom together, one wall a beautiful dark olive branch green. Painting together is not advisable early in a marriage, but after years together it can go well, evoking only a couple of testy moment for a mornings team work. One snarly incident occurred when I critiqued her work on the baseboard. She reminded me that she didn’t need or want my opinion.

At the end of the day, we sat together exhausted. I found myself shifting into my very familiar and personal I-am-with-her awareness. I unbordered, as I sometimes do, when I am very close to her, relaxing into her green tea perfume, the clean smell of her hair conditioner, the skin-on-skin tactility that feels so very safe and so extremely comforting.

I asked her only a short time back, in just such a bonded moment: “Am I you?” At the time, it seemed like the thing to say. It could have been meant romantically, but I was thinking about it epistemologically and she took it so.

“No,” she said firmly, and then threw down her own opinion on the ontological table. “Sometimes you edit my decisions too much and  tell me what to do, and I don’t like it.” My wife went to Smart Mouth College.

She’s wrong, of course, as always, but right too. I am not her. I am an autonomous self, and yet I do cross over into her, and at times I can hardly tell myself from her or her from me. I like to think back over my life; it’s been a mix of coexistence and  independence. I  have known the ecstasy of escaping my mother, and I have known the ecstasy of merging with my wife.

These many years later, I can still see my mom sick with the cancer, lying in her dark bedroom as I hold her hand, and I can see my daughter crying alone in her room with me beside her, and see too my grandma sitting on a chair in a room that my grandpa is painting. My grandma is smiling at my grandpa, her house painter, the renewer of  her own renewed spaces, her gift, her other self to shelter in. And, I can see my self too, sick with my last sickness perhaps, and my wife, my own adopted other self sitting on my bed and my beautiful daughter stroking my pale head.

How is it that a man might come to such places where he might untrailer from himself and hook on to another?  It brings to mind, oddly enough, in the shifting range of reflection, Shakespeare’s King Lear raving in the storm. The old king, once perhaps loved just a little and perhaps able to give a little love, ends up on the on the heath with no love, all bordered and fenced within himself, screaming into the wind.

He had his chances, the old coot, with his  three daughters, to cross over into them, but then in the process of his making his way through the transfer of power, they were lost to him, and crazy with pain he cries out, ”A man may see how this world goes with no eyes.”

And so I turn my no-eyed, other-seeing consciousness on the crazy king, the man of the moment who is not me and yet who is me, because we both know deep family pain, but I have lived and moved and had just a bit of my being in other persons. And I see Leer there alone in the rain, not yet ended, and I, his self-appointed fool, take him by the arm, this wacked out old king, and I lead him home with me, a piece of my own disturbed self, and I find a safe place for him within me, as if he were me.

I am capable of his foolishness, but I think I can help him, and so I take his arm, and I lead him to bed so that he might take a good, long therapeutic nap. And then I go and get his daughter Cordelia, so that he might wake to her, crossing over to him, and stroking his crazy old head sane again.

The Harpy Eagle was happily hanging out at the entrance with his trainer and a whole crowd of gawkers, the Flamingos were squawking it up together around the pool, the fish in the  snapping turtle pool seemed to be clumping together for safety and the gorillas were all clustered up within 15 feet of each other, despite their huge, grassy, multi-storied, multi-waterfalled home.

What is that about?

A few nights ago when I went to bed, the same kind of  swarming together and hanging-out-close seemed to be going on,  so  I closed and latched my bedroom door so I might get some sleep.

It was a good thing. At 1 am they tried to break in and then again at 3 am I heard them banging on the door. But I held my ground, and as a result got some sleep. I know why they wanted in. They wanted my body, it’s warmth. because they are little and thermophilic and cold at night.

When I got up they were still by the door — my two cats, hungry for company, heat and love and … cat chow.

The creatures seem to not to want to be too much alone.

More and more people are living alone these days, however, partiularly in urban areas. Eric Klinenberg, in his new book,  Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, reports that in recent years, particularly since the 1950′s, solo living has grown, and it has grown most  in countries with booming economies: China, India, and Brazil. The US is lagging in this going-it-alone stuff,  but more people live alone in the United States than ever before, 28 per cent of all households, about 31 million people.

Studies on living alone have found that women, in contrast to men,  are more likely to have strong social networks, and that this enables them to live alone without being alone. Men, living alone, are more at risk of withdrawing into isolation that, in the extreme, can make them very unhappy and that can even be dangerous for them.

According to a Finnish study, “Living alone is associated with an increased risk of alcohol-related mortality — from alcohol-related diseases and accidents.”

It can be fine to live alone, but I think that for most of us, it is not fine to be too much alone. Household practices are changing, but not our core need for clumping.

This is particularly true when we move from our family of orgin to whatever we design next.

I remember in my college years, driving places alone, talking to myself in the car and  saying stuff like, “I need more than me, here…” The loneliness in the front of the car was palpable. It felt like cold, dark  water running through the bottom of a deep cave.

I find the desire for human warmth to be quite universal.

I spoke to a homeless man a while back, “What is hardest about being homeless?” I asked.

“The loneliness,” he said.  “I just need someone to talk to.”

It seems like, no matter how we choose to live, we can’t get away from it — the need for clumping and swarming. It’s weird, almost like we were wired for this, like God himself wired a social port into us. Perhaps it feels like that because …  that’s the way it is.

In the beginning of the beginning of the very beginning it was said, “It is not good … to be alone.”

I’ve been thinking a bit about that, and I think that perhaps it is one of the vast accomplishments of life to understand what exists that will never not exist and then to act accordingly.

We are inveterately, undeniably, intrincically social.

So what’s next?

He sat on the couch in front of her and put his fist on his chest and coughed.

“I don’t know,” she said. “You used to say that nothing could hurt you, and I guess I thought that was true.”

“Well, it’s not anymore,” he replied. “You see how I’ve been lately, all emotional with the kids and with you. I see that what I’ve done has hurt a lot of other people and I’m sorry about that and I’ve been apologizing for that.”

I turned to her and asked, “Can you see that he’s been different lately?”

“I can,” she replied. “It’s like he is becoming more human.”

It’s interesting, the degrees of things, the way things change.  We are all becoming, everyday, perhaps more or less human.

What does that mean? I’m not entirely sure, except to say that part of it can be explained by the progress or regress we make emotionally. To be human is to feel —  pain, love, depression, happiness, guilt, tranquility.

To petrify emotionally is to lose our humanity. To turn to stone regarding other human’s feelings is to lose the human quality of our relationships. To grow numb, to fail to understand or care when our behaviors bring pain to others — this all is part of a process whereby we grow inhuman and inhumane.

This matters.

We must not lose the affective domain or we lose our humanity.

To be human is to be emotionally rich. To break, to soar, to break down, to take courage, to pick ourselves up and explain to someone else how we really feel — this is what it means to be an integrated person, a complete personality, a fully human being.

As long as we can be hurt then we  retain the ability to understand someone elses’ hurt.

To the extent that we can accept and honor our own emotions, then we will be able to accept and honor other people’s emotions.

Feelings feel feelings.

Feel.

Be human.

Thrive.

They don’t like politicians who sling mud at opposing parties. They don’t like religious fanatics who pronounce judgment on sinners. They don’t like ex-wives who tell the kids that dad is a jerk.

That’s interesting. I find that all very interesting.

Someone told me recently that they were embarrassed by their own skin, literally,  how it looks, how it feels.

Someone told me recently that they lacked confidence, with others — almost always.

Someone told me recently that they had a lot of guilt, when really, as far as I can tell,  this person has done nothing much wrong. They aren’t old enough!

Someone confessed to me, “I don’t know if I’ve done enough good to outweigh the bad I’ve done.”

People don’t like judgment and yet it  seems that many people are  the harshest judge of themselves that they know. People judge themselves in ways that they would never judge others.

I heard that someone told their friend a while back, “People don’t like us!”  I know both these people. It isn’t true. Both are liked.

Most all of us, if we hear a baby crying will pick up the baby and comfort it, not scold it. And yet when we cry inside, we too often scold ourselves for the very feelings we should embrace, comfort and sooth.

Yesterday, at a picnic I attended, one of the little boys present whacked his head on the tailgate of a pickup. He bellowed. I held him. He leaned into me. He was comforted. His mom came. He was comforted again.

This is the model for how we should treat ourselves. There will be jugment, but better yet is discernment, and better yet is tolerance and compassion and mercy.

We would all do well, I think, to hold ourselves more when we whack our heads against life, and to bring a little pat and not another whack to the little one within.

Of course she told her. We wanted little, preschool  Laurel in the charitable-gift-giving loop.

Grandma and grandpa had requested that we not buy them any individual presents for Christmas, but that we buy a sheep for someone in Africa or somewhere and give it in their name. The process wasn’t quite clear to Laurel. It wasn’t really for us either.

So Laurel looked up at her mom and asked, “Could we keep it at our house for a few days before we send it to grandma and grandpa?”

It begs the question, “How hands on is our charity?”

Sometimes not very, particularly when it’s just a check in the mail to an organization that handles the sheep.  But, like Laurel, many of us want it and like it hands on. We want our charity soft, wooly, “baaing,” huggable and kissable.

On Sunday Will and Judd were at church. I hugged them both, their scruffy, unwashed beards against my cheek. It was sheep,  up close — their stale alcohol breath, dirty clothes and vacant eyes right there, very near and personal. I prayed for each one, leaning in towards them, putting one of my hands on the back of their heads.

After praying for Judd, I looked into his glazed eyes and said, “I am asking you to make the choice, to stop drinking, because it is killing you.”

He looked me steadily in the eyes and said nothing. His brain wasn’t working, or was, just a little, but processing extremely slowly.

He knows I love him.

This is better for me than the check in the mail, even thought the check in the mail is good and sent sheep, good.

I’m wondering, how hands on is my love for my own flesh and blood. How near am I willing to get, because it’s interesting, getting close to the sheep.

The closer I get, the weaker I feel. When you get right next to mental illness, to addiction and to extreme social dysfunction, its makes you feel small and inadequate. Often, you aren’t sure of how to bring lasting, meaningful solutions.

But despite that, it’s so right and good and meaningful to be there, smack up against the stale,  broken, dying essence of of charity. I’m learning things there. I can’t make choices for other people.  I won’t be successful in helping if I try to do too much for them. They have to choose, they have to want change, they have to fight, hard, for their own lives.

But, I and we can do something. We can open up opportunities, we can present clear choices, we can resource possibilities and we  can pray for the sheep  and we can love them and stand with them even when they choose to not choose to change anything.

And some of us can even bring some sheep  home, if we want, for a bit, and give a wooly hug.

Her grandma had died that morning. Nothing Jessica or anyone else said was more eloquent than Jessica’s presence. She was her coin, all she was, given gladly.

This week I read on Google news that Peter Faulk had died. It happened on  June 26, 2011.

Columbo will be missed. Faulk as this character was endearing , especially in a fumbling, disheveled, thumping about kind of way. And he got the bad guys.

“This is, perhaps, the most thoroughgoing satisfaction ‘Columbo’ offers us,” Jeff Greenfield wrote in The New York Times in 1973: “the assurance that those who dwell in marble and satin, those whose clothes, food, cars and mates are the very best, do not deserve it.”

Bingo.

But who deserves anything. Yeah, probably none of us. But perhaps Jessica.

It’s interesting what intrigues — Jessica and Peter. It’s the personalities that matter, that we remember, that are the gift.

On Friday I visited the Camuy Rio caves.  Nice — a 17 story underground room, its door ways draped in jungle. But as is par for life’s course, it wasn’t the cave that was the big deal; it was Val and her mom, the friends I made on the tour. Riding there,  we chatted it up, and we ciphered it down and it looked to me like Val, a junior in high school is another Columbo and another Jessica.

She is wicked smart and godly beautiful, in love with science and ramped up to help children. Couldn’t get better, the potential, the unfolding narrative, the super righteous possibilities within the existential, ontological, epistemic essence of Val. I told her I thought she should definitely  get  a graduated degree in the sciences and keep being godly.  I bet she will, and that she’ll give the old woman’s mite too.

And then there was Saturday night in San Juan, with the gang, tossing down Mahi Mahi and yakking it up and then getting down to business discussing charity. Lisa, who I had just met through my brother Steve, was spot on. She lectured, and we leaned forward. Lisa talked about the money from her organization, just sitting, waiting, for Haiti, but how the Haitians hadn’t come up with a plan as to how they would use it, how they would do something sustainable.

Wow and wow. She said that one group bought solar panels for a school, I think, and they were stolen that night. They bought them again, and bam, gone again. They quit. The conclusion, you aren’t helping people who won’t own the help.

I loved it! Lisa was a hoot, of information and experience incarnate concerning the NGO and non-profit Christian charity business.

Again, like Val, Lisa was the coin.

What to do? Life is good, and not, and helping is good, and not, and when all is said and done, it seems more and more obvious to me what to do.

Jessica, Peter, Val and Lisa — love those coins.

They kinda deserve it.

And so, ended, the dream, they had together; they dropped  the wedding plans, the marriage and then shortly afterwards, the young man resigned from his leadership role at the school. He graduates from college this spring — in pain. And he’s not the only one.

My wife and I, talking over coffee this morning, wondered, about the conversations, behind the scenes, between the couple, with the parents,with friends and with the school leaders –  painful, excruciating, gut wrenching. The words said to this young man will be remembered by him, for life. And some of the words will have to be recovered from.

Sexual identity is no small issues; our reactions to it are so powerful and so life changing. I really suffer for this young man, and his fiancée and their parents and friends and the school’s students and leaders. This is hard, and I can see that the pain of it has not be adequately acknowledged by the school, by those involed and  by the students. But it is there, and it will not just go away. There will be a painful, ongoing conversation, and it will last much longer than some people  want it to.

I know pain.  So do so many people. A girl told me a while back that she was being pressured by an older guy to have sex with him, even though he is married. This isn’t new for her. Sex has been a huge factor in shaping the last ten years of her life.  She’s pained by it and marked by it. What to do? I have told her again and again, “God loves you.”  He does.

As my wife and I talked this morning, on the TV news, operating background to our dialogue, their was a blub about college guys voting on girls, “hot or not.” My wife remarked, “So, is that considered fun or  is it harassment?” The conversation about that and all things sexual  is being had, at the most public level, but much of it will be a report and a few people’s opinions not the much needed exposé of the pain, within the story. The news doesn’t often deal with the pain of men and women who are or who feel or who are made to feel unattactive. Not many people publically talk about the massive, universal insecurity young people have over “how I look,” or with the brutal question some young people pose to themselves, ”Am I hot enough to be loved?”  That is not even a healthy question, but it is out there, and we all know it, but we won’t often hear it put that straight.

Too often, when it comes to sexual issues, we don’t have the conversation that is within the conversation, that really matters. Christians, for instance, are known to talk a lot about sexual morality, and of course, morality is very real, and good, and Biblical morality is from God and very important,  but the converstation about what is right must be combined with talk about what has already gone wrong.  Young people need to be able to talk to older people about what is currently happening. They need to talk about  birth control, about STD’s, about sex and marriage and about homosexuality. They are talking about these things with their friends in their dorm rooms but not as much with their parents or grandparents. Why? Sometimes the older people simply will not have this conversation. They may not even know how. But young people still need to talk, to someone who is open and wise and  who has lived for a while and failed and learned to be gentle and forgiving.

The conversation  about sex must include the forgiveness and grace that need to follow failure. We need to talk about how our society and the church and schools have responsed to sexual issues in the past and whether those ways of responding are ways we want to keep using.  There has been a lot of judgment in the past that ignores our universal failure in this area. When it comes to issues of sexual morality, we all fail, actually quite similarly, and that is precisely what is too often ignored. The things to talk about are “our” sexual issues, not “their” sexual issues and we all we need to confess more and pronounce less.

Why confess about this more? Because others  are confessing, openly.  The confessional conversation is  already  going on, in public, in private, in everywhere. Proof? Just go to the movies.

Two nights ago my wife and daughters and I went to see the movie “Lincoln Lawyer.”  It’s a fairly fun movie. Matthew McConaughey actually gets a chance to act, and he does pretty well, at being cool, and fun. In the story, sex is for sale, and  murder after. It’s interesting, what entertains us. Are sex and murder entertaining? Of course they are.  Why? Because sex and violence have a powerful grip on all of us.

Sex is in the conversation that people are having, and if we want to be part of the conversation we must openly talk about sex. And if we don’t talk about sex, well, then we don’t, but that won’t stop everyone else from talking and interpreting it in ways that may not be honest or real. Sex is on the docket, and won’t be taken off, and if we don’t say anything,  we’ll be left out, without weighing in on one of life’s most significant issues.

Weigh in. I will.  Intepret or it will be interpreted for you. Sex is good, normal, fun, exciting, healing, and don’t plan on it stopping anytime  soon. And sexual issues can also be terribly and profoundly painful, because sex is not just a physical act, but a deeply ontological, psychological, social and spiritual part of all of us. It is wonderful and makes a wonderful life, and not.

A friend  sent me a text yesterday, “It’s a boy!”

“Cool!” I texted back, “Congrats!” This will be this young couples’ first baby. Lots of fun ahead for them.

A bit later, my daughter just texted me from her dorm room. “A girl on my hall just told us she’s engaged. Sorry I didn’t get back to you after you texted me, but I was yelling with everybody.”

“Whoohoo!” I texted back. “I guess.”

Of course its “whoohoo!” and I’m sure it will be fine, I guess, but I don’t know.  But it  will have a chance, I think, of being more fine if this young couple has people to talk to before they marry about sex and career and babies and fidelity and about times  coming when life won’t be “Whohoo!”

A happy marriage and happy babies after the wedding is absolutely fantastic, but it isn’t what some people end up as a result of romance, and love and sex. For many, the  relational and sexual stuff, as life goes along,  gets just plain excruciating –  a woman I know who was sexually abused as a child and then cheated on in her marriage as an adult, the  young man at the university who came out as gay, his fiancée, several of my conflicted gay friends, a woman I know who regrets not getting the degrees she always wanted to have before she had  babies. I love them, but they hurt, over choices they have made or others have made, and I know this because they tell me.

This morning my wife and I talked about a couple of people we know who are gay. One of them is in so much obvious pain that I worry about him. His sister just had a baby, made the family proud. He didn’t. I suffer for him. He needs to talk to someone, who is safe, and can understand. If he doesn’t find places to be heard, and understood, then he will really, really suffer, like he is right now. I know that God loves him and wants to enter into this struggle with him, but is this young man hearing this, enough, and does he understand this? I don’t know.

Here is the deal. I’m not shutting up about this, and I don’t think the rest of us should either.

We need to talk. And it needs to be talk that is first of all without judgment regarding people who are outside the norm and people who have made mistakes, and people who are in pain. And we need to talk more to young people who have questions and have never had honest answers from parents or leaders who have the wisdom that comes from experience and thought and morality and God and love.

In my house sex is a common topic. We laugh about it, make jokes about it, answer serious questions about it, have moral standards that we discuss, and yet we are open about our weaknesses and failures to be all we want to be.   We treat sex as a normal part of life, and we take it very seriously when there is ambiguity, uncertainty, mystery,  pain, beauty or love surrounding it. And there is, all this and so much more hovering at the edges of our sexuality.

Sex is a complex issue, and it needs some complex thinking and a complex dialogue. The people with the easy answers are fooling themselves and so they will be fooled, as life unfolds. The main thing is to  be open with ourselves and others and to get to know both ourselves and other people,  especially people who are different from us, and who have had different experiences, and to hear them, and feel with them and understand them and their pain so that we can better understand ourselves and our pain.

We need to have a conversation about sex, that doesn’t stop, with sex, but extends on into morality and God and pain and grace and unconditional love too.

Let’s keep talking.

For more of my thoughts on this, you are invited to visit www.modernproverbs.net  Click on the topic button, “Sex.”

I have a bounce-off-of friend. I bounce stuff off him to see what it looks like coming back toward me with his spin on it. It’s helpful, the curve my ideas take on the rebound.  Yesterday we spent an hour on the phone debating the growth curve of organizations. Fascinating.

I have a never-let-go friend. She is my stick-tight friend. We have waded through years and yards of stuff, and she is still there. I love the safety of such a friend.  This week we reflect on a relational train wreck we both witnessed and survived. I totally adore, her loyalty — to me.

I have a calls-when-he needs-help friend. I don’t mind. I like being the go-to-guy for him. I like how he trust that what I say, or that what I don’t say,  is good. It’s good for me to be there for him,  in the sacred moment, when the masks come off. This week he told me that when he drove away from the house, after the fight, it was as if he was moving through a dream. “I couldn’t believe that I was doing,” he told me, “what  I could see myself doing, leaving, like that.” It was good, to deconstruct the dream, that was really — reality.

I have a conceptual friend. When we meet, ideas meet. We talk insights, theories, axioms, intellectual constructs. We discourse on aesthetics, theology, history, sociality. Recently we explored the kind of creativity that can arise out of devastation. Our friendship exists within the universe of our ideations. I love an abstraction, that we invent and then that we event. It  becomes other people’s reality. Fine, so very fine!

The other day I thought about a friend who is not longer a friend. We went through something hard and this friend didn’t understand what was to be understood within the thin and quickly ripping fabric of possible understanding and so we went on down the road with the clothing that had previously covered us, rripped completely off, and I found myself traveling alone. It happens. I recovered myself with the warm embrace of new friends.

It’s very interesting, the variation of sociality.

It is very interesting, the morph, the seed, the stalk, the bloom, and the sometimes surprisingly quick wilt of togetherness, the amazing sustainability of real love.

What to do?

Enjoy, the sweet ones you have been  given.

Grieve, the once dear ones, occasionally lost.

Look forward to the precious ones still to come.