I retired after 40.5 years in the ministry, serving four churches in Louisina, Mississippi and North Carolina, and learning along the way that people have a hard time squaring themselves up with their life. Living takes the life right out of us. Mostly because, I think, we have expectations that are. not met, and are not prepared for the disappointments and heartaches that comes with life on all economic levels. No one escapes the anguish and agony that come with being alive. And they come to the church looking for a leg up. Not realizing, evidently, that Jesus died a most terrible death and no one is spared, no not one. And it is mostly up to each one of us to figure out a strategy for dealing with the truth of being alive on our own.

“Here you are, now what?” was my mantra. And finding solace and direction in the silence was my strategy. Just sitting in the silence, open to all that arises, appears, occurs to us in the silence was very helpful and instructive to me. Just watching. Just seeing. Just hearing. Just knowing what’s what and what is called for and what needs to be done, here, now to meet what has to be met and do what is called for, no matter what is all that is asked of us and it is asked of all of us. It helps to take nothing personally and very little seriously. Nothing comes out of it alive. How well we deal with it tells the tale. “Oh well, here we go again,” is a slogan for those who have what it takes, as a call to arms and encouragement for the journey.

I found peace in imagining my life as a segment of the Trail of Tears that Native Americans were forced to walk by the U.S. Government in its genocide program against the indigenous peoples of this country, and against the descendants of salves, which is still apparent today. It is amazing what we are capable of dismissing, discounting, denying, ignoring what we do and what is being done all around us as though everything is just fine on every side all the time.

But what is ignored does not go away. And the reality of social/cultural depression extracts its toll on the entire country. Living a lie does that, and the United States of America is a lie from the start, which we deny be telling ourselves stories of freedom and democracy while the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and increasingly disregarded as time goes by.

And in this way our way of life takes the life right out of us, and our addictions mask our denial but the truth is not in us, and we will not square ourselves up to it and begin living truthful lives, if only privately, and soulfully by seeing what we look at and hearing, what we listen to, and knowing what we know, and doing what we intuit needs to be done about it, here and now, in the time left for living.