Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep… My PRAYER?

GOD… Shmod…

I’m sorry if my words and irreverence are hurtful or disdainful to you.

I don’t want my blog posts to cause anyone pain … truthful (from my perspective) but not painful.

As a child, I was taught to kneel next to my bed, hands pressed together beneath my little chin, and pray to God…

And now I lay me down to sleep…

… before climbing under the covers for the night.

For the next hour, I’d anxiously lie there, blankets pulled up over my nose, hoping that no Where The Wild Things Are monster would crawl out from under the bed or burst through the doorway and cut me into pieces and eat me.

I was an anxious child. I had my own Calvin and Hobbes world.

Sleep would eventually descend over me like a drifting parachute and I was safe from the imaginary devils inside my head for another day.

Whew! Prayer answered.

Happily, I made it through the omnipresent – artificial – dangers and survived into adulthood where the only – real – monsters that exist show up on CNN routinely.

I’ve told you before that I’m not a believer in an omnipotent deity… male, female or any other non-binary choice.

It’s not a big deal and I don’t want to write evangelically atheistic rants like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins.

I respect the desire and need for religion…the salve of poverty, war, disease,  interpersonal hell… I wish it wasn’t necessary, but I understand its basis and the comfort it gives to millions.

I don’t want to judge others and their beliefs just as I don’t need or want someone hovering overhead judging me… we all have reasons for our weaknesses and faults. I judge myself pretty harshly and that’s all I can handle.

If I was a devout believer I’d probably be a better person.

I’d probably be more like Lauraine the head lady that I work with when I volunteer to chop and slice and dishwash at the Penticton soup kitchen.

Lauraine is a pious Catholic with a lively sense of humour and a Mother Teresa-like aura of warmth. She treats every person with dignity and respect and sees the inner good that so often doesn’t show on the outside of troubled people, which is everyone.

Lauraine knows I’m a non-believer but if I ever have a difficulty in any area of my life she assures me that she’ll pray for me or my loved ones. And even though I don’t believe it will have any direct impact, I feel good inside knowing that she’s sending some positive vibes.

I don’t believe in a God, but I do believe in the power of individuals to make a god-like difference for those in their circle of influence. Lauraine is real and affects my world.

Also, my inspiration doesn’t flow through the Bible, the Sutra, the Vedas, the Quran or the Torah, though each carries a wealth of wisdom.

Wisdom and understanding is cached away in a multitude of places other than religious texts. Hopefully wisdom informs beliefs.

Sometimes we come to believe in something as an accepted fact even though there’s no rational or sensible underpinning to that belief.

I was reminded of this natural human tendency when I saw a replay of perhaps my most favourite segment of television ever, of course written by one of my very favourite screenwriters, Aaron Sorkin, in the HBO series The Newsroom.

It’s a Shakespeare-style soliloquy spoken by a fictional TV news anchorman (Will McAvoy aka Jeff Daniels) during a university debate.

A young female sophomore student asks a seemingly simple question that everyone in the room takes for granted has an obvious underlying truth.

 

There’s a humungous lump in my throat right now.

Now you might ask where am I going with this whole ramble about prayer and I guess the answer is a simple… I’m not sure.

McAvoy’s monologue is filled with observable facts that would have us examine our belief in the “apparently obvious”. My biases align with his rant. His words are my prayer.

Powerful words delivered with eloquence.

I get it. Prayer is powerful. Prayer makes us weak and strong at the same time.

I love the sense of reverence and historic wonder I feel when I stand or sit in a church, a cathedral, a synagogue, a temple, a mosque.

I love the sound of the archaic words, thou and whence and messiah, and the swell of pipe-organ music reverberating off high arched ceilings.

So, even though I miss the halcyon days of kneeling next to my bed and talking to something or someone greater than my tiny mortal being, I can’t truly recapture those moments of prayer with the same innocence and sense of awe.

The only prayer that exists for me now is the active voice in my head that observes and confers and sifts and debates like crazy.

It’s the godless prayer of observation and wonder, confusion and fear, respect and admiration, love and desire, hope and optimism.

If I should die before I wake… well, I guess the monster under my bed finally got me.

 

 

 

I Love The Church But I Hate Religion

Sometimes I wake up surprised by a long forgotten memory that hasn’t passed my way in years, like a hazy ship coming into sight over the horizon. My mind is a mysterious maze.

The clock had just stroked past midnight ushering in Christmas Day, 1970, and my friend Renato and I were snickering – sacrilegiously so – as the Bishop, dressed in his flowing robes and ornate finery slowly made his way, like a blushing bride, down the aisle of sacred St. Eugene’s Church.

Slowly swinging a heavy gold thurible bubbling over with the sweet smoke of heady incense, the Bishop’s voluminous robes and the thurible’s hypnotic oscillating motion brought a vision to my head of him tossing sugary Christmas candies – Santa-like – to the children in the pews.

When I whispered this to Renato, he burst out laughing which made me crack up as well. Disapproving eyes turned our way.

A firestorm of lightning and hail should have rained down upon us.

That was my very first and to this day, only, visit to a Midnight Mass.

I sometimes wonder now if perhaps my photo has been placed in all Catholic Churches worldwide as a “Wanted Dead or Alive” reminder to those who might laugh out loud in the presence of God.

The mass was mystically ephemeral and awe-inspiring, the cavernous hall filled with deep-bassed bone-rattling organ music reverberating off the rock solid walls and high ceiling of the church.

The genuflecting, recitations, prayers and hymns filled me with a mix of reverential wonderment, and even a tiny bit of fear that I would somehow be exposed, singled out to the large congregation as a blasphemous outsider, and stoned to death as a sacrificial Protestant offering.

We were young teenagers and Renato had invited me to the special annual event to join with his Italian family: Mom, Dad, older sister and brother.

Just a couple of blocks away from my own family’s St. David’s Church, St. Eugene’s Catholic Church was all “Paris high-couture” compared to my United Church’s “dressed-down Levi jeans”…

Catholics took Holy Communion with real drunk-inducing wine, we United’s merely sipped on wussy Welch’s grape juice. OMG, we were amateurs at this religion stuff.

Compared to the much more casual, laissez-faire services at St. David’s, it was like going to the Queen’s Coronation in London. It reeked of splendour and religious gravitas.

Religions are like bird species… they all fly about in pretty much the same manner but their plumage and songs can look incredibly different.

I’m not a religious guy but I love going into churches, all churches: tiny, mammoth, simple, ornate.

I’ve been in Cathedrals and Basilicas and Chapels.

I’ve entered Mosques and Synagogues.

I’ve stood in a Rain Forest Cathedral.

Without exception, they all impart to me a sense of grandeur, an inner feeling of the greatness of all that exists in a world that none of us can explain with any certainty.

And yet I call myself an atheist, a heretic, a heathen, a non-believer of a God.

But in fact, I have to admit that I’m really a nothing because I have no belief or knowledge or wisdom that allows me to say with 100% confidence that I know an answer… THE ANSWER.

And I hesitate to say it, but really, does any human know the answer? I don’t think so.

Not me, not you, not the Pope, not the Dalai Lama (actually, the Dalai Lama puts it this way: “God exists or God does not exist. Leave it for us. Your task is to learn how to live peacefully.”) or any other religious figure that we use as a conduit to a God.

I trust my eyes and ears and science more than I trust biblical texts written thousands of years back by fallible, earthly men. I tend to throw back most of the faith and religious fish outside of those caught that instruct us in morality and good-living.

For many years, I felt bashfully nervous about releasing my inner beliefs.

My views were contrary to the God-steeped teachings I was raised with and I felt insecure running against the non-secular crowd. It came down to that pee-my-pants insecurity that people would think less of me if they knew I was a non-believer.

Well so be it. Not any more. I don’t mind the smell of my own shit.

I’ve grown older and more confident in my beliefs. Hallelujah!

And… I think those around me who do believe in an omnipotent deity are today more flexibly tolerant and understanding of others’ beliefs (Donald Trump aside), much in the same way that many, maybe most of us, accept gay love as just one more normal way of loving another person (OK, the whole American Republican Party aside).

Religion, like Communism, holds out for utopian ideals that are heartwarming and based on love and caring for our fellow travellers. When these visionary ideals are taken to heart and observed, which they often are… then… I love religion.

But when those teachings are twisted and malformed into a monstrous means of shutting out and rejecting and hurting others, when horrific wars and jihads and death squads are unleashed, when innocent women and children are shamefully abused, when obfuscation and lies are used to protect and hide those bastard transgressors, THAT is when I hate religion.

Religion can be a wonderful, rich philosophy of living a life, just like many other non-deity based philosophies that teach and promote love and humility and kindness.

Religion supports the needs of those in pain and suffering of which there is no shortage in this world.

Religion offers shelter where disease and poverty and injustice strike mercilessly upon the weakest.

There have been numerous times in my life that I wished I could embrace an inner belief that someone was looking out for me, protecting me. What warmth that blanket holds in the chill of the night.

Be religious. Don’t be religious. Be caring. Be thoughtful. Say thank you.

And be prepared to catch sweet candies tossed your way when you least expect it.

 

Did God Create Cream Cheese ?

I don’t personally believe there is a God

…………

but if I did, it would have to be because of cream cheese.

 

I was raised in a household like a million other Canadian households.

We kids went to church on Sunday because … just because. My family worshipped in the United Church of Canada.

And being United was sort of Christianity Light.

You could pretty much be any kind of devil-worshipping witch and the church elders would smile and hand you the tiny glass of non-fermented purple grape juice (I secretly wanted to be Catholic so I could drink real alcohol-laced blood-red wine… c’mon, did Jesus offer Welch’s grape juice at the Last Supper?) and tell you you’re just fine.

Tolerance R Us should be the United Church motto …

Salt and Pepper-haired Reverend Buchanan at my family’s St. David’s United Church in Hamilton spoke in a tenor Scottish brogue that was fascinating to watch and listen to during his tedious sermons – he had a divine way of making an hour feel like a whole day – not because of any amazingly insightful wisdom he brought to the congregation, but it was his teeth.

Words hissed through his teeth that gleamed with gold fillings, front tooth fillings that glimmered in the pastoral sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows of the church.

If I found myself dropping off during his sermon, which I invariably did … sorry Reverend… BORING!!!! … a shaft of sharp sunlight would reflect off his golden teeth. Piercing through my eyelids, it was like a blast of tropical sunshine on a Mexican or Hawaiian beach, minus the ready availability of a cold, fluffy drink on my right and the mesmerizing sounds of lapping waves beyond my feet.

At the age of twelve my folks gave me – or more probably I insisted (as the youngest of five kids born to worn-down old parents) – the opportunity to choose not to attend Sunday church.

I jumped at the chance. No more Reverend Buchanan.

I rejoiced when I could park my shiny Sunday hand-me-down leather shoes and stay in my Montreal Canadiens’ wool jersey. I could go play hockey on the outdoor ice rink across the street in the park. I loved the cannonading sound of hockey pucks ricocheting off the wood boards set up by city workers far more than the dull, sonorous tones of Reverend Buchanan.

Unlike myself, many folks find reassuring comfort with a God presence in their lives and I respect and understand that. There is a score of reasons and explanations for believing in a God.

Life can be filled with difficulties and trials where the sense of a loving, helpful, understanding deity is too great to not believe for many.

I’ve wished a dozen times in my life from the days of my mother’s death, to my young son suffering a terrible illness that threatened his life, to crushing romantic relationship break-ups that there was someone, something … anyone or anything that could help ease the pain.

NOW.

But for me, that something, that anything, has always been time.

Well … Time and cream cheese.

Pain doesn’t ever really disappear, it just dissipates… which brings me to the raison d’être of this blog.

My point here is that like a law of physics, pain must always have a corresponding rebound or response in joy … yin and yang …  balancing opposites. Can a meaningful life exist without both?

And what brings the world more joy than, you guessed it … cream cheese. Especially cream cheese icing.

You might think me disrespectful and trite to make a comparison and case for a simple thing such as cream cheese relating to something as soulful and complex as God.  But, as I grow older, I find that simple things are ones that often bring me the greatest joy.

For example:

• I’ve come to realize just how much I love to sit outside on a mild spring day, eyes closed, absorbing the heady scent of the spring flowers – lilac, daphne, daffodils – and the early warmth of March or April sunlight playing through my closed eyelids.
• In summer, I thrill to the hugging caress of cool Okanagan Lake water swishing over my torso as I dive beneath its surface.
• I sense an exhilaration when I read a book chapter where the writing leaves me breathless with its originality of word use and creativity. I had this feeling a number of times reading Stephen King’s 11/23/63, strangely never while reading 50 Shades of Grey!
• When I munch my way into a gooey cinnamon bun thickly swirled with cream cheese icing, or feel the delicate smoothness on my tongue of tangy key-lime pie, or bite into a crunchy toasted bagel with a swish of cream cheese, or taste a square of carrot cake lushly layered with cream cheese icing.

These are all simple things in today’s complex world filled with luxury cars, Rolexes, and high tech gadgets.

Depending on your belief system, you may tell me that these are all reflections of an omniscient being, a God.

And, you may also say to me that it was the devious work of the devil and that cream cheese icing was the culprit in Reverend Buchanan’s gold-shiny teeth in the era before top-notch dentistry.

But that doesn’t matter to me because I inhabit a world where cream cheese, a perfect blend of nature and man-made wonder – gives me a spiritual lift that lights my days.

You and I and our 7 billion human neighbours will never know the true answer …

… but if anyone would like to convert me, I can’t conceive of a better reason that God just might exist than cream cheese.

What Happens in Vegas … is it Spiritual?

Spirituality …

… it’s powerful, it’s all-embracing.

I used to hate, maybe even fear the word and now I hold it close to my bosom (do guys have bosoms … anyone?).

So you ask: “Larry, why would you fear a simple word like spirituality?”

In a nutshell, I’ve shied away from writing or talking about spirituality because it has a way of sounding like a synonym for RELIGION.

And, as you probably know by now, I’m not much of a player on the game field of religion.

Spirituality – 1 … Religion – 0.

A greater omnipotent DEITY just isn’t in the cards for me.

Hang on … just as an ADHD aside: Even though I’m not devout or God-fearing, I like hanging out with people who are religious in the traditional (but NOT Evangelical) sense. There’s a warmth and genuineness and often an atmosphere of “all will be OK” that floats in the mist surrounding a true believer. It’s comforting to be in their company.

But today I’m going to drag up the courage to voice some thoughts –  you may agree somewhat … or you may just hate my perspective.

I’ve spent most of my life refraining from this discussion because I care what you and everyone else thinks about me and so it’s easier to avoid the topic than to offend you.

Today, the water looks inviting and I’m boldly plunging in.

In my mind, Spirituality is the NEWS HEADLINE,

everything else is the Subtitle.

Religion is just one of the subtitles along with

• nature
• music
• dance
• pets
• children
• visual art
• love

You might have others to add to this list.

What I’m saying is that spirituality is the overarching feeling that plunges deepest into the heart of our personal earth.

There’s an aura or ambient meaning that accompanies something that we describe as spiritual. It’s otherwordly, even though it may or may not be religious.

We all have our outer crust that protects us from the dangers of life, great and small. But way down below there is the molten core that is warm and liquid and exudes the inner strength that rejoices in the beauty and wonder we encounter, and supports us in our darkest troubling times.

I suppose sex, drugs, alcohol, and gambling might be considered as spiritual subtitles too but they’re loaded with downside potential, so I can’t include them. I don’t think that Las Vegas will soon be changing its motto to:

“What Happens in Vegas is Spiritually Healing and Good in Vegas”

We all have monsters inside us needing some spiritual calming.

Calm is a good word. I used to think that spirituality and religion were the same thing. But now I’ve discovered, for me, the synonym for spirituality isn’t RELIGION, it’s CALM.

Religion and the other items I’ve listed above are where we find the soothing calm that carries us over the mud puddles that are the bad days, the hard times that inevitably seek us out and try to suck us into the muck.

Doesn’t matter where it comes from, we all need spirituality. When we don’t have it, we cease functioning properly.

As an illustration, the other day I finished reading a book by Jodi Picoult entitled Nineteen Minutes. It’s a wonderfully crafted book about a young teenaged boy, Peter Houghton, who is bullied his entire life before he finally snaps in late high school.

Over the course of 19 minutes, this distraught soul wanders the halls of his school shooting the dozen or so classmates who have made his life a misery, catastrophically changing his life and the entire town’s future. It’s as sad as it is telling.

It tells of his inability to find a source of spirituality to carry him over his miseries, leaving, in his mind, only one way to find calm inside his head, even though it means spending the remainder of his life in a jail cell.

Here are a few examples of where I find my spiritual base – that impression of heaven-on-earth (I’d be pleased if you shared some of yours too!):

• I awake at 6 am on an early summer’s day and step outside into my yard. Immediately, I inhale the light sweetness of Lily-of-the-Valley in the air, hear the notes of robins chirping and mourning doves cooing. Then I feel the glow of the just-risen sun striking my eyes and cheeks while a dewy dampness in the air cools me from behind.
• I’m standing still on my cross-country skis in the frigid mountain airs of January. There’s an unearthly calming quiet as I gaze out on the the sun reflecting brilliant off the snowy banks of the side of a frozen lake scraped clean for skating or sliding.
• I’m perched in the momentarily-hushed darkness of a movie theatre with the intoxicatingly warm, salty scent of popcorn rising. My mind is floating backwards to my childhood as I sit in the same darkness of the Palace or Capitol Theatre in my Hamilton boyhood where I’m mesmerized by the colourful brilliance of … movie classics of the time like Bonnie and Clyde, Bullitt, Sound of Music, Mary Poppins.
• The sands of Sunoka Beach are hot beneath my beach towel, my torso is absorbing the heat from beneath as the blazing sun burns decorative red lines through my closed eyelids. I feel the sand sift between my toes while children’s screams of delight zoom left to right by the water’s edge. There’s a mixed aroma of french fries and coconut suntan oils drifting over me like the little wiggly heat lines on a scorched highway.
• It’s 11 pm and the living room is quiet at the end of the day. I pick up my acoustic guitar and stroke the first few chords of Fire and Rain or Dan Fogelberg’s Leader of the Band and I drift away on a cloud where time is meaningless and my mind is still like the morning surface of Lake Okanagan.
• Shavasana … the end of a yoga session. It’s the only time I feel comfortable lying prone on a cool, hard surface. The room is semi-dark, filled only with Marsha’s soothing voice telling me to release, relax and let go. It’s also the only time in my life where I get to lay down beside 20 women in the dark and not feel guilty – every man’s dream …

 

CALM … SPIRITUAL …

I’ve finally lost the hate, the fear, the confusion over spirituality … SHHH, please pass the popcorn – real butter, of course –  I can’t wait to see how the rest of this story plays out …

 

Do You Really Need the Ten Commandments?

I am the Anti-Christ!

Many Americans think that Barack Obama has already filled the job, but it’s a big world so I think there’s room for a few of us out here.

Lionel, a jet-black man from Guyana said to me,

How can you be a good person and not a Christian?”

He looked at me as forthright and innocently as anyone has ever done.

Home for me at the time (1982) was a small basement suite in a little house in the bucolic, fruit-growing countryside of Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. Lionel, the ebony-skinned Guyanan, lived next door with his wife and 6 kids in a tiny wooden rental house that was more like a poor southern bayou shack than a true house. They were poor but happy people, and their little kids were the absolute cutest things going.

Lionel and I would get together a couple of times a week and lift weights and chat in the basement laundry room beside our suite. He and his burgeoning family had moved to Canada so that he could study theology at Acadia University in Wolfville. He wanted to be a man of Christ and God. He wanted to share his beliefs and his love of Christ. He wanted me to be like him.

I was the antithesis of his belief that to be a good person, one had to believe in Christ. He’d been taught this all of his life, and though he knew he should dislike or reject me, he couldn’t dig up a reason to hate or at least pity me. It was frustrating for the poor guy. I needed (and need) lots of help, just not the kind that Lionel was offering. I liked Lionel a lot.

To Lionel, you couldn’t NOT believe in a God and still live a moral life. A moral person must read and follow the scriptures laid out in the Book of Exodus.

Charleton Heston knew it too in the movie. A moral person needed: 

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

1.  You shall have no other gods before me.
2. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God…
3. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
4. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.  Six days you shall labor and do all your work,  but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. 

Commandment numbers 1 through 4 are really just protection for the benefit of the Creator and don’t hold a lot of sway in the life of the average person. But any business or operation out there needs some rules to protect their property, and God is no exception. God, in today’s multicultural and technological world, is a brand like Coca-Cola or McDonalds and we don’t want anyone mucking up that value. Competition from outside could sully or detract from the brand, and so some rules are necessary to keep the religion lawyers in litigation heaven. These rules all make sense when you consider the outside forces that would attempt to corrupt or steal the product. Just like Steve Jobs protecting the iPhone specs, “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God” doesn’t want or need someone stealing His flock.

         5. Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.

If the land the Lord has given you happens to be your parents’ home, then I think that today’s generation of young MAN-BOYS have taken this commandment to heart. The modern concept of “Failure to Launch” is buried within this commandment. Large numbers of 20’s to 30’s males, hands clenched to their joysticks, are camped on the basement sofas of their parents, some drawn in by the siren call of computer and TV screens, others too paralyzed by the nervous fear of real world responsibilities. I don’t think this is the land the Lord intended to give young folk to live long in, but how could He have anticipated the rise of X-Box and internet porn 2,000 years ago?
       

         6. You shall not murder.

This is a great commandment. From early childhood, it’s pretty clear that most of us have an innate desire to bludgeon and kill our friends and neighbours, right? This command is probably the only thing that has held us back from wanton bloodbaths. Alright, you know this isn’t true. The really neat thing about having a brain is that it helps us realize that if we choose to go about killing others, there is a very clear and present danger that we are going to come under the same threat ourselves VERY VERY soon. Humans may not have a long list of instinctive characteristics, but I’m pretty sure that self-preservation is at the mountain peak of the list. The expression Live and Let Live is as good a commandment as the one provided in Exodus. It’s called a Basic Truth.

         7. You shall not commit adultery.

Our intimate relationships are enormously complex and varied. A commitment between two adults of whatever gender involves a great deal of trust and emotion. The core structure of our society rests on a bed of family stability that works best in the presence of a pair of parents. Screwing around with another hottie could be great fun and pleasureful, but knocks a leg out of the tribal chair that we sit upon. This one can cause a lot of bruising. “Look but don’t touch” might do the job here except it kinda messes with commandment #10.

        8. You shall not steal.

This is really just a copycat version of the You shall not murder commandment. It comes down to the Golden Rule, doesn’t it? Every religious and philosophical organization out there believes in the concept, “Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You”. Civilized groups know logically that a society that indulges in theft can’t move forward and think about anything other than guarding their refrigerators and Big-Screen TV’s. When I go to work in the morning, do I want the nagging thought to be, “I hope that chicken leg is still waiting for me when I get home”? Reminder to Self: Pay for the next Justin Bieber download!

        9. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbour.

Simply put, “DON’T LIE”. This commandment needs a touch of interpretation, in my view. Many lies are hurtful or injurious to those we love, and just as often to those we have no use for. Our court systems are jammed to the rafters dealing with this commandment. When I tell the National Enquirer that I had amazing hot sex with Britney Spears (this may or may not be a lie!) and they spread the good news to the world at large, Britney has a right to be pissed off with me. Apparently her latest boyfriend or husband thought he was her one-and-only. He gets mad and sues her for millions of bucks for hurt feelings and loss of reputation. MY LIE…MY BAD!

But, when Britney asks me if I think her ass looks good in those jeans, I’m going to be the first (and for sure not the last) to break this commandment. Break this commandment judiciously or DIE young, I’m afraid! God didn’t think the consequences through fully here or hasn’t had ANY lasting relationships.

I absolutely love your new hairstyle Britney…

       10. You shall not covet your neighbour’s house. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.

Most of us are pretty susceptible to this covetness stuff, and all the advertisers know it. Billions of bucks are spent every year on Super Bowl and World Cup advertising to play into our weaknesses on wanting what our neighbour has. Is the Apple iPhone so much better than all of its competitors (well, probably yes) that we’re willing to pay a big ransom…OR….could it just be that maybe we want to be cool like Candace or John at work? I’m not sure about wanting someone else’s ox or donkey, I can make a big enough Ass of myself without taking someone else’s.

The Ten Commandments are not a bad basic set of rules to govern human existence. It could probably use some updating and bits of revision, but all in all, not too shabby.

My old friend Lionel was a good man with a heart of gold and a list of commandments to keep him on the straight and narrow. But do we really need a list of rights and wrongs from on high? The list IS valuable, but these are values we humans could figure out, accept, and follow for ourselves. Still, even when we know the good from the bad, we get our fingers caught in the cookie jar over and over again.

We’re human.

We try our best.

Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail.

Even if Moses came down from Mount Sinai to give ME the hows and whys of being a good person, I like to think I could figure it out all by myself!