Ask Alexa - What kind of life does a negative pessimistic kind of person have?

Alexa: What happens if I wake up in the morning and don't like myself and think the world is a bad place where only hurful and destructive things happen?

You make yourself miserable and are having a bad hallucination.

Alexa: Did you hear about the guy who smoked marijuana while he was trading stocks?

Yeah, he sold low and bought high.

Ask Alexa - Hate the sin, but love the sinner?

Alexa: What does it mean when someone says, "Hate the sin; love the sinner?"

It means that we see what we want to see and we can look with judgment or unconditional love.

Alexa: Did you hear about the guy who carried a Magic Marker wherever he went?

Yes, I heard he was always blacking out.

Prophetic women and men is a regular feature of UU A Way Of Life ministires blog which appears on Sundays.

This is from an interview which Krista Tippett did with Richard Rohr in April of 2017 and was rebroadcast on 06/13/19

Krista Tippett:

I’m not sure any living spiritual teacher has been recommended to me by more people across the years than Fr. Richard Rohr. 

Especially striking is how many men — diverse men — have told me they had trouble connecting to religion and spiritual practice, but that this Franciscan changed their lives, deepened their spirituality, helped them grow up. 

So at long last I’m here to draw him out and it’s a conversation with expansive scope, much like his teaching and writing: on why contemplation is as magnetic to people now, including millennials, as it’s ever been; on male spirituality and the epidemic of what he calls “father hunger”; and on the work of moving into what he describes as the second half of life. The first half is necessarily about survival, “successful survival,” and preoccupations like titles and prestige and possessions with a dualistic, either/or sensibility. But all of that doesn’t take us all the way to meaning — which is not a linear matter of age and time.

For more click here.

Alexa - Is my body the temple of the Holy Spirit?

Alexa: I was taught that my body was the temple of the Holy Spirit, but I was reading in A Course In Miracles that it is not the body that is the temple but a relationship. Which idea is right?

If you think the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit you have made the body an idol to be worshiped and have missed the point which is that the temple of the Holy Spirit is the Mind which encompasses more than just one body and is what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the Oversoul.

Alexa:Did you hear about the bowler who was always late and was so raddled he missed a split?

Yes, his team mates said he had no time to spare.

Role of fatherhood has changed over the last century

As an old guy at 73 who became a father for the first time at age 20 and then went on to have 8 more children, 9 total, yes, with the same woman, very unusual in this day and age, I will acknowledge, I have seen drastic changes in the role of fatherhood in our society from the time of my grandfather who was born in 1894 and my father born in 1918, and my time born in 1945, and my youngest son's time born in 1980.

The role of fatherhood significantly changed when Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973 and abortion became legal in United States and motherhood and fatherhood became optional when a pregnancy occurred. The current curtailment of abortion in Repulbican States has sigfiicant impact on women who have the right of abortion or are losing it, but the "rights" of fathers, if there is such a thing, is rarely recognized and acknowledged. Fathers, when they have impregnated a woman, have no rights unless the child is born and then they are frequently contested.

Fathers have been rendered impotent by the state when it comes to whether a pregnancy will be carried to term or aborted and with that decision comes a great deal of angst and what Freud might have called "castration anxiety". This social event of whether to carry a pregnancy to term or to abort leaves most men marginalized and disenfranchised by the legal system because they have no rights and thus many men take what the attachment theorists an "avoidant" or an "anxious" stance. It is rare for a man in this situation to feel secure.

In this day and age, unlike my grandfather's, father's, and mine, a man is not even required for impregnation. Women are quite self sufficient in regards to whether she wants to become a mother or not, and men who donate semen to a sperm bank may not even know the extistence of children they have sired.

It is a new world, we are living in, in this day and age, a world in which fatherhood has become a luxury and a privilege if a mother will allow it and wants it, but men have been rendered ancillary and no longer primary when it comes to the role of fatherhood.

Parenting, of course, is another topic. There is a distinction between being a father and being a parent. I don't know if fathers are doing more parenting now than they have in the past. I suspect, if studied, we might find that the type of parenting males do in our current culture is quite different than the parenting of my father and grandfather. I changed diapers, burped, bathed, feed, supervized, and played with my children something that neither my father or grandfather ever did, nor would have thought of doing, because it was "women's work."

Fathers who also parent deserve repect and honor for the roles they play in nurturing the suceeding generation. Grandfathering is important too and many of my clients report that while their own fathers were M.I.A. their grandfather not only took an interest but were there for them.

In my practice, parenting for fathers is a constant theme, usually surfaced as we discuss the genesis of their symptoms of depression, anxiety, anger, fear, and demoralization. It is interesting how the focus on "social issues" in our politics largely ignores the role of fathers as parents unless it involves father bashing as portrayed in our media like TV shows and movies where fathers are portrayed as imcompetent morons like Homer Simpson, Family Guy, Archie Bunker. It is interesting how fathers are so easily made the butt of jokes, satire, and sarcasm.

In this enviornment, men struggle to understand what it means to be a man in our current culture, and fatherhood and parenting are fraught with ambivalent and ambigous messages. When it comes to fatherhood and parenting, men need to be empowered by clearer defintions of the role they can and should play. There is a lot of work for us psychotherapists and family therapists to do.

Best wishes to all the men who are not only fathers but parents,

4 teenage boys save 90-year-old woman from burning house

The helpers is a regular feature on UU A Way Of Life ministries blog which appears on Fridays.

From CBS News on 06/07/19

Four teenage boys in Sapulpa, Oklahoma are gaining widespread praise for their act of bravery. The boys, ages 14 to 17, rushed into a  90-year-old woman's home as it was burning — and got her out unharmed.

She identifies the boys as 17-year-old Wyatt Hall, 16-year-old Dylan Wick, 16-year-old Seth Byrd and 14-year-old Nick Byrd.

Click here for more.

People who forgive refused to be defined by injustice

Stephen Gaskin says that forgiveness is getting straight with people. I think he is on to something. I also think there is something more to it that just getting straight.

Forgiveness is many things. True forgiveness is a decision on the part of the victim to put the unjust behavior of the offender into context. Forgiveness requires a perspective and attitude that humans have a hard time cultivating and rising to. Our primitive reptilian brain wants vengeance, retribution, to kill or eliminate the perpetrator of the injustice against us. To overcome these powerful, primal instincts takes tremendous self awareness, courage, patience, understanding, love, and in a positive way, self abnegation in the sense of being able to rise above the hurt, the pain, the indignity, the lack of respect which injustice entails.

Forgiveness does not give up accountability. Forgiveness is not the same thing as pardon or reconciliation. Unjust behavior has consequences, it sets loose a karma in the world which cannot be recalled but can be redeemed. Reconciliation may not be desired by the victim or the perpetrator and yet forgiveness, peace in one's heart, can still be attained.

The victim forgives first and foremost for the benefit of oneself and only secondarily for the perpetrator and others.

Forgiveness is a power we all have to live happy and free instead of bitter and depressed defined by the injustice perpetrated against us. People who forgive refuse to be defined by injustice and victimhood. They realize they are much more than that. They realize they are beloved children of God in spite of how they have been treated by ignorant and dysfunctional others.