Friday, Lafayette, Indiana

If I had to summarize what I do, I suppose you could say that I’m in the “what does this mean?” business. In other words, as a psychotherapist, a minister and (even) as a comic, my life’s work is to trade in observing what is going on in human living and interpreting what it means.

As a therapist I interpret this meaning for the person I am seeing in counseling. As a minister, through teaching and preaching, I try to bring meaning to the lives of the people sitting before me, by using the history and inherited perspectives offered in the testimony of believers and the sacred writings. And even as a comic, I satirize and ridicule, for the purpose of interpretation, the goings-on in the world around us.

This work offers a steady diet of difficult intellectual challenges. Because, as we all realize, the meaning of certain events just escapes logic and interpretation. Unexpected illness and death, terrible setbacks and unexpected eventualities are all an assault on higher reason. We accept this as a feature of human life, but, from the smartest to the dumbest of us, it’s troubling to our core that we don’t know why we are in such straits.

When I was a graduate student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, one of my favorite professors was the biblical scholar, Dr. Phyllis Trible, who had a book entitled “God’s Fierce Whimsy!” To me, this title perfectly captured the insanity of our reality - the reality that we are vulnerable creatures whose principle tool for coping is, ironically, logic and sanity.

The older I get, and the more experience I accrue with helping people, the more I focus not on discerning meeting, but rather on response, reaction and coping. No one has the answer to why something horrific happened to you. But there is lots of excellent, available counsel about how you can then live in the aftermath of these experiences.

For me it is my Christian faith, its promise of hope, and, most importantly, its command to be a person who loves others, even as I roll through the whimsy of my own life.

Hope you have a great weekend that is peaceful and uneventful.