What Happens When You Turn Off The News? Life.

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes…including you.”
--Anne Lamott, author

The “off” button.

Lately I’ve been hitting this button a lot.  On my radio when the news gets much too depressing or crazy, especially when the voice of one particular office holding bully comes on. On my TV when the local news weather person tells me for the 15th time in the last half hour that a wicked storm is coming our way. Thanks for the update! On my laptop when I’ve scrolled through all my news sites and find nothing but bad news to read, as if that is the only news in our world. On my phone when I jump from story to story about the trade war and the impeachment crisis and the looming possible government shutdown and yes, the 2020 election. Really? ALREADY?!

ENOUGH!

And so, I hit the “off” button, click the remote, close out the web page, and mute the dinging notification sound on my smart phone. And guess what? It makes me happy. It calms my soul. It slows down the beating of my heart. It lowers my anxiety level about the state of this world, which if I believed everything I read and heard and saw—I might conclude we are all going to hell in a handbasket.

I’m not quite sure how I got to this point in my life, being so tethered, so addicted to the screens all around me. Not so sure how I fell down the rabbit’s hole of needing to see the absolute latest news and know the right now news and consume all the fast-breaking news 24/7.  At least I’m not alone in my addiction. According to the Nielsen Company that tracks media consumption, the average American now spends 11 hours and 21 minutes a day, every day, consuming media.  That’s more than half our waking hours.  And I know that at least for me the bulk of that media consumption is the news. The headlines. Reports about current events.

I once loved being a news junkie.  Reading two or three newspapers a day.  Listening to NPR morning and night.  Talking politics with family and friends. But no more.

Because what now passes for news? It’s not really the news. Flip through the biggest news channels and websites—Fox News, CNN, MSNBC—and you’ll quickly notice that most of what is being reported is not news but opinion.  Not news but commentary. Not news but gossip or talking heads yelling at each other or smug anchors telling us just what we are supposed to believe.  About the news. About the state of the world.

Time for that “off” button again.

I can’t take much more of our current dystopian journalism because relatively speaking, our world right now is what it has always been and always will be. Good and bad. Hopeful and hard. Beautiful and broken. The conceit of every generation is to imagine that their times are the worst of times, that now is so much worse than then. That we are suffering through unprecedented times. News flash.  In the 20th century alone our nation (and parents and grandparents) survived and overcame two world wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the threat of nuclear annihilation, political assassinations, Watergate and Vietnam. And we are still here.

Have you found the “off” button yet?

An informed citizenry is an absolute necessity for a healthy democracy. That is not the challenge we face as news consumers in 2019. We’ve got more news and more information and more insight into the inner workings of our government and world than ever before in human history.  We just don’t know how to sift through the news and separate it from the noise and so we are tempted to just consume everything put in front of us.  Like the hungry diner who stands before an overflowing buffet table: we don’t know when to stop eating. But there is one surefire way of going on a healthy news diet.

Use the “off” button.

Here’s what you can expect if you take that radical action.  More time to watch a gorgeous God blessed sunrise as you walk the dog on a soft summer morning.  Time to pay attention at your kid’s little league baseball game as you munch on a tasty hot dog and talk balls and strikes with the person next to you in the stands.  Time to just take a deep breath and know you are alive! Or ride your bicycle or hug and kiss your spouse for no reason or just be grateful for all the gifts of God that you have in this life.  Freedom. Work. People to love and people who love you.  A universe that, while sometimes is cruel, is also an amazing and miraculous place.

The “off” button.  Find it. Use it.  The good news is that the news can wait.

Weddings Give Us This Hope: LOVE WINS!

“I ask you to affirm your willingness to enter the covenant of marriage and to share all the joys and sorrows of this new relationship, whatever the future may hold.”      --Traditional marriage vows

August 18^th.

Last year that was the most popular day for weddings in the United States, a day when almost 30,000 couples said “I do”. Think June is the most popular time to get married? Nope. It’s now September. In 2018 more than 165,000 couples walked down the aisle in the ninth month, at an average cost of $33,391 dollars per wedding. What is the number of unusable, unwearable, unreturnable bridesmaid dresses leftover the day after all those weddings? Those fuchsia or sea foam or bright cotton candy pink fashion faux pas? Infinite. I know this. I’ve officiated at more than 300 weddings in almost 

thirty years of being an “I do” professional.

And yes, I still absolutely love doing a wedding. Being there. Seeing love.

As I stand at the front of a hushed sacred church sanctuary or in the middle of a green meadow or on the back porch of a golf country club with cries of “FORE!” in the distance or in a living room with just the couple and me. Weddings are beautiful and ancient and hopeful and angst filled events, amazing rites of passage and of promises made in this human life. Weddings remind us that love still wins, still tries, still strives, that love connects and love unites.

Weddings go on. Love goes on.

Not that in almost thirty years of helping folks tie the knot, I haven’t witnessed a few weird and wacky moments. Like a wedding where the groom and his Dad almost came to blows. Why Dad chose two minutes before the big event to tell his son how he really felt about his future daughter in law, I’ll never know. The time a Grandmother fainted, just toppled over in the pew and so the paramedics arrived in a huge red firetruck with sirens blaring and the organist played music while we all waited and prayed and…she was okay!! PHEW! I’ve seen a terror filled bride and groom hang on for dear life in a horse drawn carriage as an ornery equine bucked and kicked. One bride arrived 45 minutes late as her guests melted in an August inferno. My most touching memory? A woman dying of cancer marrying the love of her life, “’til death do us part.”

Weddings teach us that love stays.  Love stands. Human love survives in spite of whatever else is going on in this world, all the bad stuff, the cruel stuff, the mean stuff, all of our fears about the future. Perhaps that is what makes a wedding so miraculous.  One person says to another, “Whatever may come, I will be with you. Whatever the future holds, we will meet it all together, as a team, as partners, as one.”

That’s why folks still get married in war time, in hard times, days when things feel shaky. They still have hope for better days ahead. That’s why people tie the knot even though in the past they may have had their hearts broken wide open. They still believe that love is possible. They still desire the companionship of one special soul in spite of yesterday.

We need weddings and we need the love these witness to: in good times, in anxious times like these, in all times. Love shared by couples and love found in families and clans and communities and even nations: this covenant love binds us all together in sacred vows, in promises that commit us one to another. We all say “I do!” in a way and the world is a stronger and a better place for our declarations of fidelity. We care about another person and this life is more tender, gentler, and just more fun. 

So, God bless us all as we move into this season of weddings. God bless overcooked chicken and the Chicken Dance.  God bless teary fathers and proud mothers, remarried couples, same sex couples, couples that are so young and couples that are so old too. God bless high religious services in houses of worship and laid-back services in a meadow and quiet moments at City Hall with the clerk. 

It’s all good because it’s all love and it’s all a gift from God and it’s ours’ for the taking and ours’ for the witnessing, whatever the future may hold. 

Let tomorrow bring whatever it will. But today? We love.

Avengers End Game: Think It's Only a Movie? Think Again.

"Because when some people are invisible, everyone suffers."            --Gloria Steinhem

(Spoiler alert: this column contains minor plot details from the film "Avengers: End Game". You've been warned!)

Either you are a super hero fan or...you are not.   

I've unearthed this cultural divide lately as I talk to people about how much I absolutely love, LOVE, the movie "Avengers: End Game", a pop culture juggernaut. In almost three weeks of wide release, the film has made $2.5 billion, making it the second biggest moneymaker of all time. It's the biggest foreign movie ever in China, one of the most expensive films ever at $356 million and is still showing on more than 4,500 screens in the United States alone. 

"End Game" is a big deal, even if you are not a fan of watching folks run around and/or fly around in multi-colored tight fitting spandex super hero uniforms. Even if your tastes run more to Downton Abbey and sipping tea than cheering as the Incredible Hulk bursts forth in bright green muscular ripples and pummels yet another evil villain. "End Game" is the final story in a twenty two film series (yes, I've seen them all), the so called Marvel Comic Universe. Begun in 2008, the series has sold more than $8 billion worth of tickets.

So attention must be paid even if you never plan to see "End Game". 

For films, like other forms of popular culture--books and TV shows and music--these both shape who we are as a people and reflect who we are at any given moment in history, through our shared mythologies and stories and images. Think of Ellen DeGeneres, who came out as a proud and unashamed lesbian on her TV show "Ellen" in 1997. That act forever changed cultural conversations around LGBT issues. Or the 1983 TV movie "The Day After". Then the United States and Russia seemed on the brink of nuclear war and this one film about a nuclear explosion over Lawrence, Kansas, made thousands of average citizens into peace activists. This pop culture effect isn't always so profound. How many folks quit swimming in the ocean after 1975's "Jaws"?   

On the afternoon I saw "End Game" in a packed Boston theater with hundreds of others, almost every seat in that dark auditorium filled, one scene more than any other elicited the loudest and biggest and longest cheer. It was not the final scene where the story concludes, as you might expect.

In the last battle scene, the lone starring female super heroine in Marvel mythology, Captain Marvel, faces a do or die task. Spider Man asks, "How will you do it?" Another character declares, "She's got help."  And then all of the women super heroines, every last one, who've appeared in past films as sidekicks or in supporting roles: they assemble together. Twelve mighty, strong and smart women, ready to do battle.

And the audience cheers!!

I know I did.  For finally, characters who'd been sidelined or essentially invisible, overshadowed by their testosterone fueled male heroic counterparts: these women got their due, one deserved for a very long time, eleven years.  Can one short scene in such a large saga really make any difference in women's ongoing fight in the real world? To be seen, to be heard, to not so often be invisible in too many circles of power?

The lack of women in the Marvel universe just reflects the lack of women in so many other places in our culture, their invisibility. In the White House where only four out of fifteen Cabinet members are women. In the corporate boardroom where only 25 out of the 500 CEOs of the largest American corporations are women. In the film industry where, of the 100 top movies from 2018, only 4 percent were directed by women.

The problem isn't ability. A super heroine can kick butt and take no prisoners as well as any super hero, in the real world too. God made male and female together, at the same time, with equal powers and equal dreams and equal talent. What I hope is that the millions of girls worldwide who see "End Game": they will see themselves in Captain Marvel or the Wasp, or Okoye, a mighty African warrior and general. Let those young women imagine that they too have superpowers, are up on the screen, invisible no more.   

And you thought "End Game" was just a comic book movie. It is and is also a reflection of who we are in our culture and perhaps, who we might become. That's why I can't wait for the next Captain Marvel movie.  Want to go?

I'm buying the popcorn.                    

To Be Or Not To Be All About Me? That's the Question.

"If you live your life as if everything is about you, you will be left with just that. Just you."      --Anonymous

Me.

Years ago when I was in my early twenties, just entering adulthood, I had an incredibly annoying and self-revealing habit, one I was oblivious to. One that made me not the most fun of people to have around the dinner table or at a cocktail party or in any group conversation.  It was a nervous unconscious social tick that caused me, out of insecurity, fear and ego, to make almost every conversation I participated in, about, well....me.

Me.

So someone at the table would bring up a random topic: the Red Sox, the weather, a funny story, and I inevitably would jump right into that social interaction, compelled to offer some personal tidbit, and all to make what they had just said, about me. To bring the focus back on me. They went to a Sox game. I bragged about what great seats I had last month.  They talked about a dentist appointment. I shared a dramatic tale of a recent root canal.  They talked of a wicked rainstorm. I regaled listeners with how I once survived a tornado!

Thank goodness that one day my older brother pulled me aside and gently pointed out just what I was doing.  "You'd don't have always make it about you, John."  It was some of the best life advice I ever received and so since that day I've tried my best (not always successfully and not by a long shot) to remember that in my life, that in this life: it is not always about me.

Me.

Like when I sit in a long line of traffic and fume about how all these people are making me, ME, so darn late and then my car slowly rolls by a serious accident that caused the slow down, and I'm embarrassed, and I remember. It's not always about me.  Or I rush into the grocery store to pick up a last minute item and I blow right by an old woman with a walker, struggling to make her way forward, and neglect to hold the door open for her. Nice job Mr. ME! Or the time at a party I offered some thoughtless gossip about a person and then realized that he was standing right behind me.

Me.

We are living in times when the culture certainly provides many outlets for the temptation to make this life all about "me", about "I", about "myself".  On Facebook where it is so tempting to present to the world a carefully curated view of life, how great, how awesome, how blessed we feel. There's even a phrase for it: the humble brag.  If only I were brave enough to show the real me: post a  photo of first thing in the morning, my hair all astray like Larry from the Three Stooges, face all puffy from sleep.  Now that's the real me! Or on Twitter. Last weekend one of our elected national leaders posted a self righteous tweet weighing in on the controversial results from Saturday's Kentucky Derby, how absolutely sure he was that the outcome was dead wrong. All I could think was, "Does this person actually believe that folks really care about what his uninformed opinion is about horse racing?" Guess what? He does! 

And I think about all of the commencement addresses that will be offered in the weeks ahead and how so many of those speeches will be all about extolling just how great the grads are, how life is about finding your own dreams, fulfilling what you want above all else, oh the places you'll go!  True: the young need to be self focused at this time in life. I know I was when I graduated and yet....a balance needs to be struck. A reminder that the best life is never, ever about just "me". That a good life in the deepest sense involves other people, always. That when we rise in this life we most often do so because of how others have helped us: parents and teachers, sibling and friends, coaches and mentors.

One of the greatest gifts I've received from my life long faith is this consistent wisdom: I am to love God, love neighbor and love self.  It takes all three loves. If I love self alone to the exclusion of God or others, that's a sad life. A lonely life. A little life.  The song is correct: one is the loneliest number and perhaps even , "me" might be the loneliest word.

So thank God a wise soul had the grace to tell me: it's not about me. It's about us. It's about a power so much greater than ourselves alone, one that holds all of life together. 

Me? Yes. And thee. And we, too.