I'm going to have to step back from this.

Ever since I returned to the United States, which was the day after election day, I have listened to those in the media, academia, and the church [the three fields in which I have spent most of my adult life] become more and more unhinged.  One side against another, both parties divided between completing ideologies, every administration statement met with a near-hysterical reaction, grossly irresponsible and demented statements on social media.  Now we are to believe that all human failure and problems are caused by inanimate objects in the form of...statues.  Apparently, too, there are Nazis, Nazis, everywhere.  It makes me wonder what happened to the Russians who supposedly fixed the election.  I haven't heard about them in a couple of weeks.  This, I guess, is no longer the source of our hysteria.

Against my better judgement, I have gradually been getting pulled into this maelstrom.  Fighting it is like fighting a rip tide.  I am exhausting myself, distracting myself from what's healthy, and bending my preaching a little bit into a more political arena.  This really has got to stop.

Yesterday, I removed a whole chunk of my sermon to go down some rabbit hole about recent events that did not really illuminate scripture nor enable my point to be worthwhile.  Sermons are sacrosanct; they are the only thing I produce that I think of as art, and I allowed secular cacophony to inform that proclamation.  That's not going to happen, again.

This feeds the growing sense of mortality that one feels when the birthday year clicks to 60.  Too often it seems that I recall some event fondly and realize that the person who was featured in that memory is now dead.  I have a measurable amount of time left in this plane of reality, This is the reality of being "chronologically gifted", I guess. When life is obviously finite, one wants it to be of a quality worth savoring.

I realize that I'm allowing this to effect what I choose to post on The Coracle.  What used to be intended as lighter, breezier fare is beginning to descend into the same swamp of aggro where I find most social media these days.  For the sake of my own mental and physical health, I'm going to stop that and return to articles about, as it says in the masthead, "human foible, archaeology, interesting people, and quirky music".  My natural insouciance needs more worthwhile subjects.

Oh, and surfing. Always something about surfing.

So, if you want to escape from the dreary sameness of the news, I hope you can come hear and be confident that you'll find things other than the daily hysteria with which to distract your mind.

Here's our new, temporary theme song. It has no meaning; it's just funky fun: