The Budding Optimist

When I was in college, I took a course on Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales is a frame tale: Chaucer paints a picture of 29 pilgrims on the road to Canterbury to make atonement for their sins. On the way, each takes a turn entertaining the others with stories to pass the time. The tales told by each character are set ( framed ) within the context of the greater pilgrimage, with every story inadvertently revealing something about the person telling it. The Pardoner, for example, while a churchman, is a terrible human being. Five hundred years before Harry Potter, the Pardoner tells the story of 3 brothers swindling Death. While his tale loftily preaches against the evils of greed, he reveals to his traveling companions his favorite ways of cheating people. He confesses that he skillfully manipulates his religion to benefit himself. My class read the book in its original Middle English, and Dr. D made us memorize the General Prologue as Chaucer first wrote it. I can still recite most of it:...

When I first met my former therapist (Therapy Elsa), I eyeballed her with a great deal of distrust. I had finally been in therapy enough years to understand that the client, too, gets a say in whether or not the fit is right. "Are you one of those therapists who talk about sin a lot and how it's wrong to be gay?" I asked. Therapy Elsa smiled. "That's an interesting question. Why do you ask?" I assumed she was mentally writing down some kind of note like, "Prospective client probably gay." "Because you have diplomas hanging on your wall and one of them is from a seminary," I said. "Also, I know many Christians, and they care a LOT about whether people are gay." "Ah, I see," she said. "Well, to answer your concerns, the seminary I went to was quite open-minded." She went on to tell me how they used gender-neutral references for God, which basically made my head explode. Then I worried maybe she was too liberal ...

In a place some 8,000 miles away, there is a small village called Aranmula. In that tiny corner of the Indian subcontinent, lives a family of alchemists. For hundreds of years, this family has jealously guarded the secret of the kannadi , or mirror, of Truth. It is said that the family was first conscripted -- along with several others -- to create objects for a temple to Krishna. That temple, now over a thousand years old, traces its lineage back to the  Mahābhārata  and is alleged to have been built by the great warrior Prince Arjuna himself. All kannadi  today are descendants of the temple Kannadi in that they follow a carefully-guarded family recipe in a complex series of steps by which tin, copper, and other alloys are alchemized to create a reflective surface that reveals the True Self.  Grab the closest hand mirror you can find and take a look. What you see is a close approximation of what you really look like...but it's not perfect. If you lay the mirror flat...

C.S. Lewis once said something to the effect of, “I don’t write to express what I think; I write to find out what I think.”  That sentiment has always resonated with me. I, too, try to work things out in my head by writing them down, moving them around, saying them differently, and just praying that at some point, I have a lightbulb moment where I can be like, “Oh! THAT must be what's going on inside me!” Sometimes it works, and sometimes even weeks after pressing “Publish,” I’m still trying to work things out in my head.  I say all that to warn you that this is that type of post.  Several days ago, I posted this to whatever it is we’re calling the Instagram/Facebook conglomerate these days: I didn’t come up with the original, but it really resonated with me, so I shared it to my stories. A woman I’ve met only a handful of times in my life (from church, of course) & haven’t spoken to in years, instigated the following exchange, via direct message: I am not good at co...