In San Jose, last week, I met a neat lady named Shelley Brown Kesselman. I discovered her sitting at a table with the sign Listening Post in front of it, and an invitation to share my triumphs and concerns. If the sign said Chaplaincy I wouldn't have stopped. I've been allergic to people telling me what good is since my early teens. But I did stop, and Shelley listened with intelligent interest to my own way of tackling moral issues, through my fiction, before I even found out that she was Assistant Chaplain of the Anglican mission at San Jose State University. After that we talked about -- not our differences -- but our shared values and increasing disgust with the money-first attitude of capitalist-fever around us, which seems to be less and less concerned with moral checks and balances. She said her mission is to help people figure out what they believe about spirituality and help them live up to those beliefs. Even rationalist humanists like me. I told her about Neil Lettinga, from UNBC, who had recently engaged me in conversation in the same fashion by showing an interest in my work and recognizing my preoccupation with moral dilemnas and the pressure to ditch ethics in order to win. That's twice in one year I've found myself more in sympathy with the "bad guys" of my early years than the "good guys". The good guys of my youth were the enlightened scientific types who would bring relief from suffering and a higher standard of living for all. Now they seems to be more interested in better service at expensive dinners and more lucrative patents. The "bad guys" were the religious types who wanted to keep us in the dark ages, stifle free thought, terrify the innocent and make decent people feel ashamed of themselves for being a bit different. Life can be confusing, can't it? Bottom line, whatever it is called, any belief that gives people the strength to be moral and care about each other in this frantic world has got to be a force for good. :-)


posted by Lynda at 08:52   comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments