Category Archives: Spirit and Faith

Reflections on the spiritual side of life

07.14.26
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Friendship

Friendship is a place of comfort, like this old pub, The Friendship, in Glossop, Derbyshire, England. Photo by Dominic Nelson, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0. Cropped for use here.

The last two posts in this space have focused on friendship. Why? Because friendship is the chief of Earthly values. 

Not truth. Truth is fickle. You labor and strive to arrive at truth; you find it; you latch on and cleave to it for dear life; you tell yourself IT REALLY IS THE TRUTH! Then some bloke comes along with a different truth. Not only different but incompatible. His truth and your truth cannot both be true. Only one can be true, therefore the other must be false.

Now you’re on the horns of a dilemma. Choose Horn One, and you must gird for battle: work up all the energy, wit, and stamina you possess: wage ideological warfare until long after all the cows are safely tucked in bed. You invest gigawatts of energy just maintaining an unshakable conviction of your truth, not to mention the energy it takes to beat your foe about the head and shoulders with it. At this point, Dear Reader, you’re thinking, “Gosh darn it all, I know what’s true and what’s not, but I didn’t sign up for this!”

Choose Horn Two, and you must cave in; just admit the other guy is right. Whew! What a relief. You avoid all the exertion, as well as the hazard of indefensible wrongness. But if you concede at the outset, why did you spend all that time and energy constructing your truth to begin with?

Entropy is breathing down your neck, Gentle Reader. Truth is fickle. Friendship is not. 

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We are social animals. We live in a web of relationships. To navigate for a week or a lifetime, you need friends. You need folks who treat you with respect and affection, people you in turn like and respect. Friendship is the sine qua non of human existence. 

It’s the most essential essential. 

Making friends is a skill. Keeping friends is a related, yet distinct, skill. 

A bit of humility goes a long way. Have you ever noticed those who need to be right all the time, those who are loudest in their inflexibilty, and those who need to be the star of the show, have few friends? Their skills do not include the friendship ones.

Facebook says I have 914 friends today. “Oh . . . Facebook friends,” you say. Yes, but I’m not promiscuous online. I don’t just friend anybody I see on Facebook. I estimate at least 8/9 of those Facebook friends are people I know in real life. Folks I would recognize on the street. People I like and who presumably like me, at least well enough to be Facebook friends. They’re not all bosom buddies, I grant. Some are mere acquaintances. But a lot of them are real, durable friends. More than a couple dozen of them are really, really close friends. And I have a lot of friends who aren’t even on Facebook.

Friendship is solid. It’s constant. It partakes of those qualities Shakespeare attributed to love:

“It is an ever-fixéd mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the star to every wand’ring bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.”

Of course friendship can go sour, but I advise going to great lengths to prevent it.

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“So, let me get this straight, O New Favorite Writer. Are you saying friendship is the cardinal virtue?”

Yes.

“Well, what about honor? Isn’t honor greater than friendship?” 

Honor has different definitions. It’s understood in a derivative sense. 

If honor, in your view of things, is a function of truth—if you must be right to be honorable—then honor is just as fickle as truth. 

If honor is what I think it means: Being honest and upright, having integrity, being a mensch—if that’s what it is, then it includes loyalty in the deepest sense; that is, loyalty to a friend’s best self and highest interests.

That’s not something greater than friendship. It is friendship. 

May I tell you a secret? I’ve always been conservative. Even long ago when I was liberal, I was conservative. 

Now, in all honesty, Dear Reader, most of my friends are liberals. I also have lots of conservative friends. 

I don’t talk politics with my friends, nor do I talk politics with my non-friends. There is no point.

I know what I believe to be true; but whatever the truth may be, I’ve still got friends. 

The world keeps getting older. You can’t have too many friends.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

07.07.26
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Friend

Last week in this space I extolled friends, specifically those with whom I share a national church-linked existence. They are wonderful people. I place a high value on their friendship.

But, returning from the church convention in Massachusetts, I came back to my first friend: Teddy. 

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Teddy is a bear, seeing his eighty-first summer. He gazes from the dresser top as I do my daily exercises. His chubby legs are splayed just right to support his body, his stubby arms akimbo, black eyes glittering, tongue vacant. 

He stares at me. I know I must complete all my twists and turns and arm swings, because I’d hate to let Teddy down. 

He was my first friend; I do not remember a time before Teddy. We’ve been together more than fourscore years. 

I don’t know what he looked like when I first met him. In my first memories, he was already worn and bedraggled. Mom told me that he once had a flapping tongue made of red felt. I must have torn it off somehow, for he now sports only a small red dot where his mouth should be. Without a real tongue, how can he speak?

Sphinx-like, he looks on from the top of the dresser. Silence is his superpower.

What he lacks in loquacity, Ted makes up in loyalty—a key virtue in a friend. Over the past eighty years, I’ve done many stupid things, manifested many weaknesses, harbored petty grudges and neurotic insecurities. Teddy has seen it all. It would be only natural if he held me in low esteem. But, like the best of friends, he never says a word.

Teddy seems content to have watched my evolution from a brash and conflicted child to a wise, if decrepit, old man. He, on the other hand, never changes.

One day I will shuffle off to my next stop on the way to Eternity. I’ll leave behind friends and lovers, child and grandchildren . . .

. . . and Teddy, the only one who has seen it all.

And he’s not talking.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

06.30.26
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Friends

I wish everybody could know my friends.

Laura reads every week’s blog post. Sometimes she comments, but always she reads them. Because they are great literature? Of course! Because she always learns something new from them? Naturally. But also—because she’s a friend. A dear friend, one of my dearest.

And there’s Ellen. She looks out for Laura—otherwise: disaster.

Bill, I have known for more than half my long life. He is a man of principle, a man of compassion—most of all, one of God’s most faithful representatives among the messy daily business of human life. Bill is as good a man as I could ever wish to be—but between you and me, I’ll never make it. That doesn’t matter to Bill. He loves me anyway.

I have a friend named Colleen. I knew her father, Bob, who was a great man. Colleen has many of Bob’s best qualities and wonderful ones of her own, including musicianship. She gives of herself and her talents unstintingly. She treats me almost as a spare father, because I was a younger colleague of Bob, who died too young. Colleen is special to me. 

Mike is another friend, one with whom we have traveled to England, the Netherlands, South Africa, and darkest Michigan. He is thoughtful, always well-spoken and well-informed. He is a talented organizer, a deeply committed Christian who often leads groups of young people in meaningful service projects that help out folks in difficult circunstances.

Let me tell you about my friend Greg, and my other friend Peter. They are middle-aged men, probably in their 50s, and lead healthy and vital New England churches. Wonderful guys.

I was talking with my friend Cynthia the other day and learned something I had not known—that years ago she was a military wife, stationed in Panama with her husband, Victor. That was back during the days of Operation Just Cause, when the U.S. was rounding up the dictator Noriega. Very exciting days. Thank God Victor and Cynthia didn’t get in the way of any lethal force. But that was years ago, and they’re in Christian ministry now. 

My friend Laura runs a very successful school for young students in Tijuana, Mexico. Her mother, Juana, was the previous head of the school. This dynamic young woman prepares hundreds of otherwise at-risk young people from poor neighborhoods for meaningful employment in the business arena and the arts. 

My new friend Ynes is a daughter of my recently deceased friend Charles. Charles, all by himself, started a mission school thirty years ago among the Baka people of the eastern part of Cameroon in Aftica. He and his school, now run by his former assistant Beatrice, give education, as well as breakfasts, lunches, clothing—even such a basic thing as registration of their births, which allows them to be citizens of their own land—to hundreds of young Cameroonians. Ynes is helping her father’s school cultivate supporting and sustaining relationships with American donors.

I wish you could know Beth. She is in her nineties now—recently remarried!—and gets around well for a woman her age. I’ve known her for years, known how generous she is for causes she believes in. But it was only last year I learned that in former days, she was one of the first woman pilots for Pan American World Airways. What a wonderful world!

Another friend, Ron, preached a sermon yesterday that would knock your socks off.

I could go on and on. These are only a fraction of the folks I encounter about once a year, occasionally more often, occasionally less often, by attending the meetings of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches—most of which, in the last forty years or so, my wife and I have attended. 

It’s a pretty good place to find friends who are not only good friends but good people. I am indebted to my faith tradition for giving me this richness of associations. I can only wish the same for you, Gentle Reader.

Perhaps you have noticed—no photos in this week’s blog. That’s because it never occurs to me to snap photos of my friends. I guess I know them well enough that I don’t need a physical image to see them. They’re in my head anytime I want them.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

04.21.26
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Numbers

I’ve been thinking about numbers. Not fancy numbers—just the ones we learned as toddlers.

Photo by Tanya Barrow on Unsplash.

“One” is a word for Unity. Wholeness. Perfection. Singularity. 

Once you say “Two,” you no longer have that perfection. You have traded in Singularity for Companionship. Fellowship. Relation. One is perfect and alone. But with Two, you can do the tango.

You have sacrificed insular perfection and gained a dyadic relationship. 

But note well: Embracing duality opens the door to plurality. 

It is inevitable: As soon as you have Two, Three comes marching in behind it, with a whole host of uninvited guests in its train. There is no end to the complexity you will encounter. You need a special symbol, ⚯, just to represent the embarrassing fact that there is no end. A through Ω no longer cover it. You need ⚯ as well.

I did not invent these ideas, Dear Reader. They have been expressed so often, for so long, that we may suspect they are hardwired into the human mind.

Lao Zi, the Daoist sage, may have had such things in mind when he opened his book, Dao De Jing, as follows: 

Lao Zi riding an ox. Painting by Zhang Lu (1464-1538). Public Domain.

The way which may be spoken of is not the Unchanging Way.

The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name. 

The Nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth. 

The named is the mother of the ten thousand things. . . . 

The Nameless is One; as soon as you name something, you have Two. And from these two, the Nameless and the named, come tumbling the myriad of other things.

Numbers are basic to Christianity as well. Long ago, formalizing a theological framework for the newly-acceptable religion, the bishops at the Council of Nicea asserted that God is one, “the Father Almighty, Maker of all things seen and unseen.” 

But also, Jesus Christ is included, being “begotten of the Father, the only-begotten; that is . . . consubstantial with the Father; by whom all things were made, both in heaven and on earth.” 

So that’s two. 

The unique twist of this god-talk, from the first chapter of John’s gospel, is that even though God is two—the Father and the Son—yet the two are still one. Some people might call that mystical.

And, as most folks know, two was not enough. They had to make it three by including the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit—a being barely mentioned in the original version of the Nicene Creed but given more detail by the First Council of Constantinople a few decades later. So the One became the Three-in-One—a concept that has survived to this day, though never without challenge from dissenters.

Adoration of the Trinity, painting by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Father and Son upper center, with the Holy Spirit as a dove flying above them, and myriad beings surrounding them in adoration.

I do not mention all this, Gentle Reader, to start a theology debate. I only mean to point out the power that these simple numbers—one, two, three—have, and have always had, on our thinking. 

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Soon, Your New Favorite Writer will be eighty-one years old. Now, there’s a number to conjure with. Eighty-one is nine nines. And nine is magical because it’s three threes. The Trinity trined. 

Lao Zi had eighty-one chapters in his little book. One legend says he remained in his mother’s womb for eighty-one years before emerging as a full-grown, wrinkly old philosopher. I do not say this is true. I do say the number “eighty-one” carries a potency in the human mind. 

When a person gets to be eighty-one, he will have learned a few things, if he has been paying attention. But all of them—all the myriad things—come out of those first three numbers. They come from unity, duality, and the further possibility of pluralism. 

These are depths we cannot plumb. We must be content to deal, in our various ways, with all the ten thousand details. But, doing so, we might be relieved to reflect upon occasion that all these things are just extrapolations of more basic themes. 

One, Two, Three . . .  

But may your blessings be myriad, Dear Friend.

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

04.14.26
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Desiderata

Dear Reader: This is a reposting of a reflection originally posted June 20, 2020. It is as timely now as it was then. In fact, “timeless” would be a better word. Hope you enjoy it.

“Desiderata” is Latin for “things desired.” Often in difficult times, the thing we most desire is peace.

Max Ehrmann. Fair use.

The prolific, inspirational writer Max Ehrmann (1872-1945) of Terre Haute, Indiana, penned a prose poem that was published as “Desiderata” in 1948. It is the only one of his works to achieve enduring fame, and that only after his death. 

For its tone and diction, and because it once appeared in a church publication with the legend, “Old Saint Paul’s Church, Baltimore AD 1692,” it is often assumed to be ancient, maybe even Scriptural in origin. “1692,” however, meant the date of the church’s founding, not of the poem’s writing.

Inspiration

“Desiderata” is neither Biblical nor liturgical nor even very old. But, like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, it stakes a claim to an authenticity of its own. It swept the nation in 1971, when a voice artist named Les Crane released it as a spoken word recording. That was at the height of our nation’s internal turmoil over Civil Rights and the Vietnam War. The serene, contemplative tone of the piece may have boosted its popularity.

Today we are again in a time of stress and conflict. Perhaps Mr. Ehrmann’s poem will be of some use to you. At least, it constitutes good advice.

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Love . . . is as perennial as the grass. Photo by Мария Волк on Unsplash.
Do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Photo by Rendiansyah Nugroho on Unsplash.

Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

You are a child of the Universe. Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy. 

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Author

02.24.26
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Archie, what hast thou wrought?

Archibald MacLeish. Public Domain.

Archibald MacLeish was a poet, a playwright, a great figure in American letters. He served as Librarian of Congress during the Second World War and apparently did a bang-up job of it. He won three Pulitzer Prizes—in 1933 and 1953 for books of poetry and in 1959 for a play, J.B.

In 1962, when I was a freshman at Knox College, Mr. MacLeish came to our school to give a speech. At the given hour—11 o’clock on a Tuesday morning, as I recall—I came to Alumni Hall, our massive, neo-romanesque theater, clutching my softback copy of the published script of J.B., which the college bookstore had stocked by the gross to prepare for the playwright’s visit. 

Climbing the front stairs and entering the small second-story lobby, I spied the literary lion in a tweed coat and dark vest, chatting with my English composition professor, Michael Crowell. 

“Mister Sommers!” Crowell boomed. “Come and meet Archibald MacLeish.” 

I stepped up and shook hands with the great man. He was trim and natty, with close-cropped gray hair, a hawklike nose, and dark, intense eyes. 

He looked five times more awake than I. 

I burbled a word or two and held out my book to him. He smiled, uncapped a huge silver fountain pen, and signed the title page in black ink. I thanked him and made a quick escape. I found a seat in the theater, and in due course he made his speech. I don’t remember what he said. Probably something about literature.

That I can no longer locate my autographed copy of J.B. may give you a reasonable estimate of the durability of literary fame.

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I actually did read that play, J.B. It was supposed to be a modern American version of the biblical Book of Job. Not to throw shade on an undeniably fine poet and library leader, nor to quibble with the judgment of a bona fide Pulitzer Prize jury, nonetheless I recall feeling underwhelmed. It seemed to me the best parts of the play were long passages quoted directly from the Bible; the parts that had been rendered into a contemporary American setting were rather mundane by comparison with the scripture from which they sprang. 

These recollections bring us, in a deplorably roundabout manner, to the Book of Job, one of the great works of world literature. Have you read it? It’s easy to find in any standard Bible, tucked right between Esther and Psalms. 

It is a stark fable, a story of undeserved suffering and a seemingly callous God. It holds believers accountable for their faith in a way that no conventional tale could.

Job, the central character, is subjected to immense suffering and loss for no reason he can discern. Instead of giving him an explanation, God re-asserts his Almightiness and draws attention to Job’s creaturehood.

Three Friends Visit Job by Wanda Korzeniowska (Polish, 1874-1939). Public Domain.

In what screenwriting guru Robert McKee would label “an education plot,” Job’s inner landscape is changed—not by anything resembling justice in ordinary human terms but by the simple knowledge that God offers no rational choice except humility.

It’s a thoroughly Jewish answer to the problem of evil. If you feel the resolution of the story unsatisfying, you can hear the unseen narrator’s voice whispering: “Vell, vot did you expect?”

In today’s world, we see evil and injustice seemingly everywhere. The good are punished while the evil prosper. It seems, at times, unbearable.

One almost hates to mention in this regard: It was ever thus. 

There is nothing new about evil. It still stinks. 

We can fight it, but we won’t always win.

As in the days of the Old Testament, we can either cast aspersions at God or admit that the universe God has made is one altogether beyond our imaginations, where justice may have to be measured by divine standards rather than human. 

Archibald MacLeish, wherever you are—I invite you to put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Until next time,

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

02.17.26
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Loyalty

Those Germans. They always know what they’re talking about, even if nobody else does. 

Those Germans. Carl Burckardt, Die jungen Deutschen. Public Domain. 

From the language that brought you Weltschmerz, Weltanschauung, Gemütlichkeit, and Fahrvergnügen, comes our old friend, Schadenfreude—taking pleasure at the misfortunes of others.

Volksvagen’s “Fahrvergnügen” ad. Fair use.

Right now, however, I’m focused on loyalty, and I’d like to commission the German language, if possible, to give us a word meaning nostalgia for the old loyalties of yore, now lost in our benighted era. 

In May 2024 Your New Favorite Writer posted a piece, “A Time Travelogue,” and a man wrote this week to thank me for it. 

The original post was a visit to the now-distant past, to the time when I was a boy in Streator, Illinois. I happened to mention “the Onized Club”; my correspondent happened to be Googling last week for “Onized.” That was, as investigators say on TV, the nexus. 

Onized jacket. Fair use.

The Onized Club was a company-sponsored club for the thousands who worked for Owens-Illinois Glass Company and their families. Owens was far the largest employer in Streator. The word “onized” was a transform of the words “Owens-Illinois” and “organized.” By going to work for Owens you became onized. People were proud of this club, which gave them various benefits—especially, wearing spiffy “Onized” fan gear around town. 

It was a company town. During the years when glass jars and bottles were being displaced for many uses by cheaper plastic or coated-paper containers, every quart of milk sold in Streator carried the legend: “See What You Buy—Buy in Glass!” Those who were onized naturally wanted to keep their high-paying jobs. They were grateful to the company. They were glad to be in the club.

The man who wrote me had been commissioned to do a project of some kind for the Streator Onized Credit Union. Puzzled by the term “onized,” he Googled it to find out what it meant and, voilà! found my blog post, which enlightened him on the origin of the term.

BUT HERE’S THE TWIST: As he continued reading, he “became nostalgic for a time I never knew when the richest among us funded the public good. A time when companies cared about their employees enough to spin up a credit union to make sure they had access to banking. A time when employees had an actual reason to be loyal because the respect went both ways. . . . [Y]our article reminded me of what life could be like and for a moment, I was there – imagining I was Onized and cheering for my team.” 

Aw, gosh—now I’m all choked up.

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But wait a minute, Dear Reader. Hold your horses. 

My new friend seems nostalgic for a time he never knew, “when employees had an actual reason to be loyal because the respect went both ways.” Hence the need for a new German word. Perhaps Loyalitätsnostalgie—nostalgia for (an era of) loyalty.

The thing is: I have lived in both eras, and I’m not sure they’re all that different.

Don’t get me wrong. I venerate the ’50s and ’60s as a wonderful time—a golden era, with all sorts of good things that have been abandoned in our heedless rush for modernity. (Or, these days, postmodernity.)

But that’s partly because memory dwells on the good stuff. At least, my memory does.

A Vietnam War-era P-38 can opener, with a U.S. penny shown for size comparison. One remains useful; the other, not so much. Photo by Jrash. Public Domain.

We all look back to the early years of our lives as the standard against which we measure all things. That’s why old duffers who have not touched an M-16 rifle or used a P-38 can opener in sixty years wear baseball caps with patches representing their old units and blubber unashamed tears when they meet fellow vets. It’s not because the service was so wonderful—it often wasn’t—but it was the capstone or climax to the early years of a person’s life, the passageway to adulthood. Often enough, as adults, we look backward to the more exciting and heady days of youth.

So what about it, Gentle Reader? Has the two-way tug of loyalty between employer and employee gone the way of the Great Auk? Does it live only in the past?

I don’t think so. To begin with, it’s not clear that all rich people, or all large corporations (the two categories are not identical) were stalwart stewards of the public good in old times. Second, for every splashy billionaire we see in today’s media behaving like an ass, there is a quieter billionaire out in the hinterlands working patiently for a better world. We have a good example right here in Wisconsin: Judith Faulkner, creator and sole owner of Epic Systems, Inc.—who, besides having invented a very beneficial medical software, is methodically working to give away 99 percent of her net worth to worthy causes during her lifetime. There must be many other examples.

I know there are a lot of lesser companies in small towns across the nation, delivering great goods and services with workforces who are proud of what they are doing and of the company in whose employ they do it. 

Loyalty will always be with us. It’s the glue that holds our society together. It works so well because it is a two-way street. Smart bosses go to extraordinary lengths to get and keep good employees, and those employees work not only for their bosses but for their communities. 

Relationships of mutual loyalty not only abound in the business world, they also make schools, churches, libraries, hospitals, and all kinds of nonprofits work. 

Those who do not live within a web of loyal relationships would be well advised to keep seeking. Such relationships are out there for the having. When you find an employer, a partner, or an institution worth giving your loyalty to, make sure you respond in kind.

Then you’ll truly know the joys of Beziehungsglück (relationship happiness).

Worth thinking about until next time.

Blessings, 

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

01.20.26
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Life in 2026

My friend Kimberly recently posted:

“I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THE REST OF YOU. I AM STRUGGLING WITH WHAT IS HAPPENING IN OUR WORLD. ANY WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT?”

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Yes, Kimberly, try these:

God is not finished with us yet. 

It’s easy to get discouraged when we are fed a constant stream of the most outlandish and outrageous things happening somewhere, anywhere, in our tired old world. 

But everything that’s happening now has happened before, over and over again. 

There was a gag in the Fifties that went like this: 

They told me, “Cheer up, things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough . . . things got worse!

Woman with a conical straw hat planting rice in a paddy field at golden hour, in Don Det, Si Phan Don, Laos. Photo by Basile Morin, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

In times like these, I feather my own nest; I tend to my knitting; I weed my garden. These are all metaphors, Kimberly. I don’t actually do those particular activities.

The point is, I show up every day. I take people one by one. I try to respond to their needs as I can discern them—especially each person’s need to be treated with dignity and respect.

I hear folks’ concerns, but when those concerns are political—usually informed by media reports of matters far from our daily lives—I safeguard them in File 13 and redirect the conversation.

An old Chinese poem, perhaps the oldest extant Chinese poem, says:

When the sun comes out, we go to work;

when the sun goes in, we rest.

We plow the fields so we can eat;

we dig wells so we can drink.

What has the Emperor’s power to do with us?
Green rice sheaves planted in a paddy field at golden hour in Don Det, Si Phan Don, Laos. A thin opaque film on the surface of the water welcomes the long recumbent shadows of the stems. Photo by Basile Morin, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

I focus on the here-and-now and on my own responses, which ultimately are the only things within my control. Yes, I can control my own thoughts, words, and deeds. 

Some may think me cold-blooded, but I simply do not get urges of the heart that compel me to act out of character. My heart, if I have one, is not that kind of heart. 

Calm, philosophical detachment may be impossible if you have another kind of heart. If so, all I can say is you are in for a lot of woe that I have managed to avoid over the past eighty years.

Despite my distance from the flames of passion—or because of it—I am active, upbeat, and productive in my actual life. I meet each day with a certain zest, untroubled by a whole world of troubles, confident the sun will rise again tomorrow. 

That’s enough for an old man. 

I wish you all peace and contentment.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

12.30.25
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Three Favorite Films

In a recent workshop, novelist Barbara M. Britton said, “What are your three favorite movies? What do they have in common? Those are apt to be the themes and topics you hold dearest as a writer.” 

In the last analysis, It’s a Wonderful Life is all about home and family. Public Domain photo.

That impressed me, because it’s true. 

How does it apply to Your New Favorite Writer? My three all-time favorites are sentimental Christmas movies. 

I like many kinds of films. I’m tickled by screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby or The Gods Must Be Crazy. I like great political satires such as Romanov and Juliet, Dr. Strangelove, or The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming. I’m bolstered by writing, directing, and acting brilliance as displayed in Casablanca, Double Indemnity, The Third Man, or any film by the late, great Hitchcock.

But the three I would choose to answer Barbara’s question are: Meet Me In St. Louis, It’s a Wonderful Life, and We’re No Angels. The first is a cozy domestic drama, the second a stark morality play with an Everyman hero, and the third a blackish comedy in which the stock villain gets a hilarious comeuppance.

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So, what do these three flicks have in common? And what does that say about the subject matters and themes in my own writing?

“Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Judy Garland comforts Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis. Screen grab, fair use.

These films are old. Meet Me In St. Louis came out in 1944,  It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946,  and We’re No Angels in 1955. I like people and things that are my age. This backwards look is my brand, if I have a brand. The fiction I write tends to be historical. Most of the posts here relate, one way or another, to times past. I like to explore the days of yore because I think that all treasures worth having, all the secrets of life, reside there.

Why Christmas movies, in particular? I happen to be a Christian and attach theological meaning to Christmas. To me, it seems Christmas is when our Creator showed how much he cares for us by taking on all the burdens of our creaturehood. The  birth of Jesus is the event that starts the reconciliation of God and man. That theme strikes a deep chord in my heart.

In these films, the characters—ordinary folks like you and me, not rich and powerful people—have their lives, their homes, and their families restored to how they should be. In a deep sense, this is a kind of homecoming.

One of the chief plot lines of literature is that of someone returning home. Odysseus, the Prodigal Son, E.T., Dorothy Gale—all are bound on homeward journeys. In the films I love most, the characters have not necessarily left home, but their homes are threatening to leave them. 

The Smith family of St. Louis, the Baileys of Bedford Falls, and the Ducotel family in the French Caribbean colony of Cayenne all face crises in which their homes are about to disappear, leaving them suspended, as memoirist Dinty W. Moore might say, “between panic and desire.” 

The purpose of the plot is to break open a new dispensation, a new state of affairs in which the characters can find their way home. A path is opened. In each case, this shifting paradigm of reality comes as a mental transformation.

Three of Santa’s helpers drop in on a distraught family, just in time for Christmas. Aldo Ray, Humphrey Bogare, and Peter Ustinov in We’re No Angels. Fair use.

In St. Louis, Alonzo Smith suddenly realizes that success is not counted in dollars or prestige, but in his family’s happiness. In Bedford Falls, George Bailey is awakened, through Divine Intervention, to the fact that all these years he has not been wasting his time in meaningless sacrifice but investing in the currency of abiding love. In Cayenne, the inward epiphany comes not to the family whose home is saved but to the trio of criminals who enact that salvation. It doesn’t seem to matter who has the revelation, as long as the audience gets to experience it. 

So I guess the cat is out of the bag. I like stories that bring people home, bring them in from the cold, reunite families, and restore harmony in local communities. 

In The Price of Passage, I wrote about people displaced from their homes—Norwegian immigrants and fugitive slaves. They prove Thomas Wolfe’s assertion that you can’t go home again. They are called to rise above their loss of home and create new spaces where they and their offspring will eventually find their harbor.

In Izzy Strikes Gold!, I focused on a 12-year-old boy being jolted from his comfort zone by family circumstances. Will Izzy have to leave home? If so, will he find a new home? Those are the dramatic questions addressed.

My current manuscript follows two brothers who can’t coexist at home with each other; their mutual resentment is too great. War intervenes and poses the question whether the brothers will ever be able to find each other again and re-establish their family relationship. I don’t know that answer because I haven’t read the book yet.

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What is the point of all this rumination? Simply to help me find and become more aware of the central themes in my writing. Ideas that reside close to the writer’s heart make for authenticity in his voice. So these are the kinds of things a guy likes to know.

See you next week, Dear Reader, when it will be about Something Completely Different.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

12.23.25
by

The Gathering

Visit of the Wise Men, from an 1894 Sunday School lesson, by lithographers Harris, Jones & Co. of Providence. Public Domain.

Tomorrow will be Christmas Eve. On Thursday morning, as Santa’s sleighbells jingle away to the North, the Big Day itself will arrive. 

This will be my eightieth Christmas on Earth. 

The first few of those eighty are lost in the mists of time, permanently and perpetually outside my experience. But I recall clearly the next several after that. I remember times of gathering and feasts of togetherness. 

After the workday—most folks used to put in a whole day on December 24—Mom and Dad piled us into the car and we drove in darkness over the hundred miles from the city of Streator to the little town of Knoxville on the Illinois prairie, to gather with family.

1936 Plymouth, from an old postcard. Fair use.

The car was a 1936 Plymouth or a 1939 Chevrolet—both of them relics from an old-time gangster movie—or, later, our first modern car, a 1954 Plymouth. I sat in the back seat with my sister Cynda. We all four sang Christmas carols all the way down the road. Over the river—both Illinois and Spoon—and near some woods but mostly through plateaus of snow-dusted corn stubble, to Grandmother’s house we went.

It was all about gathering. Being together. 

The “-gether” part of “together” is really the same word as “gather.” From Old English gaderian, meaning to unite or join.  

We gathered together with Grandma and Grandpa, with Uncle Dick and Aunt Jane and Cousin Rick, with Uncle Garrett and Aunt Edith and Cousins Steve and Betsy, with Aunt Jo and Uncle Earl, with Aunt Jean and her boyfriend Richard Henderson, with Aunt Sue and Aunt Linda; with Grandma’s sister Aunt Bertha and her husband Uncle Harry Young; with Dad’s parents, my Grandma and Grandpa Sommers, who had no other children left in the Midwest and so joined the LaFollette mélange; and sometimes we would even see Grandma LaFollette’s brother Uncle Roy Dredge and his wife, Aunt Eva.

Eighteen of us including the unpictured photographer, who is probably Aunt Bertha, plus General George C. Marshall on the cover of Life to prove it’s Christmas 1950. Your New Favorite Writer is the boy at lower left, chin on hands.

That made twenty to twenty-five of us all celebrating Christmas in Grandma’s house. Gathered. Together. And the best part was: we all knew each other. We knew one another very well. We were kin. There’s hardly a better way of understanding love than gathering at Christmas.

“Fear not,” says the prophet Isaiah, “for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth; even every one that is called by my name: for I have created him for my glory, I have formed him; yea, I have made him.” 

It’s a grand vision of gathering together, members of one tribe, one kindred. 

That’s what we did on those long-ago Christmases. Our tribe came together, at least those of us who could. We came from east and west and north and south and called one another by name. 

I did not know this fact at the time, but I know it now: It was not the toys that mattered most, nor the turkey and dressing and pie and cake. It was the coming together of the people. The spindly tree, illuminated by strings of gaudy colored lights over which Uncle Dick and Uncle Garrett and Uncle Earl had slaved for hours on the living room floor getting all the bulbs to light up at once, was the totem pole, the magnet that gathered the kin. 

Rice pudding with lingonberries. Fair use.

In my wife’s family it was much the same, only with a Swedish accent, because her mother’s folk were all Swedes, first- and second-generation Swedish Americans. So they had warm glögg with almonds and raisins in the bottoms of the cups; rice pudding with lingonberries; meatballs and gravy; limpa rye bread and dopp-i-gryta, the dipping of bread in fatty broth. But mostly with them, it was the people coming together, even if they were all Swedes except my wife’s father, who was Norsk.

The decades bring forth change. Families are smaller now. Folks tend to be more spread out, east and west, north and south. In our house this Christmas we will have Jo and me, my sister Cynda and her husband Steve, our daughter Katie and her children Elsie and Tristan (teenagers!). Plus Katie’s friend Valerie. Eight, all told. Still, it’s a coming together, a gathering. 

Most of us will attend our church’s Christmas Eve service. It’s a Congregational church, meaning the local congregation governs itself autonomously. Such a church is said to be a gathered church, that is, one formed by a process of kindred souls simply gathering together. And indeed it’s more like a family than like a formal institution. We’ll read the Scriptures and sing the carols and burn up a few candles in the process. But the main thing is, we’ll gather together.

We have within us the seeds of hate and the seeds of love. When we gather together around the Christmas tree or the communion table, we nurture the seeds of love and starve the other ones. 

Two greatly different realities are available to us in this world. I prefer the gathered one.

May you gather this season with whomever you have to gather with. And treasure the time, the place, and the gathering. It’s the best Christmas gift.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer