Randy Elrod's Blog, page 14

There are Men Too Gentle to Live Among the Wolves

If you look up definitions of “virile,” you will find words like macho, ultramasculine, hairy-chested, vigorous, masterful, and forceful. And phrases like “having traditional masculine traits, especially to a marked degree.” Virility is “any of a wide range of masculine characteristics viewed positively.” Virile means “marked by strength or force.”  I firmly believe that these...

Protected: A Tribute to My Muse and Favorite Model

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Impromptu (and Candid) Thoughts

(A Four-Minute Read) I retired at the age of forty-eight. Which caused a few years of tumultuous adjustment—tears shed over this self-imposed exile from the stage; once applauded by audiences, admired by peers, and stopped by strangers in the street; how could I not feel some bereavement over the waning of my celebrity, the weekly...

Museum of Prohibited Art

Warning: This post contains graphic images and explicit sexuality. At my first church staff position (a naive and easily manipulated nineteen-year-old) as youth and music pastor, I will never forget the ultra-authoritarian white male pastor ordering me to have a record burning of all the youth’s rock and roll albums. For some ignorant and unknown...

Pleasure: Sinful Desire or A Pathway to Healing?

Could pleasure transcend its conventional definitions of “frivolous amusement,” “a state of gratification,” or “desire,” as the Merriam-Webster dictionary suggests? Might it hold a more profound significance?  What if pleasure is a pathway to healing? Those of us brought up in a fundamentalist religious home may find this question challenging to contemplate. Pleasure, our preachers, teachers, and parents...

Gentle Thoughts for Those of Us Over 40

—Do everything you can to cultivate an inner life, especially since culture is always trying to suck it out of you.  —Try Meditation. Take 10 minutes in a quiet, private place. Set a timer and mentally recite and repeat “The Serenity Prayer,” or write your own mantra. When your mind strays, be kind to yourself...

The Last Day of My Innocence

“I am other, no longer what I was before the affair of yesterday.” An idyllic Thursday in June 2006 was my last innocent evening. A friend and I strolled along the utopian Main Street of Franklin, Tennessee, and savored beer and oysters in the heart of the historic downtown. We discussed plans for my seventh...

I Can See

Candid Thoughts On My 66th Birthday

Sixty-six (sesenta y seis) seems weirdly unimportant in a beautiful way. Last year seems more momentous—I began Medicare and turned the official American retirement age, even though I had technically “retired” twenty years earlier. The Spanish word for retired—jubilado—is a wonderfully expressed word.   The World Health Organization says age is one of the first...

Protected: 66

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