Seventy-Three Plus
A year ago, in July of 2025, I noticed that my life had gone off-track
Nothing new about that. Life seems to be a series of bold but false starts and then adjustments, never quite finding a middle and rarely aware of “enough” when I encounter it.
One day after returning from a very intellectual conference in Chicago, I was operating the web feed for a presentation by my community group. A video showing Dean Wither, a rude and decidedly un-intellectual social media influencer, was shown to the crowd to its apparent delight. I suddenly thought, “This group has experienced so much mission creep that I not only don’t support it any more, I actively oppose it.” This made me (a) step down from my position in the group, and (b) wonder how I had gotten down this particular rabbit hole.
I am an organizational scholar, so I feel fairly confident in claiming that organizations should adapt to changes in technology and demographics and even fashions and fads, but must not stray from their mission. When they do that, they no longer have an identity or a raison d'être. They are probably violating their legal charter and certainly abandoning folks who have every right to expect the group to be and to do what it said it would. I would argue that the same holds true for individual people, but don't have sufficient credentials in psychology or philosophy to make that anything more than an opinion.
The group is called Lake Superior Freethinkers. Lake Superior, because we are in Duluth, Minnesota at the Western tip of that lake. And freethinkers, because it is part of the anti-clerical tradition that goes back to the founding of America. In the 1790s, Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason popularized Deism, following on earlier Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Diderot. This view holds that there probably was some sort of Creator, but one who does not actively intervene in human affairs now.
Later, in the 1820s, Utopians like Robert Owen set up of towns with communal living and celebrated Thomas Paine’s birthday (January 29) like a religious holiday. In this second wave of freethought, it became deeply integrated with social justice issues like abolition, women’s suffrage, public schools, and labor rights. Progressive reformers - from religious individuals like Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass to later Golden Age skeptics like Robert G. Ingersoll and Mark Twain - shared the idea that social progressivism was entirely compatible with challenging traditional religious orthodoxies.
Following the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the "Golden Age" of freethought flourished from 1875 to 1914. This era saw a massive proliferation of secular publications, meeting places, public talks, and even dedicated freethought cemeteries. After the First World War, the movement shifted toward legal battles, eventually culminating in mid-20th-century Supreme Court decisions that legally protected the separation of church and state. Ultimately, the freethought movement succeeded by maintaining a very big tent, uniting diverse non-traditional viewpoints rather than focusing strictly on debunking religion or protecting non-Christians from persecution.
Lake Superior Freethinkers formed in 2007, when the second (and last) hospital in town was considering alignment with the Catholic church. That would have meant that there was nowhere in town to even discuss, never mind get, an abortion or euthanasia (what we now call Medical Aid in Dying). Dale Hagen, the older brother of Zen Master Steven Hagen, joined forces with the psychiatrist Dr. Bill van Druten, formerly of San Francisco, to work against that merger. It was eventually blocked, but not through their efforts alone.
Later they successfully had a Ten Commandments monument removed from City Hall, which led to fame and considerable suspicion of the group within the local community. While I was leading the group in 2021, we got the declaration “Jesus, I Trust in You!” removed from a city bus. We all think Jesus was a great person, but did not approve of making Jews, Buddhists, and non-believers in Duluth feel that the transit system was working against them! That bus still advertises the local Catholic radio station, which is fine, but without the faith statement.
I was introduced to this group in 2013, when I was welcomed by one of its leaders, David Broman. For a dozen years, it was my “third place” (after home, and work) to socialize and dine with about 50 like-minded friends and aquaintances. I developed a core group of three or four close friends (meeting at least once a week for food and chit-chat) and a group of about a dozen who would sporadically join in. I even briefly took part in book clubs, a very polite ritual in which a small group uses recent books (or movies) as a stepping off point to debate their politics and personal philosophies.
But that’s not me. Not at all. So, how did I end up in this circle of social justice warriors who were as outraged about GMO foods as they were about religious oaths of office? Momentum. I think we’ve all done it. Things are fine, don’t bother, don’t rock the boat, go with the flow. But suddenly, I found myself living the life of a mid-Western dad.
However, I'm a Toronto hippie. An old one, to be sure, and very compromised. I have a four-bedroom house, a half-acre treed lot, two late model cars, no debt, a large retirement cushion, live-in in-laws, and a teenage daughter in private school. But my spiritualty still comes from sitting zazen under Korean Zen master Samu Sunim. I’m still Single Breath (my Dharma name), and a member of the Liberal Party of Ontario, and Minnesota Mensa, and the American Philosophical Association, and the Clan Little Society (Yes, there is one. And yes, it is tiny). I have a doctorate in organization studies, and a Western MBA, and now a Master of Education degree. I write (bad and familiar sounding) songs, which I sing off-key along with my instrumental and vocal arrangements on REAPER software in the basement.
So now, I’m trying to get back on track: to remember who I am and "what I was made for." I meditate for hours every Saturday morning with the Bluestone Zen Practice Community, and sit with the Iron Lotus Meditation and Buddhist Study Group on Tuesday evenings (at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth church!). I occasionally attend a United Church in Two Harbors (30 miles) that has good preaching, like I used to hear from R. Maurice Boyd in New York City. I spend almost no time with the old crowd of friends, and none at all on facebook, and much more time with music and my little family. So, here we go ... let's see what happens next.