I bet that even atheists pray for their favorite sports team. Some people call sports a national religion! Religious gatherings and sports events have a lot in common, including rituals such as team huddles that are like calls to worship, chants that sound like prayers of invocation, and hymn-like fight songs. Religion also has prayers, psalms, songs, and hymns that call for the defeat of enemies.

Places of worship and people of faith can learn a lot from sports gatherings. Sports and religious gatherings are examples of community-formation, excitement, purpose, and power. Sports gatherings are often more enjoyable than religious meetings.

But sports teams and fans can also learn a lot from prayer. I once served a church in Florida (I am a pastor) when an “opponent”in the form of a ferocious hurricane was approaching. My prayer that it would not strike us meant I was also praying it would strike another “team” somewhere else instead. So, I prayed for them as well.

At the beginning of sporting events, I say a prayer for my favorite team, and I pray for a good and fair game, no matter who wins. I pray for the ability to compete ferociously and win or lose graciously. I pray for honesty and integrity on the part of managers, owners, media, and audiences. I pray for myself to realize and remember that sports isn’t, by definition, all about me. That is another great lesson that sports and prayer provide. I always end my prayer that, above my desires, “Thy will be done.”

Dwight Lee Wolter

I also pray that you will become a paid subscriber to keep “Team Dwight” going.

“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?”
~ John Lennon

P.S. I wish I could give credit to the artist who created this ceramic sculpture. I saw it in an art gallery in (I think) Asheville, N.C. about six years ago.

P.P.S. My second book is dedicated to John Lennon. I spent the proceeds from my first book on purchasing a serigraph created by him. John Lennon was my first spiritual mentor. There have since been others. But as I loop around this universe of existence, I suspect Lennon may return to also be my last.

Peace,

Dwight Lee Wolter

Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once. Wishing time would pass faster or slower impedes a natural process of unfolding. A day starts and you can’t wait for it to be over, and then suddenly you’re old and you long for a do-over of what you didn’t like in the first place. A summer lasts forever when you’re young. Time passes faster and faster as you get older and older. This doesn’t seem fair, if you’re counting days.

There is a time and purpose for every matter under heaven. It says that in the Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes. In Charles Dickens 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, Jacob Marley was visited by the three ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. To me, all three exist simultaneously. Christmas or not, I always visit the past, present and future. How could I not? But I don’t live there.

As Austrian-American psychoanalyst, Theodor Reik, wrote in “The Unreachables,” his 1965 essay, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Hmmm…

Inspired by Reik, I propose we have but one day called, “Yesterdaytodaytomorrow”. Our best bet is to live one day at a time. Sometimes one moment at a time. On my clock, where every number once was, the word “NOW” now appears.

PS: Please toss a paid subscription into my Substack. It costs me to do this. Your assistance is a treasure to me, and it helps to keep me writing yesterdaytodaytomorrow.

Peace,

Dwight Lee Wolter

Today we celebrate freedom in America. But let us consider an amazing story about freedom from 1,700 years ago. You, like about 85% of the people in my life, have no direct contact with religion. But let that not deprive us of a tremendous and brief story that may help us navigate difficult relationships today. It is found in a New Testament (Christian Bible) letter written by the Apostle Paul.

Many of Apostle Paul’s letters are heavy laden with angry diatribes, but Philemon is a very personal letter that gives us a more intimate glimpse into Apostle Paul’s character. Paul wrote this letter from prison, which many scholars believe was in Rome. As Paul sat in his prison cell, he may have dreamed of walking free once more, able to do simple things like sitting under a tree or wading in a cool river. Just imagine a prison 1,700 years ago.

Suddenly, another prisoner was cast into the same cell. He was a slave named Onesimus who had stolen from his master and then ran away, a crime that could be punishable by death. Paul and Onesimus were quite different from each other in that Paul was a Roman citizen whereas Onesimus was a slave. But they had at least two things in common: They were both in prison, and they were both Christians. The slave, Onesimus, recognizes Paul because he had been baptized by him. By coincidence or by God’s plan ~ Onesimus’ owner, a man named Philemon, had also been baptized by Paul. Thus, the slave, Onesimus, and the slave’s owner, Philemon, were both Christians who had been baptized by another Christian, the Apostle Paul. And so, two Christians ~ an Apostle and a slave ~ sit together in a Roman prison.

Who is most likely to get out? If Onesimus gets released, he goes from being a prisoner in a cell to a prisoner of institutionalized slavery. That was 2,000 years ago. Thank God that’s over. But hear now the African American poet, Maya Angelo write about slavery in America 2,000 years after the Apostle Paul carried the message of freedom in Christ to the world. She writes in the poem, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”:

But a caged BIRD stands on the grave of dreams
His shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
His wings are clipped, and his feet are tied
So he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings with
A fearful trill of things unknown
But longed for still and his
Tune is heard on the distant hill
For the caged bird sings of freedom.

The imprisoned slave, Onesimus, was like the caged bird that Maya Angelou wrote about. Whose side should the Apostle Paul take: the side of the slaveowner, who legally owned slaves and might make big donations to the church ~ or the side of the slave who sat in prison with nothing, perhaps, except a dream of freedom and redemption in his heart?

While in prison, after talking it over with the apostle Paul, his cellmate, Onesimus became willing to be returned to his master, even though Onesimus could have been put to death for having run away. However, Paul wrote a letter making a personal appeal to Onesimus’ owner, Philemon, to “have him back for good ~ no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, [have him back]as a dear brother.” The apostle Paul, who traveled the world, spread the gospel of Jesus, and baptized countless people, goes on to say, “So if you consider me as a partner, welcome him [Onesimus] as you would welcome me.”

Imagine someone stealing from you, running away, getting caught, and being thrown in jail ~ and then you are asked to drop all charges and welcome that person back as a member of your own family! Paul is not asking Philemon to bring Onesimus back and act like nothing happened. Paul is asking Philemon to acknowledge that as baptized Christians, the way we are to relate to each other is changed forever through Jesus!

Paul tells Philemon ~ and us ~ that the world is different this side of baptism! You don’t own, abuse, oppress, deny rights, exploit people, claim freedom and communion with Christ at the same time. Paul calls Philemon ~ and us ~ to practice what we preach.

This letter was written about 1,700 years before the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States! Paul was not in the position to abolish slavery. But this almost 2,000-year-old letter is a seed, planted by God, and watered by Paul that helped split the rock of slavery in America.

Back in a time when slavery was very common, Paul saw Onesimus as a man “for whom Christ died” because he was created by God and was therefore God’s own child and the moral and spiritual equal of all others, slave or free!

Leap forward with me now to 1968 when a different Paul, the Beatle, Paul McCartney, was in a hotel room in the United Kingdom. He was watching an American television news station showing a black woman who was protesting segregation being brutally beaten by police officers. You may know that the word “bird” in England is slang for “woman.” And so, in a play on words, McCartney wrote to the black woman protestor. In the song he says to her, “Blackbird singing in the dead of night / Take these broken wings and learn to fly / All your life / You were only waiting for this moment to arise… / Take these sunken eyes and learn to see / All your life / You were only waiting for this moment to be free…”

Back to the Biblical book, Philemon; was it coincidence that while the Apostle Paul was in prison contemplating his own freedom ~ a runaway slave was thrown into the same cell, and they contemplated the slave’s freedom as well as what it means to be free in Christ? This story shows Christians, in the first century of Christianity, struggling to define who they are and what they believe.

The slave’s name, Onesimus, means “useful.” Onesimus was especially useful in bringing Paul to contemplate the plight of those we consider different than us, but who God seems to believe are all God’s children.

There is some evidence that when the slave, Onesimus, was freed he went on to become bishop of the church at Ephesus. Others think he became the “right hand” of Paul, perhaps the collector of his papers and manager of his affairs. But Paul remained a prisoner. He never referred to himself as a prisoner of the Romans, but as a “prisoner of Christ Jesus.” Paul was proud to be a prisoner for Christ’s sake because he would not renounce him. Paul never thought about being free from being a servant to the mission and ministry of Jesus the Christ.

The greatest independence we can have is to choose to be dependent on God. How ironic that our dependence on God leads us to independence in other areas of our life. In the confines of a prison cell, Paul was a free man. And he knew it. And his freedom was won, not with a sword, but with a cross.

Dwight Lee Wolter

After having no contact with my father for many years, I flew from New York City where I was attending seminary to Tampa where he was in the hospital. I also went, in part, because the time had finally come to speak my truth to him. Some day he was going to be gone, and it would be too late to speak directly to him about what he had done to me and our family.

I rehearsed my speech to sound calm rather than sharp when I finally named the brutality and violence we were constantly exposed to. I wanted to remind him of him flushing Thorazine down with alcohol and how it catapulted him into rage he never seemed to remember. We were always on edge, and nothing was ever predictable. Ours was a house where plates knew how to fly across the room, where a Thanksgiving turkey was drop-kicked because it wouldn’t cook fast enough, where some of us kids were numb and hungry enough to eat TV dinners in the living room while he was hitting our mother and all leaded to the side because the violence obstructed our view of the television. When violence erupted, I hid in my sanctuary, the bathroom, behind a locked door, sitting on the closed toilet seat, eating my TV dinner and writing poetry in my head, poetry about pretty things and gentle people. I wanted to tell him, in the graphic way I experienced it, about the ways he terrorized his wife and us kids and how all of us stumbled, staggered, bled, fell, and then were punished by him for having fallen. I was ready to finally tell him how our bones were fractured by his fists and how he had broken our souls and how our addictions and incarcerations were the living proof. I wanted to finally tell him how I wanted to learn how to be a man, a father, and a decent human being from him but never did.

I got to his room, took a deep breath, opened the door and there was my father, lying in a diaper in a VA hospital in Tampa refusing to eat and too weak to sit up. At the ghastly sight of him, ancient feelings of fear once again began to flow like lava through me, but at the same time I wanted to find some way to quiet the screeching demons in him that were trying to crawl out of his mouth.

I finally opened my mouth and said to him, “Would you like to go for a drive?” He nodded yes. I lifted him out of bed. He weighed about as much as two bags of groceries. I lowered him carefully into his wheelchair and pushed him through the VA hospital and into the parking lot where I lifted him again like he was a child and I began to place him in the front seat. His head slightly bumped the roof. “You son-of-a-bitch” he muttered, “you do that again and I’ll…” His voice tapered off. I had never seen him successfully interrupt a violent outburst before. My skeletal father sat silently next to me in the front seat, wearing a diaper with the sleeves of his hospital pajamas flapping in the breeze of the open car window as we drove along the lakeshore. The weather was quite pleasant.

Repressed memories, stolen memories, lost memories, bloody memories, razor-edged memories, sound-only memories, the sickening sound of fist-against-face memories raged through my mind. Strange thoughts followed, thoughts like, shouldn’t he be driving me along the lake shore? I am his youngest child, the one who walked on crutches until he was seven years old, the one who needed to be lifted by him into the car, and now I am lifting him. I am the son of my father, yet I feel like my father is my son. And still we did not talk.

My father’s words were his fists. Pleasure, peace, idle chats, love, worked for him as well as water in his gas tank. He was empowered by being hated and feared. And if you tried to love him, you were going to get hurt. He couldn’t let love in or even say the word. I grew up wanting to be whatever he wasn’t.

After the car ride, we got back to the VA hospital and I lifted him out of the car, into the wheelchair, took him back to his room and laid him into his bed. I knew this was my last opportunity to finally speak my honestly to him. Not to do so would mean he would get away with it, like an escaped Nazi living well into old age on a ranch somewhere in South America. My father needed to be captured and held accountable by me. My three siblings couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. So it had to be done, now, and by me.

The words I had long wanted to say to him flowed through me and seemed to come from somewhere beyond me. I sat on the edge of his bed, opened my mouth, and every single word I said to him was a lie.

I told him he was a great soldier, a respected career military officer, a true patriot, a good citizen, a proud provider for his family, defender of our country, was loved deeply by his dearly departed wife, and respected by all his children, including me.

And then I told him I loved him. That was not a lie. He did not answer with fists or harsh words. His eyes softened, and he looked deeply into me, and I saw my father for the first time. And I realized that my father loves me. I never knew it. Never even suspected it. And I realized for the first time that I love my father. It was love in hiding that made the pain feel so much worse.

My father’s nurse nonchalantly charged into the room, excused herself to me, leaned over him and said, “I’m sorry! I forgot to kiss you goodbye!” and she planted a big, sloppy, wet one on his forehead and said, “see you in the morning!” She smiled and said to me, “Enjoy your visit!” and left.

The man that she knew, my father, was not the same man that I knew. It wasn’t possible. She didn’t love a part of him. She loved all of him. My father and I loved each other. We had always loved each other, and that is what sustained us both through the madness. When I left his room, I knew it was the last time I would see him.

I did not learn how to be a man and a father from him; but I did learn how not to be a man and a father from him. Those were very valuable lessons. I learned how not to use my fists as words. I learned how not to treat women. I learned how not to treat my children or any others. I learned what not to say, do, and believe many things.

I want to thank my father, on this eve of Father’s Day, for showing me how not to father. I learned what I needed to know. And I let him go. My poor dad. As I just now wrote those three words, I realized this is the first time I have ever called my father my dad.

I am trying to imagine what that man must have gone through to become the person he was. I am trying to imagine the strength it took for him to survive. I am wondering what role drug and alcohol addiction played in his insanity. And I am trying to imagine that the same strength in him was somehow given to me. I am wondering how his addiction may have helped me to recognize mine and how his refusal to ask for help helped me to ask for the help that has resulted in my decades of sobriety.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. Hear me say it now. And one more thing that has never crossed my lips, but will now: Dad, I forgive you. With God as my witness and my guide, I forgive you. And may you, my father, rest in eternal peace.

Dwight Lee Wolter

P.S. If you wish to see more of my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It most certainly is an inspirtion and affirmation that helps to keep these musings coming.

“If you asked me how many times you came into my mind, I would say once. Because you came and never left.”- Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian poet, b. 1941

Time, like death, is a rumor. Everyone I have ever loved is still with me. Sometimes I forget this, but so too do two people in the same room doing different things at the same time. They might forget the other is there as they are absorbed in a task or talent. But if they pause, the presence grows in recognition. The connection remains. I have never fully left any relationship I have ever had. I see photos and hear stories sometimes about people who are now living without me, and I do not intrude in any way, but I am not living without them. This includes the supposedly dead with whom still speak, especially in the first three days after their transition. Some of them seem to move on. But I don’t move on. There is nothing to move on to or from. I remain in communion. There are a plethora of avoidance and denial techniques I have tried, but ultimately, they failed me or I grew disinterested. Love never dies. It is not stopped by illusions of separation and cessation. I need not seek what has already been found. I am not remembering the ones I love. I don’t have to. They are always within me.

Dwight Lee Wolter

6.17.26

My shortest go-to prayer, tailor made for me by someone I have never met, never heard of, do not follow, and whose name I do not even know, is this:

Bless them, change me.

When people snipe at me, disregard me, disrespect me, disappoint me, don’t follow my spoken or implied rules of the way things should be; if they ignore my expectation, ignite my arrogance, walk on my spiritual lawn I just watered, or simply piss me off,

I pray:

Bless them, change me.

Dwight Lee Wolter

(photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash. Thanks to Nadia Bolz-Weber for sharing it today. Check out his work).

Like a ripe summer plum, my skin is tough, my personal bodyguard, but it is also packed with protective fibers and nutrients. My tart tangy tasting tough skin protects my sweet and juicy insides from bruising and helps me to stay fresh longer. Being both tart and sweet, tough and mushy, vigilant and vulnerable, I protect my inner life like I protected my children, frolicking with them at the playground, but always on the lookout with my three eyes calmly wide open. Never judge a plum person only by their cover.

Peace,

Dwight Lee Wolter

P. S. I am beginning to wonder if my posts mean anything to anyone. My Substack is beginning to get under my tough skin. Maybe I will ditch this and return to spending my time writing books, parables and stories. Your like, comment, restack, and becoming a paid or otherwise subscriber is the only way I can hear you. That said, your silence is also a powerful message.

My mother’s first husband died on D-Day, June 6, 1944, soon after storming the beach at Normandy, France. It took a long while for my mother to get the news. She received his bloody wallet and the dog tag he wore around his neck on which was written his name, serial number, blood type, and religion.

My mother remarried. Her second husband is my father. He became a career military officer. They had four kids, a girl and three boys. I was the youngest. My sister became a homemaker. One of my brothers became a career and multiply convicted and incarcerated criminal. My other brother also became a military officer who was honorably discharged after being injured in Vietnam. I became an ordained minister, pastor, poet, and author of many books.

My opposition to war, violence, and anything military was an insult to my father. His violence was an insult to me. My distance from my family began at sixteen when I left home and never went back, not on holidays, not in my memory, not in my actions. I even changed my name. That distance remained as, one by one, my parents and siblings all died off. The brother I was closest to died seven years before I accidentally found out. I have no wallet, dog tags, photos, or fond memories of any of them.

Several years ago, a second cousin, David, found me through some DNA match company. I told him, politely, that I wasn’t interested in pursuing our history or a relationship. He was kind and understanding. Last Fall, a second cousin, Karen, who had also been found by David, reached out to me. I protested and defended my distance to her as well, until I learned that she too is a clergyperson. Was this a coincidence or a divine intervention?

I travelled to California to meet them at David’s home in Walnut Creek, CA. It took over 50 years for me to become willing to meet anyone, even remotely related to me. They both waited patiently and lovingly. I brought my daughter, a mother of three, who wanted to know something, anything about my family which is, by extension, her family as well. When we met, I sat on the couch, feeling like an insecure and frightened schoolboy. I struggled to keep eye contact with them. They even remotely looked like me. I have never experienced anything like that before.

My second cousin, Karen, gave one photo of my young mother holding two kids, and a separate photo of my young father in uniform, sitting on a stool by himself, looking handsome, vacant, and lost. I wept upon seeing the man I hated and the woman I blamed for her failure to protect us, her children, from our father. They looked so young, far younger than I am now. So young. So lost. So complicit. So unknowable.

I hate war and violence. I hate what it does to people. I know war and violence intimately. I know foreign wars. I know domestic and violent war within a household. How could I not?

But it if had not been for war, violence, and the death of my mother’s first husband ~ I would not be here. In a strange, strange way, I owe my life to death. The strength, passion, determination, intelligence, ferocity of conviction, deep concern for victims of injustice, poverty, addiction, discrimination, and my willingness to fight against all the cruel “ism’s” of life ~ were birthed in me because of what I had endured and survived. Not my chosen path, but my path, nonetheless.

I don’t even know the name of my mother’s first soldier husband whose bloody death on a beach in a distant land led to me. But I want to thank him for his service to our country, and to me.

I also want to thank my mother and my father for creating me. They were my first teachers. I learned a lot from them about how not to be, what not to do, what not to believe. Those are valuable lessons. It was, I believe, the best they had to offer. And I am grateful. They were like the wind that blows the pollen off the flower that creates more flowers in distant fields. And from this distant field in this different time, I bow to them.

I want to thank David and Karen for finding me. I am both the little boy lost, and the little boy found from William Blake’s, “Songs of Innocence and Experience.” I want to thank their loving and lovely families for abiding our peculiar reunion, and for setting out a beautiful brunch spread that I don’t remember any of us touching. I want to thank my daughter, Celeste, who is my child, my teacher, and my friend, for accompanying me on this reunion. My parents, in those two photos, are her grandparents. I am grateful they met.

I am grateful we all met. I am grateful that on this D-Day, I have paused to remember and also to honor God’s goodness. Healing is possible. Hope hovers over everyone. Love never dies.

Dwight Lee Wolter

June 6, 2026

On a regular basis

I am a saint, fool, jester,

poet, punk, priest, prophet, pacifist,

struggler, fighter, loser, winner, whiner,

unloved lover of the loveless,

seeker, loser, finder, keeper,

overlord, underdog,

pussycat, tiger, baby, adult,

ingester, excreter,

leader, follower,

believer, doubter,

fearful, fearless,

cocky, cowardly, craven, brave,

optimistic, pessimistic,

lost and found.

Accepting myself and the wobbly world

is a hero’s journey

and the beginning of any change.

But, at least,

I only have to do it daily.

~ Dwight Lee Wolter

Last week, I was interviewed, thrice, by a very large, long-tenured national newspaper, for a total of two hours, for an upcoming piece. (I will post the piece and name the newspaper after it is published). I was also featured in an "Asking the Clergy" piece in Newsday (New York) on this subject. AI is all over the news and a buzz in the pews, some of it hysteria, some of it insightful, some pious pontifications, much of it contempt prior to investigation, and a lot of contempt after investigation. Some excited curiosity. A lot of fear. I thought, correctly or not, that you may be interested in this.

On Sunday, July 14, 2024, our Congregational Church of Patchogue offered an all-AI-written service. Everything, including the invocation, prayers, music, sermon, and benediction were AI. Almost two years later, on May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV wrote an 83 page encyclical (manifesto) about AI. In it, he said, “we must ask God for the wisdom to interpret the great trends of our time, particularly technological advances. In recent years, it has become increasingly evident how rapidly and profoundly digitalization, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are transforming our world.”

This Sunday, June 7th, at 10 a.m. ET, in-person (95 East Main St.) and on the Facebook page of the Congregational Church of Patchogue, we will not offer a service fully written by AI (although there is one AI-written surprise). Rather, we will offer “Our Future Artificially Intelligent Church.” During it, we will honor and recognize our 233 year old church housed in our magnificent National Registry of Historic Places building. We have gone through many traditions, transitions, and transformations in the past 233 years. But, like it or leave it, deny or accept it, we are going through a dramatic and huge transformation now. Will our congregation and the church writ large survive and even thrive in this transition also?

On Sunday, we will reflect on God, congregation, and community in the past and present. I will offer, in my sermon, a vision of the possible transformation of church and ministry beyond anything we have seen and perhaps can even imagine. Music includes traditional hymns as well as, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears. As always, in the congregational tradition, we will not pitch the correct answer, but we will unearth and envision some marvelous questions. “Fear not!“ (as it says in the Bible, over and over again). But then again, fear is sometimes utterly appropriate. But fear is a reaction, not a response. Every ending is a new beginning.

For more, consult my latest book, “The Gospel of Loneliness’ (Pilgrim Press), particularly the chapter, “The Future of Loneliness.”

Peace and Other Blessings,

Rev. Dwight Lee Wolter,

sacred is that which best not be defiled
even by the well-meaning widening of sacredness
to include everything likable.

sacred to me means set apart from all else.

sacredness is something you enter into
maybe fall into, drift into.

spaces, places, moments, including
empty spaces, empty places, even

moments of profound emptiness
may be sacred.

I may not see sacredness,
but I can often behold it.

I may not understand it,
but it seems to understand me.

the best way, for me,
to enter, behold, understand, assimilate sacredness
is to arrive empty.

- Dwight Lee Wolter

My musing is never behind a paywall. That said, you becoming a paid subscriber is an affirmation, inspiration, and it helps keep this Substack going.

On this cusp of Memorial Day, I am thinking about the phrase, “Thank you for your service” that is said to military personnel. A friend of mine, Bob Keeler, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work, wrote thoughtfully and graciously on his Substack that he wanted to add a salute to doctors, nurses, and teachers in his reflection on service. I agreed with him. But those groups (military, doctors, nurses, teachers) are paid personnel, not volunteers.

For the record, I was born on an Air Force base, am the youngest son of a career military officer, was named after a four-star general and President of the United States, am the sibling of a military officer, and I lived on military bases until I was a teenager. Everything in my world was military service. Some military personnel were enlisted. Some were drafted. But for them all it was a paid position, a job. That is as it should be. They were not volunteers.

So, what about volunteers?

Jesus was a volunteer. This is not a religious post, but I want to add Jesus to my own list of those to whom I say, “Thank you for your service.” Jesus said, “I come to serve, not to be served.” I also add here the prophets from Hebrew scripture, the Buddha (formerly known as Siddhartha), and the leaders, followers, and workers of many faith and non-faith-based traditions to my list. I have had many teachers whom I thank for their service.

Since I am a member of the clergy, this may seem self-serving, but I want to add clergy to my list of “thank you for your service” whose income comes, not from taxation and insurance policy premiums, but from passing the basket among anonymous volunteer donors. We are professionals of a precarious lot. You have to pay taxes and insurance premiums to support the service of some health care workers, education providers, police, and military personnel, but you don’t have to drop a penny in a basket to support many others who serve you.

You can attend a 12 step group in a house of faith without financially supporting either, if you so desire. So I want to say, “Thank you for your service” to them also.

I also want to add volunteers from religious and non-religious groups whose service, intentionally or not, is mirrored in Matthew 25: “When I was hungry you fed me. When I was naked you clothed me. When I was in prison you visited me…” Volunteers involved in feeding, clothing, and visiting motivate me to say, “thank you for your service.”

I also want to thank other volunteers who perform sacrificial service in my little corner of the world, such as those who opened a free barbershop staffed by volunteer barbers, soup kitchens volunteers who struggle to feed 70 or more food-insecure people with no government help.

I also want to thank mobile shower unit workers, clothes pantry donors and workers, volunteers who escort domestic violence victims, the sick, elderly, destitute, and immigrants to court, and those providing free transportation and legal counsel to them for their service. These people serve people who most of society won’t even look at because they seem not to matter, and they sadly know it.

I want to thank patriots, protestors, and patriotic protestors for their service to the Constitution and its declaration of the freedom of assembly, free speech, religion, the press, and the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Is there anyone who thanks everyone for their service? The only one I can think of is God. God says, “thank you for your service” to all of us who work for the embetterment of the earth and all its creations, including but not limited to creatures and human inhabitants.

Gratitude expressed as service to others is as great as gratitude to others for service to us. Saying “thank you for your service” to them also helps me. Gratitude in my attitude is a boomerang that goes out but always comes back to me. Feeling aligned with a higher purpose, under the blessing of a higher power, in service to goodness and love, is a tremendous and perhaps a sufficient affirmation. In response to the gifts I have been given, I hope to be made a better server of these gifts to others.

There are certainly people and groups you are thinking of that I have failed to mention from my little corner of the world. Use the comments section of this message to say to them, “thank you for your service.”

In service,

Dwight Lee Wolter

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The older I get the more certain I am that I never did, do not, and never will know exactly who I am and who you are and that is fine with me. My life is more of an exploration than a demarcation, more discovery and uncovery than recovery. The only certainty is uncertainty. The only constant is change. What is sought is not found. As soon as I find “it” it doesn’t fit or it is actually not what I was looking for after all. It is the looking that defines the looked for. I am that which I am at this moment and whoops even that moment is now gone but here comes another moment and another version of me, another version of you, another version of reality. Each minute of the day is now. Acceptance is key.

Dwight Lee Wolter.

I am on a gurney awaiting eye surgery.

The left eye today, the right eye two weeks ago.

One lens has been removed after decades of loyal service.

I thanked it in my morning shower on the day of its passing.

I also thanked the other eye lens this morning before its surgery.

Some thousands of years ago and also just yesterday,

Maya, my six year old daughter, died

in an act of stupidity and negligence

also known as a car crash.

She died alone in a room full of strangers

trying to save her life.

She had never been alone

in a room full of strangers before.

She had never even crossed the street alone

to check the mailbox.

Sitting alone on the floor

in a hallway of a hospital,

I donated Maya’s eyes

so that another child could see.

I did the same with her small, still heart

for a sake of a different kid.

How strange, me, lying in a hairnet

and a backwards hospital gown,

staring up at an operating room light

as big as a small planet, and yes,

how strange

that my last word before the drugs took me out

was “Maya.”

This must have been what it was like

for Maya, also lying on a gurney,

under an operating room light

as big as a small planet

and her last word before

an allegedly impaired driver took her out

was “Casey.”

Casey is her brother, also in the car.

He went to surgery alone also

after his first and only medical evacuation helicopter ride.

He survived, she died. Part of him is still missing.

Today, she lives again and again and again,

her cornias in another child’s eyes,

her heart in another child’s chest.

Life comes from another and flows to another.

What we give we receive. What we receive we share.

My six year old departed daughter taught me

much about sacrice.

My ten year old living son taught me

much about survival.

In the end, we will be known and remembered

less by what we accumulated

and more by what we gave away.

Dwight Lee Wolter

“If you work on your mind with your mind, how can you avoid an immense confusion?” -Seng-ts’an, written about year 601.

Brain surgeons do not perform

brain surgery on themselves.

Anger does not remove anger.

Hate does not eliminate hate.

Violence does not cure violence.

But Hope sutures.

Compassion soothes.

Love cures.

- Dwight Lee Wolter.