Seventy-Three Plus
A year ago, in July of 2025, I noticed that my life had gone off-track. Nothing new about that. Life has always seemed to me like a series of false starts and subsequent adjustments - never quite finding a middle.
But here's what happened. On July 7th, one day after returning from an intellectual conference in Chicago, I was operating the web feed for my community group. Part of the presentation featured a video clip of a rude, decidedly un-intellectual young social media influencer. The audience seemed delighted with his antics. Suddenly, a cold realization struck me: this group no longer represented who I was, at all.
Groups change over time, of course. As an organizational scholar, I know they must adapt to shifts in technology, demographics, and maybe even fads. But they must not stray from their core mission. That is "mission creep," and it is the sacred duty of organizational leaders to prevent it. When a group wanders from its mission, it loses its identity and raison d'être. It abandons the folks who trusted it to do what it said it would.
The group in question is Lake Superior Freethinkers - based in Duluth, Minnesota, at the western tip of that lake. To see why the shift felt like such a betrayal, you have to understand the historical legacy it is supposed to represent.
"Freethinkers" belong to an anti-clerical tradition charting back to the founding of America. In the 1790s, Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason popularized Deism as a logical reaction to scientific discoveries that seemed to explain away nature's mysteries. By the 1820s, Utopians like Robert Owen intertwined reason with social justice - abolition, women’s suffrage, and labor rights.
Following Darwin's On the Origin of Species, freethought flourished from 1875 to 1914 with secular publications and community halls and even a freethought cemetery at Vergas, Minnesota! For over a century, the movement succeeded by maintaining a very big tent: uniting diverse, non-traditional viewpoints rather than focusing strictly on resisting the overreach of the church.
Lake Superior Freethinkers was born directly from this grand tradition in 2007. That was when Duluth's secular hospital faced a merger with a Catholic health system - a move that would have eliminated local access to abortions or Medical Aid in Dying. Dale Hagen (brother of Zen Master Steven Hagen) and psychiatrist Dr. Bill van Druten came together to help block it. Later, the group teamed up with the ACLU to remove a Ten Commandments monument from City Hall, earning local notoriety.
I found this group in 2013 and for a dozen years, it was my vital "third place." I built a core circle of deep friendships. When I led the group in the early 2020s, we successfully petitioned to remove the sectarian declaration “Jesus, I Trust in You!” from a city bus. We weren't opposed to Jesus, but believed that Duluth's Jews, Buddhists, and non-believers shouldn't feel like the city had picked a theological side.
Somewhere along the line, though, the mission crept. Suddenly, I looked around and realized I was surrounded by a circle of reactive social justice warriors who were as outraged by GMO foods or unsustainable farms as they were by religious oaths of office. And who would rather spend an election year warning a room full of Democrats about Project 2025 than try to reach across the aisle and find common cause with other freethinkers.
How did I end up here? Momentum. We all do it, I suppose. We think, "Things are fine, don’t rock the boat, go with the flow." Then, suddenly, we find ourselves living a life we haven't carefully chosen. I was living the comfortable life of a standard Midwestern dad.
But I am not a Midwestern dad; I'm more of a Toronto hippie.
Granted, I'm an antiquated, highly compromised hippie. With a four-bedroom house, a half-acre treed lot, two late-model cars, no debt, a large retirement cushion, and a daughter in private school, one could easily call me a "sell-out." Yet, my spirituality still comes from sitting zazen with Korean Zen master Samu Sunim. I am still Single Breath.
And I'm still the guy who spent the 1970s in a band. A member of the Liberal Party, Minnesota Mensa, and the American Philosophical Association. And I still spend time writing derivative songs and singing them off-key into REAPER software in my basement. For better or worse, that's who I am.
So now, I’m trying to get back on track - to remember "what I was made for." I meditate for hours on Saturday mornings with the Bluestone Zen Practice Community, sit with the Iron Lotus meditation group on Tuesdays, and occasionally drive 30 miles to the United Church in Two Harbors just to hear good preaching.
I spend very little time with the old crowd, none at all on facebook, and much more with my little family. Here we go . . . let's see what will happen next.