When I was 7 years old, I wrote a letter to the editor of our local newspaper, the Victoria Times-Colonist, about integration being a wonderful thing, despite the fact that I had only one non-white classmate in my elementary school. Nearly 55 years later, with america more divided than ever by religion and spirituality, the New York Times is crowd-sourcing an article called "What do you Believe In?"(see link below)...Here's an excerpt from my response: The past 15 years have been a journey from the religion I grew up with, full of my mom and various preachers filling me with a fear that I might never be good enough for God to love, & might end up in hell, to realizing that the spirituality I have now come to embrace, full of Pops and my birthmother's and my wife's examples of loving me better than I could love myself, has enabled me to survive the hells I've been through and left me convinced that there is a God, and that God loves me unconditionally, and that hopefully I can learn to love myself more like God does, & in so doing, love others in a much healthier way than the old me, who was trapped in a prison of fear & self-loathing. (a journey which I document in my debut memoir , "killing justice"...
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