Death, sex, politics, race, religion, alcohol, and egohood. These are the seven most difficult conversation topics.  

It’s much easier to stick to subjects such as: Is it time for the Cubs to start talking about next year?  How do I catch and prosecute the squirrels who ate my eggplant seedlings? Does a heated car seat help with hemorrhoids? When they give a hood to successful Ph.D. candidates, why doesn’t it go on top of their heads like everyone else’s hood?  These are easy conversations, and people can ramble on harmlessly about them, even if they don’t know a whit about them. But the Big Seven Topics—watch out.  I generally try to squirm out of them if I can.  

It's not that I’m uninterested.  In fact, I secretly spend most of my time exploring and probing them.  But when you try to have an intelligent and honest conversation with someone about any of them, you’re likely to come away frustrated, unless you are talking with someone whose thinking is an exact carbon copy of your own.  The reason?  I refer to these as the Seven Gilded Topics.  Gilding is a veneer we put over something to hide its real gist.  Rare is the individual who truly knows what they think about these seven topics.  Most of us pick up phrases and comments we’ve gleaned along the way and use them to coat these seven topics with truthiness.  (Truthiness is not actually ‘truth,’ but rather a mix of assertions and attitude, enough to make us believe we’ve made a good point.)  

People say the oddest things when they begin talking about any of the Seven Gilded Topics. They go funny on me, and I don’t mean in a humorous way.  I’ve also noticed that people exhibit a high degree of incuriosity when it comes to these subjects, as though we are afraid of coming upon evidence that contradicts our beliefs.  When people delve into these topics, I often get the feeling I’m listening to a mantra, or a parrot, rather than an honest description of an introspective journey, or a logical analysis of the subject.  

Raise any of these difficult topics, and the flight or fight reaction sets in.  We either fight about it, usually with a set of belligerent and irrational sentence fragments, or we flee all honesty by retreating into as many platitudes as we can conjure.

If you can stand it then, let's pick them apart one by one.

Granted, death isn’t usually all that pleasant to contemplate.  One anthropologist (Ernst Becker) wrote a whole book titled The Denial of Death.  We do and say the craziest things in order to skirt the thought.  When was the last time you found someone who could talk rationally, imaginatively, and empathetically about such topics as funerals, mass shootings, suicide, violent sports, death with dignity…

Conversations about sex seldom go beyond our culture war debates over gender transitions, same-sex marriages, abortion, and who can use what bathroom.  Is that all we’ve got?  Why is there no conversation about the number of neuro-transmitters needed to watch pornography vs. the number needed to navigate an actual human relationship with someone?  Why is our quest for morality reduced to “All non-cisgendered, non-straight people are an abomination” vs. “Anything goes.”  Isn’t there a thoughtful, curious person out there I can talk to?

Politics used to be fun.  Not anymore.  It is now the number one cause of hatred in this country.  And it’s illogical.  When my side does it, it’s all right.  When the other side does it, the country is going to hell.  Over the past ten years, I’ve taken to writing down quotes of various recent presidents.  Then I read them to people I know who are virulently liberal or conservative.  But I don’t tell them what president said it.  It's amazing how many die-hard Republicans thought an Obama quote was wonderful, until I told them who said it—or how many progressive Democrats ignorantly cheered for a George W quote.  But most of the time I don’t tell them where the idea came from.  It would only cause people to get even stranger on me. 

I can barely talk with people about race.  Is there something in our DNA that makes humans believe ours is the superior race?  I don’t believe white people are superior, but I do have to check some deep impulse within me that has a tendency to mitigate tragic deaths occurring in Africa.  One of our reasons for pulling out of both Korea and Viet Nam (and there were many humane reasons to end our military involvement in those places) was that “those” people weren’t worth dying for.  I’ve had many deep conversations with both Black folks and Asian folks, about race.  Why is it that I always get the feeling they are indulging me? And when I talk with another white person about racial matters, why does it feel like two Greeks arguing about how many teeth the horse has, without ever bothering to open the horse’s mouth and count?  

You’d think a pastor would love talking about religion with people.  Not me.  I hate it.  The Latin origin of the word “religion” means to “tie down.”  Most of us turn to religion when we can no longer tolerate life’s uncertainties.  We can’t stand it when questions about the future just dangle before us, without any clue as to what will actually happen.  And so we take the teachings of Jesus or Paul, or Buddha, or Allah, or the Lord Krishna out of context, and we build meanings the original authors of our sacred texts never intended, just so we can relax about what will happen to us after we die.  When religion is a crutch for our anxiety rather than the source of human liberation and abundant life, then conversations on the topic will go nowhere. 

Has anyone else noticed that conversations about alcohol are seldom sober?  If you're talking to a "drinker," (whatever that means) a serious comment about drinking is far likelier to trigger a defensive reaction than a thoughtful response.  On the other hand, if your conversation partner has had a bad experience with another person’s drinking, about all you'll get is a scrunched-up opinion on the whole matter.

Finally, it is hard to talk about egohood.  One reason it's hard is because the word isn’t in my fat Random House Unabridged Dictionary.  But it was in my fat Roget’s International Thesaurus.  Since the word seems to exist without a definition, it is a writer’s dream.  Or maybe nightmare.  It appears that I’m egotistic enough (you can look that one up) to craft my own definition for egohood.  Here goes:  egohood is the sense of who I am in relation to other people, nature, the spiritual world, my own history, my body, and worth.  Because virtually none of us has enough grace in our lives, none of us can risk a truly honest egohood.  Grace is the lubrication that allows us to be ruthlessly honest about our self, including the enormous worth of our self, without having to give compensation, excuse, blame, or judgment.  

There you have it:  The Seven Gilded Topics.  I think about them all the time.  Everything I read is a quest to dive deeper into them.  And when I find someone who can handle the subject, that person is my favorite person in the world, for that conversation.  Not that I don’t get silly myself when it comes to these subjects.  But a good conversation partner helps me navigate those dangers as well.