SPEAK UP!

OK, maybe this is a diary after all. Went to sleep too early, so rose way too early, for two or three hours reading. Kristen is taking Intro to Ethics, book list includes Plato’s Gorgias. Seeing it’s free on Kindle and liking to read her course material, I read it in Saturday wee hours.

Yesterday a letter came from a friend of nearly six decades who also became a priest after a career of other things. Long years ago, just out of university, I told him I was intending seminary at some point. He said he didn’t think I should do it. Hearing that negatively about myself, I backed away from it for a quarter century.

Years later during a visit in Apalachicola, I reminded him of the conversation. He was stunned that it had been my reason for denying the vocation until my forties, said I had heard him wrong. Long-closed in my mind but not his, every time we’ve met he’s mentioned it, and in his letter yesterday he enclosed an old plaque

That conversation some fifty-five years ago set the course of my life. Had we not had it, things today would be different for me, likely different children and grandchildren because of different things happening at different times, and I would not risk such a change for the world, would not change one second of my life to save it. Can a misunderstanding be a blessing in waiting, even the Word of God?

It all came round in my wee hours reading this morning as Callicles and Socrates argued and virtually the exact same words of the plaque kept showing up in their dialogue.

Worse, it showed up again in today’s comics.

It’s the Epiphany Season, is somebody saying something to someone? Speak up, can't hear you.

TW+

St Andrew Bay from my upstairs front porch a moment ago.