Friday the 21st

God stuff

“Life is Good” says the sign on my orange hat, “Do what you love, love what you do.” That’s the way it is. Loving life, loving living at 7H, loving hearing what I hear, seeing what I see, doing what I do.

Even arising at one-thirty-odd in the wee hours to sacrifice to Father Nature, life is good. Even going back to bed, not being able to return to sleep, and quickly up again to write a funeral homily and arrange two psalms for responsive reading, life is good. But it’s now four-forty-four and sleepiness is returning, though if I go back to bed now, I’ll sleep halfway through the morning, past the walk, past breakfast, and not feel right about myself. 

So I’m eighty-one and’ve known since I was ten that I would be doing this throughout life, Gott Zeug, though I did manage to avoid it the middle twenty-five. But homilies, liturgy, sermons, pastoral calls, hospital, vest, smile beatifically, what. Religious, theological, political and social views. 

In America, someone was executed last night, put to death: what heinous act brought about capital judgment? It matters to me. Victim-oriented, I am not deontological about capital punishment. What might one do to someone else, by which offense one forfeits one’s right to live, to life? And does the system both preclude irreversible error while also extracting justice, as our old Prayer for the Whole State of Christ's Church had it, "punishment of wickedness and vice" ? 

War? war with DPRK, madman against madman, madness against madness? Does anyone besides me remember the Chinese hordes crossing the border by thousands upon thousands, what, November 1950? Saber-rattling is guaranteed to raise every national leader’s status, approval ratings, popularity. Whose tough-guy ratings are worth the life of a child? And to whom? 



Blowhard idiots, fools posturing, playing cowboy, daring, screaming “Draw!” we are about to find out. I have lived into the age of insanity; it’s fine for me to be down at the far end of +Time+ but what about my loved ones? What about your loved ones? What about their loved ones?